"What happened tonight?" he asked.
"You and Panesa get into a fight or something?"
"Quite the opposite. If you want to end it, go ahead."
"You're crazy," he said.
"That's right, well on my way to it, thanks to you." His wife lowered the gun and put the safety on.
"Seth, tomorrow you go for help. A psychiatrist and your primary care physician. You straighten yourself out. Starting this minute. You're a pig. A slob. A bore. You're committing slow suicide and I do not intend to watch a minute longer."
She snatched the bowl of popcorn out of his oily hands.
"You don't get it fixed, I'm out of here. Period."
Brazil and West also were suffering aftershocks from their confrontation in her unmarked car. They had continued arguing about his living situation, by now both of them in a lather as they drove through another rough area of the city. Brazil was glaring at her, and not particularly cognizant of the area or its bad people who were thinking violent thoughts about the cop car cruising past. Brazil wondered what possessed him to want to spend so much of his valuable time with this rude, insensitive, inappropriate deputy chief who was old and backward and, in truth, a jerk.
It seemed that fighting was a cloud layer over the Queen City, and Panesa's pleasant mood had deteriorated as well when his lawyer friend called at the precise moment Hammer was locking her bedroom door and West was telling Brazil to grow up and Bubba was on the prowl in his King Cab. The lawyer had been thinking about Panesa, whom she had observed on the late news, in his stunning tuxedo, receiving a trophy.
The lawyer was thinking about Panesa and his silver hair, and wanted to drop by and maybe stay over. Panesa made it clear that this was not possible, and never would be again, as Bubba parked in dark shadows near Latta Park.
Bubba was in camouflage, a black cap pulled low.
When he stealthily reached West's house, he was pleased that she wasn't home. Bubba could only suppose that she was being screwed by her sissy boyfriend, and Bubba smiled as he imagined her getting screwed again by Bubba, as he sneaked closer to the front of the brick house. His intention wasn't felonious but would ruin the bitch's mood when she couldn't open her front or back doors because someone had filled the locks with Super Glue. This idea had come from yet another of his anarchist manuals, and might well have worked like a charm had circumstances not conspired against him as he unfolded his Buck knife and cut off the tip from the tube of glue.
A car was coming, and Bubba wisely supposed it might be the cop returning home. It was too late to run, and he dove into the hedge. The Cavalier wagon passed, carrying Ned Toms to The Fish Market, where he was about to start his shift, unpacking seafood from boxes of ice. He noticed a big dog moving around in bushes in front of a house where he often saw an unmarked cop car parked, then his Cavalier was gone like a breeze.
Bubba emerged from the hedge, his fingers glued together and left hand completely fastened to the right inner thigh of his fatigues. He rapidly hobbled away, looking remarkably like a hunchback. He could not unlock his truck or drive without freeing one hand, and this required his removing his pants, which he was in the process of doing when Officer Wood happened by on routine patrol, checking the park for perverts. Bubba was arrested for indecent exposure.
West and Brazil heard the call over the scanner, but were not even close, and were busy discussing Brazil's life.
"What the hell do you know about my mother or why I choose to take care of her?" Brazil was saying.
"I know a lot. Social services, juvenile court, are overwhelmed by cases just like yours," West said.
"I've never been a social service case. Or in juvenile court."
"Yet," she reminded him.
"Mind your own business for once."
"Get a life," she said.
"Declare your independence. Go out on a date."
"Oh, so now I don't date, either," he snapped.
She laughed.
"When? While you're brushing your teeth? You're out every night working, and then show up in the newsroom by nine, after you've run your ass off around the track and hit a million tennis balls. You tell me when you date, Andy? Huh?"
Fortunately, Radar the dispatcher hailed them exactly at this moment.
Apparently there was an assault on Monroe Road.
"Unit 700 responding," Brazil irritably said into the mike.
They call you Night Voice," West told him.
"Who's they?" he wanted to know.
"Cops. They know when you get on the radio that you're not me."
