“Man!” Devon gasped. “Let’s drop it! Run!”

“I am running, man!”

As for Ro, whose name was short for something no one could recall, he would be damned before he would relinquish what he had his arms around. The TV alone would keep him in rocks for a week, unless he traded it in on a new pistol, this time one with a holster. The Smith & Wesson stainless steel .357 revolver with its four-inch barrel jammed in the back of his baggy jeans wasn’t going to stay put much longer. Ro could feel it slipping as sweat blurred his vision and sirens screamed.

“Shit,” Ro complained.

The gun was completely submerged now, and working its way down. Oh Lord, he hoped he didn’t shoot himself in some private place. He would never live it down. The revolver slid through layers of huge boxer shorts, burrowing down his thigh, his knee, and finally peeking out at the top of a leather Fila. Ro helped it along by shaking his leg. This was no easy feat while running with half the Charlotte Police Department and some crazy-ass white boy in a BMW about to run Ro down. The gun clattered against pavement as the circle of white cars with flashing lights was complete around Devon and Ro. The two bandits simply stopped in their tracks.

“Shit,” Ro said again.

In all fairness, Brazil’s reward for his valiant contribution to community policing should have been the pleasure of cuffing the suspects and tucking them into the back of a patrol car. But he had no enforcement powers. For that matter, he was on the newspaper’s payroll this night, and it was no simple matter to explain why he happened to be parked in a dark alleyway behind a Radio Shack when the burglary occurred. He and Officer Weed went round and round about this as Brazil gave his statement in the front seat of Weed’s cruiser.

“Let’s try this again,” Weed was saying. “You were sitting back there with your headlights off for what reason?”

“I thought I was being followed,” Brazil patiently explained one more time.

Weed looked at him, and had no idea what to make of this one except that she knew the reporter was lying. All of them did. Weed was willing to bet the guy had parked back there to sleep on the job, maybe jerk off, smoke a little weed, or all of the above.

“Being followed by who?” Weed had her shiny metal clipboard in her lap, as she worked on her report.

“Some guy in a white Ford,” Brazil said. “Wasn’t anybody I knew.”

It was late by the time Brazil rolled away from the Southpark scene, without a word of thanks from any officer there, he noted. The way he calculated it, he had about an hour to kill before he needed to get back to the newsroom and write up what he’d gotten during his eight-hour shift, which wasn’t much, in his mind.