was and then at the Sergeant. “That’s a sheet of crack… yeah… The supplier mixes the shit into some kind of a, like, batter… and rolls it into a sheet like that and bakes it, kind of like pastry or something. They sell it to meatheads like the ones we got here. They cut them into rocks they call ’em, and sell ’em for ten dollars apiece. So that big dipshit’s got maybe thirty thousand dollars’ worth a crack lying there on his belly. They could sell all those bits and pieces where it broke, too. Hell, they could sell those little crumbs. By the time a crackhead needs another rock, he ain’t very discriminating.”
“But why would he stash it on his belly, Sarge, under a T-shirt?”
“Don’t you see what happened?” said the Sergeant. “He’s out on the porch, and all of a sudden here come the cops. So he makes a run for it. He wants to grab that sheet a crack and hide it or just get rid of it. It was probably lying right out in the open on that table back there, the one we saw moving. He’s grabbed the sheet a crack and hidden under the table and stuck the crack under the T-shirt and stuffed the front of the T-shirt down his jeans. The first chance he has, he’s gonna make a run for it out the back door and get rid a the crack any way he can, so even if he gets caught he won’t get caught with the stuff on him. But he’s a hothead, this jigaboo is, and he’s a big dick who ain’t gonna take no shit off nobody. So when I call him a piece a shit, the big dick in him’s bigger than his common sense, assuming he has any, and all he wants to do is tear my arms off and shove ’em up my ass. I was on the way to ventilating him when Nestor here jumped on his back.”
“How the hell did you do that?” said Nuñez. “This side a beef is twice your size.”
Music music MUSIC to Nestor’s ears! “I didn’t do anything,” said this paragon of masculinity with becoming nonchalance. “All I had to do was, you know, neutralize him for thirty seconds, and he’d do the rest himself.”
The heaving, sawing noise was still coming out of his throat… Bloody murder was oozing out of his eyeballs… His hatred of the Cuban invaders was now cold-cast forever in concrete. His mind would never change on that score. He had been humiliated by a Cuban cop half his size… and then this Cuban cop and another one rub it in by calling him a piece of shit and variations of a piece of shit.
“Where’s the other fucker, Sarge, the skinny one with the mustache?” said Nestor.
The Sergeant looked back at the door from the porch, the door they had all come in. “García’s got him. He’s right back there in the doorway, him and Ramirez. Ramirez caught the piece a shit who made the buy, the crackhead.”
“He did? Where?”
“Found him lying in the alley, wriggling around in the trash trying to dig the rock out of his pocket.”
Nestor could now see that six CST cops were here inside the hovel, making sure all witnesses and possible perpetrators stayed put. The three babies were still wailing away… The white face… Nestor sought her out in the dimness of the room… and found her with his eyes… her white face and the black baby in her arms… squalling away… He couldn’t see her very well, but he could make out her big, wide-open—frightened?—eyes set in a white face that didn’t belong here… in a trash-littered bottom-dog dope den in Overtown… It was a dope den, all right, a retail outlet for the crack cocaine trade. It was hard to take that seriously, with all the women and children and bawling babies, but maybe his great victory, demolishing the monster, looked just as unreal and lightweight to them, to her, the one with the white face…
Now began the usual procedure… talking to the prisoners and the witnesses… by themselves, one-on-one, beyond the hearing of the others. A lucky, or canny, CST officer could get good, usable information that way. But you were also looking for inconsistencies in their stories… Why are you here? Where did you come here from? How did you get here? Do you know anybody else in the room? Do you know the