"Because my voice is deeper? Or maybe because I use proper grammar?"
he said.
West was making her way through more menacing- looking government-subsidized housing. She was constantly checking her mirrors.
"Where the hell are my backups?" she said.
Brazil had his eye on something else, and excitedly pointed.
"White van, EWR-117," he said.
"From the APB earlier."
The van was moving slowly around a corner, and West sped up. She flipped on lights and siren, and twenty minutes later, cops hauled someone else to jail as West and Brazil drove on.
Radar wasn't finished with them yet. A call came in for a car broken into at Trade and Tryon, and he assigned this to unit 700, as well, while other cops rode around with nothing much to do.
"Subject a black male, no shirt, green shorts. May be armed," Radar's voice came over the scanner.
At the scene. West and Brazil discovered a Chevrolet Caprice with a smashed windshield. The upset owner, Ben Martin, was a law-abiding citizen. He'd had his fill of crime and violence, and did not deserve to have his brand new Caprice mauled like this. For what? His wife's coupon book that looked like a wallet in the back seat? Some shithead hooligan destroyed Martin's hard-earned ride to get fifty cents off Starkist albacore tuna, or Uncle Ben's, or Maxwell House?
"Last night, same thing happened to my neighbor over there," Martin was explaining to the cops.
"And the Baileys over there got hit the night before that."
What had gone wrong in the world? Martin remembered being a boy in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where they did not lock their doors, and a burglar alarm was when you walked in on the sucker cleaning you out and he was surprised. So you beat the fool out of him, and that was the end of it. Now there was nothing but randomness, and strangers brutalizing a new Caprice for manufacturer's coupons camouflaged by a red fabric wallet fastened with Velcro.
Brazil happened to notice a black male in green shorts running a block away, headed toward the dark, ancient Settlers Cemetery.
"That's him!"
Brazil shouted.
"Get on the radio!" West ordered.
She took off. It was instinct, and had nothing to do with reality, which revealed her as a middle-aged, out of shape, Boj angles-addicted smoker. She was at least a hundred feet behind the subject and already heaving. She was sweating and clumsy, her body and heavy Sam Browne belt simply not designed for this. The bastard had no shirt on, his muscles rippling beneath gleaming ebony skin. He was a damn lynx. How the hell was she supposed to catch something like this? No way.
Subjects didn't used to be this fit. They didn't used to drink Met-Rx and have fitness clubs in every jail.
Even as she was thinking these thoughts, Brazil passed her, flying like an Olympic athlete. He was gaining on
Green Shorts, closing in as they entered the cemetery. Brazil zeroed in on the muscular V-shaped back. This dude had maybe five percent body fat, was shiny with sweat, running his scrawny butt off, and believing he would get away with stealing that coupon book. Brazil shoved him as hard as he could from the rear, and sent him sprawling to the grass, coupons fluttering. Brazil jumped on top of Green Shorts and dug a knee in the common thief's spine. Brazil pressed his Mag-Lite, like a gun, against Green Shorts's skull.
"Move I'll blow your brains out mother fucker!" Brazil screamed.
He
looked up, proud of himself. West had finally gotten around to showing up, heaving and sweating. She would have a heart attack, of this she was certain.
"I stole that line from you," Brazil told her.
She managed to detach handcuffs from the back of her belt, having no clear recollection of when she might have used them last. Was it when she was a sergeant and got in a foot pursuit with a shim in Fourth Ward, way back when, or in Fat Man's? She felt lightheaded, blood pounding her neck and ears. West traced her deterioration back to her thirty-fifth year, when coincidentally, Niles had deposited himself on her back stoop one Saturday night. Abyssinians were exotic and quite expensive. They were also difficult and eccentric, possibly explaining why Niles had been available for adoption. Even West had moments when she wanted to boot him out the car door on one of life's highways. Why the scrawny, cross-eyed kitten with memories of the pyramids had picked West remained unknown.
