Hornet's Nest

  "You should have thought about that before you broke the law." She was not nice about it.

  A half hour later, Brazil was talking on the two-way radio, and leaving the fire scene, where an abandoned building was still fully involved. Flames danced from the roof, as fire fighters on cranes blasted water through broken windows. News helicopters hovered nearby.

  Brazil was telling a metro editor what he'd found.

  "Unoccupied, an old warehouse. No injuries," he said into the mike.

  In the rearview mirror, a patrol car was following him. He couldn't believe it. Another cop was staring right at him.

  "Just do a couple graphs," the editor told him over the air.

  He would get to it. Right now, Brazil had more important concerns.

  This was not an imagined threat, and he could afford no more tickets or points on his record. He started driving the way he played tennis, serving up this and that, slicing, sending a ball top spinning over his opponent's head. Asshole, he thought as the same car bird-dogged him.

  Like anybody else, Brazil could and would take but so much.

  "That's it," he snapped.

  The patrol car was behind him in the right lane. Brazil continued at a steady speed, and took a left on Runnymede Lane. The cop stayed on Brazil's bumper, and they slowed to a stop at a red light. Brazil did not look over or acknowledge in any way that he was aware of the problem. He was cool in his saddle-leather seat, preoccupied with adjusting the radio, which had been silent for years. At the last second, he swerved into the left lane, and the officer pulled up beside him, with an icy smile that Brazil returned. The ruse was up.

  They were squared off. This was war. There was no turning back. Brazil thought fast. Officer Martin, with his . 40 caliber pistol, shotgun, and 350 V8, didn't need to think.

  The light turned green and Brazil threw his old car into neutral, gunning it like he was going to blast off after the space shuttle.

  Officer Martin gunned his car, too, only the big horsepower Ford was in drive. It was already through the intersection by the time Brazil had finished his U-turn, flying the other way on Barclay Downs. He caromed off on Morrison, and cut a tangled path that ended in a dark alleyway in the heart of Southpark Mall, next to a Dumpster.

  His heart was hammering as he turned off headlights and sat, his thoughts frantic and frightened. He was trying to figure out what might happen if the cop found him again. Would the officer arrest Brazil for trying to elude, for resisting arrest? Would the cop show up with other goons and beat the shit out of Brazil in a place like this, remote and dark, with no chance of discovery by a citizen with a video camera? Brazil gasped as a burglar alarm suddenly sounded like a clanging jackhammer, shattering the absolute quiet. At first, he thought it was a siren that was somehow related to his fugitive status, then aback door swung open and slammed against brick. Two young males hurried out, loaded down with electronics they had just stolen from Radio Shack.

  '911! " Brazil yelled into the mike connecting him into the newsroom.

  Disgusted, he yelled at himself this time, "Oh now that was helpful."

  "What was that?" the newsroom crackled back.

  Brazil squealed off in pursuit, flipping headlights on. The thieves were having a hard time moving fast and holding on to their hard-earned rewards. Smaller boxes dropped first, primarily Walkmans, portable CD players, and computer modems. Brazil could tell that these two would hang on to boom boxes and miniature televisions until the bitter end. He raised the newsroom on the radio, and this time instructed an editor to call 911 and put the phone near the base station so a dispatcher could hear what Brazil was saying.

  "Burglary in progress." He was talking like a machine gun, weaving after his quarry.

  "Southpark Mall. Two white males running east on Fairview Road. I'm in pursuit. You might want a unit at the rear of Radio Shack to collect what they've dropped before someone else does."

  W The thieves cut through a parking lot, then through another alleyway. Brazil broadcast their every step, on their heels like a border collie herding sheep. Neither young man could legally buy beer, and both had been smoking dope, stealing, lying, and jailing since they were old enough for their pants to fall off. Neither was in premier shape. Shooting hoops and boogeying in front of their friends and on street corners was one thing. But running wide open for blocks was definitely another. Devon, especially, knew one lung, and possibly both, would rupture any second. Sweat was stinging his eyes. His legs might buckle, and unless he was having vision disturbances, too, the flashing red and blue lights of his childhood were closing in like UFOs from all corners of the planet.

  "Man!" Devon gasped.

  "Let's drop it! Run!"

  "I am running, man!"

  As for To, whose name was short for something no one could recall, he would be damned before he would relinquish what he had his arms around. The TV alone would keep him in rocks for a week, unless he traded it in on a new pistol, this time one with a holster. The Smith &: Wesson stainless-steel . 357 revolver with its four-inch barrel jammed in the back of his baggy jeans wasn't going to stay put much longer. To could feel it slipping as sweat blurred his vision and sirens screamed.

  "Shit," To complained.

