The Hornet’s Nest. Patricia Cornwell

and siren, and twenty minutes later, cops hauled someone else to jail as West and Brazil

drove on.

Radar wasn’t finished with them yet. A call came in for a car broken into at Trade and

Tryon, and he assigned this to unit 700, as well, while other cops rode around with

nothing much to do.

“Subject a black male, no shirt, green shorts. May be armed,” Radar’s voice came over the scanner.

At the scene. West and Brazil discovered a Chevrolet Caprice with a smashed

windshield. The upset owner, Ben Martin, was a law-abiding citizen. He’d had his fill of

crime and violence, and did not deserve

to have his brand new Caprice mauled like this. For what? His wife’s coupon book that looked like a wallet in the back seat? Some shithead hooligan destroyed Martin’s hard-earned ride to get fifty cents off Starkist albacore tuna, or Uncle Ben’s, or Maxwell

House?

“Last night, same thing happened to my neighbor over there,” Martin was explaining to

the cops.

“And the Baileys over there got hit the night before that.”

What had gone wrong in the world? Martin remembered being a boy in Rock Hill, South

Carolina, where they did not lock their doors, and a burglar alarm was when you walked

in on the sucker cleaning you out and he was surprised. So you beat the fool out of him,

and that was the end of it. Now there was nothing but randomness, and strangers

brutalizing a new Caprice for manufacturer’s coupons camouflaged by a red fabric wallet

fastened with Velcro.

Brazil happened to notice a black male in green shorts running a block away, headed

toward the dark, ancient Settlers Cemetery.

“That’s him!”

Brazil shouted.

“Get on the radio!” West ordered.

She took off. It was instinct, and had nothing to do with reality, which revealed her as a

middle-aged, out of shape, Boj angles-addicted smoker. She was at least a hundred feet

behind the subject and already heaving. She was sweating and clumsy, her body and

heavy Sam Browne belt simply not designed for this. The bastard had no shirt on, his

muscles rippling beneath gleaming ebony skin. He was a damn lynx. How the hell was

she supposed to catch something like this? No way.

Subjects didn’t used to be this fit. They didn’t used to drink Met-Rx and have fitness

clubs in every jail.

Even as she was thinking these thoughts, Brazil passed her, flying like an Olympic

athlete. He was gaining on

Green Shorts, closing in as they entered the cemetery. Brazil zeroed in on the muscular

V-shaped back. This dude had maybe five percent body fat, was shiny with sweat,

running his scrawny butt off, and believing he would get away with stealing that coupon

book. Brazil shoved him as hard as he could from the rear, and sent him sprawling to the

grass, coupons fluttering. Brazil jumped on top of Green Shorts and dug a knee in the

common thief’s spine. Brazil pressed his Mag-Lite, like a gun, against Green Shorts’s

skull.

“Move I’ll blow your brains out mother fucker!” Brazil screamed.

He looked up, proud of himself. West had finally gotten around to showing up, heaving

and sweating. She would have a heart attack, of this she was certain.

“I stole that line from you,” Brazil told her.

She managed to detach handcuffs from the back of her belt, having no clear recollection

of when she might have used them last. Was it when she was a sergeant and got in a foot

pursuit with a shim in Fourth Ward, way back when, or in Fat Man’s? She felt

lightheaded, blood pounding her neck and ears. West traced her deterioration back to her

thirty-fifth year, when coincidentally, Niles had deposited himself on her back stoop one

Saturday night. Abyssinians were exotic and quite expensive. They were also difficult

and eccentric, possibly explaining why Niles had been available for adoption. Even West

had moments when she wanted to boot him out the car door on one of life’s highways.

Why the scrawny, cross-eyed kitten with memories of the pyramids had picked West

remained unknown.

The stress brought on by Niles’s addition to the family precipitated a self-destructiveness

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