Hornet's Nest (24 page)

“They’ll X-ray, of course,” she was saying, “to make certain the bullet isn’t lodged close to anything important.”

There was a dark side of +P hollowpoints, Hammer thought. The objective of their design was for the lead projectile to expand and rip through tissue like a Roto-Rooter. Rarely did the bullets exit, and there was no telling how much lead was scattered through Seth’s formidable lower region. Brazil was listening to all this, wondering if the chief would ever get around to calling the police.

“Chief Hammer,” Brazil finally felt compelled to speak. “I don’t guess you’ve called this in?”

“Oh dear.” It hadn’t even occurred to her. “You’re absolutely right. I guess a report has to be taken.” She began pacing as the reality hit. “Oh no, oh no. That’s all I need! So now I get to hear about this on TV, the radio. In your paper. This is awful. Do you realize how many people will enjoy this?” She envisioned Cahoon sitting in his crown, laughing as he read about it.

POLICE CHIEF’S HUSBAND SHOOTS SELF RUSSIAN ROULETTE SUSPECTED

No one would be fooled, not for a minute. A depressed, unemployed, obese husband in bed with his wife’s .38 loaded
with only one cartridge? Every cop who worked for Hammer would know that her husband had been flirting with suicide. All would know that there were serious problems in her house. Some would even suspect that she had shot her husband and knew exactly how to get away with it. Maybe it wasn’t his left buttock she had been aiming at, either. Maybe he had turned around just in the nick of time. Hammer went into the kitchen and reached for the phone.

There was simply no way she was dialing 911 and having the call broadcast to every cop, paramedic, reporter, and person who owned a scanner in the region. She got the duty captain on the line. It happened to be Horgess. He was fiercely loyal to his boss, but not especially quick-thinking or known for shrewd judgment.

“Horgess,” she said. “I need an officer over to my house ASAP to take a report. There’s been an accident.”

“Oh no!” Horgess was upset. If anything ever happened to his chief, he’d answer directly to Goode. “Are you all right?”

She paced. “My husband’s at Carolinas Medical. I’m afraid he had an accident with a handgun. He should be fine.”

Horgess immediately grabbed his upright portable radio. He ten-fived David One unit 538, a rookie too scared to do anything other than what she was told. This decision would have been good had Horgess not failed to overlook the reason Hammer had called him, the duty captain, directly.

“Need you over there
now
to take an accidental shooting report,” Horgess excitedly said into his radio.

“Ten-four,” Unit 538 came back. “Any injuries?”

“Ten-four. Subject en route to Carolinas Medical.”

Every officer on duty, and some who weren’t, and anyone else with a scanner, heard every word of the broadcast. Most assumed Chief Hammer had been accidentally shot, meaning Jeannie Goode this very instant was the acting chief. Nothing could have sent the force into more of a panic. Hammer had a base radio station in her kitchen and it was on.

“Horgess, you idiot!” she exclaimed in disbelief to no one in particular, inside her kitchen.

She stopped pacing. It struck her that Andy Brazil was still standing in the doorway. She was not entirely sure why he was here and suddenly doubted the wisdom of a handsome young reporter dressed like a cop being in the house with her, in the wake of a domestic shooting. Hammer also knew that her entire evening shift was heading toward her address, flying to investigate the fate of their leader.

Goode never kept her radio on at home or in her car, but a source had tipped her off, and she was already putting on her uniform, preparing to take over the Charlotte Police Department, as Unit 538 sped through Fourth Ward. Unit 538 was terrified. She worried she might have to stop to vomit. She turned on Pine Street, and was stunned to find five other police cars already in front of Hammer’s house, lights strobing. In Unit 538’s rearview mirror, more cars came, miles of them, speeding through the night to help their fallen chief. Unit 538 parked, shakily gathered her metal clipboard, wondering if she could just leave and deciding probably not.

Hammer went out on the porch to reassure her people. “Everything is under control,” she spoke to them.

“Then you’re not injured,” said a sergeant whose name she did not recall.

“My husband is injured. We don’t think it’s serious,” she said.

