Southern Cross (30 page)

“Virginia, I haven’t seen anybody,” Brazil said in a softer tone.

He reached out and took her hand. She had a hard time swallowing.

“And I didn’t dump you,” he said.

He moved his chair next to hers and kissed her. In the bedroom he discovered the wineglasses of Mountain Dew.

Hammer wanted to dump the entire NIJ project. Her mind was a riotous crowd of dissenting, unhappy people who would not let her sleep. She thought about Bubba and how badly she had maligned him. She obsessed over how badly she had handled Lelia Ehrhart and those like her.

Part of Hammer’s mission was to enlighten people. She saw no evidence that she had. Part of her plan was to modernize the police department. And what happened? The entire COMSTAT telecommunications network crashed. The ATM robberies escalated to murder. There were gangs. There was Smoke.

Hammer didn’t think she could ever again endure seeing Ruby Sink’s house or even the block Miss Sink had
lived on. Miss Sink, in her pink robe and slippers, had shuffled through Hammer’s mind all night. Hammer could not get away from their last conversation on Miss Sink’s sidewalk. Hammer could see the old woman in such detail it hurt her heart and pierced her with guilt.

“I’m a failure,” Hammer said to Popeye.

Popeye was under the covers, between Hammer’s feet.

“I’ve caused harm. I should never have come here. I bet you wish you still lived in Charlotte where you had a yard, don’t you?”

Her eyes filled with tears. Popeye burrowed up to her and licked her face. Hammer couldn’t remember the last time she had cried. She had been so stoical when Seth had died because she believed she had to be. She had been rational about the reasons her sons did not seem to want to see her. Hammer had been courageous, innovative, community-minded. All of it so she would be too busy to be lonely, and it hadn’t worked. She got up and dressed.

There was no answer at Brazil’s house when Hammer called from her car phone. She tried West next and was relieved that he and West were there.

“I’ve got something important to say to both of you,” Hammer said over the line.

Parking in the Fan wasn’t as much of a problem at this early hour, and she managed to squeeze into a space on the curb right across the street from West’s town house. Hammer was numb. She did not feel present, nor did she want to be when Brazil opened the front door.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Hammer said to Brazil as they walked into the living room.

“Thank
you,”
he replied. “It’s kind of messy.”

Hammer didn’t care. She didn’t even notice her surroundings, messy or not. She sat in a straight-back chair while West and Brazil sat across from her on the couch.

“Virginia, Andy,” she began, “I’m going to resign.”

“Oh God,” West said, shocked.

“You can’t,” Brazil said, sick.

“Basically,” Hammer went on, “I’ve pretty much
screwed up everything here. I used to be a good police officer, a good chief. Everybody hates us.”

“Not
everybody,”
Brazil said.

“Most of them,” said West. “I mean, let’s be honest about it.”

“Well, I guess the Charlotte connection doesn’t help,” Brazil supposed.

“Or our locking up the COMSTAT network pretty much around the globe,” Hammer said.

“Or our failure to crack the ATM cases before they progressed to a horrible murder. Or a communications officer getting in a fight with a traffic cop, both of whom had just received commendations several days before.” West helped her out with the list.

Hammer folded her hands in her lap and kept them still. She did not interrupt. She did not get up and pace.

“Judy,” West said. “Where are you going to go? Back to Charlotte?”

Hammer shook her head.

“Nowhere,” she answered. “If I can’t handle Richmond, I’m not going to be able to handle someplace else. When the horse dies, get off. I’m retiring from police work. I don’t know where I’ll live. It doesn’t matter.”

“That reminds me,” West said. “We need to talk about the Azalea Parade.”

“How did what she just said remind you of that?” Brazil asked.

“The horse comment. We’ve got mounted cops in the parade,” West said. “And”—she looked at Hammer—“Andy and I are supposed to ride in your convertible.”

“What kind of convertible is it?” Hammer looked distracted.

“Dark blue Sebring,” Brazil said. “Modest, not showy, although one of the big guys at Philip Morris wanted to drive you in his red Mercedes V12 convertible.”

