“You know what I look like, bitch?” he said. “I mean, you gonna recognize me on the street?”

“No. No. I didn’t see you! Please,” Miss Sink begged.

“What ’bout that ugly little motherfucker of yours in her little seat back there. She know what I look like?”

“No! She’s just a baby! You don’t want to hurt us!”

Miss Sink was shaking as if she was having a seizure.

“Let me think about this. What’s a guy to do?”

Smoke smacked his gum. He pulled back the slide of his Glock and it snapped forward with a loud clack.

He felt the power. Smoke was high and hard with it as he pumped three Winchester hollowpoints into the back of Miss Sink’s head.

26

BRAZIL STOOD WITH his hands in his pockets, impatiently staring out at sloped, loamy land sutured by railroad tracks and tangled with brambles and trees. Steam billowed from the Fort James Paper Company, and the river was soft music played with fingers of wind and bright notes of sun.

The portable radio on Brazil’s belt was a staccato of dispatchers and cops cutting in and out in spurts and codes. Nothing was going on. A handicap van was abandoned on a roadside, traffic was tied up because a light wouldn’t flash, a driver had been stopped at a Kmart.

Unit numbers and military time peppered the air, but Passman and Rhoad were strangely silent. Passman dispatched no calls. Rhoad answered no one. Brazil was furious. He was certain the cops were messing with him.

“Eleven,” Brazil tried again.

“Go ahead, 11,” answered a communications officer whose name Brazil did not know.

“Radio, I’m still at the cemetery,” Brazil said, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Need someone to 10-25 me right away.”

“That’s Hollywood.”

“Ten-4.”

“Any unit in the area of Hollywood Cemetery, need someone to 10-25 unit 11 there.”

“Unit 199.”

“Go ahead, 199.”

“Just two blocks away, I’ll swing by the cemetery, 10-25 11.”

“Ten-5, 199, 0812 hours.”

Brazil turned away from the river as he heard a rustle. He caught a flash of red on the other side of the cemetery fence where Spring and South Cherry streets intersected. The chain link was dense with ivy. Through it Brazil could just make out the back of the large metal sign advertising Victory Rug Cleaning, an arrow pointing to the business a block away. He turned off his radio and didn’t move.

The fence began to shake as someone gripped the edge of the sign and hoisted himself up. Brazil was hidden by the thick shadows of holly trees as he watched Weed reach for a tree branch and pull himself up with ease, swing over the fence and drop branch by branch to the ground. Brazil took cover behind a monument.

“Come on, it’s easy,” Weed said to someone on the other side.

The fence shook harder. Brazil was baffled when a scraggly, bearded face was followed by a filthy, raggedly dressed body missing part of a hand and an entire foot. The street person grabbed a branch, got snagged a couple times, but somehow made it over.