Hornet's Nest (12 page)

Her house was as he remembered it, and the fence was no further along. Brazil asked no questions but followed her through the backyard to her small workshop, where there was a table saw and a vast collection of tools neatly organized on pegboards. West built birdhouses, cabinets, even
furniture, it appeared to him. He had done enough odd jobs around his house during his life to have a healthy respect for her obvious ability. He found it a strain to even assemble Kmart bookcases.

“Wow,” he said, looking around.

“Wow what?” She shut the door behind them and turned on a radio.

“What made you decide to do all this?”

“Survival,” she said, squatting to open a small refrigerator. Bottles rattled as she brought out two long-neck Southpaw Lights.

Brazil did not like beer, in truth, even though he drank it from time to time. It tasted rotten and made him silly and sleepy. He would die before he let her find this out.

“Thanks,” he said, screwing off the cap and tossing it in the trash.

“When I was getting started, I couldn’t afford to hire people to help me out around here. So I learned on my own.” She opened hard cases and got out guns. “Plus, as you know, I grew up on a farm. I learned whatever I could from my dad and the hired hands.”

“What about from your mom?”

West was disassembling the pistols as if she could do it in her sleep. “Like what?” She glanced across the table at him.

“You know, domestic stuff. Cooking, cleaning, raising kids.”

She smiled, opening a tackle box stocked with gun-cleaning paraphernalia. “Do I cook and clean for myself? You see a wife anywhere?” She handed him a cleaning rod and a stack of patches.

He took a big swig of beer and swallowed it as fast as he could, trying not to taste it, as usual. He was feeling braver and trying not to notice how good she looked in her gray tee shirt and jeans.

“I’ve done shit like that all my life, and I’m not a wife,” he said.

“What do you know?” she asked as she dipped her rod into a small brown bottle of solvent.

“Nothing.” He said this as a sulking challenge.

“Don’t give me your moods, okay?” West replied, refusing to play games because, frankly, she was too old for them.

Brazil threaded a patch through his rod and dipped it in Hoppes. He loved the smell and had no intention of confessing anything else to her. But the beer had a tongue of its own.

“Let’s talk about this wife-shit again,” she pushed him.

“What do you want me to say?” Brazil, the man, replied.

“You tell me what it means.” She really wanted to know.

“In theory”—he began to clean the barrel of the .380—“I’m not entirely sure. Maybe something to do with roles, a caste system, a pecking order, a hierarchy, the ecosystem.”

“The ecosystem?” She frowned, blasting her barrel and other parts with Gunk Off.

“Point is,” he explained, “that being a wife has nothing to do with what you do, but with what someone thinks you are. Just like I’m doing something you want me to do right now, but that doesn’t make me a slave.”

“Don’t you have the roles a little reversed here? Who was giving who firearms instruction?” She scrubbed the inside of the barrel with a toothbrush. “You’re doing what you want to do. I’m doing what you want me to do. For nothing, for the record. And who’s the slave?” She sprayed again and handed him the can.

He reached for his beer. It was his limited experience that the warmer beer got, the worse it got.

“So let’s say you grow up and get married someday,” she went on. “What are you going to expect of your wife?”

“A partner.” He tossed his bottle into the trash. “I don’t want a wife. I don’t need anybody to take care of me, clean for me, cook for me.” He got out two more beers, popped them open, and set one within her reach. “Saying I’m too busy to do all that shit for myself someday? I’ll hire a housekeeper. But I’m not going to marry one,” he said as if this was the most ridiculous notion society had ever devised.

“Uh huh.”

She reached for the barrel of the .380, checking his work.
Man talk, she thought. The difference was, this one could put words together better than most. She didn’t believe a thing he said.

“It should look like a mirror inside.” She slid the barrel in front of him. “Scrub hard. You can’t hurt it.”

He picked up the barrel, then his beer. “See, people should get married, live together, whatever, and do things just like this,” he went on as he dipped a brush in solvent and resumed scrubbing. “There shouldn’t be roles. There should be practicalities, people helping out each other like friends. One weak where the other’s strong, people using their gifts, cooking together, playing tennis, fishing. Walking on the beach. Staying up late talking. Being unselfish and caring.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought about this a lot,” she said. “A good script.”

He looked puzzled. “What script?”

She drank. “Heard it all before. Seen that rerun.”

