West drove around the city much of the night, mopping her face, popping Motrin, and turning the air conditioner on and off as she vacillated between hot and cold. On South College, she slowly passed street people, staring hard at each, as if she expected Brazil to have suddenly turned into one of them. She recognized Poison, the young hooker from Mungo's videotape, undulating along the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and enjoying being watched. Poison followed the dark blue cop car with haunted, glassy eyes, and West looked back. West thought of Brazil, of his sad curiosity about bad people and what had happened to make them that way.
They make choices. West said that all the time, and it was true.
But she envied Brazil's freshness, his innocent clarity of vision. In truth, he saw life with a wisdom equal to her own, but his was born of vulnerability, and not of the experience that sometimes crowded West's compassion and cloaked her feelings in many hard layers. Her condition had been coming on for a long time, and most likely was irreversible.
West accepted that when one is exposed to the worst elements of life, there comes a point of no return. She had been beaten and shot, and she had killed.
She had crossed a line. She was a missionary, and the tender, warm contours of life were for others.
On Tryon Street, she was stopped at a traffic light near Jake's, another favorite spot for breakfast. Thelma could do anything with fried steak and biscuits, and the coffee was good. West stared ahead, several blocks away, just past First Union Bank with its giant painted hornet bursting out of one side of the building. She recognized the dark car's boxy shape and conical tail lights glowing red. She wasn't close enough to see the tag yet, and was going to do something about that.
The light turned green and West gunned the Ford's powerful engine until she was on the old BMW's bumper. Her heart thrilled as she recognized the plate number. She honked her horn and motioned, and Brazil kept going. West followed, honking again and longer, but clearly he had no intention of acknowledging her as she followed his shiny chrome bumper through downtown. Brazil knew she was there and didn't give a damn as he threw back another gulp from the tall-boy Budweiser he was holding between his legs. He broke the law right in front of Deputy Chief West, and knew she saw it, and he didn't give a shit.
"Goddamn son of a bitch," West exclaimed as she flipped on flashing lights.
Brazil sped up. West couldn't believe what was happening. How could he do anything this stupid?
"Oh for fuck's sake!" She hit the siren.
Brazil had been in pursuits, but he had never been the lead car.
Usually, he was back there sitting in the front seat with West. He drank another swallow of the beer he had bought at the 76 truck stop just off the Sunset East exit. He needed another one, and decided he might as well hit 1-77 off Trade Street, and cruise on back for a refill. He tossed his empty in the back seat, where several others clinked and rolled on the floor. His broken speedometer faithfully maintained its belief that the BMW was going thirty-two miles per hour.
In fact, he was going sixty-three when he turned onto the Interstate.
West doggedly pursued as her alarm and anger grew. Should she call for other cars, Brazil was ruined, his volunteer days ended, his real troubles only begun. Nor was there a guarantee that more cops would effect a stop. Brazil might decompensate further. He might feel desperate, and West knew how that might end. She had seen those final chapters before, all over the road, crumpled metal sharp like razors, glass, oil, blood, and black body bags on their way to the morgue.
His speed climbed to ninety miles per hour, and he maintained it, with her steadily behind him, lights and siren going full tilt. It penetrated his fog that she had not gotten on the radio for help. He would have heard it on his scanner, and backup cars surely would have shown up by now. He didn't know if this made him feel better or worse.
Maybe she didn't take him seriously. Nobody took him seriously, and nobody ever would again, because of Webb, because of the unfairness, the heartlessness of life and all in it.
Brazil shot onto the exit of Sunset Road East and began to slow. It was finished. In truth, he needed gas. This chase had its limits anyway. He might as well stop. Depression settled heavier, crushing him into his seat as he parked at the outer limits of the tarmac, far away from eighteen-wheelers and their bright-painted shiny cabs with all their chrome. He cut the engine and leaned back, shutting his eyes, as punishment approached. West wouldn't cut him any slack. She, in her uniform and gun,
was above all else a cop, and a hard, unkind one at that. It mattered not that they were partners and went shooting together and talked about things.
