"My neck hurts."
"Lying like a rug," Mrs. Purvis told the cop, wondering why he wasn't wearing any hardware beyond a whistle. What if he got in a shootout?
W Deputy Chief West didn't often get out to cruise so she could check on her troops. But this night she had been in the mood. She floated along rough, dark streets in David One, listening to Brazil's voice on the scanner in her car.
"One subject requesting transport to Carolinas Medical Center," Brazil was saying.
West saw him in the distance, from the vantage of her midnight-blue car, but he was too busy to notice as he filled out a report. She circled the intersection as he worked hard, talking to subjects in barely damaged cars. Flares languished along the roadside, his grille lights silently strobing. His face was eerie in blue and red pulses, and he was smiling, and seemed to be helping an old biddy in a Camry.
Brazil lifted his radio, talking into it.
tw He marked EOT for End Of Tour and drove to the newspaper. Brazil had a ritual few people knew about, and he indulged himself in it after zipping through a small story on Charlotte's quirky traffic problems. He went up the escalator three moving steps at a time. The workers in the press room had gotten used to him long months before, and didn't mind when he came into their off-limits area of huge machinery and deafening noise. He liked to watch some two hundred tons of paper fly along conveyor belts, heading to folders, destined for bundles and driveways, his byline on them.
Brazil stood in uniform and watched, not talking, overwhelmed by the power of it all. He was used to laboring on a term paper that took months and was read by maybe one person. Now he wrote something in days or even minutes, and millions of people followed every word. He could not comprehend it. He walked around, avoiding moving parts, wet ink, and tracks to trip on as the roar filled his ears like a nexus on this sixth night before the seventh day of his career's creation.
It was chilly out the next morning, Sunday, and sprinkling rain.
West was building a high wooden fence around her yard on Elmhurst Road, in the old neighborhood of Dilworth. Her house was brick with white trim, and she had been fixing up the place since she'd bought it. This included her latest, most ambitious project, inspired, in part, by people driving through from South Boulevard, and pitching beer bottles and other trash in her yard.
West was wet, as she hammered, with tool belt on. She held nails in her mouth, and vented her spleen, as Denny Raines, an off-duty paramedic, opened her new gate and helped himself to her property. He was whistling, had jeans on, and was a big, handsome guy and no stranger to this industrious woman. She paid him no mind as she carefully measured a space between two boards.
"Anyone ever tell you you're anal-retentive?" he said. She hammered, which was suggestive of what he felt like doing to her the first time they met, at a crime scene, when he could only suppose she had been called from home since she was in charge of investigations, and the victim was a businessman with the weird orange paint over his parts, and bullets in his head. Raines took one look at the babe in brass and that was the end of his rainbo. She hammered, eating nails, in the rain.
"I was thinking about brunch," he said to her.
"Maybe Chili's."
Raises approached from the rear and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed her neck, and found it wet, and a little sAy- West didn't smile or respond or take the nails out of her mouth. She hammered and didn't want to be bothefod- He gave up, and leaned against what she was building- He crossed his arms, and studied her as water dripped off Ac bill of his Panthers baseball cap.
"I take it you've seen the paper," he said.
He would bring that up, and she had no comment. She measured another space.
"This is an affirmative. Now I know a celebrity. Right there. This big on the front page." He exaggerated with his hands, as if the morning paper with West in it was ten feet tall- "Above the fold, too," he went on.
"Good story. I'm impressed."
she measured and hammered.
"Truth is? I learned stuff even I didn't know. Like the part about high school. Shelby High. That you played on the boys' tennis team for Coach Wagon? Never lost a matfh? How 'bout that?"
He was more enchanted with her than ever, roaming her with his eyes and not getting charged a dime a minute. She was aware of this and feeling ripped off as she tasted metal and hammered.
"You got any idea what it does to a guy to see a woman in a tool belt?" He finally got to his feet.
"It's like when we roll up on a scene and you're in that goddamn uniform. And I start thinking thoughts I shouldn't, people bleeding to death. Right now I got it for you so bad I'm busting out of my jeans."
She slipped a nail from between her lips and looked at him, at his jeans. She rammed the hammer into her belt, and it was the only tool that was going to be intimate with her this day. Every Sunday, without fail, they had brunch, drank mimosas, watched TV in her bed, and all he ever talked about was calls he had been on over the weekend, as if she didn't get enough blood and misery in her life. Raines was a doll, but boring.
"Go rescue somebody and leave me alone," she suggested to him.
His smile and playfulness fled as rain fell in a curtain from heaven.
"What the hell did I do?" he complained.
Chapter Six
West stayed outside in the rain alone, hammering, measuring, and building her fence as if it were a symbol of what she felt about people and life. When her gate opened and shut again at three p. m. " she assumed it was Raines trying again. She slammed another nail into wood and felt bad about the way she had treated him. He had meant no harm, and her mood had nothing to do with him, really.
"W Niles could have done with the same consideration. He was in the window over the kitchen sink, looking out at his owner in a flood. She was swinging something that looked like it might hurt Niles if he got in her way. Niles had been minding his own business earlier, walking in circles, kneading the covers, finding just the right warm spot to settle on his owner's chest. Next thing, he was an astronaut, a circus acrobat shot out of a cannon. It was just a darn good thing he could land on his feet. He stared through streaming water at someone entering the yard from the north. Niles, the watch cat, had never seen this person, not once in his ancient feline life.
Brazil was aware of a skinny cat watching him from a window as he trespassed and West hammered, calling out to someone named Raines.
"Look, I'm sorry, okay?" she was saying.
"I'm in this mood."
Brazil carried three thick Sunday papers wrapped in a dry-cleaning bag he had found in his closet.
"Apology accepted," he said.
West wheeled around, and fixed him in her sights, hammer mid-swing.
"What the hell are you doing here?" She was startled and taken aback, and did her best to sound hateful.
"Who's Raines?" Brazil got closer, his tennis shoes getting soaked.
"None of your damn business." She started hammering as her heart did.
He was suddenly shy and tentative in the rain as he got closer.
brought you some extra papers. Thought you might. "
"You didn't ask me." She hammered.
"You didn't give me a warning. Like you have some right to investigate my life." She bent a nail and clumsily pried it out.
"Ride around all night. The whole time you're a spy."
She stopped what she was doing to look at him. He was soaked and dejected, wanting her to be pleased. He had given her the best he knew.
"You got no fucking right!" she said.
"It's a good story." He was getting defensive.
"You're a hero."
She went on, enraged and not certain why, "What hero? Who cares?"
"I told you I was going to write about you."
"Seems to me that was a threat." She turned back to her fence and hammered.
"And I didn't believe you meant it."
"Why not?" He didn't understand any of this, and didn't think it was fair.
"No one has before." She hammered again, and stopped again, trying to stay mad but not doing a good job of it.
"I wouldn't have thought I was all that interesting."
Wft "What I did is good, Virginia," he said.
Brazil was vulnerable and trying not to be. He told himself that what this hammer-wielding deputy chief thought didn't matter in the least.
West stood in the rain, the two of them looking at each other as Niles watched from his favorite window, tail twitching.
"I know about your father," West went on.
"I know exactly what happened. Is that why you run around playing cop morning, noon and night?"
Brazil was struggling with emotions he didn't want anyone to know about. West couldn't tell if he was angry or close to tears as she chipped away at him with her own investigation into his past.
"He's plainclothes," she said, 'decides to pull a stolen vehicle.