“Not a good idea,” Hammer muttered.

“I don’t think you should be in the parade at all,” West said with conviction. “The parade could be a possible
target for Smoke. And I hate for you to be riding slow in a convertible anyway. There’re a lot of kooks out there.”

Hammer got up. She really didn’t care what happened to her.

“It’s important,” she dully said. “Every little thing we do to reach the community is helpful. I won’t back out of a promise.”

“Well, we’re going to have fifty off-duty cops there in addition to the regular shifts,” West told her. “To the public, it will appear we’re there mainly for traffic control. And we’re mobilizing about twenty plainclothes guys to mingle, just in case Smoke shows up or someone else decides to cause a problem.”

Bubba was thinking the same thing. He believed Chief Hammer should not be riding in an open car in the Azalea Parade, and worse, it had been in the newspaper so everybody knew it. It was possible this was where all roads met. Bubba had been called to save her from a terrible danger. Bubba also figured the Pikes somehow factored in.

At eight o’clock this morning, he was already parking in front of Green Top Sporting Goods on U.S. Route 1, some twenty minutes outside of Richmond. There was no place Bubba would rather be. The minute he walked through the door and was greeted by thousands of fishing rods and all that went with them, his pulse quickened. When he turned to the right and saw hundreds of rifles, shotguns, pistols and revolvers, he got flushed. He felt lust in a way he had never experienced with Honey.

“Hey, what’cha know.” He was enthusiastically greeted by Fig Winnick, the assistant manager.

By Virginia law, a citizen could buy one handgun every thirty days and no more. This had given rise to the tongue-in-cheek Gun-of-the-Month Club. It was a small but clever group of one hundred and eighty-nine men and sixty-two women who sent each other reminders when their thirty days, loosely interpreted as a month, were up. It was April 2.

“If only I’d come in two days ago, I could have bought a gun then and another one today,” Bubba misinterpreted, as usual.

“Wishful thinking,” Winnick told him again. “Doesn’t work that way, Bubba. And it sure as hell is too damn bad.”

“So you’re saying it’s not once a month,” Bubba challenged what he refused to believe.

“Not literally. But sort of. If you start with the first day of each month.”

“You know, someone stole all my guns.” Bubba browsed.

“The guys were talking about it,” Winnick sympathized.

“So all I got left’s the Anaconda and I need something I can pack easier,” Bubba spoke the language.

“I got just the thing.”

Winnick lovingly opened a showcase and gently pulled out a Browning 40 S&W Hi-Power Mark III pistol. He handed the beauty to Bubba.

“Oh God,” Bubba muttered as he fondled the silver chrome pistol. “Oh, oh, oh.”

“Molded polyamide grips with thumb rest,” Winnick said. “Weighs thirty-five ounces, four and three-quarters barrel. Feels great to the hand, huh?”

“Boy. No kidding.”

Bubba pulled back the slide and snapped it forward. There was just no better sound than that.

“Low profile front sight blade, drift-adjustable rear sight,” Winnick went on. “Ambidextrous safety, ten-round magazine.”

“Imported from Belgium.” Bubba wasn’t going to be fooled. “The genuine thing.”

“Nothing but.”

“What about a matte blue finish?” Bubba inquired. “It doesn’t show up as much.”

“Sorry,” Winnick apologized. “Damn. If only you had come in yesterday. We had about eleven left.”

“Well, I guess this one will have to do,” Bubba said.

• • •

Patty Passman also was thinking ahead. She hadn’t missed an Azalea Parade in twelve years and she didn’t intend to miss this one. Although Rhoad had unfairly charged her with many things, it was only
assault on a police officer
that had stuck. She wished bail bondsman Willy “Lucky” Loving would show up to get her the hell out of here.

