Hornet's Nest (4 page)

“Mom!” Brazil yelled.

The light was flashing on the answering machine by his bed, and he hit the play button. The first message was from the newspaper credit union, and he impatiently hit the button again, then three more times, skipping past hang-ups. The last message was from Axel. He was playing guitar, singing Hootie & the Blowfish.

“I only wanna be with you . . . Yo! Andy, it’s Axel-don’t-axe-me. Maybe dinner? How ’bout Jack Straw’s . . . ?”

Brazil impatiently cut off the recording as the phone rang. This time the caller was live and creepy, and breathing into the phone as the pervert had sex with Brazil in mind, again without asking.

“I’m holding youuu so haarrrddd, and you’re touching me with your tongue, sliiiidiiing . . .” she breathed in a low tone that reminded Brazil of psycho shows he sometimes had watched as a child.

“You’re sick.” He slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

He stood in the mirror over his dresser and began brushing hair out of his eyes. It was really bugging him, getting too long, streaks from the sun catching light. He had always worn his hair one of two ways, short or not as short. He was tucking an obstinate strand behind an ear when suddenly the reflection of his mother boiled up from behind, an obese, raging drunk, attacking.

“Where have you been?” his mother screamed as she tried to backhand her son across the face.

Brazil raised an arm, warding off the blow just in time. He wheeled around, grabbing his mother by both wrists, firmly but gently. This was a tired old drama, an endless rerun of a painful play.

“Easy, easy, easy,” he said as he led his besotted mother to the bed and sat her down.

Muriel Brazil began to cry, rocking, slurring her words. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me, Andy. Please, oh pleeeassse.”

Brazil glanced at his watch. He looked furtively at the window, afraid West might somehow see through shut blinds and know the wretched secret of his entire life.

“Mom, I’m going to get your medicine, okay?” he said. “You watch TV and go to bed. I’ll be home soon.”

It wasn’t okay. Mrs. Brazil wailed, rocking, screaming hell on earth. “Sorry, sorry, sorry! Don’t know what’s wrong with me. Andyeeee!”

West did not hear all of this, but she heard enough because she had opened car windows to smoke. She was suspicious that Brazil lived with a girlfriend and they were having a fight. West shook her head, flicking a butt out onto the weed-choked, eroded drive. Why would anyone move in with another human being right after college, after all those years of roommates? For what? She asked no questions of Brazil as they drove away. Whatever this reporter might have to say to explain his life, she didn’t want to hear it. They headed back to the city, the lighted skyline an ambitious monument to banking and girls not allowed. This wasn’t an original thought. She heard Hammer complain about it every day.

West would drive her chief through the city, and Hammer would look out, poking her finger and talking about those businessmen behind tall walls of glass who decided what went into the paper and what crimes got solved and who became the next mayor. Hammer would rail on about
Fortune 500 yahoos who didn’t live anywhere near here and determined whether the police needed a bicycle squad or laptops or different pistols. Rich men had decided to change the uniforms years ago and to merge the city police with the Mecklenburg County Police. Every decision was unimaginative and based on economics, according to Hammer.

West believed every bit of it as she and Brazil cruised past the huge, new stadium where David Copperfield was making magic and parking decks were jammed with thousands of cars. Brazil was oddly subdued, and not writing down a word. West looked curiously at him as the police scanner rudely announced this modern city’s primitive crimes, and the radio softly played Elton John.

“Any unit in the area,” a dispatcher said. “B&E in progress, four hundred block East Trade Street.”

West floored it and flipped on lights. She whelped the siren, gunning past other cars. “That’s us,” she said, snapping up the mike.

Brazil got interested.

“Unit 700,” West said over the air.

The dispatcher wasn’t expecting a deputy chief to respond and sounded somewhat startled and confused.

“What unit?” the dispatcher inquired.

“700,” replied West. “In the nine hundred block. I’ll take the B&E in progress.”