"Andy." She loudly rapped a knuckle on his window.
"Get out," she commanded this common lawbreaker.
He felt tired as he climbed out of a car that his father, Drew, had loved. Brazil took off his father's jacket and tossed it in the back seat. It was almost eighty degrees out, gnats and moths swarming in sodium vapor lights. Brazil was soaked with sweat. He tucked the keys in a pocket of the tight jeans that Mungo believed pointed to Brazil's criminal leanings. West shone her flashlight through the back window, illuminating aluminum tallboy beer cans on the mat in back. She counted eleven.
"Did you drink all these tonight?" she demanded to know as he shut his door.
"No."
"How many have you had tonight?"
"I didn't count." His eyes were hard and defiant on hers.
"Do you always elude police lights and sirens?" she said, furious.
"Or is tonight special for some reason?"
He opened the back door of his BMW, and angrily grabbed out a T-shirt.
He had no comment as he peeled off his wet polo shirt, and yanked on the dry one. West had never seen him half naked.
"I ought to lock you up," she said with not quite as much authority.
"Go ahead," he said.
W Randy and Jude Hammer had flown into the Charlotte- Douglas International Airport within forty-five minutes of each other, and their mother had met them downstairs in baggage. The three were somber and distracted as Hammer returned to Carolinas Medical Center without delay. She was so happy to see her boys, and old memories were reopened and exposed to air and light.
Randy and Jude had been born with their mother's handsome bones and straight white teeth. They had been blessed with her piercing eyes and frightening intelligence.
From Seth, they had received their four-cylinder engines that moved them slowly along, and with little direction or passing power or drive. Randy and Jude were happy enough simply to exist and go nowhere in a hurry. They drew gratification and joy from their dreams, and from regular customers in whatever restaurant employed them from one year to the next. They were happy with the understanding women who loved them anyway. Randy was proud of his bit parts in movies no one saw. Jude was thrilled to be in any jazz bar he and the guys got gigs in, and he played the drums with passion, whether the audience was ten people or eighty.
Oddly, it had never been their rocket-charged mother who could not live with the sons' something less than stellar accomplishments in life. It was Seth who was disgusted and ashamed. Their father had proved so totally lacking in understanding and patience, that the sons had moved far away. Of course. Hammer understood the psychological dynamics. Seth's hatred for his sons was his hatred for himself. It didn't take great acumen to deduce that much. But knowing the reason had changed nothing. It had required tragedy, a grave illness, to reunite this family.
"Mom, you holding up?" Jude was in back of Hammer's personal car. He was rubbing her shoulders as she drove.
"I'm trying."
She swallowed hard as Randy looked at her with "Well, I don't want to see him," said Randy, cradling flowers he had bought for his father in the airport.
"That's understandable," Hammer said, switching lanes, eyes in the mirrors. It had begun to rain.
"How are my babies?"
"Great," Jude said.
"Benji's learning to play sax."
"I can't wait to hear it. What about Owen?"
"Not quite old enough for instruments, but she's my boogie baby. Every time she hears music, she dances with Spring," Jude went on, referring to the child's mother.
"God, Mom, you'll die when you see it. It's hilarious!"
Spring was the artist Jude had lived with in Greenwich Village for eight years. Neither of Hammer's sons was married. Each had two children, and Hammer adored every fine golden hair on their small lovely heads. It was her bleeding, buried fear that they were growing up in distant cities with only infrequent contact with their rather legendary grandmother. Hammer did not want to be someone they might someday talk about but had never known.
"Smith and Fen wanted to come," said Randy, taking his mother's hand.
"It's gonna be all right. Mom." He felt another stab of hate for his father.
West didn't know what to do with her prisoner of the evening. Brazil was slumped down in the seat, arms crossed, his posture defiant and decidedly without remorse. He refused to look at her now, but stared out the windshield at bugs and bats swirling beneath lights. He watched truckers in pointed cowboy boots and jeans strolling out to their mighty steeds, and leaning against cabs, propping a foot on the running board, hands cupped around a cigarette, as they lit up like the Marlboro Man.