Bubba guffawed. Fred laughed so hard his eyes watered. He began waving cars around them. Drivers were panicked as they sped past the guard booth, competing for parking.
Brazil was panicking, too. It occurred to him that neither he nor anyone else would be able to fix the new website he had begged Hammer to delay until the department had someone other than Fling banging away on the keys every day.
Brazil was computer literate and actually quite good at understanding instructions and help files, unlike West, who had no patience for any sort of tool or material she couldn't grip in her hand or saw in two. But Brazil could not cure computer viruses, and he was convinced the blue fish were a fulminating eruption caused by a fatal new strain that had slipped in unnoticed, perhaps because it was widely assumed if one abstained from practicing unsafe disks, there was nothing to worry about. How could he have been so naive? How could he have been so careless when he knew damn well that viruses could be transmitted over the Internet, and therefore his website had put all of COMSTAT in jeopardy?
Brazil's heart battered his ribs as he drove his cosmos V6 BMW Z3. The leather still smelled new, the paint was without a flaw, yet he didn't love the car the way he did the vintage BMW 2002 that had belonged to his father. When Brazil had covered it and left it at his childhood home in Davidson, he had thought it was the thing to do. It was time to start over. It was time to leave his past. Maybe it was time to finally get away from his alcoholic mother.
He passed through the endless intersections and oneway streets of the Fan, avoiding bicycles and pedestrians and the crowds trying to get in and out of Helen's, Joe's Inn, Soble's, Konsta's, Commercial Tap House, Southern Culture and various markets and Laundromats. Brazil was terrified of telling Hammer the truth about COMSTAT, and worse, parking wasn't possible in West's part of town. Brazil had no luck, and groaned when he saw Hammer turning up and down narrow streets, impatient and picking up speed, for whenever she could not get somewhere, she did it in a hurry.
Brazil parked in front of a fire hydrant as a Mercedes VI2 roared away from a curb and a Jeep Cherokee tried to bulldoze its way into the space. Brazil jumped out of his car, trotted over to the Jeep and held up his hand to halt. Shari Moody was at the wheel. She scowled as she rolled down her window.
'Look, I was here first,' she said.
'That's not the issue,' Brazil told her.
'It sure as hell is.'
'I'm Richmond Police.'
'The whole department?' she scoffed.
'An officer.'
'An officer? Just one?' she said sarcastically.
'There's no point in being rude, ma'am.'
'Police officers don't drive BMWs and you're in jeans,' she retorted. 'I'm so sick and tired of people trying to cheat me out of parking just because I'm a woman.'
Brazil got out his creds and displayed them as he noted Hammer racing by again.
'We drive all kinds of cars and aren't always in uniform,' Brazil explained to Shari Moody, whose parking place he was going to appropriate. 'Depends on what we're doing, ma'am, and gender has nothing to do with it.'
'Bullshit,' she said, popping gum as she argued. 'If I was a guy, you wouldn't be standing here.'
'Yes, I would.'
'What are you going to do, anyway? Give me a ticket for something I didn't do, as usual. You know how many tickets I get just because I'm a woman in a four-by-four?'
Brazil had no idea.
'Lots,' she said. 'If I had a Suburban or, God forbid, a Ford F-350 Crew Cab with a four-hundred-and-sixty-cubic-inch engine, a brush guard and tow package, I'd probably be on fucking death row.'
'I'm not giving you a ticket,' Brazil told her. 'But I'm afraid you're in a U.Z. and I'm going to have to ask you to leave for your own protection.'
'An Uzi?' She was suddenly frightened and locked her doors. 'You mean drug dealers with machine guns are in this neighborhood, too?'
'This is an Unsafe Zone,' Brazil explained in his best police tone. 'We've been having an epidemic of Jeeps broken into around here.'
'Ohhhhh,' she said as it dimly came to her. 'I've read about that. The cabbage thing.'
'You definitely don't want to park your Jeep here, ma'am,' Brazil told her as Hammer flew by again, going faster the other way.
'Well, gee,' Ms. Moody said, finally easing up and appreciating how good-looking and helpful the cop was. 'I sure am glad you told me. You new around here? Some way I can get hold of you if I need further information about U.Z.s and the cabbage problem?'
Brazil gave Ms. Moody his card and moved her along. He managed to flag down Hammer as she was racing through the intersection again. He motioned her into the space at the curb, got back into his car and had to park five blocks away, close to a rundown section of West Cary where citizens stared at him from porches and calculated how much a chop shop would pay for his car.
Chapter Ten
Bubba hurried along in his blue uniform and safety shoes and earplugs, already getting sweaty as he race-walked through two filter rooms. He trotted under the observation deck that had not been used since Philip Morris had started giving scheduled tours on small trains.
He ran and walked and ran and walked over shiny floors filled with spotless beige Hauni Protos II and G.D. Balogna making machines, computers and OSCAR units in bays where the roar and rat-a-tatting of production never ceased and there was no such thing as dirt or killing time.
Driverless, bright yellow robotic cars loaded with cases of cigarettes hummed back and forth, pausing to recharge at computerized magnets, never tiring or loitering or forming unions. Gray-uniformed maintenance workers zipped back and forth in supply carts and were careful turning corners and passing through busy intersections.
Huge spools spun cellulose too fast to see while thousands of pristine white cigarettes flowed down tracks and were fed into veins that configured them in rows of 7-6-7 for soft packs and 6-7-7 for flip-top boxes before a plunger kicked them into a pocket where they were wrapped in double-wide foil which was married to blanks that were labeled and glued on the sides and fed into big wheel drying drums and finished in cellophane and tear tape and marched single file into stacker towers where ten-packs were pushed into cartons that were carried by elevators up to exit stations with conveyor belts that eventually carried cases out of the building to awaiting trucks.
Bubba was breathless when he reached Bay 8, where he was a maker operator, or more formally, a tech 3, the highest pay grade. His responsibility was huge. He was the sole captain of a module that had been predicted to produce exactly 12,842,508 cigarettes by the end of this day's twenty-four-hour period, or 4,280,836 cigarettes during Bubba's eight-hour shift.
No module was ever unattended at Philip Morris, and Bubba's supervisor, Gig Dan, had been forced to fill in for the last half of second shift and the first sixteen minutes of third. Dan was relieved but unhappy when Bubba appeared, dripping sweat and panting.
'What in the hell has gotten into you, Bubba?' Dan said loud enough for both of them to hear through their earplugs.
'I got pulled by the cops,' Bubba bent the truth.
'And getting a ticket took four and a half hours?' Dan didn't buy it.
'He spent a long time warning me and then the radio was down or something. I'm telling you, I was pissed.