“Ten-four, 700!”

The radio broadcast the call. Other cars responded as West cut in and out of traffic. Brazil was staring at her with new interest. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

“Since when do deputy chiefs answer calls?” he said to her.

“Since I got stuck with you.”

The projects on East Trade were cement barracks subsidized by the government and exploited by criminals who did deals in the dark and got their women to lie when the cops showed up. Breaking and entering around here, it had been West’s experience, usually meant someone was pissed off. Most of the time, this was a girlfriend calling in a complaint on an apartment where her man was hiding and had enough
outstanding warrants to be locked up twenty times.

“You stay in the car,” West ordered her ride-along as she parked behind two cruisers.

“No way.” Brazil grabbed the door handle. “I didn’t go to all this trouble to sit in the car everywhere we go. Besides, it isn’t safe to be out here alone.”

West didn’t comment as she scanned buildings with windows lighted and dark. She studied parking lots filled with drug dealer cars and didn’t see a soul.

“Then stay behind me, keep your mouth shut, and do what you’re told,” she told him as she got out.

The plan was pretty simple. Two officers would take the front of the apartment, on the first floor, and West and Brazil would go around back to make sure no one tried to flee through that door. Brazil’s heart was pounding and he was sweating beneath his leather jacket as they walked in the thick darkness beneath sagging clotheslines in one of the city’s war zones. West scanned windows and unsnapped her holster as she quietly got on the radio.

“No lights on,” she said over the air. “Closing in.”

She drew her pistol. Brazil was inches behind her and wished he were in front, as furtive officers they could not see closed in on a unit scarred by graffiti. Trash was everywhere, caught on rusting fences and in the trees, and the cops drew their guns as they reached the door.

One of them spoke into his radio, giving West, their leader, an update. “We got the front.”

“Police!” his partner threatened.

Brazil was concerned about the uneven terrain, and clotheslines hanging low enough to choke someone, and broken glass everywhere in the tar-black night. He was afraid West might hurt herself and turned on his Mag-Lite, illuminating her in a huge circle of light. Her sneaking silhouette with drawn pistol was bigger than God.

“Turn that fucking thing off!”
she whipped around and hissed at him.

Charlotte police caught no one on that call. West and Brazil were in a bad mood as they rode and the radio chattered. She could have gotten shot. Thank God her officers hadn’t
seen what this idiot reporter had done. She couldn’t wait to give Hammer a piece of her mind and was halfway tempted to call her boss at home. West needed something to give her a boost and pulled into the Starvin Marvin on South Tryon Street. Before she had shifted the car into park, Brazil was pulling up his door handle.

“You ever heard of looking before you leap?” she asked, like a severe schoolteacher.

Brazil gave her an indignant, disgusted look as he undid his seatbelt. “I can’t wait to write about you,” he threatened.

“Look.” West nodded at the store, at the plate glass in front, at customers prowling inside and making purchases. “Pretend you’re a cop. That should be easy for you. So you get out of your cop car? Don’t check? Walk in on a robbery in progress? And guess what?” She climbed out and stared inside at him. “You’re dead.” She slammed the door shut.

Brazil watched Deputy Chief West walk into the convenience store. He started to make notes, gave up, and leaned back in the seat. He did not understand what was happening. It bothered him a lot that she did not want him around, even though he was convinced he didn’t give a rat’s ass. No wonder she wasn’t married. Who would want to live with somebody like that? Brazil already knew that if he were ever successful, he wouldn’t be mean to people new at life. It was heartless and said everything about West’s true character.

She made him pay for his own coffee. It cost a dollar and fifteen cents, and she hadn’t bothered to ask him how he drank it, which wasn’t with Irish cream and twenty packs of sugar. Brazil could barely swallow it but did the best he could as they resumed patrolling. She was smoking again. They began to cruise a downtown street, where prostitutes clutching washcloths strolled languidly along the sidewalk, following them with luminous, empty eyes.

