when Queens ran into Queens and the gray, hard-to-see Prelude ran into her.
“Ma’am, did you see the stop sign there?” The boy cop pointed.
Myra Purvis had reached her limit. She had turned seventy last February and didn’t have
to take this sort of shit anymore.
Ts it in Braille? ” she smartly asked this whippersnapper in blue with a white tornado on
his arms, reminding her of something she once used to mop her kitchen floor. What was
the name of that? Genie in a Bottle? No. Lord, this happened a lot.
“I want to go to the hospital,” that man in the Honda was complaining.
“My neck hurts.”
“Lying like a rug,” Mrs. Purvis told the cop, wondering why he wasn’t wearing any
hardware beyond a whistle. What if he got in a shootout?
W Deputy Chief West didn’t often get out to cruise so she could check on her troops. But
this night she had been in the mood. She floated along rough, dark streets in David One,
listening to Brazil’s voice on the scanner in her car.
“One subject requesting transport to Carolinas Medical Center,” Brazil was saying.
West saw him in the distance, from the vantage of her midnight-blue car, but he was too
busy to notice as he filled out a report. She circled the intersection as he worked hard,
talking to subjects in barely damaged cars. Flares languished along the roadside, his grille
lights silently strobing. His face was eerie in blue and red pulses, and he was smiling, and seemed to be helping an old biddy in a Camry.
Brazil lifted his radio, talking into it.
tw He marked EOT for End Of Tour and drove to the newspaper. Brazil had a ritual few
people knew about, and he indulged himself in it after zipping through a small story on
Charlotte’s quirky traffic problems. He went up the escalator three moving steps at a
time. The workers in the press room had gotten used to him long months before, and
didn’t mind when he came into their
off-limits area of huge machinery and deafening noise. He liked to watch some two hundred tons of paper fly along conveyor belts, heading to folders, destined for bundles
and driveways, his byline on them.
Brazil stood in uniform and watched, not talking, overwhelmed by the power of it all. He
was used to laboring on a term paper that took months and was read by maybe one
person. Now he wrote something in days or even minutes, and millions of people
followed every word. He could not comprehend it. He walked around, avoiding moving
parts, wet ink, and tracks to trip on as the roar filled his ears like a nexus on this sixth
night before the seventh day of his career’s creation.
Y^,?
W It was chilly out the next morning, Sunday, and sprinkling rain.
West was building a high wooden fence around her yard on Elmhurst Road, in the old
neighborhood of Dilworth. Her house was brick with white trim, and she had been fixing
up the place since she’d bought it. This included her latest, most ambitious project,
inspired, in part, by people driving through from South Boulevard, and pitching beer
bottles and other trash in her yard.
West was wet, as she hammered, with tool belt on. She held nails in her mouth, and
vented her spleen, as Denny Raines, an off-duty paramedic, opened her new gate and
helped himself to her property. He was whistling, had jeans on, and was a big, handsome
guy and no stranger to this industrious woman. She paid him no mind as she carefully
measured a space between two boards.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re anal-retentive?” he said. She hammered, which was
suggestive of what he felt like doing to her the first time they met, at a crime scene, when
he could only suppose she had been
called from home $ince she was in charge of investigations, and the victim was a
businessman with the weird orange paint over his parts, and bullets in his head. Raines
took one look al ^e babe in brass and that was the end of his rainbo^ She hammered,