THE PLACE BUSH slept in but didn’t call home was only two miles (and a world away) from the offices of La Nación, but on this particular evening it took him well over an hour to reach it. Getting through the business district was never much of a problem. You hardly ever saw cops on foot there, and the gangs didn’t come that far west, as a rule. Things got trickier farther downtown. His shortest route was past the bus station, but he avoided it like the plague. It was a Mecca for crackheads, hustlers, and whores, and therefore a honeypot for cops. Plus, at least once every couple of weeks the feared Child Protection Force — otherwise known as the Rataneros, Ratcatchers — swept through it. There was an election looming, and the government would want to boast that they’d cleaned up the streets. So Bush gave the bus station a wide berth. He had several routes that made longish detours around it, and he used a different one every trip. The bucket and the squeegee marked him as someone who might be carrying cash, someone worth looking out for. In the past couple of months, he’d been mugged three times, despite his caution. Each time, he’d handed over the few centavos he kept in his pocket, and his attackers had failed to find the rest of the meager takings hidden in his waistband. But on the second occasion he’d been given a beating just for the pleasure of it, and it had left him with a painful bubbling inside his right ear that had lasted a week.

Now, on a narrow street between the vast blank side wall of the Church of All Saints and the back of a row of small shops, he heard from behind him a faint squeal of brakes, followed by the harsh popping of a motor. Turning, he saw a scooter with two guys on it, hustlers, both wearing bandido bandannas. For two long seconds he watched them watching him. Then the scooter snarled toward him, and he began to run, his head frantically mapping possible escape routes. He would be okay if he could get to the Carrer Jesús and across the one-way traffic. But that was too far to outrun a scooter. It was already within twenty yards of him. Just ahead, he saw a cat, alarmed by the commotion, leap from an overflowing trash can. Bush grabbed the rim of the can with his free hand and swung it into the middle of the street. The echoing snarl of the scooter paused, revved again. A yelled obscenity. More revving.

He ran on. The street made a turn beyond the end of the church wall, and there Bush found deliverance: a red-and-yellow barrier, a wheelbarrow, a couple of bags of cement, a wooden pallet. Two men relaying paving stones, another one supervising. All three looked up as Bush hurtled into view, and yelled curses at him when he vaulted the barrier and slapped a single footprint into their patch of wet cement. Their cries turned into a violent altercation when the scooter screeched sideways into the barrier, but by then Bush was gone.

On the far side of Jesús, where the flower sellers were already accosting early-evening strollers, Bush found a quiet space on the sidewalk and sat down on his upended bucket. Traffic noise surged and ebbed. Nearby, a street musician with one leg played mournful tangos on the accordion, leaning on a crutch.

Bush’s breathing steadied eventually. He was desperately thirsty, as well as hungry. It had not been a good day, but his late bonus, Maestro’s fifty centavos, would get him an ice-cold zumo. There was a place just down the street that did guava ones thick enough to be both food and drink. But he was worried about time, which was to say, he was worried about Bianca and Felicia. Well, about Bianca, anyway. In the end he bought the zumo and drank it too quickly, so that it made his throat ache and filled his chest with cold pebbles as it went down.

His flight had taken him off course, and now he would have to zigzag westward through the maze of little cafés and workshops of the artisan quarter. That was okay, because it was still busy at this time. And once he was on the other side, he’d hit the Avenida Buendía, and from there, if he jogged, he’d be home in fifteen minutes or so.

He hadn’t thought about the cops.

He emerged from an alley onto Buendía, walked thirty yards, and there they were. A cruiser and a big van blocking off half the street. Ratcatchers and ordinary cops working in pairs. They already had two older kids wearing baseball caps spread against a wall and were feeling them over. A smashed-looking girl — she couldn’t have been more than twelve — was being dragged toward the back of the van, her thin legs giving way every time she tried to kick the cop that had her by the hair and one wrist. An old woman with a foxy little dog under her arm was yelling abuse at the police; a man leaned in the doorway of a barbershop with his hands in his pockets, laughing at her. Bush took in all this in less than two seconds, then a sort of uh-oh feeling made him turn. Sure enough, the sidewalk was cut off in the opposite direction too; a cop saw him and pointed him out to his colleague.

“Hey, you, Rasta kid! Don’t you damn well move! Yeah, you!”

He couldn’t go back the way he’d come; they were already nearer the alley than he was. He put his bucket down, dropped his shoulders, and raised his open hands in a gesture of unconditional surrender. The cops’ approach slowed to a saunter. The older one grinned.

Bush grabbed the bucket and was across the sidewalk in two long strides. It was separated from the four lanes of almost solid traffic by a high curb not much wider than his foot. He ran along it toward the police van, leaning inward slightly, away from the suction of the vehicles that roared past only inches from him. The cops behind him were yelling at the ones ahead, but Bush figured that they’d be muffled by the blare of the traffic. He teetered past the front of the van and shit! — there was another cop, turning toward him, mouth open, arm going up. Nothing to do but raise his own arm, too skinny to be much use as a battering ram, but, praise be to God, it struck the cop’s shoulder and spun him away, and Bush was past and still running along the low parapet. A huge truck shoved air at him that felt solid as a wall, and he lost his balance. For a moment that was like a scream, he nearly fell the wrong way, knowing that he would die if he did so. But his body did a trick that had nothing to do with him, and he toppled away from the traffic and went down. He felt the palm of his free hand tear, then he was rolling over. He was back on his feet and running again before he felt the hot tickle of blood on his leg.

There was a subway station up ahead of him, and if he could reach it, he had a chance of disappearing among the rush-hour bodies. He looked back, expecting to see violently angry men in dark-blue uniforms close behind him. Instead, he saw ordinary people carrying shopping bags and briefcases and talking into cell phones. Some of these people glanced at him with condescending interest. He slowed, and immediately felt the pain in his leg. At the entrance to the subway, he took shelter beyond the stall of a newspaper seller and squatted, dragging in breath. His mouth tasted like dirty coins.

He checked himself over, starting with his money. It was all still there. A little under two dollars. His hand was scraped raw from the base of the thumb to the base of the little finger, and it burned. He picked little bits of grit out of the wound with the longest nail on his left hand. It would have been nice to pour cold water on it. In fact, imagining it was almost as good as doing it. The leg was okay. The blood was already drying. It looked like a shiny brown spiderweb.

The light had switched from natural to electric. The day had gone. He had to get home. It was extremely important that he was not late, because of the girls. He was about five subway stops from the Triangle. If he could beg an unexpired day ticket, he could still be home in quarter of an hour. Actually, in his head, he did not use the word home. He used the word there.

He went down the steps and picked a spot where he would only gently interrupt the flow of travelers. He used his sad smile.

“Finished with your ticket, señora? Señor? Finished with your ticket, señora?”