“What are the washcloths for?” Brazil asked.

“What do you expect? Finger bowls? It’s a messy profession,” West remarked.

He shot her another look.

“No matter what kind of car I drive, they know I’m here,” she went on, flicking an ash out the window.

“Really?” he asked. “I guess the same ones have been out here, what, fifteen years, then? And they remember you. Imagine that.”

“You know, this isn’t how you make points,” West warned.

He was looking out and thoughtful when he said, “Don’t you miss it?”

West watched the ladies of the night and didn’t want to answer him. “Can you tell which are men?”

“That one, maybe.”

Brazil stared at a big, ugly hooker in a vinyl miniskirt, her tight black top stretched over opera breasts. Her come-hither walk was slow and bulging as she stared hate into the cop car.

“Nope. She’s real,” West let Brazil know, and not adding that the hooker was also an undercover cop, wired, armed, and married with a kid. “The men have good legs,” she went on. “Anatomically correct perfect fake breasts. No hips. You get close, which I don’t recommend, they shave.”

Brazil was quiet.

“Guess you didn’t learn all this working for the TV magazine,” she added.

He could feel her glancing at him, as if she had something else on her mind.

“So, you drive that Cadillac with shark fins?” she finally got around to it.

He continued looking out at the trade show along the street, trying to tell women from men.

“In your driveway,” West went on. “Doesn’t look like something you’d drive.”

“It isn’t,” Brazil said.

“Gotcha.” West sucked on the cigarette and flicked another ash into the wind. “You don’t live alone.”

He continued staring out his window. “I have an old BMW 2002. It was my dad’s. He got it used and fixed it up, could fix anything.”

They passed a silver rental Lincoln. West noticed it because the man inside had the interior light on and looked
lost. He was talking on his portable phone, and casting about in this bad part of town. He turned off on Mint Street. Brazil was still looking out at dangerous people looking back at them when West got interested in the Toyota directly ahead, its side window knocked out, the license plate hanging by a coat hanger. There were two young males inside. The driver was watching her in the rearview mirror.

“What you wanna bet we got a stolen car ahead,” West announced.

She typed the plate number into the MDT. It began to beep as if she’d just won at slot machines. She read the display and flipped on flashing blue and red lights. The Toyota blasted ahead of them.

“Shit!” West exclaimed.

Now she was in a high-speed pursuit, trying to be a race driver and balance a cigarette and coffee and snatch up the mike, all at the same time. Brazil didn’t know what to do to help. He was having the adventure of his life.

“700!” West’s voice went up as she yelled into the mike. “I’m in pursuit!”

“Go ahead, 700,” the radio came back. “You have the air.”

“I’m north on Pine, turning left on Seventh, give you a description in a second.”

Brazil could scarcely contain himself. Why didn’t she pass, cut the car off. The Toyota was just a V6. How fast could it go?

“Hit the siren!” West shouted at him as the engine strained.

Brazil didn’t have this course in the volunteer academy. Unfastening his seatbelt, he groped around under the dash, the steering column, West’s knees, and was practically in her lap when he found a button that felt promising. He pressed it as they roared down the street. The trunk loudly popped up. West’s car rocked into a dip as they sped after the Toyota, and crime-scene equipment, a raincoat, a bubble light, flares spilled out, scattering over pavement. West couldn’t believe it as she stared into the rearview mirror at her career
bouncing away in the afterburn. Brazil was very quiet as police lights were turned off. They slowed, crawled off the road, and stopped. West looked at her ride-along.

“Sorry,” Brazil said.

W
est answered nothing more for an hour and twenty-five minutes, as she and Brazil inched their way along the street, collecting police gear that had jumped out of the trunk. The bubble light was shattered blue plastic. Flares were crushed paper cases leaking a dangerous composition. A Polaroid crime-scene camera would capture nothing anymore. The raincoat was miles away, snagged on the undercarriage of a station wagon, touching the exhaust pipe and soon to catch on fire.

