"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 pa
cked 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.
West flipped open her portable phone and tried her boss's number again. For the past ten minutes, the phone had been busy because Hammer had one son on call waiting, and the other on the line. When Hammer hung up, her phone immediately rang with more bad news.
Four minutes later, she drove out of her Fourth Ward neighborhood in a hurry as West folded the phone and handed it to Brazil. He returned it to the leather case on his belt, where there was plenty of room since volunteers packed light. Brazil was pleased to attach anything to his belt that was road legal, a Charlottean term, the etymology of which could be traced back to Nascar gods and the rockets they drove, not one of which, in fact, was permitted on life's highways unless it was chained to a trailer. Brazil envied what most cops complained about.
Backaches, inconvenience, and being encumbered did not enter his mind.
Of course, he carried a radio with channels for all response areas, the antenna stubby and prone to probe very short officers' armpits.
Brazil also wore a pager no one ever called, a Mini Mag-Lite with two-thousand two-hundred candlepower in its black leather holster, and West's cellular phone, because he was not allowed to carry the Observer's cellular phone when he was in uniform. Brazil had no gun or pepper spray. His ultra duty belt was without expandable baton, nightstick ring, double magazine holders, handcuffs, or double cuff case. Brazil lacked a long flashlight case, or Pro-3 duty holster, or clip holder, and had not a single molded belt keeper, or for that matter, a silent key holder with Velcro wraparound flap.
tw West had all this and more. She was fully loaded, and Niles could hear her coming from the far reaches of the city. Minute by minute, the seven-pound Abyssinian waited for the sound, listening for the beloved clanking and creaking and heavy landings. His disappointment was becoming chronic and broaching unforgivable as he sat in his window over the sink, watching and waiting, and increasingly fixated by the US Bank Corporate Center (USBCC) dominating the sky. Niles in his earlier lives had been intimate with the greatest erections in all of civilization, the pyramids, the magnificent tombs of pharaohs.
In the fantasies of Niles, USBCC was the giant King Usbeecee, with his silver crown, and it was simply a matter of time before his majesty shook loose of his moorings. He would turn right and left, looking at his feeble neighbors. Niles imagined the King stepping slowly, heavily, feeling his way, shaking earth, for the first time. He aroused Niles's fearful reverence because the King had no smile, and when his eyes caught the sun and turned gold, they were overpowering, as was the mighty monarch's sheer weight. King U
sbeecee could step on the Charlotte Observer, the entire police department, all of the LEC and City Hall. He could crush the entire force of armed officers, and their chief and deputy chiefs, the mayor, the newspaper's publisher, reducing all to precast dust.
Vy Hammer got out of her car and wasted no time striding through her detectives and uniformed police. She ducked under the tape with its bright yellow warning that always made her ache and fear, no matter where she saw it. Hammer was not in the form she would have liked, having even more on her mind than usual. Since her ultimatum to Seth, her quality of life had radically disintegrated. He had not gotten up this morning, and was mumbling about Dr. Kevorkian, living wills, and the Hemlock Society. Seth had pontificated about the silliness of assuming that suicide was selfish, for every adult had the right to be absent.
"Oh for God's sake," his wife had said.
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