The stress brought on by Niles's addition to the family precipitated a self-destructiveness in West that had nothing to do with her growing isolation as she continued to get promoted in a man's world. Her increased smoking, consumption of fat and beer, and her refusal to exercise were completely unrelated to her breaking up with Jimmy Dinkins, who was allergic to Niles, and, frankly, hated the cat to the point of pulling his gun on Niles one night when Dinkins and West were arguing and Niles decided to insert himself by pouncing on Dinkins from the top of the refrigerator.
West was still sweating, her breathing labored, as she led their prisoner back to the car. She thought she might throw up.
"You got to quit smoking," Brazil said to her.
West stuffed the subject into the back of the car, and Brazil climbed in the front.
"You got any idea how much fat's in Bojangles, and all that other shit you eat?" Brazil went on.
Their prisoner was silent, his eyes bright with hate in the rearview mirror. His name was Nate Laney. He was fourteen. He would kill these white cops. All he needed was a chance. Laney was bad and had been since birth, according to his biological mother, who also had always been bad, according to her own mother. This bad seed could be traced back to a prison in England, where the original bad seed had been shipped out to this country, around the same time the troops in the Queen City had been chasing Cornwallis down the road.
"I bet you never exercise." Brazil did not know when to quit.
West gave him a look as she wiped her flushed face with a tissue.
Brazil had just sprinted a hundred yards and wasn't even breathing.
She felt old and crabby, and sick and tired of this kid and his naive, self-righteous opinions. Life was entirely more complicated that he thought, and he would begin to see it for himself after he'd been out here a year or two, with nothing but fried chicken places on every corner. Bojangles, Church's, Popeye's, Chic N Grill, Chick-Fil-A, Price's Chicken Coop. Plus, cops didn't make much money, certainly not in their early years, so even off-duty options for dining were limited to the pizza, burgers, and bar food that were plentiful in Charlotte, where citizens loved their Hornets and Panthers and Nascar race-car drivers.
"When was the last time you played tennis?" Brazil asked as their prisoner plotted in the backseat.
"I don't remember," she said.
"Why don't we go out and hit some."
"You need your head examined," she said.
"Oh come on. You used to be good. I bet you used to be in shape, too," he said.
The massive concrete jail was in the heart of downtown. It had been built at the same time as the big new police department, in this city that enjoyed a crime clearance rate that exceeded the actual number of cases, according to some. There were many levels of security to go through at the jail, starting with lockers where police were to deposit their guns on the way in. At a desk, deputies checked all who entered, and Brazil looked around, taking in yet another new, scary place. A Pakistani woman in dark clothing and a veil was being processed for shoplifting. Drunks, thieves, and the usual drug dealers were being herded by cops, while the sheriff's department supervised.
In the Central Warrant Repository, West searched her prisoner, emptying his pockets of Chap Stick, one dollar and thirteen cents, and a pack of Kools. She shuffled through his paperwork. He was happy now, laughing, full of himself, checking to see who was watching Nate the Man.
"You able to read?" West asked him.
"My bond on there?" Her prisoner was jailing, wearing three pairs of boxer shorts, two pairs of shorts, the outer ones green, falling off, no belt, looking around and unable to stand still.
"Fraid not," West said.
Inside blue metal solitary holding cells, another young boy beyond redemption stared out with forlorn, killing eyes. Brazil stared back at him. Brazil looked at the Holding Area, where a cage was packed with men waiting to be transported to the jail on Spector Drive until the Department of Corrections transferred them to Camp Green or Central Prison. The men were quiet, peering out, gripping bars like animals in the zoo, nothing else to do in their jailhouse orange.
"I ain't been in here in a while," West's prisoner let her know.
"How long's a while?" West completed an inventory of Nate the Man's belongings.
Nate Laney shrugged, moving around, looking. "Bout two months," he said.
West and Brazil ended their ride with break fast at the Presto Grill.
