Hornet's Nest (18 page)

Wheatie nodded, heart drilling out of his chest.

“We ain’t gonna be sitting right here.” Fright made that point, jerking his head at the Payless gas station next door. “Back there by the Dumpster. You take long, motherfucker, we leave your ass.”

Wheatie understood. “Get the fuck outa my face,” he said, tough and invincible as he tucked the revolver in the front of his pants and pulled his tee shirt over it.

What Wheatie did not understand was that this particular Hardee’s had been robbed before, and Slim, Fright, and Tote were aware of it. They were laughing and lighting up another joint even as he walked in and they drove off. Wheatie’s little butt was going to get locked up tonight. He’d learn about jailing honestly, his pants falling off because they took his belt, then dropping the rest of the way when some motherfucker got the urge for his sweet little ass.

“Twelve piece, white meat.” Wheatie’s voice didn’t sound quite so tough now that he was at the counter. He was shaking all over and terrified that the fat black lady in a hair net knew all about his plan.

“What sides you want?” she asked.

Shit. Slim didn’t tell him that part. Oh shit. He got it wrong and they’d kill him. His furtive, hard eyes cast about, not seeing the Tracker anywhere.

“Baked beans. Slaw. Biscuits.” He did the best he could.

She rang it up, and took his twenty. He left the change on the counter, fearful that tucking it in his pocket might draw attention to the gun. When the big bag of chicken and side orders were gripped under a frail arm, Wheatie drew the gun, not real smoothly, but he got it out and pointed it at the fat lady’s startled face.

“Give me all your money, motherfucker!” he
commanded in his cruelest voice as the gun shook in his small hands.

Wyona managed this Hardee’s and was working the counter because two of her people were out sick tonight. She’d been robbed three times in her life and this little piece of motherfucking white meat wasn’t going to make it four. She put her hands on her hips, glaring at him.

“What you gonna do, cock-a-doodle-doo? Shoot me?” she sang.

Wheatie had not anticipated this. He clicked back the hammer, hands shaking harder. He wet his lips, eyes jumping. It was decision time. No way he could let this fat chicken lady dis him. Shit man. He walked out of here without the money and that was the end of his career. He wasn’t even sure he’d gotten the sides right. Oh shit, he was in trouble. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The explosion was incredible and the revolver jumped in his hands. The bullet smashed through
large fries $1.99
on the lit-up sign over Wyona’s head. She grabbed the big .357 magnum away from him, and he ran like hell.

Wyona was a firm believer in community intervention. She chased Wheatie out the door. She thundered after him through the parking lot, across the way to the Payless, and behind it where a red Tracker was parked, filled with teenagers smoking weed. They locked the doors. Wheatie tugged a handle to no avail, yelling, as the huge woman grabbed the back of his pants, yanking them down to his leather Adidas. He fell to the pavement in a tangle of red denim as she pointed the revolver through glass, at the driver’s head.

Slim knew a determined look when he saw it. This bitch was going to shoot him if he so much as blinked. He slowly lifted his hands from the steering wheel and held them up.

“Don’t shoot,” he begged. “Oh please don’t shoot.”

“Get on your car phone and call 911 right now,” Wyona screamed.

He did.

“Tell them where you are and what you done and that if they don’t get here in exactly two minutes, I’m blowing your motherfucking head off!” she screamed, her foot firmly planted on Wheatie, who was supine and shaking on the pavement, facedown, hands covering his head.

“We just robbed Hardee’s and are behind the Payless on Central Avenue!” Slim yelled into the phone. “Please get here quick!”

Selma, the 911 operator who got the call, wasn’t certain what this was about. But she gave it a priority one because her instinct prodded her in a tragedy-about-to-occur direction. Radar, meanwhile, had not finished with West this night. He passed the emergency along to her.

“Goddamn it,” West said as she drove past Piedmont Open Middle School. She was trying to avoid other problems and did not wish to hear her unit number one more time, ever.

Brazil couldn’t grab the mike fast enough. “700,” he said.

“Unknown trouble, four thousand block of Central Avenue,” Radar said with a smile.

West floored it, flying down Tenth Street, cutting over to the one thousand block of Central, flying past the Veterans Park and Saigon Square. Other units backed her up, for by now it had occurred to every cop on the street that their deputy chief was handling a lot of dangerous calls unassisted by anyone. When she rolled into the Payless, six cars with lights flashing were behind her. This was uncommon, but West didn’t question it and was grateful. She and Brazil got out. Wyona lowered the gun, now that help was here.