West and Brazil drove and stopped, picked up, and drove again. This went on without conversation. West was so angry she did not dare speak. So far, two patrol units had cruised past. There was no doubt in the deputy chief’s mind that the entire four-to-midnight shift knew exactly what had happened and probably thought it was West who had hit the switch because she hadn’t been in a pursuit in this life. Before tonight she had been respected. She had been admired by the troops. She stole a hateful glance at Brazil, who had recovered a jumper cable and was neatly coiling and tucking it beside the spare tire, which was the only thing that hadn’t flown out, because it was bolted down.

“Look,” Brazil suddenly spoke, staring at her beneath a
streetlight. “I didn’t do it on purpose. What more do you want me to say?”

West got back in the car. Brazil halfway wondered if she might drive off without him, and just leave him out here to be murdered by drug dealers or hookers who were really men. Maybe the consequences were occurring to West, too. She waited for him to climb in. He shut the door and pulled the seatbelt across his chest. The scanner hadn’t stopped, and he was hoping they’d go on something else quick so he could redeem himself.

“I have no reason to have a detailed knowledge of your car,” Brazil said in a quiet, reasonable tone. “The Crown Vic I got to drive during the academy was older than this. The trunk opened from the outside. And we don’t get to use sirens . . .”

She shoved the car in gear and drove. “I know all that. I’m not blaming you. You didn’t do it on purpose. Enough already,” she said.

She decided to try another part of town, off Remus Road near the dog pound. Nothing would be going on there. Her assumption would have been accurate, were it not for an old drunk woman who decided to start screaming on the lawn of the Mount Moriah Primitive Baptist Church, near the Greyhound bus station and the Presto Grill. West heard the call over the scanner and had no choice but to back up the responding unit. She and Brazil were maybe four blocks away.

“This shouldn’t be anything and we’re going to make sure we keep it that way,” West pointedly told Brazil as she sped up and took a right on Lancaster.

The one-story church was yellow brick with gaudy colored glass windows all lit up and nobody home, the patchy lawn littered with beer bottles near the JESUS CALLS sign in front. An old woman was screaming and crying hysterically and trying to pull away from two uniformed cops. Brazil and West got out of their car, heading to the problem. When the patrolmen saw the deputy chief in all her brass, they didn’t know what to make of it and got exceedingly nervous.

“What we got?” West asked when she got to them.

The woman screamed and had no teeth. Brazil could not understand a note she was wailing.

“Drunk and disorderly,” said a cop whose nameplate read
Smith
. “We’ve picked her up before.”

The woman was in her sixties, at least, and Brazil could not take his eyes off her. She was drunk and writhing in the harsh glare of a streetlight near the sign of a church she probably did not attend. She was dressed in a faded green Hornets sweatshirt and dirty jeans, her belly swollen, her breasts wind socks on a flat day, arms and legs sticks with spiderwebs of long dark hair.

Brazil’s mother used to make scenes outside the house, but not anymore. He remembered a night long ago when he drove home from the Harris-Teeter grocery to find his mother out in front of the house. She was yelling and chopping down the picket fence as a patrol car pulled up. Brazil tried to stop her and stay out of the way of the axe. The Davidson policeman knew everyone in town and didn’t lock up Brazil’s mother for disturbing the peace or being drunk in public, even though he had justification.

West was checking the old woman’s cuffed wrists in back as blue and red lights strobed and her wailing went on, pierced by pain. West shot the officers a hot, angry look.

“Where’s the key?” she demanded. “These are way too tight.”

Smith had been around since primitive times and reminded West of jaded, unhappy old cops who ended up working private security for corporations. West held out her hand, and he gave her the tiny metal key. West worked it into the cuffs, springing them open. The woman instantly calmed down as cruel steel disappeared. She tenderly rubbed deep angry red impressions on her wrists, and West admonished the troops.

