"We just robbed Hardee's and are behind the Payless on Central Avenue!" Slim yelled into the phone.
"Please get here quick!"
vy Selma, the 911 operator who got the call, wasn't certain what this was about. But she gave it a priority one because her instinct prodded her in a tragedy-about-to- occur direction. Radar, meanwhile, had not finished with West this night. He passed the emergency along to her.
"Goddamit," West said as she drove past Piedmont Open Middle School. She was trying to avoid other problems, and did not wish to hear her unit number one more time, ever.
Brazil couldn't grab the mike fast enough. '700," he said.
"Unknown trouble, four thousand block of Central Avenue," Radar said with a smile.
West floored it, flying down Tenth Street, cutting over to the one thousand block of Central, flying past the Veterans Park and Saigon Square. Other units backed her up, for by now it had occurred to every cop on the street that their deputy chief was handling a lot of dangerous calls unassisted by anyone. When she rolled into the Payless, six cars with lights flashing were behind her. This was uncommon, but West didn't question it and was grateful. She and Brazil got out. Wyona lowered the gun, now that help was here.
"They tried to rob me," she said to Brazil.
"Who did?" West asked.
"The piece of white shit under my foot," she said to Brazil.
West noted the fade haircut, the bad skin, the Hornets cap and shirt.
The boy's pants were knotted around his basketball shoes, and he had on yellow boxer shorts. Next to him was a big bag of chicken and side orders.
"He come in, ordered twelve piece all white meat, then pulled out this thing." Wyona handed the gun to Brazil because he was the man and Wyona had never dealt with woman police and wasn't about to start now.
"I chased him out here to where these sons of bitches are." She gestured furiously at Slim, Fright, and Tote as they cowered inside the Tracker.
West took the gun from Brazil. She looked back at the six other officers standing nearby and observing.
"Let's lock 'em up," she said to the troops. To Wyona, she added.
Thanks. "
The boys were rounded up and cuffed. Now that they were official felons again and not about to be killed, their bravery returned. They stared hatefully at the police and spat. In the car. West gave Brazil a pointed look. He typed on the MDT, clearing them from the scene.
"Why do they hate us so much?" he said.
"People tend to treat others the way they've been treated," she answered.
"Take cops. A lot of them are the same way."
They rode in silence for a while, passing other poor landscapes, the aspiring sparkling city around them.
"What about you?" Brazil asked.
"How come you don't hate?"
T had a good childhood. "
This made him angry.
"Well I didn't, and I don't hate everyone," he said.
"So don't ask me to feel sorry for them."
"What can I tell you?" She got out a cigarette.
"It goes back to Eden, the Civil War, the Cold War, Bosnia. The six days it took God to make all this."
"You got to quit smoking," he said, and he remembered her fingers touching him as she fixed his shirt.
Chapter Thirteen
Brazil had a lot to think about. He wrote his stories fast and shipped them out within seconds of various deadlines for various editions. He was strangely unsettled and not remotely tired. He did not want to go home, and had fallen into a funk the instant West had let him out at his car in the parking deck. He left the newsroom at quarter past midnight, and took the escalator down to the second floor.
The press room was going full tilt, yellow Ferag conveyors flying by seventy thousand papers per hour. Brazil opened the door, his ears overwhelmed by the roar inside. People wearing hearing protectors and ink-stained aprons nodded at him, yet to understand his odd peregrinations through their violent, dirty world. He walked in and stared at miles of speeding newsprint, at folding machines rat-a-tat-a-tatting, and belt ribbon conveyors streaking papers through the counting machines. The hardworking people in this seldom-thought-of place had never known a reporter to care a hoot about how his clever words and bigshot bylines ended up in the hands of citizens every day.
Brazil was inexplicably drawn to the power of these huge, frightening machines. He was awed to see his front page racing by in a blur, thousands and thousands of times. It was humbling and hard to believe that so many people out there were interested in how he saw the world and what he had to say. The big headline of the night was, of course, Batman and Robin saving the hijacked bus. But there was a pretty decent piece on WHY A BOY RAN AWAY, on the metro section front page, and a few paragraphs on the altercation at Fat Man's Lounge.
In truth, Brazil could have written stories forever about all he saw while riding with West. He wandered up a spiral metal staircase to the mail room, and thought of her calling him partner. He replayed her voice over and over. He liked the way she sounded, deep but resonate and womanly. It made him think of old wood and smoke, of field stone patched with moss, and of lady's slippers in old forests scattered with sun.
Brazil did not want to go home. He wandered out to his car, in a mood to roam and think. He felt blue and did not know the source of it.
Life was good. His job couldn't be better. The cops didn't seem to despise him quite as intensely or as universally. He contemplated the possibility that his problem was physical, because he wasn't working out as much as usual, and wasn't producing enough endorphin, or pushing himself to the point of exhaustion. He cruised down West Trade, looking at the people of the night trolling, offering their bodies for cash. Sh'ims followed him with sick, glowing eyes, and the young hooker was out again, at the corner of Cedar.
She walked seductively along the sidewalk and stared brazenly at him as he slowly drove past. She had on tight cut-off jeans that barely covered firm buttocks, her T-shirt cut off, too, just below her chest.
Typically, she wasn't wearing a bra, and her flesh moved as she walked and stared at the blond boy in his black BMW with its loud, rumbling engine. She wondered what he had beneath his hood, and smiled. All those Myers Park boys in their expensive cars, sneaking out here to taste the fruit.
Brazil roared ahead, daring a yellow light to be red. He turned off on Pine and entered Fourth Ward, the lovely restored area where important people like Chief Hammer lived, within walking distance of the heart of the city she was sworn to serve. Brazil had been here many times, mostly to look at huge Victorian homes painted fun colors like violet and robin's egg blue, and at graceful manors with elaborate dentil work trimming slate roofs. There were walls and big azaleas, and trees that could clarify history, for they had been here since horses, shading genteel streets traveled by the rich and well known.
He parked on that special corner on Pine where the white house and its gracious wraparound porch were lit up, as if expecting him. Hammer had liriope grass, periwinkles, pansies, yucca, ligustrum hedges, and pachysandra. Wind chimes stirred in the dark, sending friendly tones of truth, like a tuning fork, welcoming him, her protege. Brazil would not trespass, would not even think of it. But there were numerous tiny public parks in Fourth Ward, sitting areas with fountains and a bench or two. One such cozy spot was tucked next door to Hammer's house, and Brazil had known about this secret garden for a while. Now and then he sat in the dark there, when he could not sleep, or did not want to go home. There was no harm done or imagined.
It wasn't as if he were on her property. He wasn't a stalker or a voyeur. All he wanted, really, was to sit where no one could see him.
The most he invaded was the window of her living room, where he saw nothing, for the draperies were always drawn, unless a shadow passed by, someone who belonged in that house and could walk wherever he pleased. Brazil sat on a stone bench that was cold and hard beneath his dirty uniform trousers. He stared, and the sadness he felt was beyond any word he knew. He imagined Hammer inside her fine house, with her fine family, and her fine husband. She was in a fine suit, probably talking on a portable phone, busy and important. Brazil wondered what it would be like to be loved by a woman like that.