A car was coming, and Bubba wisely supposed it might be the cop returning home. It was too late to run, and he dove into the hedge. The Cavalier wagon passed, carrying Ned Toms to The Fish Market, where he was about to start his shift, unpacking seafood from boxes of ice. He noticed a big dog moving around in bushes in front of a house where he often saw an unmarked cop car parked, then his Cavalier was gone like a breeze.
Bubba emerged from the hedge, his fingers glued together and left hand completely fastened to the right inner thigh of his fatigues. He rapidly hobbled away, looking remarkably like a hunchback. He could not unlock his truck or drive without freeing one hand, and this required his removing his pants, which he was in the process of doing when Officer Wood happened by on routine patrol, checking the park for perverts. Bubba was arrested for indecent exposure.
West and Brazil heard the call over the scanner, but were not even close, and were busy discussing Brazil's life.
"What the hell do you know about my mother or why I choose to take care of her?" Brazil was saying.
"I know a lot. Social services, juvenile court, are overwhelmed by cases just like yours," West said.
"I've never been a social service case. Or in juvenile court."
"Yet," she reminded him.
"Mind your own business for once."
"Get a life," she said.
"Declare your independence. Go out on a date."
"Oh, so now I don't date, either," he snapped.
She laughed.
"When? While you're brushing your teeth? You're out every night working, and then show up in the newsroom by nine, after you've run your ass off around the track and hit a million tennis balls. You tell me when you date, Andy? Huh?"
Fortunately, Radar the dispatcher hailed them exactly at this moment.
Apparently there was an assault on Monroe Road.
"Unit 700 responding," Brazil irritably said into the mike.
They call you Night Voice," West told him.
"Who's they?" he wanted to know.
"Cops. They know when you get on the radio that you're not me."
"Because my voice is deeper? Or maybe because I use proper grammar?"
he said.
West was making her way through more menacing- looking government-subsidized housing. She was constantly checking her mirrors.
"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.