out in the streets, soon as they find out this known racist, this Ku Klux Camacho of yours, has managed to switch the blame onto one of their own. I told you this kid is a one-man race riot, didn’t I? And now you’re gonna restore him to duty and not only that, glorify him! I don’t get you, Cy. I really don’t. You know very well that one of the main reasons you were made chief was that we thought you were the man to keep the peace with all these—uh uhhh—communities. So you think I’m gonna stand by and let you turn racial friction into a goddamn conflagration on my watch? Nooooooooo, hoooooooh, my friend, you’re not gonna do that! Otherwise you’re gonna make me do something I’d rather not have to do.”
“Which is what?” said the Chief.
The Mayor snapped his fingers. “You’ll be gone like that! That I can promise you!”
“You can’t promise me a goddamned thing, Dionisio. Remember? I don’t work for you. I work for the City Manager.”
“That’s a distinction without a difference. The City Manager works for me.”
“Oh, you may have gotten him the job, and you’re the one who pushes his buttons, but the City Charter thinks he works for the City Council. You hand him this goddamned thing, and the press is all over him, and he’ll panic. He’ll be shitting bricks! I know some Councilmen—I know them—exactly the same way you know your so-called City Manager—and they’re ready to give your dicky-boy such holy hell, they’re so stoked to call him your personal tool… in utter violation of the Charter’s mandate… your little boy will turn into a gibbering dwarf. He’ll call for a goddamned committee to study the problem for ten months or until it goes away.”
“All you can do is delay me, Cy… maybe. But you’re already dead meat. The difference between you and me is, I have to think about the whole city.”
“No, Dio, the difference between you and me is that you are incapable of thinking about anything other than what the whole city thinks of Dio. Why don’t you try going into a small quiet room and thinking about right and wrong… I bet some of it will come back to you.”
The Mayor twisted his lips into a smirk. “Dead meat, Cy, dead meat.”
The Chief said, “You do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do… and we’ll see, won’t we.”
He stood up and stared at Mayor Dionisio Cruz as belligerently as he had ever confronted anybody in his life… and never blinked once. But neither did Dio, who remained seated in the luxurious oxblood-leather-and-mahogany maw of his mammoth swivel chair and—coolly—stared back. The Chief wanted to laser Dio’s eyeballs out of his skull. But Dio didn’t flinch. Neither of them moved a muscle or said a word. It was a classic Mexican standoff, and it seemed to go on for ten minutes. In fact, it was closer to ten seconds. Then the Chief wheeled about and showed Dio his big powerful back and stormed out of the room.
On the way down in the elevator he could feel his heart beating as fast as it had when he was a young athlete. In the lobby there were citizens who had no idea he had been frozen out, cryogenized, two flights up. Down here, among these innocent souls, the Hi, Chief!s rang out as they always had. Uncharacteristically he ignored them, these good souls, his fans. He was completely focused upon something else.
The moment he stepped out of this ridiculous stucco Pan American Air-head city hall, Sergeant Sanchez pulled up in the big black Escalade, and the Chief got into the seat beside him. He realized he must have looked more morose and upwrought than Sanchez had ever seen him.
Not knowing quite what to say—but curious about what had happened—Sanchez said, “Well, Chief… uhhh… how’d it go?”
Staring straight out through the windshield, the Chief said two words: “It didn’t.”
No doubt Sanchez was dying to say, “What didn’t?”… but he was afraid to ask anything so direct. So he screwed up his courage and said, “It didn’t? It didn’t what, Chief?”
“It didn’t go,” said the Chief, still looking straight ahead. After a few beats he said to the windshield, “But it will.”
Sanchez realized he wasn’t talking to him. This was a conversation with his high and mighty Self.
The Chief took his iPhone out of his breast pocket and tapped its glass face with