"Burglary in progress." He was talking like a machine gun, weaving after his quarry.
"Southpark Mall. Two white males running east on Fairview Road. I'm in pursuit. You might want a unit at the rear of Radio Shack to collect what they've dropped before someone else does."
W The thieves cut through a parking lot, then through another alleyway. Brazil broadcast their every step, on their heels like a border collie herding sheep. Neither young man could legally buy beer, and both had been smoking dope, stealing, lying, and jailing since they were old enough for their pants to fall off. Neither was in premier shape. Shooting hoops and boogeying in front of their friends and on street corners was one thing. But running wide open for blocks was definitely another. Devon, especially, knew one lung, and possibly both, would rupture any second. Sweat was stinging his eyes. His legs might buckle, and unless he was having vision disturbances, too, the flashing red and blue lights of his childhood were closing in like UFOs from all corners of the planet.
"Man!" Devon gasped.
"Let's drop it! Run!"
"I am running, man!"
As for To, whose name was short for something no one could recall, he would be damned before he would relinquish what he had his arms around. The TV alone would keep him in rocks for a week, unless he traded it in on a new pistol, this time one with a holster. The Smith amp;: Wesson stainless-steel. 357 revolver with its four-inch barrel jammed in the back of his baggy jeans wasn't going to stay put much longer. To could feel it slipping as sweat blurred his vision and sirens screamed.
"Shit," To complained.
The gun was completely submerged, now, and working its way down. Oh Lord, he hoped he didn't shoot himself in some private place. He would never live it down. The revolver slid through layers of huge boxer shorts, burrowing down his thigh, his knee, and finally peeking out at the top of a leather Fila. To helped it along by shaking his leg. This was no easy feat while running with half the Charlotte Police Department and some crazy-ass white boy in a BMW about to run To down.
The gun clattered against pavement as the circle of white cars with flashing lights was complete around Devon and To. The two bandits simply stopped in their tracks.
"Shit," To said again.
In all fairness, Brazil's reward for his valiant contribution to community policing should have been the pleasure of cuffing the suspects and tucking them into the back of a patrol car. But he had no enforcement powers. For that matter, he was on the newspaper's payroll this night, and it was no simple matter to explain why he happened to be parked in a dark alleyway behind a Radio Shack when the burglary occurred. He and Officer Weed went round and round about this as Brazil gave his statement in the front seat of Weed's cruiser.
"Let's try this again," Weed was saying.
"You were sitting back there with your headlights off for what reason?"
"I thought I was being followed," Brazil patiently explained again.
Weed looked at him, and had no idea what to make of this one except that she knew the reporter was lying. All of them did.
Weed was willing to bet the guy had parked back there to sleep on the job, maybe jerk off, smoke a little weed, or all of the above.
"Being followed by who?" Weed had her shiny metal clipboard in her lap, as she worked on her report.
"Some guy in a white Ford," Brazil said.
"Wasn't anybody I knew."
It was late by the time Brazil rolled away from the Southpark scene, without a word of thanks from any officer there, he noted. The way he calculated it, he had about an hour to kill before he needed to get back to the newsroom and write up what he'd gotten during his eight-hour shift, which wasn't much, in his mind.
He wasn't far from the area of Myers Park where Michelle Johnson's horrible accident had occurred, and for some reason, Brazil was haunted by that awful night, and by her. He cruised slowly past the mansions of Eastover and fantasized about who lived inside them and what they must feel about the neighbors who were killed. The Rollins family had lived around the corner from the Mint Museum. When Brazil was in front of their stately white brick house with its copper roof, he stopped. He sat and stared. The only lights on were for the benefit of burglars, because nobody in the family was home, or ever would be.
He thought of a mother, a father, and three young children, gone in one violent minute, life lines randomly intersecting in exactly the horribly wrong way, and all was lost.
Brazil had never heard much about rich people dying in car wrecks or shoot-outs. Now and then their private planes went down, and he recalled there had been a serial rapist in Myers Park back in the eighties. Brazil imagined a young male in a hood knocking on doors,
his sole intention to rape a woman home alone. Was it resentment that fired such cruelty? An up yours to the rich? Brazil tried to put himself in the mind set of such a young violent man as he watched lighted windows flow past.
He realized the rapist had probably done exactly what Brazil was doing this night. He would have browsed, stalked, but most likely on foot.
He would have spied and planned, the actual awful act incidental to the fantasy of it. Brazil could not think of much worse than to be sexually violated. He had been scorned by enough rednecks in his brief life to fear rape as a woman might. He would never forget what Chief Briddlewood of Davidson security told him once. Don't ever go to jail, boy. You won't stand up straight the whole time you're there.
The wreck was right about where Selwyn and the various Queens Roads got confused, and Brazil recognized the scene instantly as he approached. What he had not' expected was the Nissan pulled off the street. As he got closer, he was shocked to realize Officer Michelle Johnson inside it, crying in the dark. Brazil parked on the shoulder.
He got out and walked toward the officer's personal car, his footsteps sure and directed, as if he were in charge of whatever was going on.
He stared through the driver's window, transfixed by the sight of Johnson crying, and his heart began to thud. She looked up and saw him and was startled. She grabbed her pistol, then realized it was that reporter. She relaxed but was enraged. She rolled her window down.
"Get the fuck away from me!" she said.
He stared at her and could not move. Johnson cranked the engine.
"Vultures! Fucking vultures!" she screamed.
Brazil was frozen. He was acting so oddly and atypically for a reporter that Johnson was taken aback. She lost interest in leaving. She did not move, as they stared at each other.
"I want to help." Brazil was impassioned.
A streetlight shone on broken glass and black stains on pavement, and illuminated the gouged tree the Mercedes had been wrapped around.
Fresh tears started. Johnson wiped her face with her hands, her humiliation complete as this reporter continued to watch her. She heaved and moaned, as if overwhelmed by a seizure, and was aware of the pistol that could end all of it.
"When I was ten," the reporter spoke, 'my dad was a cop here. About your age when he got killed on duty. Sort of like you feel you've been. "
Johnson looked up at him as she wept.
"Eight-twenty-two p.m." March twenty-ninth. A Sun day. They said it was his fault," Brazil went on, his voice trembling.
"Was in plain clothes, followed a stolen car out of his district, wasn't supposed to make a traffic stop in Adam Two. The backup never got there. Not in time. He did the best he could, but…" His voice caught, and he cleared his throat.
"He never had a chance to tell his story."
Brazil stared off into the dark, furious at a street, at a night, that had robbed him of his life, too. He pounded his fist on top of the car.
"My dad wasn't a bad cop!" he cried.
Johnson had gotten strangely quiet, and felt empty inside.
"I'd rather be him," she said.
"I'd rather be dead."
"No." Brazil bent down, at her eye level.
"No." He saw her left hand on the steering wheel, and the wedding band she wore. He reached in and gripped her arm.