“What the hell you think you’re doing parking in my space!”
He grinned, flashing rings and a fake Rolex as he swept arms open wide, the pistol beneath his jacket peeking out.
“Look around. Tell me what you see. Not one damn parking place in all of Charlotte.”
“That’s why important people like me are assigned one,” she said to this detective she supervised as she tossed him her keys.
“Bring them back when you’ve moved my car,” she ordered.
West was forty-two, a woman who still turned heads and had never been married to anything beyond what she thought she was here on earth to do. She had deep red hair, a little unattended and longer than she liked it, her eyes dark and quick, and a serious body that she did not deserve, for she did nothing to maintain curves and straightness in the right places. She wore her uniform in a way that made other women want one, but that was not why she chose police blues over plain clothes. She supervised more than three hundred wiseass investigators like Ronald Brewster who needed every reminder of law and order West could muster.
Cops greeted her on her way in. She turned right, headed to offices where Chief Judy Hammer decided everything that mattered in law enforcement in this hundred-mile area of almost six million people.
West loved her boss but right now didn’t like her. West knew why she had been called in early for a meeting, and it was a situation beyond reason or her control. This was insane. She walked into Hammer’s outer office, where Captain Fred Horgess was talking on the phone. He held his hand over the receiver and shook his head in a there’s nothing I can do way to West as she walked up to the dark wooden door, where Hammer’s name was announced brightly in brass.
“It’s not good,” he warned with a shrug.
“Why is it I didn’t need you to tell me that?” West irritably said.
Balancing her burdens, she knocked with the toe of her Bates hi-gloss black
shoe and nudged up the door handle with a knee, coffee almost spilling but caught in time. Inside, Hammer sat behind her overwhelmed desk, surrounded by framed photographs of children and grand babies her mission statement, Prevent the Next Crime, on the wall behind her.
She was early fifties, in a smart hounds tooth business suit, her telephone line buzzing relentlessly, but she had more important matters on her mind at the moment.
West dumped her load on one chair and sat in another one near the brass Winged Victory award the Inter national Association of Chiefs of Police had presented to Hammer last year. She had never bothered to get a stand or give it an honored place. In fact, the trophy, which was three feet high, continued to occupy the same square of carpet next to her desk, as if waiting for a ride to someplace better. Judy Hammer won such things because she wasn’t motivated by them. West removed the lid off her coffee, and steam wafted up.
“I already know what this is about,” she said, ‘and you know what I think. ”
Hammer gestured to silence her. She leaned forward, folding her hands on top of her desk.
“Virginia. At long last I have gotten the support of city council, the city manager, the mayor,” she started to say.
“And every one of them, including you, is wrong,” West said, stirring cream and sugar into her coffee.
“I can’t believe you’ve talked them into this, and I can tell you right now, they’re going to find some way to screw it up because they don’t really want it to happen. You shouldn’t want it to happen, either. It’s a damn conflict of interests for a police reporter to become a volunteer cop and go out on the street with us.”
Paper crackled as West unwrapped a greasy Bojangles biscuit that Hammer would never raise to her lips, not even back in the old days when she was underweight and on her feet all day long, working the jail, juvenile division, crime analysis, records, inspections, auto theft, all those exciting assignments women got back in the days when they weren’t allowed in patrol. She did not believe in fat.