So had Bubba’s wife, Mrs. Rickman, whose first name had ceased to be important when she had gotten married twenty-six years ago in the Tabernacle Baptist Church. This had been down the road in Mount Mourne where she worked every day at the B&B, known for the best breakfast in town. The B&B’s hot dogs and burgers were popular, too, especially with Davidson students, and of course, with other Bubbas on their way for a day of fishing at Lake Norman.

When gun cleaning was completed and Brazil suggested to West that they stop for a bite to eat, neither of them had a way to know that the overweight, tired woman waiting on them was Bubba’s wretched wife.

“Hi, Mrs. Rickman,” Brazil said to the waitress.

He gave her his bright, irresistible smile and felt sorry for her, as he always did when he came to the B&B. Brazil knew how hard food service was, and it depressed him to think of what it had been like for his mother all those years when she
could still get out and go anywhere. Mrs. Rickman was happy to see him. He was always so sweet.

“How’s my baby?” she chirped, setting plastic laminated menus in front of them. She eyed West. “Who’s your pretty lady friend?”

“Deputy Chief Virginia West with the Charlotte police,” Brazil made the mistake of saying.

So it was that Bubba would learn the identities of his attackers.

“My, my.” Mrs. Rickman was mighty impressed as she got an eyeful of this important woman sitting in a B&B booth. “A deputy chief. Didn’t know they had women that high up. What’ll be? The pork barbecue’s extra good tonight. I’d get it minced.”

“Cheeseburger all the way, fries, Miller in the bottle,” West said. “Extra mayonnaise and ketchup. Can you put a little butter on the bun and throw it on the grill?”

“Sure can, honey.” Mrs. Rickman nodded. She didn’t write down anything as she beamed at Brazil.

“The usual.” He winked at her.

She walked off, her hip killing her worse than yesterday.

“What’s the usual?” West wanted to know.

“Tuna on wheat, lettuce, tomato, no mayo. Slaw, limeade. I want to ride patrol with you. In uniform,” he said.

“In the first place, I don’t ride patrol. In the second place, in case you haven’t noticed, I have a real job, nothing important. Just the entire investigative division. Homicide. Burglary. Rape. Arson. Fraud. Auto theft. Check theft,” she said. “White collar, computer, organized crime, vice. Juvenile. Cold case squad. Of course, there’s a serial killer on the loose, and it’s my detectives on the case, getting all the heat.”

She lit a cigarette and intercepted her beer before Mrs. Rickman could set it down. “I would prefer not to work twenty-four hours a day, if it’s all the same to you. You know how my cat gets? Won’t touch me, won’t sleep with
me? Not to mention, I haven’t gone out to a movie, to dinner, in weeks.” She drank. “I haven’t finished my fence. When was the last time I cleaned my house?”

“Is that a no?” Brazil said.

B
ubba’s Christian name was Joshua Rickman, and he was a forklift operator at Ingersoll-Rand in Cornelius. Perhaps the manufacturer’s greatest claim to fame came and went in the early eighties when it manufactured a snow machine that was used in the winter Olympics somewhere. Bubba wasn’t clear on the details and didn’t care. Air compressors were what one saw on life’s highways. They were in demand all over the world. His was an international career. This early Monday morning he was deep in thought as he skillfully deposited crates on a loading dock.

His wife happened to have mentioned the Davidson kid who was dating some big-shot policewoman. Yo. Bubba didn’t have to strain himself to add two and two. His nose hurt like shit but no way he was going to a doctor. For what? It was his philosophy that there was nothing to be done about a busted nose or ripped ears, knocked-out teeth and other non-life-threatening head injuries, unless one had some queerbait interest in plastic surgery, which Bubba clearly did not. His nose was a blimp and always had been, so the setback in this case was pain and pain alone. Every time he blew his nose, blood gushed and tears filled his eyes, all because of that little son of a bitch. Bubba wasn’t about to forget.

He had books for life’s problems and referred to them as needed.
Make ’Em Pay
and
Get Even 1
and
2
were especially insightful. These were the ultimate revenge technique manuals penned by a master trickster and privately published out of Colorado. Bubba had discovered them at gun shows here and yon. Bombs were an idea. What about a television tube that would explode, or a Ping-Pong ball loaded with potassium chlorate and black powder? Maybe not. Bubba wanted some real damage here but wasn’t interested in the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) fast roping in or staking out his property. He didn’t want prison time. Maybe what was called for was the trick where certain scents available at the hunt shop would draw every rodent, neighborhood pet, bug, reptile, and other critter into the yard, that all might ruin it during the night. Bubba slammed the forklift in reverse, thoughts buzzing.

