front. An old woman was screaming and crying hysterically, and trying to pull away
from two uniformed cops. Brazil and West got out of their car, heading to the problem.
When the patrolmen saw the deputy chief in all her brass, they didn’t know what to make
of it and got exceedingly nervous.
“What we got?” West asked when she got to them.
The woman screamed and had no teeth. Brazil could not understand a note she was
wailing.
“Drunk and disorderly,” said a cop whose nameplate read Smith.
“We’ve picked her up before.”
The woman was in her sixties, at least, and Brazil could not take his eyes off her. She
was drunk and writhing in the harsh glare of a street light near the sign of a church she
probably did not attend.
She was dressed in a faded green Hornets sweatshirt and dirty jeans, her belly swollen,
her breasts wind socks on a flat day, arms and legs sticks with spider webs of long dark
hair.
Brazil’s mother used to make scenes outside the house, but not any more. He
remembered a night long ago when he drove home from the Harris-Teeter grocery to find
his mother out in front of the house.
She was yelling and chopping down the picket fence as a patrol car pulled up. Brazil tried
to stop her and stay out of the way of the axe. The Davidson policeman knew everyone
in town, and didn’t lock up Brazil’s mother for disturbing the peace or being drunk in
public, even though he had justification.
West was checking the old woman’s cuffed wrists in back as blue and red lights strobed
and her wailing went on, pierced by pain. West shot the officers a hot, angry look.
“Where’s the key?” she demanded.
“These are way too tight.”
Smith had been around since primitive times and reminded West of jaded, unhappy old
cops who ended up working private security for corporations. West held out her hand,
and he gave her the tiny metal key. West worked it into the cuffs, springing them open.
The woman instantly calmed down as cruel steel disappeared. She tenderly rubbed deep
angry red impressions on her wrists, and West admonished the troops.
“You can’t do that,” she continued to shame them.
“You’re hurting her.”
West asked the woman to hold up drooping arms so West could pat her down, and it
entered West’s mind that she ought to grab a pair of gloves. But she didn’t have a box in
her car because she wasn’t suppose to need things like that anymore, and, in truth, the
woman had been put through enough indignity. West did not like searching people, never
had, and she remembered in the old days finding unfortunate surprises like bird claw
fetishes, feces, used condoms, and erections.
She thought of rookie days, of fishing cold slimy Spam out of Chicken Wing’s pocket
right before he socked her with his one arm. This old lady had nothing but a black comb,
and a key on a shoelace around her neck.
if7 W Her name was Ella Joneston, and she was very quiet as the police lady cuffed her
again. The steel was cold but didn’t have the teeth it did a minute ago when the sons-a-
bitches snaked her. She knew exactly what it was they wrapped around her wrists in
back where she couldn’t see, and it bit and bit without relief, venom spreading through
her, making her shake as she screamed.
Her heart swelled up big, beating against her ribs, and would have broke had that blue car with the nice lady not pulled up.
Ella Joneston had always known that death was when your heart broke.
Hers had come close many times, going back to when she was twelve and boys in the
projects knocked her down right after she’d washed her hair. They did things she never
would speak of, and she’d gone home and picked dirt and bits of leaves out of braids and
washed off while nobody asked. The police lady was sweet, and there was someone in
plain clothes there to help her, a clean-looking boy with a kind face.
A detective, Ella reckoned. They took each of her arms, like she was going to Easter