Hornet's Nest (21 page)

“I guess we should go,” Hammer volunteered, about an hour into their sitting inside the dark Volvo and talking.

“You’re right,” said Panesa, who had a trophy in the backseat and an emptiness in his heart. “Judy, I have to say something.”

“Please,” said Hammer.

“Do you have a friend or two you just have fun with?”

“No.”

“I don’t either,” Panesa confessed. “Don’t you think that’s rather incredible?”

Hammer took a moment to analyze. “No,” she decided. “I never had a friend or two. Not in grammar school, when I was better than everyone in kickball. Not in high school, when I was good in math and the president of the student body. Not in college. Not in the police academy, now that I think about it.”

“I was good in English,” Panesa thought back. “And dodgeball, I guess. A president of the Bible Club one year, but don’t hold that against me. Another year on the varsity basketball team but horrible, fouled out the one game I played in when we were forty points behind.”

“What are you getting at, Richard?” asked Hammer, whose nature it was to walk fast and rush to the point.

Panesa was silent for a moment. “I think people like us need friends,” he decided.

West needed friends, too, but she would never admit this to Brazil, who was determined to solve every crime in the city that night. West was smoking. Brazil was eating a Snickers bar when the scanner let them know that any unit in the area of Dundeen and Redbud might want to look for a dead body in a field. Flashlights cut across darkness, the sound of feet moving through weeds and grass as Brazil and West searched the dark. He was obsessed and managed to get ahead of West, his flashlight sweeping. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt, yanking him behind her, like a bad puppy.

“You mind if I go first?” West asked him.

• • •

Panesa stopped in Fourth Ward, in front of Hammer’s house, at twenty minutes past one
A
.
M
. “Well, congratulations on your award,” Panesa said again.

“And to you,” Hammer said, gripping the door handle.

“Okay, Judy. Let’s do this again one of these days.”

“Absolutely. Award or not.” Hammer could see the TV flickering through curtains. Seth was up and probably eating a Tombstone pizza.

“I really appreciate your allowing Brazil to be out with your folks. It’s been good for us,” Panesa said.

“For us, too.”

“So be it. Anything innovative, I’m all for it,” said Panesa. “Doesn’t happen often.”

“Rare as hen’s teeth,” Hammer agreed.

“Isn’t that the truth.”

“Absolutely.”

Panesa controlled his impulse to touch her. “I need to go,” he said.

“It’s late,” she completely agreed.

Hammer finally lifted the door handle, letting herself out. Panesa drove off in the direction of his empty house and felt blue. Hammer walked into her space, where Seth lived and ate, and was lonely.

West and Brazil were working hard and unmindful of the time. They had just pulled up to the federally subsidized housing project of Earle Village and entered apartment 121, where there were suspicious signs of money. A computer was on the coffee table, along with a lot of cash, a calculator, and a pager. An elderly woman was composed on the couch, her raging old drunk boyfriend dancing in front of her, his finger parried at her. Police were in the room, assessing the problem.

“She pulled a .22 revolver on me!” the boyfriend was saying.

“Ma’am,” West said. “Do you have a gun?”

“He was threatening me,” the woman told Brazil.

Her name was Rosa Tinsley, and she was neither drunk
nor excited. In fact, she didn’t get this much attention except once a week, when the police came. She was having a fine time. Billy could just hop around, threaten away like he always did when he went to the nip joint and lost money in poker.

“Come in here doing all his drug deals,” Rosa went on to Brazil. “Gets drunk and says he’s gonna cut my throat.”

“Are there drugs here?” West asked.

Rosa nodded at Brazil and gestured toward the back of the house. “The shoe box in my closet,” she announced.

T
here were many shoe boxes in Rosa’s closet, and West and Brazil went through all of them. They found no drugs, the boyfriend was evicted, and Rosa was rewarded with instant gratification. West and Brazil headed back to their car. Brazil felt they had accomplished a good thing. That rotten, stinking, besotted old man was out of there. The poor woman would have some peace. She was safe.

