"Police!" she said loudly.
"Open up!"
This went on for a while until the door opened and Mrs. Brazil blearily peered out. She steadied herself by holding on to the door frame.
"Where's Andy?" West asked.
"Haven't seen him." Mrs. Brazil pressed her forehead with a hand, squinting, as if the world was bad for her health.
"At work, I guess," she muttered.
"No, he's not and hasn't been since Thursday," West said.
"You're sure he hasn't called or anything?"
"I've been sleeping."
"What about the answering machine? Have you checked?" West asked.
"He keeps his room locked." Mrs. Brazil wanted to return to her couch.
"Can't get in there."
West, who did not have her tool belt with her, could still get into most things. She took the knob off his door and was inside Brazil's room within minutes. Mrs. Brazil returned to the living room and settled her swollen, poisoned self on the couch. She did not want to go inside her son's room. He didn't want her there anyway, which was why she had been locked out for years, ever since he had accused her of taking money from the wallet he tucked under his socks. He had accused her of rummaging through his school papers. He had blamed her for knocking over his eighteen-and-under singles state championship tennis trophy, badly denting it and breaking off the little man.
The red light was flashing on the answering machine beside Brazil's neatly made twin bed with its simple green spread. West hit the play button, looking around at shelves of brass and silver trophies, at scholastic and creative awards that Brazil had never bothered to frame, but had thumbtacked to walls. A pair of leather Nike tennis shoes, worn out from toe-dragging, was abandoned under a chair, one upright, one on its side, and the sight of them pained West. For a moment, she felt distressed and upset. She imagined the way he looked at her with blue eyes that went on forever. She remembered his voice on the radio, and the quirky way he tested coffee with his tongue, which she had repeatedly told him wasn't a smart way to determine whether something was too hot. The first three calls on his machine were hang-ups.
"Yo," began the fourth one.
"It's Axel. Got tickets for Bruce Hornsby."
West hit a button.
"Andy? It's Packer. Call me."
She hit the button again and heard her own voice looking for him. She skipped ahead, landing on two more hang-ups. West opened the closet door, and her fear intensified when she found nothing inside. She, the cop, went into drawers and found them empty, as well. He had left his books and computer behind, and this only deepened her confusion and concern. These were what he loved the most. He would not abandon them unless he had embarked upon a self-destructive exodus, a fatalistic flight. West looked under the bed and lifted the mattress, exploring every inch of Brazil's private space. She did not find the pistol he had borrowed from her.
West drove around the city much of the night, mopping her face, popping Motrin, and turning the air conditioner on and off as she vacillated between hot and cold. On South College, she slowly passed street people, staring hard at each, as if she expected Brazil to have suddenly turned into one of them. She recognized Poison, the young hooker from Mungo's videotape, undulating along the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and enjoying being watched. Poison followed the dark blue cop car with haunted, glassy eyes, and West looked back. West thought of Brazil, of his sad curiosity about bad people and what had happened to make them that way.
They make choices. West said that all the time, and it was true.
But she envied Brazil's freshness, his innocent clarity of vision. In truth, he saw life with a wisdom equal to her own, but his was born of vulnerability, and not of the experience that sometimes crowded West's compassion and cloaked her feelings in many hard layers. Her condition had been coming on for a long time, and most likely was irreversible.
West accepted that when one is exposed to the worst elements of life, there comes a point of no return. She had been beaten and shot, and she had killed.
She had crossed a line. She was a missionary, and the tender, warm contours of life were for others.
On Tryon Street, she was stopped at a traffic light near Jake's, another favorite spot for breakfast. Thelma could do anything with fried steak and biscuits, and the coffee was good. West stared ahead, several blocks away, just past First Union Bank with its giant painted hornet bursting out of one side of the building. She recognized the dark car's boxy shape and conical tail lights glowing red. She wasn't close enough to see the tag yet, and was going to do something about that.