“So everything’s okay.”

“Man, what a scare.”

“We’re so relieved, Chief Hammer.”

“See you in the morning.” Hammer dismissed them with a wave.

That was all they needed to hear. Each officer secretly keyed his mike, broadcasting several clicks over the air, signaling comrades everywhere that all was ten-four. Only Unit 538 had unfinished business, and she followed Hammer into the rich, old house. They sat in the living room.

“Before you even start,” Hammer said, “I’m going to tell you how this is going to be done.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There will be no implication that the right thing was not done here, that exceptions were made because the subject involved happens to be married to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is routine and will be worked according to the book.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“My husband should be charged with reckless endangerment and discharging a firearm in the city limits,” Hammer went on.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Unit 538’s handwriting was unsteady as she began filling out the accidental shooting report. This was amazing. Hammer must not like her husband much. Hammer was nailing him with the maximum charge, locking him up and throwing away the key. It just proved Unit 538’s theory that women like Hammer got where they were by being aggressive hard-asses. They were men poured into the wrong form at the factory. Hammer recited all the necessary information. She answered Unit 538’s banal questions and got the cop out as fast as possible.

Brazil remained seated at the kitchen table in Chief Hammer’s house, wondering if anyone might have recognized his distinctive BMW parked out front. If the cops ran his tag, what would they think? Who was he here to see? He remembered with a sinking feeling that the condominiums Axel and friends lived in were just around the corner. Cops with their suspicious minds might think Brazil had parked a street away, trying to fool everybody. If word got back to Axel, he’d believe Brazil was stalking him, had a thing for him.

“Andy, let’s wind this up.” Hammer walked in. “I suppose it’s too late to get this in the paper for tomorrow.”

“Yes, chief. The city edition deadline was hours ago,” Brazil replied, glancing at his watch, and startled that she would want a word of this in the paper.

“I’m going to need you to help me and have to trust that you will, even after what happened with Channel Three,” she said.

There was no one Brazil would rather assist.

Hammer looked at the clock on the wall, in despair. It was almost three
A
.
M
. She had to get to the hospital, whether Seth liked it or not, and she needed to be up in three hours. Hammer’s body did not appreciate all-nighters anymore, but she would make it. She always did. Her plan was the best she could devise under circumstances which were truly extreme and upsetting. She knew tomorrow’s news would bristle with Seth’s bizarre shooting and what it might imply. She could not preempt the television and radio stations, but at least could straighten out the facts the following day with a true, detailed account by Brazil.

Brazil was silent and stunned as he sat in the passenger’s seat of Hammer’s impeccable Crown Victoria. He took notes while she talked. She told him all about her early life and why she had gone into law enforcement. She talked about Seth, about what a support he had been as she was fighting her way through the ranks of what was truly a male militia. Hammer was exhausted and vulnerable, her personal life in shambles, and she had not been to a therapist in two years. Brazil had caught her at a remarkable time, and he was moved and honored by her trust. He would not let her down.

“It’s a perfect example of the world not allowing powerful people to have problems,” Hammer was explaining as she drove along Queens Road West, beneath a canopy of great oak trees. “But the fact is, all people have problems. We have tempestuous and tragic phases in relationships we don’t have time enough to tend to, and we get discouraged and feel we have failed.”

Brazil thought she was the most wonderful person he had ever met. “How long have you been married?” he asked.

“Twenty-six years.”

She had known the night before her wedding that she was making a mistake. She and Seth had united out of need, not want. She had been afraid to go it alone, and Seth had seemed so strong and capable back then.

As he lay on his stomach in the E.R., after X-rays and scrubbing and being rolled all over the place, Seth wondered how
this could have happened. His wife had once admired him, valued his opinion, and laughed at his witty stories. They were never much in bed. She had far more energy and staying power, and no matter how he might have wanted to please, he simply could not carry her same tune, didn’t have as many pages, usually was snoring by the time she’d returned from the bathroom, ready for the next act.

“Ouch!” he yelled.

“Sir, you’re going to have to hold still,” the stern nurse said for the hundredth time.