Or he could feed beer-laced urine through a tube inserted under the police lady’s front door. He could mail hair to her, anonymously. Eventually, would she move? Hell yes. She’d want to, oh yeah. Or maybe Sea Breeze in the jock strap of that blond kid she was jerking off with, unless both of them were queer and, frankly, Bubba had his opinion. Honestly, there was no way a man could look that good or a woman could be that powerful unless they were suspect. Bubba could see it now. The pretty boy getting what he deserved, from the rear, from a manly man like Bubba, whose favorite movie was
Deliverance
. Bubba would teach the little asshole, oh yes he would. Bubba hated fags so intensely that he was on the lookout for them in every sports bar and truck stop and in all vehicles he passed on life’s highways, and in politics and the entertainment industry.

West and Brazil could not know of their personal peril. They were not thinking of themselves this Tuesday night as emergency lights flashed on broken glass and the torn, crumpled remains of a patrol car that had crashed in the affluent residential neighborhood of Myers Park. Raines and other paramedics were using hydraulic tools to get bodies out of a
Mercedes 300E that was wrapped around a tree. Everyone was tense and upset as a siren screamed, and police had set up a barricade, blocking off the street. Brazil parked his BMW as close as anyone would let him. He ran toward red and blue lights and rumbling engines.

West arrived, and cops moved sawhorses to let her through. She spotted Brazil taking notes. He was dazed by horror as Raines and other paramedics lifted another bloody dead body out of the Mercedes and zipped it inside a pouch. Rescuers lowered a victim next to three others on pavement stained with spilled oil and blood. West stared at the totaled Charlotte cruiser with its hornet’s nest emblem on the doors. She turned her attention to another cruiser not far away, where Officer Michelle Johnson was collapsed in the backseat, holding a bloodstained handkerchief to her devastated face as she trembled and shook. West swiftly walked that way. She opened the cruiser’s back door and climbed in next to the distraught officer.

“It’s going to be okay,” West said, putting an arm around a young woman who could not comprehend what had just happened to her. “We need to get you to the hospital,” West told her.

“No! No!” Johnson screamed, covering her head with her hands, as if her plane were going down. “I didn’t see him until he was through the light. Mine was green! I was responding to the ten-thirty-three, but my light was green. I swear. Oh God! No, no. Please. No. Please, please, please.”

Brazil was inching closer to the cruiser and heard what Johnson said. He stepped up to the door and stared through the window, watching West comfort a cop who had just smashed into another car and killed all its occupants. For an instant, West looked out. Her eyes met his and held. His pen was poised and filled with quotes he now knew he would never put in any story. He lowered the pen and notepad. Slowly, he walked away, not the same reporter or person he had been.

Brazil returned to the newspaper. He walked in no hurry and was not happy to be here as he headed for his desk. He
took his chair, typed in his password, and went into his computer basket. Betty Cutler, the night editor, was an old crow with an underbite. She had been pacing and waiting for Brazil and swooped in on him. She began her annoying habit of sniffing as she spoke. It had occurred to Brazil that she might have a cocaine problem.

“We got to ship this in forty-five minutes,” she said to him. “What did the cop say?”

Brazil began typing the lead and looking at his notes. “What cop?” he asked, even though he knew precisely whom she meant.

“The cop who just wiped out an entire family of five, for Chrissake.” Cutler sniffed, her lower teeth bared.

“I didn’t interview her.”

Cutler, the night editor, didn’t believe this. She refused to believe it. Her eyes glittered as she gave him a penetrating stare. “What the hell do you mean, you didn’t interview her, Brazil!” She lifted her voice that all might hear. “You were at the scene!”

“They had her in a patrol car,” he said, flipping pages.

“So you knock on the window,” Cutler loudly berated him. “You open her door, do whatever you have to!”

Brazil stopped typing and looked up at a woman who truly depressed him. He didn’t care if she knew it. “Maybe that’s what you would do,” he said.

When the paper thudded on his front porch at six o’clock the next morning, Brazil was already up. He had already run five miles at the track. He had showered and put on his police uniform. He opened the door, snatched the paper off the stoop, and rolled off the rubber band, eager to see his work. His angry steps carried him through the sad living room and into the cramped dingy kitchen where his mother sat at a plastic-covered table, drinking coffee held in trembling hands. She was smoking and momentarily present. Brazil tossed the paper down on the table. The front page, above-the-fold headline screamed POLICE CRASH KILLS FAMILY OF FIVE. There were large color photographs of broken glass, twisted metal, and Officer Michelle Johnson weeping in the cruiser.