The light turned green and West gunned the Ford's powerful engine until she was on the old BMW's bumper. Her heart thrilled as she recognized the plate number. She honked her horn and motioned, and Brazil kept going. West followed, honking again and longer, but clearly he had no intention of acknowledging her as she followed his shiny chrome bumper through downtown. Brazil knew she was there and didn't give a damn as he threw back another gulp from the tall-boy Budweiser he was holding between his legs. He broke the law right in front of Deputy Chief West, and knew she saw it, and he didn't give a shit.
"Goddamn son of a bitch," West exclaimed as she flipped on flashing lights.
Brazil sped up. West couldn't believe what was happening. How could he do anything this stupid?
"Oh for fuck's sake!" She hit the siren.
Brazil had been in pursuits, but he had never been the lead car.
Usually, he was back there sitting in the front seat with West. He drank another swallow of the beer he had bought at the 76 truck stop just off the Sunset East exit. He needed another one, and decided he might as well hit 1-77 off Trade Street, and cruise on back for a refill. He tossed his empty in the back seat, where several others clinked and rolled on the floor. His broken speedometer faithfully maintained its belief that the BMW was going thirty-two miles per hour.
In fact, he was going sixty-three when he turned onto the Interstate.
West doggedly pursued as her alarm and anger grew. Should she call for other cars, Brazil was ruined, his volunteer days ended, his real troubles only begun. Nor was there a guarantee that more cops would effect a stop. Brazil might decompensate further. He might feel desperate, and West knew how that might end. She had seen those final chapters before, all over the road, crumpled metal sharp like razors, glass, oil, blood, and black body bags on their way to the morgue.
His speed climbed to ninety miles per hour, and he maintained it, with her steadily behind him, lights and siren going full tilt. It penetrated his fog that she had not gotten on the radio for help. He would have heard it on his scanner, and backup cars surely would have shown up by now. He didn't know if this made him feel better or worse.
Maybe she didn't take him seriously. Nobody took him seriously, and nobody ever would again, because of Webb, because of the unfairness, the heartlessness of life and all in it.
Brazil shot onto the exit of Sunset Road East and began to slow. It was finished. In truth, he needed gas. This chase had its limits anyway. He might as well stop. Depression settled heavier, crushing him into his seat as he parked at the outer limits of the tarmac, far away from eighteen-wheelers and their bright-painted shiny cabs with all their chrome. He cut the engine and leaned back, shutting his eyes, as punishment approached. West wouldn't cut him any slack. She, in her uniform and gun,
was above all else a cop, and a hard, unkind one at that. It mattered not that they were partners and went shooting together and talked about things.
"Andy." She loudly rapped a knuckle on his window.
"Get out," she commanded this common lawbreaker.
He felt tired as he climbed out of a car that his father, Drew, had loved. Brazil took off his father's jacket and tossed it in the back seat. It was almost eighty degrees out, gnats and moths swarming in sodium vapor lights. Brazil was soaked with sweat. He tucked the keys in a pocket of the tight jeans that Mungo believed pointed to Brazil's cr
iminal leanings. West shone her flashlight through the back window, illuminating aluminum tallboy beer cans on the mat in back. She counted eleven.
"Did you drink all these tonight?" she demanded to know as he shut his door.
"No."
"How many have you had tonight?"
"I didn't count." His eyes were hard and defiant on hers.
"Do you always elude police lights and sirens?" she said, furious.
"Or is tonight special for some reason?"
He opened the back door of his BMW, and angrily grabbed out a T-shirt.
He had no comment as he peeled off his wet polo shirt, and yanked on the dry one. West had never seen him half naked.
"I ought to lock you up," she said with not quite as much authority.
"Go ahead," he said.
W Randy and Jude Hammer had flown into the Charlotte- Douglas International Airport within forty-five minutes of each other, and their mother had met them downstairs in baggage. The three were somber and distracted as Hammer returned to Carolinas Medical Center without delay. She was so happy to see her boys, and old memories were reopened and exposed to air and light.
