to put her hand into—and a terrible heat begins rising up into her cranial cavity, burning the lining of her skull… she doesn’t have her handbag! In her wild rush to escape, she left it in the examination room… her car keys and the remote and her key to the apartment… her credit cards… cash… cell phone… driver’s license!—her only ID in this world except for her passport, but that’s in the apartment, and he has the key now! He has it all, even her makeup… She doesn’t dare stay here crouched beside her car… he knows the car! What if he—
—scurried hunched over until she finally saw the exit on the far side… Even then she didn’t dare walk through upright… People were looking at her, a young nurse in white scurrying out of a parking lot… hunched way over like that… Look at her! So young, and she’s out to lunch or she’s having a stroke! That girl needs a lot of help… and who’s going to give it to her?… Don’t look at me.
Noon on yet another identical Miami day, the sky a pale-blue white-hot dome radiating ferocious heat and blinding light down upon all the shoppers on Collins Avenue and giving them stumpy shadows on the sidewalk… which they can scarcely even notice, their macular-degeneration-defying glasses are so dark… when something makes them want to open their eyes and see. A young man wearing some sort of white sport shirt and blue jeans has just sidled up to a building, whose shadow at noon is all of eighteen inches wide. He’s carrying a big CVS shopping bag. Hurriedly, there in the stingy shade, he lifts the CVS bag and holds it upside down and starts to pull it over his head. Now the gawkers can see that there is another shopping bag stuffed inside the first… that and a white towel that wants to fall out. Hurriedly he pulls the towel out and puts it on top of his head so that it drapes his face, his ears, everything down to his shoulders, in fact, and then he pulls the shopping bags, one inside the other, down over the towel, and now the gawkers can barely see a couple of inches of the towel sticking out of the bags. They can’t see his head at all. Then they see him pull a cell phone out of his blue-jeans pocket and slip it under the bags and the towel. What is this?… a nutcase—nobody can figure it out.
Under the towel and inside the bags the cell phone rings, “¡Caliente! Caliente baby… Got plenty fuego in yo’ caja china…” and the man inside the bag says, “Camacho.”
“Where are you?” says the voice of Sergeant Hernandez. “Underneath a mattress?”
“Hey, Jorge,” says Nestor, “thank God it’s you! Wait a second. Let me take all this shit off… This better?”
“Yeah, you sound halfway normal now. I can hear traffic. Where the hell are you?”
“Down on Collins Avenue. I put all this shit over my… my…” ::::::I’m not going to say “head.” He’ll think that’s very weird:::::: “over the phone so they won’t know I’m not at home.”
“Gotcha,” said Hernandez. “I do sort of the same thing—but they must know nobody has a landline anymore, just a cell phone—but never mind. Have you heard the news?”
“No… and do I even want to? I remember the last time you called me with ‘the news.’ ”
“This time maybe you do want to, I don’t know—anyway, they just let our crack dealers off! The grand jury wouldn’t indict them!”
“You’re kidding!”
“It just happened, Nestor, maybe half an hour ago. It’s all over the internet.”
“Wouldn’t indict them—why not?”
“Take a wild guess, Nestor.”
Nestor wanted to say, Because of you and your jungle bunny shit, but he caught himself. “You and me?” was all he said.
“You got it. First try. How the hell can they indict two nice young gentlemen from Overtown when the two arresting officers are racists? Right? They didn’t even call us as witnesses, Nestor, and it was our case!”
Silence. Nestor was baffled. He couldn’t figure out the consequences. Finally he said, “This means there won’t be any trial. Right?”
“Right,” said Hernandez. “And if you wanna know what I think, I say thank God for that much. I wasn’t looking forward to being on the stand, and some suit is asking me, ‘So, Sergeant Hernandez, how racist would you say you are? Just a little bit or a lot or somewhere in the middle?”