“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 woman 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?”
T 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.
Chapter Thirteen.
Brazil 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 bigshot 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 field stone patched with moss, and of lady’s slippers in old forests scattered with sun.