Randy and Jude had been born with their mother's handsome bones and straight white teeth. They had been blessed with her piercing eyes and frightening intelligence.
From Seth, they had received their four-cylinder engines that moved them slowly along, and with little direction or passing power or drive. Randy and Jude were happy enough simply to exist and go nowhere in a hurry. They drew gratification and joy from their dreams, and from regular customers in whatever restaurant employed them from one year to the next. They were happy with the understanding women who loved them anyway. Randy was proud of his bit parts in movies no one saw. Jude was thrilled to be in any jazz bar he and the guys got gigs in, and he played the drums with passion, whether the audience was ten people or eighty.
Oddly, it had never been their rocket-charged mother who could not live with the sons' something less than stellar accomplishments in life. It was Seth who was disgusted and ashamed. Their father had proved so totally lacking in understanding and patience, that the sons had moved far away. Of course. Hammer understood the psychological dynamics. Seth's hatred for his sons was his hatred for himself. It didn't take great acumen to deduce that much. But knowing the reason had changed nothing. It had required tragedy, a grave illness, to reunite this family.
"Mom, you holding up?" Jude was in back of Hammer's personal car. He was rubbing her shoulders as she drove.
"I'm trying."
She swallowed hard as Randy looked at her with "Well, I don't want to see him," said Randy, cradling flowers he had bought for his father in the airport.
"That's understandable," Hammer said, switching lanes, eyes in the mirrors. It had begun to rain.
"How are my babies?"
"Great," Jude said.
"Benji's learning to play sax."
"I can't wait to hear it. What about Owen?"
"Not quite old enough for instruments, but she's my boogie baby. Every time she hears music, she dances with Spring," Jude went on, referring to the child's mother.
"God, Mom, you'll die when you see it. It's hilarious!"
Spring was the artist Jude had lived with in Greenwich Village for eight years. Neither of Hammer's sons was married. Each had two children, and Hammer adored every fine golden hair on their small lovely heads. It was her bleeding, buried fear that they were growing up in distant cities with only infrequent contact with their rather legendary grandmother. Hammer did not want to be someone they might someday talk about but had never known.
"Smith and Fen wanted to come," said Randy, taking his mother's hand.
"It's gonna be all right. Mom." He felt another stab of hate for his father.
West didn't know what to do with her prisoner of the evening. Brazil was slumped down in the seat, arms crossed, his posture defiant and decidedly without remorse. He refused to look at her now, but stared out the windshield at bugs and bats swirling beneath lights. He watched truckers in pointed cowboy boots and jeans strolling out to their mighty steeds, and leaning against cabs, propping a foot on the running board, hands cupped around a cigarette, as they lit up like the Marlboro Man.
"You got your cigarettes?" Brazil asked West. She looked at him as if he had lost his mind.
"Forget it.
"I want one."
"Yeah, right. You've never smoked in your life, and I'm not going to be the reason you start," she said, and she wanted one, too.
"You couldn't possibly know whether I've ever smoked a cigarette or pot or anything else," he said in the strange tone of intoxication.
"Ha! You think you know so much. You don't know shit. Cops. And their dark, narrow alleyways for minds."
"Really? I thought you were a cop. Or have you quit that, too?"
He stared miserably out his side window.
West felt sorry for him, mad as she was. She wished she knew what was wrong, exactly.
"What the hell's gotten into you?" She tried another tactic, poking Brazil, this time not playfully.
He did not respond.
"Trying to ruin your life? What if some other cop spotted you first?"
She was no-nonsense.
"Got any idea how much trouble you'd be in?"
"I don't care," he said, and his voice caught.
"Yes, you do, goddamn it! Look at me!"
Brazil stared out, his eyes swimming as he dully watched bleary images of people in and out of the truck stop, men and women whose lives were different from his, and who would not understand what it was like to be him. They would look at all that he was and despise him for being privileged and spoiled, because they could not comprehend his reality.