Lockup was just a holding area and inmates wore their own clothes, giving up only their belts to make it trickier to commit suicide. Passman was sticky, her panty hose so torn up she’d had no choice but to take them off right in front of her cellmate, Tinky Meaney, a truck driver for Dixie Motorfreight, who had gotten picked up for getting into a scuffle in the parking lot of the Power Clean Grill on Hull Street. Passman didn’t know the details, but of one thing she was certain, Tinky Meaney wasn’t on the list of those Passman might have invited to a slumber party.

“I sure wish he’d hurry up,” Passman said from her narrow steel pull-down bed.

She said this often to make certain Meaney didn’t think that Passman enjoyed Meaney’s company and was in no hurry to leave it. Meaney was a big woman. She was the sort who always said they weren’t fat, just big-boned and solid. This was nonsense.

Meaney’s thighs were thicker than the biggest Smithfield hams Passman had ever seen, and every time Meaney stalked about the tiny cell, her jeans swished as her upper legs rubbed together. Her hands were thick with stubby fingers and big knuckles that were scraped and bruised from the fistfight that had landed her here. She had no neck. As she sat on the edge of her bed staring at Passman, Meaney’s breasts sagged over her empty belt loops. Unshaved pale legs showed between the hem of her jeans and the top of her hand-tooled black and red cowboy boots.

“What the hell are you staring at?” Meaney caught Passman looking.

“Nothing,” Passman lied.

Meaney stretched out on her side and propped up on an
elbow, chin in hand. She stared without blinking, a look in her tiny dark eyes that Passman recognized instantly. At the same time Passman realized in amazement that Meaney’s breasts were even bigger than Passman had thought. One was hanging over the side of the bed, almost touching the floor, and brought to mind a sandbag. Passman realized Meaney wasn’t wearing a bra under her Motor Mile Towing & Flatbed Service sweatshirt.

Passman was painfully reminded of yet one more lousy card she’d been dealt in life. No matter how much weight she had put on over the years, her breasts were elusive. Their fat cells dodged any opportunity for growth and development and always had. She suspected that when, as a young girl, she had tried to be a boy, that part of the programming never got deleted when she later returned to her proper gender.

It was unbearably humiliating in eighth-grade health class to watch the films on menstruation, the female outline on the screen developing right before Passman’s eyes, the breasts rounding, the pear-shaped muscular uterus discharging its menses in little hatch-marks flowing through the mature female outline, then out of it, on the screen.

All the other girls could relate. Passman could not. She could have gotten by in life without a bra, had she been honest about it. Her periods were more like commas, brief pauses each month that exacerbated her hypoglycemia and made her very cranky.

Passman was still staring, lost in tortured memories of puberty. Meaney smiled like a jack-o’-lantern and stretched provocatively. Passman came to. She quickly averted her gaze.

“I sure wish he’d hurry up,” Passman said again, this time with more emphasis.

“It ain’t so bad in here,” Meaney said in her twangy drawl. “I recognize your voice. Hear you all the time when I’m in the vincinity, riding through. Channels one, two and three, know ’em by heart. Four-sixty point one hundred megs, 460.200, 460.325. I always thought you had a nice voice.”

“Thank you,” Passman said.

“So, what’d you do?”

Passman thought it wise to send out a warning.

“Beat the shit out of some guy,” she answered. “I lost control and should’ve held back a little more than I did. Huge son of a bitch. Had it coming.”

Meaney nodded. “Mine had it coming, too, fucking son of a bitch. I’m sitting in the bar minding my own business, you know, after a long day on the road, I mean long. He comes over to my table, this big ole trashy fucker in a cowboy hat. I recognized him.” She nodded. “And he recognized me.” She nodded again. “He was in his personal car this night. Nineteen ninety-two Chevy Dually, lowered, loaded, four-fifty-four, aluminum wheels, tinted windows, air ride, all the hitches.

“It was in the lot and he asked if I liked it. I said I did. He asked what I drove. I told him a Mack. He asked if I’d ever drove a Peterbilt. I said I’d driven all there was. He asked if I’d ever had a blowout in a Peterbilt. I said I hadn’t. He asked if I wanted to. I said,
Why would I?
And he yanked down his zipper, so I threw him up against his Chevy Dually.