the marina parking lot. Here in the midnight hour at least a third of it was empty. The parking lot’s lighting didn’t truly illuminate much of anything. It created the feeblest mechanical dusk imaginable. The palm trees around this perimeter were barely discernible. At best you could see some flat black shapes. As for the cars in the lot, they were not so much shapes as feeble dusky glints of light… off a windshield here, a strip of chrome there… a wing mirror over there… a dub over there… feeble feeble reflections of feeble feeble light… In Nestor’s current state of mind it was worse than no light at all… this was light in its junk form…
He was heading for his Camaro… why?… where was he going to spend the night?
He could make out the Camaro only because he knew exactly where he had parked it. He headed toward it out of sheer habit. And then what? He had to drive somewhere and stretch out and log a good solid ten hours of sleep. He couldn’t recall ever feeling this tired and empty in his life… burnt out, dried out, drained… and where was that healing sleep going to take place? All evening, every time there was a lull he’d call up friends, asking for a place to crash, anything, even guys he hadn’t seen since Hialeah High, and the answers were all like Jesús Gonzalo’s, Jesús, his best buddy on the wrestling team, and he says, “Uhhhh well, I ahhhh guess so, but I mean, how long you wanna stay just tonight, right?—because I told my cousin Ramón—he’s from New Jersey—and he said he might be coming to town tomorrow, and I told him—”
His friends! True, for the past three years his friends had been mostly other cops, because only other cops could understand what was on your mind, the things you had to do, the things you worried about. Besides, you had an elite status. You had to face dangers your old friends couldn’t imagine. They couldn’t imagine what it took to beam the Cop Look and order people around on the street… Anyway, the news of what he had done had obviously seeped like a gas throughout the Cuban community. Okay. He’d ask one of the younger cops on the shift. He had his chance just now in the locker room over the past half hour… had plenty of chances all night… but he couldn’t do it! They’ve inhaled the gas, too!… His own family had thrown him out of his own house… the humiliation! Go to a motel? To a Hialeah boy that was not even a thinkable solution. Pay that kind of money just to lay your head down overnight in the dark? Ask Cristy? She was on his side. But could he stop with just a place to sleep? Okay, let’s see… there was always the Camaro. He could always conk out in his own car. He tried to picture it… How the hell would you ever get horizontal in a Camaro? You’d have to be a child or a contortionist… a second straight sleepless night… that’s all he’d get out of that.
I now live… nowhere… I don’t belong anywhere. Once more the question popped into his head: Do I exist? The first couple of times it popped into his head, it was with a tinge of self-pity. The next couple of times, it was with a tinge of morbid humor. And now… with a tinge of panic. I’m doing the usual, heading for my car at the end of a shift… and I’ve got no place to drive it to! He stopped in his tracks. Tell me truthfully now… Do I exist?
“Officer Camacho! Hey! Over here! Officer Camacho!”
Over here was somewhere in the parking lot. Nestor peered into the feeble electro-dusk of the place. A tall white man was running toward him along a row of parked cars.
“John! hunh hunh hunh hunh Smith! hunh hunh from the Herald!” he shouted. Not in very good shape, whoever the hell you are hunh hunh hunh hunh… panting like that after jogging maybe 150 feet. Nestor didn’t recognize the name but “from the Herald” sounded okay. Alone in all the media the Herald had been at least halfway on his side.
“I’m sorry!” said the man as he drew closer. I hunhunhunhunh couldn’t figure out any other way to reach you!”
Once they were face-to-face, Nestor recognized him. He was the reporter who had been waiting with a