Bubba felt precisely this, and just so happened to be parking his King Cab at the pumps. He spotted the BMW first, then the cop car with the enemy in it. Bubba could not believe his good fortune. He went in for Pabst Blue Ribbon and Red Man, and picked up the latest Playboy.
Brazil was struggling to control himself, and West could be hard but so long. She cared about him in a way that fit no easy definition, and this was partly why he unsettled and confused her so much. She enjoyed him as a talented, precocious recruit, someone she could mentor and get a kick out of watching as he learned. She did not have a brother and would have liked one exactly like him, someone young, smart, sensitive and kind. He was a friend, although she did not give him much of a chance. He was a pretty incredible-looking guy and didn't seem to notice.
"Andy," she quietly said, 'please tell me what happened. "
"Somehow he got in my computer basket, my files. Everything over the news channels before the paper came out. Scooped." His voice trembled, and he did not want West to see him like this.
West was stunned.
"He?" she asked.
"Who's he?"
"Webb." He could barely bring himself to say that name.
"Same piece of shit screwing your deputy chief!"
"What?" Now West was truly lost.
"Goode," he said.
"Everybody knows."
"I didn't." West wondered how she could have missed intelligence like that.
Brazil's heart was broken forever. West wasn't quite sure what to do as she mopped her face again.
Bubba stealthily made his way back to his truck, his thick face with its misshapen nose averted and shadowed by an Exxon baseball cap.
Climbing up into his cab with his purchases, he sat watching the cop car out his windshield. For a while, he nipped through his magazine, pausing at the really big stories. There were many of them, and he tried not to think about his wife or make comparisons as he calculated the best method of attack.
He had packed light tonight, just a Colt. 380 caliber seven-shot pistol in an ankle holster, which would not have been his first choice had he known he might have a standoff with the cops. It was a good thing he had aback up between the seats, a Quality Parts Shorty E-2 Carbine,223 cali
ber, with thirty-shot magazine, adjustable sights, chrome-lined barrel finished in manganese phosphate that didn't shine at night. For all practical purposes, this was an M-16, and with it, Bubba could riddle West's car Bonnie and Clyde style. He turned a page, and massaged more big ideas as he enjoyed the dark.
Vy West had never really been called upon to comfort a member of the male gender. Rarely was such a thing needed or requested, and having no precedent to follow, she used common sense. Brazil was hiding his face in his hands. She felt terribly sorry for him. What an unfortunate state of affairs.
"It's not that bad, really," she kept saying.
"Okay?" She patted his shoulder.
"We'll find a way out of this. Okay?"
She patted him again, and when this did not make a dent, she finally broke down.
"Come here," she said.
West put an arm around him, and pulled him close. Suddenly, he was in her lap, his arms clamped around her, as he held her like a child, which he was not. West's hot flashes seemed worse as she thought fast and hormones spiked. He nuzzled her, holding tight, and her insides woke up, startling her. Brazil was suffering from a similar response, and moved up her body, to her neck, until he found her mouth. For moments, at least, they were completely out of control and out of orbit. Their traumatized brains went into shock, allowing other instincts to have their way, for Mother Nature worked in this fashion to trick couples into procreating.
West and Brazil had not gotten to the point of worrying about what sort of birth control was best suited to their anatomies, needs, tastes, belief systems, personal choices, fantasies, secret pleasures, or faith in consumer reports. This way of communicating with each other was new, so they took the time to linger in places they had always wondered about. Then reality asserted itself with alacrity, and West suddenly sat up and looked out the windows of her police car, remembering she was on duty with a man in her lap.
"Andy," she said.
He was busy.
"Andy," she tried again.
"Andy, get up. You're on my… gun."
She tried to move him, with no energy or enthusiasm, not wanting him to go anywhere ever again. Hell was here and she was finished.
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