  The gun was completely submerged, now, and working its way down. Oh Lord, he hoped he didn't shoot himself in some private place. He would never live it down. The revolver slid through layers of huge boxer shorts, burrowing down his thigh, his knee, and finally peeking out at the top of a leather Fila. To helped it along by shaking his leg. This was no easy feat while running with half the Charlotte Police Department and some crazy-ass white boy in a BMW about to run To down.

  The gun clattered against pavement as the circle of white cars with flashing lights was complete around Devon and To. The two bandits simply stopped in their tracks.

  "Shit," To said again.

  ^y W In all fairness, Brazil's reward for his valiant contribution to community policing should have been the pleasure of cuffing the suspects and tucking them into the back of a patrol car. But he had no enforcement powers. For that matter, he was on the newspaper's payroll this night, and it was no simple matter to explain why he happened to be parked in a dark alleyway behind a Radio Shack when the burglary occurred. He and Officer Weed went round and round about this as Brazil gave his statement in the front seat of Weed's cruiser.

  "Let's try this again," Weed was saying.

  "You were sitting back there with your headlights off for what ?"

  reason;

  "I thought I was being followed," Brazil patiently explained again.

  Weed looked at him, and had no idea what to make of this one except that she knew the reporter was lying. All of them did.

  Weed was willing to bet the guy had parked back there to sleep on the job, maybe jerk off, smoke a little weed, or all of the above.

  "Being followed by who?" Weed had her shiny metal clipboard in her lap, as she worked on her report.

  "Some guy in a white Ford," Brazil said.

  "Wasn't anybody I knew."

  It was late by the time Brazil rolled away from the Southpark scene, without a word of thanks from any officer there, he noted. The way he calculated it, he had about an hour to kill before he needed to get back to the newsroom and write up what he'd gotten during his eight-hour shift, which wasn't much, in his mind.

  He wasn't far from the area of Myers Park where Michelle Johnson's horrible accident had occurred, and for some reason, Brazil was haunted by that awful night, and by her. He cruised slowly past the mansions of Eastover and fantasized about who lived inside them and what they must feel about the neighbors who were killed. The Rollins family had lived around the corner from the Mint Museum. When Brazil was in front of their stately white brick house with its copper roof, he stopped. He sat and stared. The only lights on were for the benefit of burglars, because nobody in the family was home, or ever would be.

  He thought of a mother, a father, and three young
children, gone in one violent minute, life lines randomly intersecting in exactly the horribly wrong way, and all was lost.

  Brazil had never heard much about rich people dying in car wrecks or shoot-outs. Now and then their private planes went down, and he recalled there had been a serial rapist in Myers Park back in the eighties. Brazil imagined a young male in a hood knocking on doors,

  his sole intention to rape a woman home alone. Was it resentment that fired such cruelty? An up yours to the rich? Brazil tried to put himself in the mind set of such a young violent man as he watched lighted windows flow past.

  He realized the rapist had probably done exactly what Brazil was doing this night. He would have browsed, stalked, but most likely on foot.

  He would have spied and planned, the actual awful act incidental to the fantasy of it. Brazil could not think of much worse than to be sexually violated. He had been scorned by enough rednecks in his brief life to fear rape as a woman might. He would never forget what Chief Briddlewood of Davidson security told him once. Don't ever go to jail, boy. You won't stand up straight the whole time you're there.

  The wreck was right about where Selwyn and the various Queens Roads got confused, and Brazil recognized the scene instantly as he approached. What he had not' expected was the Nissan pulled off the street. As he got closer, he was shocked to realize Officer Michelle Johnson inside it, crying in the dark. Brazil parked on the shoulder.

  He got out and walked toward the officer's personal car, his footsteps sure and directed, as if he were in charge of whatever was going on.

  He stared through the driver's window, transfixed by the sight of Johnson crying, and his heart began to thud. She looked up and saw him and was startled. She grabbed her pistol, then realized it was that reporter. She relaxed but was enraged. She rolled her window down.

  "Get the fuck away from me!" she said.

  He stared at her and could not move. Johnson cranked the engine.

  "Vultures! Fucking vultures!" she screamed.

  Brazil was frozen. He was acting so oddly and atypically for a reporter that Johnson was taken aback. She lost interest in leaving. She did not move, as they stared at each other.

  "I want to help." Brazil was impassioned.

  A streetlight shone on broken glass and black stains on pavement, and illuminated the gouged tree the Mercedes had been wrapped around.

  Fresh tears started. Johnson wiped her face with her hands, her humiliation complete as this reporter continued to watch her. She heaved and moaned, as if overwhelmed by a seizure, and was aware of the pistol that could end all of it.

  "When I was ten," the reporter spoke, 'my dad was a cop here. About your age when he got killed on duty. Sort of like you feel you've been. "

  Johnson looked up at him as she wept.

  "Eight-twenty-two p.m." March twenty-ninth. A Sun day. They said it was his fault," Brazil went on, his voice trembling.