“You can’t do that,” she continued to shame them. “You’re hurting her.”

West asked the woman to hold up drooping arms so West could pat her down, and it entered West’s mind that she ought to grab a pair of gloves. But she didn’t have a box in
her car because she wasn’t supposed to need things like that anymore, and, in truth, the woman had been put through enough indignity. West did not like searching people, never had, and she remembered in the old days finding unfortunate surprises like bird claw fetishes, feces, used condoms, and erections. She thought of rookie days, of fishing cold slimy Spam out of Chicken Wing’s pocket right before he socked her with his one arm. This old lady had nothing but a black comb, and a key on a shoelace around her neck.

Her name was Ella Joneston, and she was very quiet as the police lady cuffed her again. The steel was cold but didn’t have the teeth it did a minute ago when the sons-a-bitches
snaked
her. She knew exactly what it was they wrapped around her wrists in back where she couldn’t see, and it bit and bit without relief, venom spreading through her, making her shake as she screamed. Her heart swelled up big, beating against her ribs, and would have broken had that blue car with the nice lady not pulled up.

Ella Joneston had always known that death was when your heart broke. Hers had come close many times, going back to when she was twelve and boys in the projects knocked her down right after she’d washed her hair. They did things she never would speak of, and she’d gone home and picked dirt and bits of leaves out of braids and washed off while nobody asked. The police lady was sweet, and there was someone in plain clothes there to help her, a clean-looking boy with a kind face. A detective, Ella reckoned. They took each of her arms, like she was going to Easter Sunday and dressed in something fine.

“Why you out here drinking like this?” The lady in uniform meant business but she wasn’t harmful.

Ella wasn’t sure where
out here
was. She didn’t have a way to get places. So she couldn’t be far from her apartment in Earle Village, where she had been sitting in front of the TV when the phone had rung earlier this evening. It was her daughter with the awful news about Efrim, Ella’s fourteen-year-old grandson, who was in the hospital. Efrim had been
shot several times this morning. Everyone supposed the white doctors tried all they could, but Efrim had always been stubborn. The memory brought fresh hot tears to Ella’s eyes.

Ella told the lady cop and the detective all about it as they situated her into the back of a police car with a partition to make sure Ella couldn’t hurt anyone. Ella mapped out Efrim’s entire short life, going back to when Ella held him in her arms right after Lorna birthed him. He was always trouble, like his father. Efrim started dancing when he was two. He used to act big beneath the streetlight out front, with those other boys and all their money.

“I’m going to get your seatbelt on,” the blond detective said, snapping her in and smelling like apples and spices.

The old woman reeked of stale bad hygiene and booze, triggering more images for Brazil. His hands were shaking slightly and not as facile as usual. He didn’t understand what the woman was muttering and gumming and crying about, and every breath smelled like the inside of a Dumpster in the heat. West wasn’t helping a bit now, standing back and watching, making Brazil do the dirty work. His fingers brushed the old woman’s neck and he was startled by how smooth and warm it was.

“You’re going to be all right.” Brazil kept saying what couldn’t possibly be true.

West was not naive. She knew patrol was a problem. How could it not be with Deputy Chief Goode heading it? That beat cops might be a little too rough or simply unprofessional in general wasn’t a shock, but West couldn’t stomach it. She approached the two patrolmen, both older and miserable in their jobs. She got in Smith’s face and remembered being a sergeant and putting up with dead wood like him. As far as she was concerned, he was so low on the food chain, she wouldn’t slop hogs with him.

“Don’t let me
ever
see or hear of anything like this again,” West said in that low tone that Brazil found scary.

West was close enough to see stubble that looked like sand, and a firestorm of broken blood vessels caused by what Smith did when he wasn’t in a patrol car. His eyes were lifeless on hers, for his building had been vacant for years.