“They tried to rob me,” she said to Brazil.

“Who did?” West asked.

“The piece of white shit under my foot,” she said to Brazil.

West noted the fade haircut, the bad skin, the Hornets cap
and shirt. The boy’s pants were knotted around his basketball shoes, and he had on yellow boxer shorts. Next to him was a big bag of chicken and side orders.

“He come in, ordered twelve piece all white meat, then pulled out this thing.” Wyona handed the gun to Brazil because he was the man and Wyona had never dealt with women police and wasn’t about to start now. “I chased him out here to where these sons of bitches are.” She gestured furiously at Slim, Fright, and Tote as they cowered inside the Tracker.

West took the gun from Brazil. She looked back at the six other officers standing nearby and observing.

“Let’s lock ’em up,” she said to the troops. To Wyona, she added, “Thanks.”

The boys were rounded up and cuffed. Now that they were official felons again and not about to be killed, their bravery returned. They stared hatefully at the police and spat. In the car West gave Brazil a pointed look. He typed on the MDT, clearing them from the scene.

“Why do they hate us so much?” he said.

“People tend to treat others the way they’ve been treated,” she answered. “Take cops. A lot of them are the same way.”

They rode in silence for a while, passing other poor landscapes, the aspiring sparkling city around them.

“What about you?” Brazil asked. “How come you don’t hate?”

“I had a good childhood.”

This made him angry. “Well, I didn’t, and I don’t hate everyone,” he said. “So don’t ask me to feel sorry for them.”

“What can I tell you?” She got out a cigarette. “It goes back to Eden, the Civil War, the Cold War, Bosnia. The six days it took God to make all this.”

“You got to quit smoking,” he said, and he remembered her fingers touching him as she fixed his shirt.

B
razil had a lot to think about. He wrote his stories fast and shipped them out within seconds of various deadlines for various editions. He was strangely unsettled and not remotely tired. He did not want to go home and had fallen into a funk the instant West had let him out at his car in the parking deck. He left the newsroom at quarter past midnight and took the escalator down to the second floor.

The press room was going full tilt, yellow Ferag conveyors flying by seventy thousand papers per hour. Brazil opened the door, his ears overwhelmed by the roar inside. People wearing hearing protectors and ink-stained aprons nodded at him, yet to understand his odd peregrinations through their violent, dirty world. He walked in and stared at miles of speeding newsprint, at folding machines rat-a-tat-a-tatting, and belt ribbon conveyors streaking papers through the counting machines. The hardworking people in this seldom-thought-of place had never known a reporter to care a hoot about how his clever words and big-shot bylines ended up in the hands of citizens every day.

Brazil was inexplicably drawn to the power of these huge, frightening machines. He was awed to see his front page racing by in a blur, thousands and thousands of times. It was humbling and hard to believe that so many people out there
were interested in how he saw the world and what he had to say. The big headline of the night was, of course, Batman and Robin saving the hijacked bus. But there was a pretty decent piece on WHY A BOY RAN AWAY, on the metro section front page, and a few paragraphs on the altercation at Fat Man’s Lounge.

In truth, Brazil could have written stories forever about all he saw while riding with West. He wandered up a spiral metal staircase to the mail room and thought of her calling him
partner
. He replayed her voice over and over. He liked the way she sounded, deep but resonate and womanly. It made him think of old wood and smoke, of fieldstone patched with moss, and of lady’s-slippers in old forests scattered with sun.

Brazil did not want to go home. He wandered out to his car, in a mood to roam and think. He felt blue and did not know the source of it. Life was good. His job couldn’t be better. The cops didn’t seem to despise him quite as intensely or as universally. He contemplated the possibility that his problem was physical, because he wasn’t working out as much as usual and wasn’t producing enough endorphin or pushing himself to the point of exhaustion. He cruised down West Trade, looking at the people of the night trolling, offering their bodies for cash. Sh’ims followed him with sick, glowing eyes, and the young hooker was out again, at the corner of Cedar.

She walked seductively along the sidewalk and stared brazenly at him as he slowly drove past. She had on tight cutoff jeans that barely covered firm buttocks, her tee shirt cut off, too, just below her chest. Typically, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and her flesh moved as she walked and stared at the blond boy in his black BMW with its loud, rumbling engine. She wondered what he had beneath his hood, and smiled. All those Myers Park boys in their expensive cars, sneaking out here to taste the fruit.

