It was West’s bad luck that Jerome Swan had not experienced a pleasant evening. It had begun at a fuzzy hour before the sun had gone down in this run-down part of the city. West had no reason to be aware of the nip joint in the area known as the Basin, off Tryon Street, very close to the dog pound, where she had been heading for quite some time now. So when the call went out, she was trapped, really. Two marked units got there first, and then Captain Jennings arrived with his ride-along, City Councilman Hugh Bledsoe.

“Shit,” West said when they rolled up on the scene. “Fuck.”

She parked on the side of the narrow, dark street.

“You see that tall man right there getting out of the car, the one in the suit? You know who that is?”

Brazil reached for the door handle, then thought better of it.

“I know exactly who it is,” he said. “Huge Bedsore.”

West shot him a surprised look. It was true the cops had a pet name for their city councilman, but she wasn’t clear on how Brazil knew about it.

“Not one peep out of you,” West warned as she opened her door. “Stay out of the way.” She got out. “And don’t touch anything.”

The ambulance was rumbling, and parked in the middle of the street with the tailgate open wide, light spilling out as red and blue flashed and strobed from cop cars. The men had convened near a rear tire to come up with a plan. West followed around to the back to assess the problem for herself, Brazil right behind her and dying to get in front. Swan was inside, as far back as he could get, wielding a pair of surgical scissors, his eyes bloody egg yolks filled with fury when the woman cop in the white shirt filled his vision.

He had knots on his head and was bleeding from the fight he had gotten into at the nip joint where he had been gambling and drinking Night Train Express fortified wine. When he was put in the ambulance, it was one of those times when he decided he really didn’t feel like going anywhere just that second. Whenever this happened, Swan seized the environment. In this case, he grabbed the closest dangerous object he could and yelled to the paramedics that he had AIDS and was going to cut every one of them. They jumped out and got the cops, all of them men except for that one with the big tits peering in at him like she might do something.

West saw the problem plainly. The subject was holding down the lock to a side door that led out to the street, and the only way to get to him was for someone to climb inside the ambulance. This didn’t require much of a plan. West went around to confer with the committee of officers still gathered by the same tire.