Hornet`s Nest

Chapter Nine

Chad Tiny could have used another undertaker at exactly that moment.

He had brilliantly outmaneuvered the Dodge Dart with its kamikaze old man rocking to country western. That round the funeral director had won without effort, but it had also been Tiny's experience that when he was relaxed and not looking, he usually got his butt kicked. Tiny was creeping along again when he decided to light a cigar and fiddle with the radio at the same time.

Tiny did not notice the blond kid in uniform, and no gun, suddenly halting the procession as, of all things, a Fourth of July-looking float appeared on the horizon, running the lead limo off the road.

This was amazing. Sweet Jesus, this could not be so. Tiny slammed on brakes at the same moment his assistant's inability to completely shut the hearse's tailgate became known. The copper-tinted casket with deep satin lining slammed one way and ricocheted out the other like a lightweight alloy bullet. The casket and its occupant skittered over pavement and kept going, for, as luck would have it, the procession was momentarily on a slight hill.

X? Brazil had not been trained to handle such a situation and was on his radio in a flash as yet a second float glided into view. This was awful. It was his intersection. He would be blamed. His armpits were soaked and his heart was out of control as he tried to contain the disaster of the world. Men in dark suits with lots of rings and gold crowns on their teeth were flying out of stretch limousines, and chasing a run-away gaudy electroplated casket down the boulevard. Oh God. No. Brazil blew his whistle and stopped all traffic, including floats. He raced after the casket as it continued its lonely journey.

People stared at the cop chasing it. They cheered.

"I'll get it," Brazil called out to men in suits, as he sprinted.

The foot pursuit was brief, order restored, and a dapper man who identified himself as Mr. Tiny formally thanked Brazil for all to hear.

Ts there anything else I can do to help? " replied Brazil, the community-oriented cop.

"Yeah," the funeral home director boomed.

"Get them mother-fucking floats outa my way."

Floats were pulled over to make room, and none moved an inch for an hour. Not one spectator went home, and others came as word traveled around. This was the best Freedom Day in the history of Charlotte.

mA Goode, head of patrol, did not share quite the same enthusiasm, since traffic control was her responsibility, and a runaway casket was not something she wanted to hear about on the evening news. It was a matter she intended to resolve in person, but not until it was dark out. Then she packed up her slim, soft leather satchel and headed to the parking deck, where the city paid nineteen dollars a month for her reserved parking space. She preferred driving her personal car back and forth to work, and got inside her black Miata.

Goode opened her satchel, dug for Obsession, and strategically sprayed. She dry-brushed her teeth. She worked on her hair a bit, and threw the car in reverse, loving the engine throbbing beneath her. She headed out to Myers Park, the wealthiest, oldest neighborhood, where huge mansions with slate roofs gathered their cobblestone skirts around them lest they be splashed by the dirtier elements of the city.

Myers Park Methodist Church was gray stone and rose from the horizon like a castle. Goode had never been to a service here, but the parking lot she knew very well, for she worshiped in it regularly. Brent Webb was on his break after the six o'clock news, his Porsche idling beneath a large magnolia tree in a far corner. He shut down the engine as his other one got going. He got out of his car, looking each way, as if about to cross traffic, and slid inside Goode's Miata.

Rarely did they talk, unless she had a scoop he must know. Their lips locked, sucked, bit, probed, and invaded, as did tongues and hands.

They drove each other farther than either had ever been, each time more primitive and special, each frenzied by the other's power. Webb had secret fantasies of Goode in uniform, whipping out her handcuffs, and her gun. She liked to watch him on TV, when she was alone at home, savoring his every syllable as he alluded to her, and secretly quoted her to the world.

T assume you know about the casket problem. " Goode could barely talk.

"Whose?" asked Webb, who never knew anything unless the information was stolen or leaked.

"Never mind."

They were breathing heavily, the Pointer Sisters jumping on the radio.

They made out in the front seat, maneuvering around the stick shift as best they could. Through the front windshield the lit-up city skyline was close, the US Bank Corporate Center very much a symbol of Webb's good mood. He unfastened her bra, never sure why he bothered, and he imagined her tie, her police belt, and his excitement grew.

Officer Jenny Frankel was typically excited, as well, for she was young and still enthusiastic about her job. She looked for trouble, begged, and even prayed for it, so when she noticed two vehicles pulled off in a remote corner of the Myers Park Methodist Church parking lot, she had to check it out. In the first place, choir practice was yesterday, and AA didn't meet until Thursday. Plus, there were drug dealers everywhere, threatening to take over. Fuck no, was her position. She would take the city back, return it to decent, hard-working men and women if it was the last thing she did in life.