Brazil roared ahead, daring a yellow light to be red. He turned off on Pine and entered Fourth Ward, the lovely restored area where important people like Chief Hammer lived, within walking distance of the heart of the city she was
sworn to serve. Brazil had been here many times, mostly to look at huge Victorian homes painted fun colors like violet and robin’s egg blue, and at graceful manors with elaborate dentil work trimming slate roofs. There were walls and big azaleas, and trees that could clarify history, for they had been here since horses, shading genteel streets traveled by the rich and well known.

He parked on that special corner on Pine where the white house and its gracious wraparound porch were lit up, as if expecting him. Hammer had liriope grass, periwinkles, pansies, yucca, ligustrum hedges, and pachysandra. Wind chimes stirred in the dark, sending friendly tones of truth, like a tuning fork, welcoming him, her protégé. Brazil would not trespass, would not even think of it. But there were numerous tiny public parks in Fourth Ward, sitting areas with fountains and a bench or two. One such cozy spot was tucked next door to Hammer’s house, and Brazil had known about this secret garden for a while. Now and then he sat in the dark there, when he could not sleep or did not want to go home. There was no harm done or imagined.

It wasn’t as if he were on her property. He wasn’t a stalker or a voyeur. All he wanted, really, was to sit where no one could see him. The most he invaded was the window of her living room, where he saw nothing, for the draperies were always drawn, unless a shadow passed by, someone who belonged in that house and could walk wherever he pleased. Brazil sat on a stone bench that was cold and hard beneath his dirty uniform trousers. He stared, and the sadness he felt was beyond any word he knew. He imagined Hammer inside her fine house, with her fine family and her fine husband. She was in a fine suit, probably talking on a portable phone, busy and important. Brazil wondered what it would be like to be loved by a woman like that.

Seth knew exactly what it was like, and as he finished loading his ice cream bowl into the dishwasher, he entertained violent thoughts. He had been lacing his late-night Chunky Monkey with butterscotch and hot fudge when Chief Wife
came in with her bottle of Evian. So what did she do? Nag, nag, nag. About his weight, his coronary arteries, his propensity for diabetes, his laziness, his dental problems. He went into the living room, flipped on “Seinfeld,” tried to block her out, and wondered what had ever attracted him to Judy Hammer.

She was a powerful woman in uniform the first time they met. He would never forget the way she stood out in dark blue. What a figure she cut. He had never told her his fantasies about being overpowered by her, cuffed, pinned, held, yoked, and hauled away in the paddy wagon of erotic captivity. After all these years, she did not know. None of it had happened. Judy Hammer had never restrained him physically.

She had never made love to him while she was in uniform, not even now, when she had enough brass and gold braid to impress the Pentagon. When she went to police memorial services and banquets and showed up in dress blues, Seth turned fainthearted. He was overcome, helpless and frustrated. In the end, after all these years and disappointments, she was still splendid. If only she didn’t make him feel so worthless and ugly. If only she hadn’t driven him to this, forced him into it, caused it, and willed abject ruination upon his life. It was her fault that he was fat and a failure.

The chief, his wife, honestly was not privy to any of her husband’s ambitions or lustful imaginings or the complete set of his resentments. She would not have been flattered, amused, or held responsible, for Chief Hammer was not aroused by dominance or prey to control or quick to assume that others might be smitten and excited by her position in life. It would never occur to her that Seth was eating ice cream with butterscotch, hot fudge sauce, and maraschino cherries at this unhealthy hour because he really wished to be shackled to the bedposts or to be searched inappropriately and for a long time. He wanted her to arrest him for animal desire and throw away the key. He wanted her to languish and doubt herself and all she had done. What did not interest him in the least was to be sentenced to the solitary confinement their marriage had become.

Chief Hammer was not in uniform or even on the portable phone. She was in a long, thick terry cloth robe, and suffering from insomnia, and this was not unusual. She rarely slept much because her mind kept its own hours, the hell with her body. She was sitting in the living room, “The Tonight Show” droning on as she read the
Wall Street Journal
, various memos, another long letter from her ancient mother, and a few salient pages from Marianne Williamson’s
A Return to Love
. Hammer did her best to block out Seth making noise in the kitchen.

His failure in his passage through the world felt like hers. No matter what she told herself or the therapists she left in Atlanta and Chicago, profound personal failure was what she felt every hour of every day. She had done something very wrong, otherwise Seth would not be committing suicide with a fork, a spoon, or chocolate sauce. When she looked back, she realized that the woman who had married him was another entity. She, Chief Hammer, was a reincarnation of that earlier lost manifestation. She did not need a man. She did not need Seth. Everyone knew it, including him.