  "Was in plain clothes, followed a stolen car out of his district, wasn't supposed to make a traffic stop in Adam Two. The backup never got there. Not in time. He did the best he could, but..." His voice caught, and he cleared his throat.

  "He never had a chance to tell his story."

  Brazil stared off into the dark, furious at a street, at a night, that had robbed him of his life, too. He pounded his fist on top of the car.

  "My dad wasn't a bad cop!" he cried.

  Johnson had gotten strangely quiet, and felt empty inside.

  "I'd rather be him," she said.

  "I'd rather be dead."

  "No." Brazil bent down, at her eye level.

  "No." He saw her left hand on the steering wheel, and the wedding band she wore. He reached in and gripped her arm.

  "Don't leave anybody behind," he said.

  "I turned in my badge today," Johnson told him.

  They made you do that? " he protested. There's no evidence you ..."

  "No one made me. I did it," she cut him off. They think I'm a monster! " She broke down more.

  Brazil was determined.

  "We can change that," he said.

  "Let me help."

  She unlocked her car and he got in.

  Chapter Ten.

  Chief Hammer was watering her plants when West walked in the next morning. West carried coffee and another healthy breakfast from Bojangles, this time a sausage-egg biscuit and Bo-Rounds, for a little variety. The chief's phone was going crazy, but Hammer was busy atomizing orchids. She glanced up without a greeting. Hammer was well known for one-two punch announcements in her faint Arkansas accent.

  "So." She sprayed.

  "He gets in a pursuit, resulting in two arrests.

  Single-handedly cracking a string of Radio Shack burglaries that has plagued the city for eight months. "

  She examined an exotic white blossom, and sprayed again. Hammer was striking in a black silk suit with subtle pinstripes, and a black silk blouse with a high collar, and black onyx beads. West loved the way her boss dressed. West was proud to work for a woman who looked so sharp and had good legs, and was decent to people and plants, and could still kick butt with the best of them.

  "And he somehow managed to get the truth from Johnson." Hammer nodded at the morning paper on her desk.

  "Clearing up this notion that she's responsible for those poor people's deaths. Johnson's not going to quit."

  Hammer moved over to a calamondin tree near a window and plucked dead leaves from bushy branches that always bore fruit.

  "I talked to her this morning," she went on.

  "All this, and Brazil wasn't even riding with us." She stopped what she was doing, and looked up at her deputy chief.

  "You're right. He can't be out by himself. God knows what he'd do if he had a uniform on. I wish I could transfer him to another city about three thousand miles from here."

  West smiled as her boss worried about spider mites and quenched a corn plant with a small plastic watering can.

  "What you wish," West said to her, 'is that he worked for you. " Paper crackled as she dug into her Bojangles bag.

  "You eat too much junk," Hammer told her.

  "If I ate all the crap you do, I'd be a medicine ball."

  "Brazil called me," West finally got around to this as she folded back a greasy wrapper.

  "You know why he was behind that Radio Shack?"

  "No." Hammer started on African violets, glancing curiously at West.

  Five minutes later. Hammer was walking with purpose down a long hallway on the first floor. She did not look friendly. Police she passed stared and nodded. She reached a door and opened it. Uniformed officers inside the roll call room were startled to see their well-dressed leader walk in. Deputy Chief Jeannie Goode was in the midst of briefing dozens of the troops about her latest concerns.

  "All, I mean all inquiries get routed to the duty captain ..." Goode was saying before the vision of Hammer walking toward her cut the meeting short. Goode knew trouble when she saw it.

  "Deputy Chief Goode," Hammer said for all to hear.

  "Do you know what harassment is?"

  The color drained from Goode's face. She thought she might faint, and leaned against the blackboard while cops stared, paralyzed. Goode could not believe the chief was about to dress her down in front of thirty-three lowly David One street cops, two sergeants, and one captain.

  "Let's go upstairs to my office," Goode suggested with a weak smile.

  Hammer stood in front of her troops and crossed her arms. She was very calm when she replied, "I think every one could benefit from this. It has been reported to me that officers tailed an Observer reporter all over the city."

  "Says who?" Goode challenged.

  "Him? And you believe him?"

  "I never said it was a him," Hammer informed her.

  The chief paused for a long time and the silence in the room gave Goode chills. Goode thought about the pink Kaopectate tablets in her desk drawer. The third floor seemed very far away.

  "One more ti
me." Hammer looked at everyone.

  "It will cost you."

  High heels snapped as she walked out. When she tried to reach Andy Brazil at home, someone else answered the phone. The woman was either drunk or did not have her teeth in, perhaps both. Hammer hung up and tried Panesa.

  "Judy, I will not have my reporters intimidated, bullied ..." Panesa jumped right in.

  "Richard, I know," Hammer simply said, staring out at the skyline, and discouraged.

  "Please accept my apology and my promise that something like this will not happen again. I'm also giving Brazil a special commendation for his assisting the police last night."