“I guess we got rid of them,” Brazil commented with pride.

“She was just scaring him, like she does once a week,” West replied. “They’ll be back together by the time we drive off.”

She started the engine, watching the old boyfriend in her rearview mirror. He was standing on the sidewalk, carrying his things, staring at the dark blue Crown Victoria, waiting for it to disappear.

“One of these days he’ll probably kill her,” West added.

She hated domestic cases. Those and dog bite reports were the most unpredictable and dangerous to the police. Citizens called the cops, and then resented the intervention. It was all very irrational. But perhaps the worst feature of people like Rosa and their boyfriends was the codependency, the inability to do without the other, no matter how many times
partners brandished knives and guns, slapped, stole, and threatened. West had a difficult time dealing with people who wallowed in dysfunction and went from one abusive relationship to the next, never gaining insight and hurting life. It was her opinion that Brazil should not live with his mother.

“Why don’t you get an apartment and be on your own for once?” West said to him.

“Can’t afford it.” Brazil typed on the MDT.

“Sure you can.”

“No, I can’t.” He typed some more. “A one-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood is about five hundred a month.”

“So?” West looked over at him. “And your car is paid for, right? You owe any money to Davidson?”

It wasn’t any of her business.

“You could afford it,” West preached on. “What you got is a sick relationship. You don’t get away from her, you’ll grow old together.”

“Oh really?” Brazil looked up at West, not appreciating her remarks in the least. “You know all about it, do you?”

“I’m afraid so,” West said. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Andy, you aren’t the first person in the world to have a codependent, enabling relationship with a parent or spouse. Your mother’s crippling, self-destructive disease is her choice. And it serves one important function. It controls her son. She doesn’t want you to leave, and guess what? So far you haven’t.”

This was also Hammer’s problem, although she had yet to face it fully. Seth, too, was a cripple. When his powerful, handsome wife breezed in with her trophy in the early morning hours, he was surfing hundreds of cable channels made possible by his eighteen-inch satellite dish on the back porch. Seth liked country western music and was looking for just the right band. It was not true that he was eating a Tombstone pizza. That had been earlier, when it had gotten to be midnight and his wife still was not home. Now he was working
on popcorn drenched with real butter he had melted in the microwave.

Seth Bridges had never been much to look at. Physical beauty was not what had attracted Judy Hammer to him long ago in Little Rock. She had loved his intelligence and gentle patience. They had started out as friends, the way everyone would were the world filled with good sense. The problem lay in Seth’s capacity. He grew as his wife did for the first ten years. Then he maxed out, and simply could stretch no further as a spiritual, enlightened, big-thinking entity. There was no other way to broaden himself unless he did so in the flesh. Eating, frankly, was what he now did best.

Hammer locked the front door and reset the burglar alarm, making sure the motion sensors were on stay. The house smelled like a movie theater, and she detected a hint of pepperoni beneath a buttery layer of chilled air. Her husband was stretched out on the couch, crunching, fingers shiny with grease as he stuffed popcorn inside a mouth that never completely rested. She walked through the living room without comment as stations changed as fast as Seth could point and shoot. In her bedroom, she angrily set the trophy on the floor in a closet with others she never remembered.

She was overwhelmed with fury and slammed the door, tore her clothes off, and threw them in a chair. She put on her favorite nightshirt and grabbed her pistol out of her pocketbook and walked back out into the living room. She’d had it. No more. Enough. Every mortal had limits. Seth froze mid-shovel when his wife marched in, armed.

“Why drag it out?” she said, towering over him in blue and white striped cotton. “Why not just kill yourself and get it over with? Go ahead.”

She racked the pistol and offered it to him, butt first. Seth stared at it. He had never seen her like this, and he propped himself up on his elbows.

“What happened tonight?” he asked. “You and Panesa get into a fight or something?”

