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 motherfucker!” 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 sh’im 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 in West that had nothing to do with her growing isolation as she continued to get promoted in a man’s world. Her increased smoking, consumption of fat and beer, and her refusal to exercise were completely unrelated to her breaking up with Jimmy Dinkins, who was allergic to Niles, and frankly hated the cat to the point of pulling his gun on Niles one night when Dinkins and West were arguing and Niles decided to insert himself by pouncing on Dinkins from the top of the refrigerator.

West was still sweating, her breathing labored, as she led their prisoner back to the car. She thought she might throw up.

“You got to quit smoking,” Brazil said to her.

West stuffed the subject into the back of the car, and Brazil climbed in the front.

“You got any idea how much fat’s in Bojangles, and all that other shit you eat?” Brazil went on.

Their prisoner was silent, his eyes bright with hate in the rearview mirror. His name was Nate Laney. He was fourteen. He would kill these white cops. All he needed was a chance. Laney was bad and had been since birth, according to his biological mother, who also had always been bad, according to her own mother. This bad seed could be traced back to a prison in England, where the original bad seed had been shipped out to this country around the same time the troops in the Queen City had been chasing Cornwallis down the road.