Hornet's Nest

  Brazil's mother used to make scenes outside the house, but not any more. He remembered a night long ago when he drove home from the Harris-Teeter grocery to find his mother out in front of the house.

  She was yelling and chopping down the picket fence as a patrol car pulled up. Brazil tried to stop her and stay out of the way of the axe. The Davidson policeman knew everyone in town, and didn't lock up Brazil's mother for disturbing the peace or being drunk in public, even though he had justification.

  West was checking the old woman's cuffed wrists in back as blue and red lights strobed and her wailing went on, pierced by pain. West shot the officers a hot, angry look.

  "Where's the key?" she demanded.

  "These are way too tight."

  Smith had been around since primitive times and reminded West of jaded, unhappy old cops who ended up working private security for corporations. West held out her hand, and he gave her the tiny metal key. West worked it into the cuffs, springing them open. The woman instantly calmed down as cruel steel disappeared. She tenderly rubbed deep angry red impressions on her wrists, and West admonished the troops.

  "You can't do that," she continued to shame them.

  "You're hurting her."

  West asked the woman to hold up drooping arms so West could pat her down, and it entered West's mind that she ought to grab a pair of gloves. But she didn't have a box in her car because she wasn't suppose to need things like that anymore, and, in truth, the woman had been put through enough indignity. West did not like searching people, never had, and she remembered in the old days finding unfortunate surprises like bird claw fetishes, feces, used condoms, and erections.

  She thought of rookie days, of fishing cold slimy Spam out of Chicken Wing's pocket right before he socked her with his one arm. This old lady had nothing but a black comb, and a key on a shoelace around her neck.

  if7 W Her name was Ella Joneston, and she was very quiet as the police lady cuffed her again. The steel was cold but didn't have the teeth it did a minute ago when the sons-a-bitches snaked her. She knew exactly what it was they wrapped around her wrists in back where she couldn't see, and it bit and bit without relief, venom spreading through her, making her shake as she screamed.

  Her heart swelled up big, beating against her ribs, and would have broke had that blue car with the nice lady not pulled up.

  Ella Joneston had always known that death was when your heart broke.

  Hers had come close many times, going back to when she was twelve and boys in the projects knocked her down right after she'd washed her hair. They did things she never would speak of, and she'd gone home and picked dirt and bits of leaves out of braids and washed off while nobody asked. The police lady was sweet, and there was someone in plain clothes there to help her, a clean-looking boy with a kind face.

  A detective, Ella reckoned. They took each of her arms, like she was going to Easter Sunday and dressed in something fine.

  "Why you out here drinking like this?" The lady in uniform meant business but she wasn't harmful.

  Ella wasn't sure where out here was. She didn't have a way to get places. So she couldn't be far from her apartment in Earle Village, where she had been sitting in front of the TV when the phone had rung earlier this evening. It was her daughter with the awful news about Efrim, Ella's fourteen-year-old grandson, who was in the hospital.

  Efrim had been shot several times this morning. Everyone supposed the white doctors tried all they could, but Efrim had always been stubborn. The memory brought fresh hot tears to Ella's eyes.

  Ella told the lady cop and the detective all about it as they situated her into the back of a police car with a partition to make sure Ella couldn't hurt anyone. Ella mapped out Efrim's entire short life, going back to when Ella held him in her arms right after Eorna birthed him.

  He was always trouble, like his father. Efrim started dancing when he was two. He used to act big beneath the streetlight out front, with those other boys and all their money.

  "I'm going to get your seatbelt on," the blond detective said, snapping her in and smelling like apples and spices.

  tw The old woman reeked of stale bad hygiene and booze, triggering more images for Brazil. His hands were shaking slightly and not as facile as usual. He didn't understand what the woman was muttering and gumming and crying about, and every breath smelled like the inside of a Dumpster in the heat. West wasn't helping a bit now, standing back and watching, making Brazil do the dirty work. His fingers brushed the old woman's neck and he was startled by how smooth and warm it was.

  "You're going to be all right." Brazil kept saying what couldn't possibly be true.

  ^ West was not naive. She knew patrol was a problem. How could it not be

  with Deputy Chief Goode heading it? That beat cops might be a little too rough or simply unprofessional in general wasn't a shock, but West couldn't stomach it. She approached the two patrolmen, both older and miserable in their jobs. She got in Smith's face and remembered being a sergeant and putting up with dead wood like him. As far as she was concerned, he was so low on the food chain, she wouldn't slop hogs with him.

  "Don't let me ever see or hear of anything like this again," West said in that low tone that Brazil found scary.

  West was close enough to see stubble that looked like sand, and a firestorm of broken blood vessels caused by what Smith did when he wasn't in a patrol car. His eyes were lifeless on hers, for his building had been vacant for years.