“Quite the opposite. If you want to end it, go ahead.”

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“That’s right, well on my way to it, thanks to you.” His
wife lowered the gun and put the safety on. “Seth, tomorrow you go for help. A psychiatrist and your primary care physician. You straighten yourself out. Starting this minute. You’re a pig. A slob. A bore. You’re committing slow suicide and I do not intend to watch a minute longer.” She snatched the bowl of popcorn out of his oily hands. “You don’t get it fixed, I’m out of here. Period.”

Brazil and West also were suffering aftershocks from their confrontation in her unmarked car. They had continued arguing about his living situation, by now both of them in a lather as they drove through another rough area of the city. Brazil was glaring at her and not particularly cognizant of the area or its bad people who were thinking violent thoughts about the cop car cruising past. Brazil wondered what possessed him to want to spend so much of his valuable time with this rude, insensitive, inappropriate deputy chief who was old and backward and, in truth, a jerk.

It seemed that fighting was a cloud layer over the Queen City, and Panesa’s pleasant mood had deteriorated as well when his lawyer friend called at the precise moment Hammer was locking her bedroom door and West was telling Brazil to grow up and Bubba was on the prowl in his King Cab. The lawyer had been thinking about Panesa, whom she had observed on the late news, in his stunning tuxedo, receiving a trophy. The lawyer was thinking about Panesa and his silver hair and wanted to drop by and maybe stay over. Panesa made it clear that this was not possible and never would be again, as Bubba parked in dark shadows near Latta Park.

Bubba was in camouflage, a black cap pulled low. When he stealthily reached West’s house, he was pleased that she wasn’t home. Bubba could only suppose that she was being screwed by her sissy boyfriend, and Bubba smiled as he imagined her getting screwed again by Bubba, as he sneaked closer to the front of the brick house. His intention wasn’t felonious
but would ruin the bitch’s mood when she couldn’t open her front or back doors because someone had filled the locks with Super Glue. This idea had come from yet another of his anarchist manuals and might well have worked like a charm had circumstances not conspired against him as he unfolded his Buck knife and cut off the tip from the tube of glue.

A car was coming, and Bubba wisely supposed it might be the cop returning home. It was too late to run, and he dove into the hedge. The Cavalier wagon passed, carrying Ned Toms to The Fish Market, where he was about to start his shift, unpacking seafood from boxes of ice. He noticed what he supposed was a big dog moving around in bushes in front of a house where he often saw an unmarked cop car parked, then his Cavalier was gone like a breeze.

Bubba emerged from the hedge, his fingers glued together and left hand completely fastened to the right inner thigh of his fatigues. He rapidly hobbled away, looking remarkably like a hunchback. He could not unlock his truck or drive without freeing one hand, and this required his removing his pants, which he was in the process of doing when Officer Wood happened by on routine patrol, checking the park for perverts. Bubba was arrested for indecent exposure.

West and Brazil heard the call over the scanner but were not even close and were busy discussing Brazil’s life.

“What the hell do you know about my mother or why I choose to take care of her?” Brazil was saying.

“I know a lot. Social services, juvenile court, are overwhelmed by cases just like yours,” West said.

“I’ve never been a social service case. Or in juvenile court.”

“Yet,” she reminded him.

“Mind your own business for once.”

“Get a life,” she said. “Declare your independence. Go out on a date.”

“Oh, so now I don’t date, either,” he snapped.

She laughed. “When? While you’re brushing your teeth? You’re out every night working and then show up in the
newsroom by nine, after you’ve run your ass off around the track and hit a million tennis balls. You tell me when you date, Andy? Huh?”

Fortunately, Radar the dispatcher hailed them exactly at this moment. Apparently there was an assault on Monroe Road.

“Unit 700 responding,” Brazil irritably said into the mike.

“They call you Night Voice,” West told him.

“Who’s they?” he wanted to know.

“Cops. They know when you get on the radio that you’re not me.”