“Why can’t you knock me out or something!” Tears welled in his eyes as he clenched his fists.

“Mr. Hammer, you’re very fortunate.” It was the triage surgeon’s voice now, rattling X rays that sounded like saw blades. She was a pretty little thing with long red hair. Seth was humiliated that her only perspective on him was his corpulent fanny that had never seen the sun.

T
he Carolinas Medical Center was famous for its triage, and patients were med-flighted in from all over the region. This early morning, helicopters were quiet silhouettes on red helipads centered by big H’s on rooftops, and shuttle buses moved slowly from parking lots to different areas of the massive concrete complex. The medical center’s fleet of ambulances was teal and white, the colors of the Hornets and much of what filled Charlotte with pride.

The entire hospital staff knew that a V.I.P. had arrived. There would be no waiting, no bleeding in chairs, no threatening, no shortcuts or neglect. Seth Hammer, as he had been erroneously registered and referred to most of his marriage, had been taken straight into the E.R. He had been rolled in and out of many rooms. He wasn’t certain he understood the pretty surgeon’s vernacular, but it seemed, according to her, that although the bullet’s destruction of tissue had been significant, at least no major arteries or veins had been hit. However, because he was a V.I.P., no chances could be taken. It was explained that medical personnel would do arteriography and shoot him full of dye and see what they found. Then they would give him a barium enema.

Hammer parked in a police slot outside the emergency room at not quite four
A
.
M
. Brazil had filled twenty pages in
his notepad and knew more about her than any reporter who had ever lived. She fetched her large pocketbook with its secret compartment and took a deep breath as she got out. Brazil was struggling with his next question but had to ask. It was for her own good, too.

“Chief Hammer.” He hesitated. “Do you suppose I could get a photographer here to maybe get something of you on your way out of the hospital, later?”

She waved him off as she walked. “I don’t care.”

The more she thought about it, the more she realized it didn’t matter what he wrote. Her life was over. In the course of one short day, all was lost. A senator had been murdered, the fifth in a series of brutal slayings committed by someone the police were no closer to catching. USBank, which owned the city, was at odds with her. Now her husband had shot himself in the ass while playing Russian roulette. The jokes would be endless. What did this suggest about where he assumed his most vital organ was, after all? Hammer would lose her job. What the hell. She may as well offer her two cents’ worth on her way out the door. Brazil had just gotten off a pay phone and was walking fast to keep up with her.

“We’ll also be running the Black Widow story, if there’s a positive I.D.,” he nervously reminded her.

She didn’t care.

“I’m wondering,” Brazil pushed his luck, “if you’d have a problem with my slipping in a few details or two that might trick the killer.”

“What?” Hammer glanced blankly at him.

“You know, if I messed with him a little. Well, Deputy Chief West didn’t think it was a good idea, either,” he conceded.

The enlightened chief caught on to what he was suggesting and was interested. “As long as you don’t release sensitive case details.” She fixed on the triage nurse in her console and headed there. No introduction was necessary.

“He’s on the way to the O.R. right now,” the nurse said to the police chief. “Do you want to wait?”

“Yes,” Hammer decided.

“We have a private room the chaplain uses, if you’d like
a little quiet,” the nurse said to this woman who was one of her heroes.

“I’ll just sit where everybody else does,” Hammer said. “Someone might need that room.”

The nurse certainly hoped not. Nobody had died in the last twenty-four hours, and this had better not change on her shift. Nurses always got the raw end of that deal. Doctors suddenly vanished. They were off to their next bit of drama, leaving the nurses to take out tubes, tie on toe tags, wheel the body to the morgue, and deal with bereft relatives who never believed it and were going to sue. Hammer found two chairs in a corner of the reception area. There were maybe twenty distressed people waiting, most accompanied by someone trying to comfort them, most arguing, others moaning and bleeding into towels or cradling broken limbs and holding ice on burns. Almost all were weeping or limping to the restroom, and drinking water from paper cups and fighting another wave of nausea.