  "We're out here to help, not hurt," West whispered.

  "Remember? That goes for you, too," she added to his partner.

  V9 Neither cop had any idea about the boy riding with the deputy chief this night, and they sat inside the cruiser with its hornet's nests on the doors, watching the midnight-blue Crown Victoria leave. Their prisoner in back was quietly snoring.

  "Maybe Deputy Chief Virgin finally found a boyfriend," said Smith as he peeled open two sticks of Big Red gum.

  "Yeah," said the other cop, 'when she gets tired of Romper Room, I'll show her what she's missing with the big dogs. "

  They laughed, pulling out. Moments later, the scanner announced more bad news.

  "Thirteen-hundred block Beatties Ford Road," it said.

  "Report of an ambulance held hostage by a subject with a knife."

  "Glad we're tied up on a call," Smith said, smacking a mouthful of cinnamon.

  W) It was West's bad luck that Jerome Swan had not experienced a pleasant evening. It had begun at a fuzzy hour before the sun had gone down in this rundown part of the city. West had no reason to be aware of the nip joint in the area known as the Basin, off Tryon Street, very close to the Dog Pound, where she had been heading for quite some time now. So when the call went out, she was trapped, really. Two marked units got there first, and then Captain Jennings arrived with his ride-along, City Councilman Hugh Bledsoe.

  "Shit," West said when they rolled up on the scene.

  "Fuck."

  She parked on the side of the narrow, dark street.

  "You see that tall man right there getting out of the car, the one in the suit? You know who that is?"

  Brazil reached for the door handle, then thought better of it.

  "I know exactly who it is," he said.

  "Huge Bedsore."

  West shot him a surprised look. It was true the cops had a pet name for their city councilman, but she wasn't clear on how Brazil knew about it.

  "Not one peep out of you," West warned as she opened her door.

  "Stay out of the way." She got out.

  "And don't touch anything."

  The ambulance was rumbling, and parked in the middle of the street with the tailgate open wide, light spilling out as red and blue flashed and strobed from cop cars. The men had convened near a rear tire to come up with a plan. West followed around to the back to assess the problem for herself, Brazil right behind her and dying to get in front. Swan was inside, as far back as he could get, wielding a pair of surgical scissors, his eye
s bloody egg yolks filled with fury when the woman cop in the white shirt filled his vision.

  He had knots on his head and was bleeding from the fight he had gotten into at the nip joint where he had been gambling and drinking Night Train Express fortified wine. When he was put in the ambulance, it was one of those times when he decided he really didn't feel like going anywhere just that second. Whenever this happened. Swan seized the environment. In this case, he grabbed the closest dangerous object he could, and yelled to the paramedics that he had AIDS and was going to cut every one of them. They jumped out and got the cops, all of them men, except for that one with the big tits peering in at him like she might do some thing.

  West saw the problem plainly. The subject was holding down the lock to a side door that led out to the street, and the only way to get to him was for someone to climb inside the ambulance. This didn't require much of a plan. West went around to confer with the committee of officers still gathered by the same tire.

  "I'm going to divert him," she said as Bledsoe stared at her as if he'd never seen a woman in uniform.

  "The minute he takes his hand off the door, you guys grab him," she made sure they understood.

  She got closer to the open back of the ambulance and made a face, waving a hand before her eyes.

  "Who used pepper spray?" she called out.

  "Even that didn't stop him," one of the cops let her know.

  Next thing Brazil knew, West had climbed inside the ambulance and picked up an aluminum stretcher to use as a shield. She did this easily, and her lips moved. Swan didn't like whatever it was she was communicating to him. His eyes were on hers, arteries bulging in his neck as he twitched and challenged her with looks and utterances. She was halfway inside when he lunged. Swan was sucked out as if he opened the door of an airplane. Brazil went around to check and found him facedown on the street being cuffed by all those men with a plan. City Councilman Bledsoe watched, hands in his pockets. His eyes followed West as she walked back to her car. Then he stared at Brazil.

  "Come here," Bledsoe said to him.

  Brazil cast a furtive glance in West's direction, certain he might get left alone out on this dark, unfriendly road.

  He was mindful that West had ordered him not to talk to anyone.

  "You're the ride-along," Bledsoe stated as he got closer.

  "I don't know if I'm the ride-along," Brazil answered. He was just trying to be modest, but the councilman took it the wrong way. He thought the kid was being a smartass.

  "Guess Superwoman there just gave you a good story, huh?" The councilman nodded his head toward West, who was getting back into her car.

  Brazil was beginning to panic.

  "I've got to go," he said. Bledsoe had a goatee and liked gloss gel. He was the minister of the Baptist church on Jeremiah Avenue. Strobing police lights flashed in his glasses as he stared at Brazil and mopped his neck with a handkerchief.

