it that?”
“They don’t bother with much figuring. Here’s their reasoning, if that’s what it is. What they say is, it’s easy to be a pez gordo and go around acting like a valiente when you have all the other peces gordos behind you, the whole police force, the Coast Guard, the Miami Herald.” He chuckled. “I guess they throw in Yo No Creo el Miami Herald for good measure. You haven’t been listening to the Latino radio?”
“I haven’t had time,” said Nestor. “If you knew what my last twenty-four hours were like…” He paused. He could feel he was entering some dicey territory now. “… you’d know what I mean.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” said John Smith. Now he was staring straight into Nestor’s eyes with an intensity that just wasn’t John Smith. Nestor got the feeling that this must be the Reporter Look, the same way cops hit people with the Cop Look. Not that the two were equivalent. He stared off at the liquor bottle light show. Every cop Nestor had ever talked to on that subject considered the press a bunch of pussies. Nestor was willing to bet that the one right beside him at this bar was a pussy, too. There was something about the soft way he talked and all his good manners… He was the kind—if you made the slightest threat physically, he could fold and run away. But the older cops also said that they were like little spiders, like black widows. They could bite and cause you major grief.
That being the case, he now focused on John Smith and said, “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d probably need approval before I talked about that.”
“Whose approval?”
“I don’t know exactly, because I’ve never been through the procedure. But I’d need a zone captain at least.”
“I don’t get that,” said John Smith. “You talked to me after you brought the so-called leader of the underground down from the mast. Whose approval did you have to get before you did that?”
“Nobody’s, but that was diff—”
A suddenly aggressive John Smith ran right over Nestor’s words with “And who wrote you the most favorable story that came out of the whole thing?… and the most accurate. Did I treat you badly in any way?”
The man bored in with his Reporter Look.
“No,” said Nestor, “but—”
The reporter trampled again. “So what makes you think I’d try to make you look bad now? The people who are causing you trouble are El Nuevo Herald—I hope you saw what they said”—Nestor averted his eyes and rocked his head forward and back slowly, indicating a very faint yes—“and the Latino radio and Latino TV tried to bury you!” the reporter continued. “And they’re not going to stop with yesterday. They’ll keep it up today, too. Don’t you want anybody on your side? You want to be nothing but a piñata the whole bunch can keep on having fun whacking at? Oh, I can go ahead and write a nice piece analyzing what you did and why it was absolutely necessary and humane. But that would just be an editorial, and not even by an editor. I need some details that only you can provide.”
The hell of it was that reporter John Smith was right. The word cobarde kept throbbing in Nestor’s brain. His sense of honor decreed that such a slur not go unanswered. Revenge is mine, sayeth the Lord—and in the meantime, what happens to your job, big avenger? If he dumps everything out for the reporter’s benefit… even if he doesn’t criticize the Department in any way… a big newspaper article dwelling upon Himself in a police action this highly publicized—he doesn’t need any written-down protocols to know what the Department will think of that. ::::::Still, everybody—everybody—needs to get one thing straight. No way is Nestor Camacho a cobarde… you assholes… but that’s not for me to say, is it. That’s for the Department to say… and fat chance of them doing it. Oh, they’ll defend their decision to bring the guy down off the mast, but they’re not going to go into raptures over the cop who went up and did it—::::::
Nestor didn’t realize how he must have looked to John Smith. He was staring not at John, but into the mirror behind all the lit-up liquor bottles. He didn’t bother looking at himself, even though there he was in the mirror. He was running his right hand over the knuckles of his left