“Because my voice is deeper? Or maybe because I use proper grammar?” he said.

West was making her way through more menacing-looking government-subsidized housing. She was constantly checking her mirrors. “Where the hell are my backups?” she said.

Brazil had his eye on something else, and excitedly pointed. “White van, EWR-117,” he said. “From the APB earlier.”

The van was moving slowly around a corner, and West sped up. She flipped on lights and siren, and twenty minutes later, cops hauled someone else to jail as West and Brazil drove on.

Radar wasn’t finished with them yet. A call came in for a car broken into at Trade and Tryon, and he assigned this to unit 700 as well, while other cops rode around with nothing much to do.

“Subject a black male, no shirt, green shorts. May be armed,” Radar’s voice came over the scanner.

At the scene, West and Brazil discovered a Chevrolet Caprice with a smashed windshield. The upset owner, Ben Martin, was a law-abiding citizen. He’d had his fill of crime and violence and did not deserve to have his brand-new Caprice mauled like this. For what? His wife’s coupon book that looked like a wallet in the backseat? Some shithead hooligan destroyed Martin’s hard-earned ride to get fifty cents off Starkist albacore tuna, or Uncle Ben’s, or Maxwell House?

“Last night, same thing happened to my neighbor over there,” Martin was explaining to the cops. “And the Baileys over there got hit the night before that.”

What had gone wrong in the world? Martin remembered being a boy in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where they did not lock their doors and a burglar alarm was when you walked in on the sucker cleaning you out and he was surprised. So you beat the fool out of him, and that was the end of it. Now there was nothing but randomness, and strangers brutalizing a new Caprice for manufacturers’ coupons camouflaged by a red fabric wallet fastened with Velcro.

Brazil happened to notice a black male in green shorts running a block away, headed toward the dark, ancient Settlers Cemetery. “That’s him!” Brazil shouted.

“Get on the radio!” West ordered.

She took off. It was instinct and had nothing to do with reality, which revealed her as a middle-aged, out of shape, Bojangles-addicted smoker. She was at least a hundred feet behind the subject and already heaving. She was sweating and clumsy, her body and heavy Sam Browne belt simply not designed for this. The bastard had no shirt on, his muscles rippling beneath gleaming ebony skin. He was a damn lynx. How the hell was she supposed to catch something like this? No way. Subjects didn’t used to be this fit. They didn’t used to drink Met-Rx and have fitness clubs in every jail.

Even as she was thinking these thoughts, Brazil passed her, flying like an Olympic athlete. He was gaining on Green Shorts, closing in as they entered the cemetery. Brazil zeroed in on the muscular V-shaped back. This dude had maybe five percent body fat, was shiny with sweat, running his scrawny butt off and believing he would get away with stealing that coupon book. Brazil shoved him as hard as he could from the rear and sent him sprawling to the grass, coupons fluttering. Brazil jumped on top of Green Shorts and dug a knee in the common thief’s spine. Brazil pressed his Mag-Lite, like a gun, against Green Shorts’s skull.

“Move I’ll blow your brains out motherfucker!”
Brazil screamed.

He looked up, proud of himself. West had finally gotten
around to showing up, heaving and sweating. She would have a heart attack, of this she was certain.

“I stole that line from you,” Brazil told her.

She managed to detach handcuffs from the back of her belt, having no clear recollection of when she might have used them last. Was it when she was a sergeant and got in a foot pursuit with a sh’im in Fourth Ward, way back when, or in Fat Man’s? She felt lightheaded, blood pounding her neck and ears. West traced her deterioration back to her thirty-fifth year when, coincidentally, Niles had deposited himself on her back stoop one Saturday night. Abyssinians were exotic and quite expensive. They were also difficult and eccentric, possibly explaining why Niles had been available for adoption. Even West had moments when she wanted to boot him out the car door on one of life’s highways. Why the scrawny, cross-eyed kitten with memories of the pyramids had picked West remained unknown.