Hammer looked around, pained by what she saw. This was why she had chosen her profession, or why it had chosen her. The world was falling apart, and she wanted to help. She focused on a young man who reminded her of Randy, her son. The young man was alone, five chairs away. He was burning up with fever, sweating and shivering and having a difficult time breathing. Hammer looked at his earrings, his chiseled face and wasted body, and she knew what was wrong with him. His eyes were shut as he licked cracked lips. It seemed everyone was sitting as far from him as possible, especially those leaking body fluids. Hammer got up. Brazil never took his eyes off her.

The triage nurse smiled at Hammer’s approach. “What can I do for you?” the nurse said.

“Who’s the young man over there?” Hammer pointed.

“He’s got some sort of respiratory infection.” The nurse became clinical. “I’m not allowed to release names.”

“I can get his name from him myself,” Hammer told her. “I want a large glass of water with a lot of ice, and a blanket. And when might your folks get around to seeing him? He
looks like he could pass out any minute and if he does, I’m going to know about it.”

Some seconds later, Hammer was returning to the waiting area with water and a soft folded blanket. She sat next to the young man and wrapped him up. He opened his eyes as she held something to his lips. It was icy cold and wet and felt wonderful. Warmth began to spread over him, and his shivering calmed as his feverish eyes focused on an angel. Harrel Woods had died, and he was relieved as he drank the water of life.

“What’s your name?” the angel’s voice sounded from far away.

Woods wanted to smile, but his lips bled when he tried.

“Do you have a driver’s license with you?” the angel wanted to know.

It blearily occurred to him that even Heaven required a picture I.D. these days. He weakly zipped open his black leather butt pack and handed the license to the angel. Hammer wrote down the information, in the event he might need a shelter somewhere if he ever got out of here, which wasn’t likely. Two nurses were making their way to him with purpose, and Harrel Woods was admitted to the ward for AIDS patients. Hammer returned to her chair, wondering if she might find coffee somewhere. She digressed more about helping people. She told Brazil that when she was growing up, it was all she had wanted to do in life.

“Unfortunately, policing seems to be part of the problem these days,” she said. “How often do we really help?”

“You just did,” Brazil said.

She nodded. “And that’s not policing, Andy. That’s humanity. And we’ve got to bring humanity back into what we do or there’s no hope. This is not about politics or power or merely rounding up offenders. Policing always has been and always must be about all of us getting along and helping each other. We’re one body.”

Seth’s body was in dire straits in the O.R. His arteriogram was fine and he hadn’t leaked any barium from his bowels,
but because he was a V.I.P., no chance would be taken. They had draped and prepped him, and he was facedown again, and nurses had pierced his tender flesh repeatedly with excruciatingly painful injections and a Foley catheter. They had rolled in a tank of nitrogen and connected it to a tube. They began subjecting him to what they called a Simpulse irrigation, which was nothing more than a power wash with saline and antibiotics. They were blasting him with three thousand cc’s, suctioning, debriding, as he complained.

“Put me under!” he begged.

There was too much risk.

“Anything!” he whined.

They compromised and gave him an amnesiac they called Midazolam, which did not relieve pain but caused it to be forgotten, it seemed. Although the bullet was located on the X ray, they would never locate it in so much fat, not without dicing Seth as if he were destined for a chef salad, the surgeon knew. Her name was Dr. White. She was a thirty-year-old graduate of Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and had done her residency at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. White would not have been as concerned about leaving the bullet were it the typical semi-jacketed, round-nosed variety.

But hollowpoints opened like a flower on impact. The deformed missile in the chief’s husband had cut a swath, exactly as planned by Remington, and might continue to do damage after the fact. Without question, it put him at considerable risk for infection. Dr. White made an incision so the wound could drain, and it was packed and dressed. The sun was rising by the time Dr. White met Chief Hammer in recovery, where Seth was groggy, lying on his side, tethered by IV lines, a curtain drawn to give him the privacy afforded V.I.P.s, as set by the medical center’s unwritten policy.

“He should be fine,” Dr. White was saying to Hammer.

“Thank God,” Hammer said with relief.

