Rivas was at the wheel of an unmarked Crown Victoria driving through Roseland. It was still early, and the streets were quiet. The car ahead was a red Explorer that held Mike Daley and three officers from Gang Crimes. He and Frames were part of a joint operation to arrest a Sureño dealer named Arturo Peña, suspected in the murder of a rival dealer three days earlier.

Frames turned in his seat. “You sure? No offense, bro, but being a native speaker doesn’t make you an expert on the whole Spanish language. Maybe your mother, or whoever, taught you the wrong word and never had a chance to correct it.”

Rivas let that one go and kept his attention on Daley’s car.

It was a working-class neighborhood of closely spaced, one-story houses built in the fifties. Rivas knew the euphemisms from the city reports—ethnically diverse, high density—and he was familiar with the trouble hidden by those words. The graffiti on the highway abutments and sides of empty stores marked the territory for the VSL, the Varrio Sureño Locos. The Sureños meant drug sales, street crime, and drive-bys.

Rivas had grown up here forty years earlier and had ridden the streets on a BMX bicycle as a boy. What he saw every time he drove through were the first homes, the front yards of six-by-ten mown grass, and the daily, hard-won battles to keep them paid for.

“Hispanic guys always throw cut fastballs. Now don’t tell me that’s not true.” Frames was into it, pedal to the metal. “Case in point: my man Mariano Rivera. His out pitch was always a cutter, thrown with an off-center, four-seam grip, pushing the middle finger as the ball’s released. He could do it because you guys have unusually long second and third fingers. Weird hands, period. Who’s that guy pitched for the Marlins, Antonio Alfonseca? Guy had six fingers on each fucking hand.”

Rivas saw Daley, half a block ahead, and slowed down. They’d been tipped to the address the night before by an informant named Arlen Waters, a meth dealer facing ten years on his second strike. Waters put Peña at the house with his girlfriend and her two children, Peña’s cousin, and an uncle. The plan was to park out of sight and go in on foot. Daley and his guys would go in the front, Rivas and Frames in the back.

“A cutter drops as it reaches the plate,” Frames said. “You know this, man. So hitters are forced to settle for ground balls. Half the time, you get a cutter on the inside corner, it shatters the bat.”

Rivas smiled and nodded. “What you’re saying is, Hispanics are involved in a conspiracy to break bats?” His favorite part of Frames’s rants was spoiling the endings.