He was wide-eyed and ready for adventure. She was worn out, a new day just begun. She went home long enough to notice a tube of Super Glue in her shrubbery. Nearby was an open Buck knife. She barely remembered hearing something on the scanner about a subject exposing himself in Latta Park. It seemed glue was involved. West bagged possible evidence, getting an odd feeling about why it might have landed in her yard. She fed Niles. At nine a. m. " West accompanied Hammer through the atrium of City Hall.
"What the hell are you doing with a summons book in your car?" Hammer was saying, walking fast.
This had gone too far. Her deputy chief had been out all night in foot pursuits. She had been locking people up.
"Just because I'm a deputy chief doesn't mean I can't enforce the law," West said, trying to keep up, nodding at people they passed in the corridor.
"I can't believe you're writing tickets. Morning, John. Ben. Locking people up. Hi, Frank." She greeted other city councilmen.
"You're going to end up in court again. As if
I can spare you. Your summons book gets turned in to me today. "
West laughed. This was one of the funniest things she'd heard in a while.
"I will not!" she said.
"What did you tell me to do? Huh? Whose idea was it for me to go back out on the street?" Her sleep deficit was making her giddy.
Hammer threw her hands up in despair as they walked into a room where a special city council meeting had been called by the mayor. It was packed with citizens, reporters, and television crews. People instantly were on their feet, in an uproar, when the two women police officials walked in.
"Chief!"
"Chief Hammer, what are we going to do about crime in the east end?"
"Police don't understand the black community!"
"We want our neighborhoods back!"
"We build a new jail but don't teach our children how to stay out of it!"
"Business downtown has dropped twenty percent since these serial killing-carjackings started!" another citizen shouted.
"What are we doing about them? My wife's scared to death."
Hammer was up front now, taking the microphone. Councilmen sat around a polished horseshoe-shaped table, polished brass nameplates marking their place in the city's government. All eyes were on the first police chief in Charlotte's history to make people feel important, no matter where they lived or who they were. Judy Hammer was the only mother some folks had ever known, in a way, and her deputy was pretty cool, too, out there with the rest of them, trying to see for herself what the problems were.
"We will take our neighborhoods
back by preventing the next crime," Hammer spoke in her strong voice.
"Police can't do it without your help. No more looking the other way and walking past." She, the evangelist, pointed at all.
"No more thinking that what happens to your neighbor is your neighbor's problem. We are one body." She looked | around.
"What happens to you, happens to me." No one moved. Eyes never left her as she stood before i all and spoke a truth that power brokers from the past had not wanted the people to hear. The people had to take their streets, their neighborhoods, their cities, their states, their countries, their world, back. Each person had to start looking out his window, do his own bit of policing in his own part of life, and get irate when something happened to his neighbor. Yes sir. Rise up. Be a Minute Man, a Christian soldier.
"Onward," Hammer told them.
"Police yourself and you won't need us."
The room was frenzied. That night, West was ironically reminded of the overwhelming response as she and Brazil sped past the stadium rising eerily, hugely against the night, filled with crazed, cheering fans celebrating Randy Travis. West's Crown Victoria was directed and in a hurry as it passed the convention center, where a huge video display proclaimed WELCOME TO THE QUEEN CITY. In the distance, cop cars went fast, lights strobing blue and red, protesting another terrible violation. Brazil, too, could not help but think of the timing, after all Hammer had said this morning. He was angry as they drove.
West knew fear she would not show. How could this happen again? What about the task force she had handpicked, the Phantom Force, as it had been dubbed, out day and night to catch the Black Widow Killer? She could not help but think of the press conference, and its excerpts on radio and television. West was tempted to wonder if this might be more than coincidental, as if someone was making a mockery of Charlotte and its police and its people.
The killing had occurred off Trade Street, behind a crumbling brick building where the stadium and the Duke Power transfer station were in close view. West and Brazil approached the disorienting strobing of emergency lights, heading toward an area cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape. Beyond were railroad tracks and a late-model white Maxima, its driver's door open, interior light on, and bell dinging.
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