those who wallow in respect everywhere they set foot…
All this went through the Chief’s mind in a single blip as his driver, Sergeant Sanchez, pulled up in front of City Hall in the Chief’s official Escalade. Miami’s city hall was a curiously small white building that stood alone on a half-acre rectangle of landfill sticking out into Biscayne Bay. The Escalade, on the other hand, was a huge brute, all black, with darkened windows and without a single marking to indicate it was a police vehicle… only a low black bar across the roof containing a lineup of spotlight and flasher lenses and a light on the dashboard, no bigger than a quarter, emitting some sort of ominous X-ray-blue radiation. As soon as they stopped, the Chief fairly sprang from the passenger seat in front… in front, next to Sergeant Sanchez. The last thing he wanted people to think was that he was an old coot who had to be chauffeured around. Like many men in their mid-forties, he wanted to look young, athletic, virile… and so he sprang, imagining himself a lion or a tiger or a panther… a vision of lithe strength, in any case. What a sight it was! Or so he was convinced… he couldn’t very well ask anybody, could he? He wore a darkest-blue military-style shirt, tie, and pants, black shoes, and dark wraparound sunglasses. No jacket; this was Miami… ten o’clock on a September morning, and the cosmic heat lamp was high overhead, and it was already 88 degrees out here. On each side of his neck, which he figured looked thick as a tree trunk, a row of four gold stars ran along each side of his navy blue collar… a galaxy of eight stars in all… and atop that starry tree trunk was his… dark face. There were six feet, four inches and 230 pounds of him, with big wide shoulders, and he was unmistakably African American… and he was the Chief of Police.
Oh yeah, how they stared, all those people going in and out of City Hall—and he loved it! The Escalade was in the traffic circle right in front of the entrance. The Chief stepped onto the curb. He stopped for a moment. He lifted his arms out to the side with bent elbows, thrust his shoulders back as far as they would go, and took a deep breath. He looked like he was stretttttching after being cooped up in the car. In fact, he was forcing his chest to bulge out full-blown. He bet that made him look twice as mighty… but of course he couldn’t very well ask anybody, could he…
He was still in midstretch, midpreen, when—
“Hey, Chief!” It was a young man, but he had City Hall Lifer written all over him… light skin, probably Cuban… emerging from the entrance and beaming a smile of homage at him and paying his respects with a wave that began at his forehead and turned into half a salute. Had he ever laid eyes on the kid before? Did he work in the Bureau of—what the hell was it? Anyway, he was paying homage… The Chief blessed him with a lordly smile and said,
“Hi, Big Guy!”
He had barely rolled his shoulders forward into a normal position when a middle-aged couple passed him—on their way into City Hall. They looked Cuban, too. The man swung his head around and sang out, “How’s it going, Chief!”
Homage. The Chief blessed him with a lordly smile and favored him with a “Hi, Big Guy!”
In rapid succession another “Hey, Chief,” a “How ya doin’, Chief!” and then a “Hi, Cy!”—short for Cyrus, his first name—and a “Keep ’em flyin’, Cy!” and he hadn’t even reached the door yet. The citizens seemed to enjoy paying homage with salutations that rhymed with Cy. His last name, Booker, was too much for their poetic powers, which was just as well, the way he looked at it. Otherwise, everything they called him would be mockery or a racial or personal insult… mooker, spooker, kooker, hooker… Yes, it was just as well…
The Chief said, “Hi, Big Guy!”… “Hi, Big Guy!”… “Hi, Big Guy!”… and “Hi, Big Guy!”
Homage! The Chief was in an excellent mood this morning. The Mayor had summoned him here to City Hall for a little… “policy meeting”… concerning this Marine Patrol officer Nestor Camacho and that Man on the Mast business. He broke out into a big smile, for nobody’s benefit but his own. It was going