unfair! You didn’t pay attention to what I actually said! You can’t just lump me together with the Sergeant! Don’t you have any idea of what started this whole thing? You’re not some clueless work-a-daddy who looks at the thing and thinks it all began with two Cuban cops throwing that big black hulk flat out on the floor and then calling him this and that just for the fun of it?!:::::: And then Nestor’s rope broke:
“That’s not fair, Chief”—his voice started rising on the way to a scream—“because all I said—”
“You, too, Camacho! Shut up! Both a you listen and listen carefully to every word I say.” The Chief paused. He seemed to be debating whether or not to let Nestor really have it. He must have decided no. When he resumed, his voice took on a tone of blunt reasoning. “Look, I know the video cut everything that explains what drove you to that point. I know the urge to kill some punk who’s just tried to kill me, because I’ve been there a hell of a lot more than you have. I know what it is to wanna bury the motherfucker with every jab you can get out of your mouth. I’ve been there, too. But you two had to ring the fucking gong, didn’t you. You had to come up with the worst brand of bigotry in America today. You had to come up with a goddamn thesaurus of the insults guaranteed to hurt black folks’ feelings the most. And I’ve been there, too. Me, I don’t take any a that shit anymore, and I’ll break every bone in the body of any fool who directs it at me, from the humerus to the hip socket to the hyoid. I guarantee I will fuck up any cracker who tries to put that shit over on me.”
Nestor was dying—dying—to cry out. ::::::But it wasn’t me! I didn’t say anything wrong!:::::: Two things held him back… One, he had a live fear of the Chief and what he might do. And two, if he started trying to pin the blame on the Sergeant… he’d be ostracized—by these guys, the brotherhood, the police force, Hernandez, Ruiz, even americanos like Kite and McCorkle from the Marine Patrol, and yeah, even the Chief. ::::::I won’t take this kind of abuse from my dad, my papi, anymore, but I’ll take it from this big black man at that desk. Cops are my whole life, the only people I have now. And what if sixty seconds from now it turns out that the Chief’s bone-crushing anger is just the build-up to canning us, me and the Sergeant, firing us, dumping us like a couple of dead fish gone high?::::::
The next words out of the Chief’s mouth were “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna fire you, I’m not gonna demote you. I think I know you two guys. You’re two cops…” He paused, as if to let that sink in. “Whatever else you are—and you’re probably a stone-cold irredeemable racist, Hernandez—you both have medals for valor, and they don’t just get handed out to improve morale. But what we’ve gotta do in the short run, it’s not so understanding and forgiving of human frailty.”
He smiled slightly when he said “human frailty.” It was his first affable smile since he began this lecture. Okay, thought Nestor, ::::::but what is supposed to be amusing about “human frailty,” unless the Chief wants to show that he knows he was using a bullshit expression? And who was “we”—or was it just another one of these bullshit words politicians like to use by way of saying, “You’re not just looking at one man here, you’re in the presence of the Power”?::::::
“We’re going to have to relieve you from duty,” the Chief said. “As I said, this is what we gotta do in the short run. It’s not a permanent thing. You’ll be paid as usual.”
Nestor looked at the Sergeant. The Sergeant had his lips compressed and kept clenching his jaw muscles. He seemed to have some knowledge about just what “relieved from duty” meant that Nestor didn’t have. Nestor worked up enough courage to ask, “Chief… could you tell me what that means exactly? We come in and do desk work?”
“No,” said the Chief. “If you’re relieved from duty, you don’t do any work at all.” The Chief’s face was a stone once more.
“You don’t do any work?” By the time he finished the question, Nestor found himself no longer