It was a simple fact that the best cops, Marines, Airmen, National Guardsmen, fire fighters, and military people in general who were women did not need men personally. Hammer had commanded many such independents. She would pick them without question, as long as they weren’t so much like the men they did not need that they had completely adopted bad male habits, such as getting into fights rather than not, or being clingy and demanding and domineering. What Hammer had concluded after all these years was that she had an overweight, neurotic, nonworking wife who did nothing but bitch. Judy Hammer was ready for change.

Thus it was that she made a tactical error this very early morning, in her long clean robe. She decided to go out on her wraparound porch and sit on the swing, sipping chardonnay, alone with her thoughts, for a spell.

Brazil was mesmerized when she emerged, a vision, a god glowing in lamplight, all in white and shimmering. His heart
rolled forward at such a pitch that he could not catch up with it. He sat very still on the cold cement bench, terrified she would see him. He watched every small thing she did, the way she pushed forward and let go, the bend of her wrist as she lifted the tapered glass, her head leaning back against the swing. He saw the slope of her neck as she rocked with eyes shut.

What did she think? Was she a person just like him, with those darker shades, those lonely, cold corners of existence that no one knew? She swung slowly and alone. His chest ached. He was drawn to this woman and had no clear idea why. It must be hero worship. If he had a chance to touch her, he really wouldn’t know what to do. But he did want to, as he stared in the night at her. She was pretty, even at her age. Not delicate but fascinating, powerful, compelling, like a collector’s car, an older BMW in mint condition, with chrome instead of plastic. She had character and substance, and Brazil was certain that her husband was quite the contender, a Fortune 500 man, a lawyer, a surgeon, someone capable of holding an interesting conversation with his wife during their brief, busy interfaces with each other.

Chief Hammer pushed the swing again and sipped her wine. She would never be completely devoid of street sense, no matter her station in life. She goddamn knew when she was being watched. Abruptly, she stood, feet firmly planted on her porch. She searched the night, detecting the vague silhouette of someone sitting in that annoying little park right slam next to her house. How many times had she told the neighborhood association that she didn’t want a public area adjacent to her domicile? Did anyone listen? To Brazil’s horror, she walked down porch steps and stood amidst pachysandra, staring right at him.

“Who’s there?” she demanded.

Brazil could not speak. Not a fire or a
Mayday
could have pried a word loose from his useless tongue.

“Who’s sitting there?” she went on, irritable and tired. “It’s almost two o’clock in the morning. Normal people are home by now. So either you’re not normal, or you’re interested in my house.”

Brazil wondered what would happen if he ran as fast as he could. When he was a little boy, he believed that if he sprinted full speed, he would disappear, become invisible, or turn to butter like in Little Black Sambo. It wasn’t so. Brazil was a sculpture on his bench, watching Chief Judy Hammer step closer. A part of him wanted her to know he was there, so he could get it over with, confess his intensity, have her blow him off, laugh, dismiss him from her police department, and be done with him, as he deserved.

“I’m going to ask one more time,” she warned.

It occurred to him that she might have a gun on her person, perhaps in a pocket. Jesus Christ, how could any of this happen? He had meant no harm driving here after work. All he’d wanted was to sit, think, and contemplate his raison d’être and how he felt about it.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, slowly bringing himself to his feet and holding his hands up in surrender.

Hammer knew for a fact she had a wacko in her midst.
Don’t shoot?
What the hell was this? Clearly, this was someone who knew who she was. Why else would the person assume she might be armed and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot? Hammer had always nurtured the unspoken fear that in the end, she would be taken out by a loonytune with a mission. Assassinated. Go ahead and try, was her motto. She followed the brick walk through more pachysandra as Brazil’s panic level crested. He cast his eyes toward his car on the street, realizing that by the time he raced to it, got in, and drove off, she would have his plate number. He decided to relax and feign innocence. He sat back down as she, in her white robe, floated closer.

“Why are you here?” she asked, hovering mere feet from him now.

“I didn’t mean to be disturbing anyone,” he apologized.

Hammer hesitated, not getting quite what she had expected. “It’s almost two o’clock in the morning,” she repeated.

“Actually, it’s a little later than that,” Brazil said, chin in hand, face shadowed. “Love this place, don’t you? So
peaceful, great for thinking, meditating, getting into your spiritual space.”

Hammer was entertaining second thoughts about this one. She sat down on the bench, next to him.