She pulled into shadows and stopped, now close enough to notice movement in the front seat of a late-model black Miata that looked vaguely familiar, for some reason. Frankel suspected the active silhouettes were two men, based on the hair. She typed plate numbers into her MDT and patiently waited as the two guys kissed, fondled, and sucked. When Deputy Chief Goode's and Brent Webb's Department of Motor Vehicle information returned to the video display, Frankel rapidly left the area. Other than her sergeant, with whom she went out drinking several times a week, Frankel told no one what she had observed this night. The sergeant also told only one person, and this discreetly went on.

Brazil's day had been long, but he did not want to go home. After working traffic, he had changed his clothes and done his eight hours for the Observer. Now it was almost one a. m. The late shift had been slow. For a while he had hung around the press room watching newspapers race towards their final destination of puppy crates and recycling bins. He had stood, mesmerized, unable to see his byline this time because all he had been able to bring in was a local metro story about a pedestrian run over in Mint Hill. The victim was a known drunk and night editor Cutler didn't think the story merited more than three inches.

Brazil got in his BMW and headed back toward Trade Street. This was not a safe thing to do, and no one need tell him that. He rumbled past the stadium and the Duke Power transfer station, stopping at a dead end at West Third where the old crumbling building seemed even more haunted and menacing at this hour. Brazil sat and stared, imagining murder, and believing there was a person who had heard the gunshots and spraying of paint. Somewhere, someone knew. Brazil left his engine running, the Sig Sauer between the front seats, and within reach.

He began walking around, probing with a flashlight, his eyes nervous, as if he feared he was being watched. Old blood on pavement was black, and an opossum was working on it, eyes white in the flashlight as it spied the intrusion and scuttled off. The woods teemed with restless insects, and fireflies winked. A far-off train rumbled down rusty tracks, and Brazil was chilled, his attention darting around, like static. He felt murder in this place. He sensed a sinister energy that bristled and coiled and waited to claim more. These killings were common and cold, and Brazil believed that the monster was known by the people of the night, and fear kept identity hidden.

Brazil did not believe prostitution was right. He did not think that anyone should have to pay for such a thing. He did not believe that anyone should have to sell such a thing. All of it was depressing, and he imagined being a homely middle-aged man and accepting that no woman would want him without his wallet. Brazil imagined a woman worrying about servicing the next client in order to feed her child or herself or avoid another beating from her pimp. A horrid slavery, all of it dreadful and hard to imagine. This moment, Brazil entertained little hope about the human condition when he considered that heartless behavior had evolved not one level higher since the beginning of time.

It seemed that what had changed, simply, was the way people got around and communicated, and the size of the weapons they used against each another.

On Highway 277, he saw one of these very sad creations on the shoulder, walking languidly, in tight jeans and no bra, her chest thrust out. The young hooker was pointed and tattooed, in a skimpy white knit shirt. He slowed, meeting bold, mocking eyes that didn't know fear. She was about his age and missing most of her front teeth, and he tried to imagine talking to her, or picking her up. He wondered if the appeal was stolen fire, some sort of mythical thing, an ill-gotten rush that made people feel powerful, her over him, him over her, if only for a dark, degrading moment. He imagined her laughing at her Johns and hating them as much as she hated herself and all. He followed the young hooker in his rearview mirror as she stared back at him, with a slight, quizzical smile, waiting for the boy to make up his mind. She could have been pretty once. Brazil sped up as a van cruised close to her and stopped.

The next night, Brazil was out on the street again, and reality seemed different and odd, and, at first, he thought it was his imagination. From the moment he left the Observer in his BMW, he saw cops everywhere in spotless white patrol cars. They were watching and following him, and he told himself this could not be true, that he was tired and full of fantasy. The evening was slow, with no good reports in the press basket, unless Webb had already stolen them. There were no good calls over the scanner until a fire broke out. Brazil didn't waste time. The blaze was huge and he could see it against the night sky in Adam One, close to where Nations Ford and York Roads met.

Brazil's adrenaline flooded him with nervous energy. He was focused on getting to the scene and not getting lost, when suddenly a siren sounded behind him, and he checked his rearview mirror.

"Shit," he said.

Moments later, he was in the passenger's seat of a police cruiser, getting a ticket as the distant fire burned without him.

"My speedometer is broken," Brazil tried that shopworn line.

"Get it fixed." The officer was unfriendly and taking her time.

"Could you please hurry with that, ma'am?" Brazil then politely said.

"I've got to get to my assignment."

"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 amp;: 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.

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.