“We’re out here to help, not hurt,” West whispered. “Remember? That goes for you, too,” she added to his partner.

Neither cop had any idea about the boy riding with the deputy chief this night, and they sat inside the cruiser with its hornet’s nest on the doors, watching the midnight-blue Crown Victoria leave. Their prisoner in back was quietly snoring.

“Maybe Deputy Chief Virgin finally found a boyfriend,” said Smith as he peeled open two sticks of Big Red gum.

“Yeah,” said the other cop, “when she gets tired of Romper Room, I’ll show her what she’s missing with the big dogs.”

They laughed, pulling out. Moments later, the scanner announced more bad news.

“Thirteen-hundred block Beatties Ford Road,” it said. “Report of an ambulance held hostage by a subject with a knife.”

“Glad we’re tied up on a call,” Smith said, smacking a mouthful of cinnamon.

It was West’s bad luck that Jerome Swan had not experienced a pleasant evening. It had begun at a fuzzy hour before the sun had gone down in this run-down part of the city. West had no reason to be aware of the nip joint in the area known as the Basin, off Tryon Street, very close to the dog pound, where she had been heading for quite some time now. So when the call went out, she was trapped, really. Two marked units got there first, and then Captain Jennings arrived with his ride-along, City Councilman Hugh Bledsoe.

“Shit,” West said when they rolled up on the scene. “Fuck.”

She parked on the side of the narrow, dark street.

“You see that tall man right there getting out of the car, the one in the suit? You know who that is?”

Brazil reached for the door handle, then thought better of it.

“I know exactly who it is,” he said. “Huge Bedsore.”

West shot him a surprised look. It was true the cops had a pet name for their city councilman, but she wasn’t clear on how Brazil knew about it.

“Not one peep out of you,” West warned as she opened her door. “Stay out of the way.” She got out. “And don’t touch anything.”

The ambulance was rumbling, and parked in the middle of the street with the tailgate open wide, light spilling out as red and blue flashed and strobed from cop cars. The men had convened near a rear tire to come up with a plan. West followed around to the back to assess the problem for herself, Brazil right behind her and dying to get in front. Swan was inside, as far back as he could get, wielding a pair of surgical scissors, his eyes bloody egg yolks filled with fury when the woman cop in the white shirt filled his vision.

He had knots on his head and was bleeding from the fight he had gotten into at the nip joint where he had been gambling and drinking Night Train Express fortified wine. When he was put in the ambulance, it was one of those times when he decided he really didn’t feel like going anywhere just that second. Whenever this happened, Swan seized the environment. In this case, he grabbed the closest dangerous object he could and yelled to the paramedics that he had AIDS and was going to cut every one of them. They jumped out and got the cops, all of them men except for that one with the big tits peering in at him like she might do something.

West saw the problem plainly. The subject was holding down the lock to a side door that led out to the street, and the only way to get to him was for someone to climb inside the ambulance. This didn’t require much of a plan. West went around to confer with the committee of officers still gathered by the same tire.

“I’m going to divert him,” she said as Bledsoe stared at her as if he’d never seen a woman in uniform. “The minute
he takes his hand off the door, you guys grab him,” she made sure they understood.

She got closer to the open back of the ambulance and made a face, waving a hand before her eyes.

“Who used pepper spray?” she called out.

“Even that didn’t stop him,” one of the cops let her know.

Next thing Brazil knew, West had climbed inside the ambulance and picked up an aluminum stretcher to use as a shield. She did this easily, and her lips moved. Swan didn’t like whatever it was she was communicating to him. His eyes were on hers, arteries bulging in his neck as he twitched and challenged her with looks and utterances. She was halfway inside when he lunged. Swan was sucked out as if he opened the door of an airplane. Brazil went around to check and found him facedown on the street being cuffed by all those men with a plan. City Councilman Bledsoe watched, hands in his pockets. His eyes followed West as she walked back to her car. Then he stared at Brazil.