“I want to keep him overnight in isolation and continue the IV antibiotics. If he spikes a fever during the first twenty-four hours, we’ll keep him longer.”

“And that could happen.” Hammer’s fears returned.

Dr. White could not believe she was standing here and
the police chief was looking to her for answers. Dr. White had read every article written about this incredible woman. Hammer was what Dr. White wanted to be when Dr. White was older and powerful. Caring, strong, good-looking, kick-ass in pearls. Nobody pushed Hammer around. It wasn’t possible that Hammer put up with the same shit Dr. White did, from the old boy surgeons. Most were graduates of Duke, Davidson, Princeton, and UVA, and wore their school bow ties to the symphony and cocktail parties. They didn’t think twice when one of their own took a day off to boat on Lake Norman or play golf. But should Dr. White need a few hours to go to her gynecologist, to visit her sick mother, or give in to the flu, it was another example of why women didn’t belong in medicine.

“Of course, we’re not expecting any problem,” Dr. White was reassuring Hammer. “But there is extensive tissue damage.” She paused, searching for a diplomatic way to explain. “Ordinarily, a bullet of that power and velocity would have exited when fired at such close range. But in this case, there was too much mass for the bullet to pass through.”

The only image that came to Hammer’s mind was tests the firearms examiners conducted by shooting into massive shimmering blocks of ballistic jelly, manufactured by Knox. Brazil was still taking notes. Nobody cared. He was such a respectful, helpful presence he could have continued following Hammer for years and it would not have been a problem. It was entirely possible she would not have been fully cognizant of it. If her imminent termination were not an inevitability, she might have assigned him to her office as an assistant.

Hammer spent little time with her husband. He was checked out on morphine and would have nothing to say to her were this not the case. She held his hand for a moment, spoke quiet words of encouragement, felt terrible about all of it, and was so angry with him she could have shot him herself. She and Brazil headed out of the hospital as the region headed to work. He hung back to allow the
Observer
photographer to get dramatic shots of her walking out the E.R. entrance, head down, grimly following the sidewalk as
a Medvac helicopter landed on a nearby roof. Another ambulance roared in, and paramedics rushed to get another patient out as Hammer made her way past.

That photograph of her by the ambulance, a helicopter landing in the background, her eyes cast down and face bravely tragic, was sensational. The next morning it was staring out from racks, boxes, and stacks of papers throughout the greater Charlotte-Mecklenburg area. Brazil’s story was the most stunning profile of courage Packer had ever seen. The entire metro desk was in awe. How the hell did he get all this? Hammer wasn’t known for divulging anything personal about herself or her family, and suddenly, in a time when discretion was most vital, she revealed all to this rookie reporter?

The mayor, city manager, city council, and Cahoon were not likewise impressed. They were interviewed by several television and radio reporters and were openly critical of Hammer, who continued to draw far too much attention to the serial murders and other social problems in the Queen City. It was feared that several companies and a restaurant chain were reconsidering their choice of Charlotte as a new location. Businessmen were canceling meetings. It was rumored that sites for a computer chip manufacturing plant and a Disney theme park were being scouted in Virginia.

Charlotte’s mayor, city manager, and several city councilmen promised that there would be a full police investigation into the accidental shooting. Cahoon, in a brief statement, agreed this was fair. The men smelled blood and were crazed by it. Panesa did not often get directly involved in choosing sides, but he rolled up his sleeves on this one and penned an impassioned editorial on the Opinion page that ran Sunday morning.

It was called HORNET’S NEST, and in it, Panesa went into great detail about the city’s ills as seen through the eyes of an unflagging, humane woman, their beloved chief, who was embattled by her own demons and yet “has never let us down or burdened us with her private pain,” Panesa wrote. “Now is the time to support Chief Hammer, to show her respect and caring, and prove that we, too, can stand up and
make the right choices.” Panesa went on to allude to Brazil’s story of Hammer in the E.R. bringing a blanket and water to a young man dying of AIDS. “That, citizens of Charlotte, is not only community policing but Christianity,” Panesa wrote. “Let Mayor Search, city council, or Solomon Cahoon throw the first stone.”