  "Let me just tell you one thing," he went on, getting unctuous.

  "The city of Charlotte doesn't need people coming out here and being insensitive to humanity and poverty and crime. Even this man here is not to be ridiculed or laughed at."

  Swan was being led away, dazed. He had been minding his own business in the nip joint one minute and was sucked up by aliens the next.

  Bledsoe swept a hand over the lighted skyline in the distance, rising and sparkling like a kingdom.

  "Why don't you write about that?" the councilman said it as if he wanted Brazil to start taking notes, so he did.

  "Look at all the good, the accomplishments. Look at how we've grown. Voted the most attractive city to live in nationwide, third largest banking center in the country, with an appreciation of the arts. People are in line to move here. But no. Oh no." He tapped Brazil's shoulder.

  "I'll wake up in the morning to another depressing story. An ambulance hijacked by a man with a knife. News intended to strike fear in the hearts of citizens."

  West started pulling out and Brazil broke into a run, as if he were about to miss the school bus. Bledsoe looked surprised and annoyed for he hadn't finished talking, and West knew it was no accident that the councilman just happened to be out tonight while Andy Brazil, the experiment in community policing, was riding. Bledsoe would find his way into a story and impress his constituents this reelection year with how diligent and caring he was. CITY COUNCILMAN TAKES TIME TO RIDE WITH POLICE. She could see the headline now. Opening the glove box, she rummaged for a roll of Turns.

  She stopped the car so Brazil could climb in. He wasn't even breathing hard and had just sprinted a good fifty yards. Reminders like that made West want to smoke.

  "I told you not to talk to anyone," she said, lighting up.

  "What was I supposed to do?" He was indignant.

  "You walked off without me and he got in my face."

  They passed more impoverished houses, most of them boarded up and not lived in anymore. Brazil was staring at West, thinking about Bledsoe calling her Superwoman.

  "They made a mistake promoting you," Brazil said.

  "That was really something, what you did back there."

  West had been good at this once. Taking the sergeant's exam had been the first step toward paperwork and political correctness. If Hammer hadn't come to town, West was fairly certain she would have looked for some thing else.

  "So tell me," Brazil was saying.

  "Tell you what?" West asked, blowing out a stream of smoke.

  "What did you say to him?" Brazil wanted to know.

  "Say to who?"

  "You know, the guy in the ambulance."

  "Can't tell you."

  "Come on. You said something that really pissed him off," Brazil insisted.

  "Nope." West flicked an ash out the window.

  "Oh, come on. What?"

  "I didn't say anything."

  "Yes you did."

  "I called him a pussy," she finally confessed.

  "And you can't print that."

  "You're right," Brazil told her.

  Chapter Four.

  The downtown skyline was huge around a terrible crime scene, minutes past ten p. m. Police were tense and sweating, their flashlights probing a parking lot behind an abandoned building, and an area overgrown with weeds where the black rental Lincoln had been abandoned. The driver's door was open, headlights burning, interior bell dinging a feeble warning that was too late. Detective Brewster had been called in from home and was standing near the Lincoln, talking on his portable phone. He was dressed in jeans and an old Izod shirt, his badge and a Smith & Wesson . 40 caliber pistol and extra magazines clipped to his belt.

  "Looks like we got another one," he said to his in-transit boss.

  "Can you give me a ten-thirteen?" West's voice sounded over the phone.

  Ten-thirteen's still clear. " Brewster looked around.

  "But not for long. What's your ten-twenty?"

  "Dilworth. Heading your way on forty-nine. EOT ten- fifteen."

  Vft Brazil had learned how to talk on the radio in the academy and understood codes and why Brewster and West were talking in them.

  Something very bad had gone down, and they didn't want anyone else, a reporter for example, monitoring what they were saying. Basically, Brewster had let West know that the scene was still clear of people who shouldn't be there, but not for long. West was en route and would arrive in less than fifteen minutes.

  West reached for the portable phone she had plugged into the cigarette lighter. She was on red alert, driving fast as she dialed a number.

  Her conversation with Chief Hammer was brief.

  West shot Brazil a severe look.

  "Do everything you're told," she said.

  "This is serious."

  By the time they reached the crime scene, reporters had gathered in the night, all poised as Brazil's peers tried to get close to a terrible tragedy. Webb held a microphone, talking into a camera, his pretty face sincere and full of sorrow.

  "No identificatio
n of the victim, who like the first three shot to death very close to here was driving a rental car," Webb taped for the eleven o'clock news.

  West and Brazil were quiet and-determined as they made their way through. They avoided microphones jabbed their way, cameras rolling in their faces as they ducked and dodged and hurried. Questions flew all around them as if some fast-breaking news bomb had gone off, and Brazil was terrified. He was acutely self-conscious and embarrassed in a way he did not understand.