“I can’t believe it!” Brazil exclaimed. “Look! The damn headline makes it sound like it was the cop’s fault when we don’t even know who caused the wreck!”

His mother wasn’t interested. She got up, moving slowly toward the screen door that led out to the side porch. Her son watched with dread as she swayed and snatched keys from a hook on the wall.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“The store.” She dug inside her big old pocketbook.

“I just went yesterday,” he said.

“I need cigarettes.” She opened her billfold and scowled.

“I bought you a carton, Mom.” Brazil stared at her.

He knew where his mother was really going and felt the same old defeat. He sighed angrily as his mother clutched her pocketbook and counted dollar bills.

“You got a ten-spot?” she asked him.

“I’m not buying your booze,” he stated.

She paused at the door, regarding an only child she had never known how to love. “Where are you going?” she said, with a cruel expression that made her face ugly and unfamiliar. “A costume party?”

“A parade,” Brazil answered. “I’m directing traffic.”

“Parade charade.” She sneered. “You’re not police, never will be. Why do you want to be going out there to get killed?” She got sad just as quickly as she had turned mean. “So I can end up all alone?” She yanked the door open.

The morning got no better. Brazil drove fifteen minutes through the police department deck, and finally left his BMW in a press space, even though he really wasn’t on official press business. The day was lovely, but he took the tunnel from the deck to the first level of police headquarters because he was feeling especially antisocial. Whenever he had encounters with his mother, he got very quiet inside. He wanted to be alone. He did not want to talk to anyone.

At the Property Control window, he checked out a radio and was handed keys for the unmarked vehicle he would be driving in the Charlie Two response area between Tryon and Independence Boulevard for the annual Freedom Parade. It was a modest celebration sponsored by local Shriners in their
tasseled hats and on their scooters, and Brazil could not have been assigned a worse car. The Ford Crown Victoria was dull, scratched black and had been driven hard for a hundred and sixteen thousand miles. The transmission was going to drop out any moment, providing the damn thing started, which it didn’t seem inclined to do.

Brazil flipped the key in the ignition again, pumping the accelerator as the old engine tried to turn over. The battery supplied enough juice to wake up the scanner and radio, but forget about going anywhere, as the car whined and Brazil’s frustration soared.

“Shit!” He pounded the steering wheel, accidentally blaring the horn. Cops in the distance turned around, staring.

Chief Hammer was causing her own commotion not too far away inside the Carpe Diem restaurant on South Tryon, across the street from the Knight-Ridder building. Two of her deputy chiefs, West and Jeannie Goode, sat at a quiet corner table, eating lunch and discussing problems. Goode was West’s age and jealous of any female who did anything in life, especially if she looked good.

“This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Goode was saying as she poked at tarragon chicken salad. “He shouldn’t be out with us to begin with. Did you get a load of the headline this morning? Implying we caused the accident, that Johnson was pursuing the Mercedes? Unbelievable. Not to mention, skid marks indicate it wasn’t us who ran the red light.”

“Andy Brazil didn’t write the headline,” West said, turning to Hammer, her boss, who was working on cottage cheese and fresh fruit. “All I’m asking is to ride routine patrol with him for maybe a week.”

“You want to respond to calls?” Hammer reached for her iced tea.

“Absolutely,” West said as Goode looked on with judgment.

Hammer put down her fork and studied West. “Why can’t he ride with regular patrol? Or for that matter, we’ve got
fifty other volunteers. He can’t ride with them?”

West hesitated, motioning to a waiter for more coffee. She asked for extra mayonnaise and ketchup for her club sandwich and fries, and returned her attention to Hammer as if Goode were not at the table.

“No one wants to ride with him,” West said. “Because he’s a reporter. You know how the cops feel about the
Observer
. That won’t go away overnight. And there’s a lot of jealousy.” She looked pointedly at Goode.

“Not to mention, he’s an arrogant smartass with an entitlement attitude,” Goode chimed in.

“Entitlement?” West let the word linger like a vapor trail in the rarified air of Carpe Diem, where high feminine powers met regularly. “So tell me, Jeannie, when was the last time you directed traffic?”

It was an odious job. Citizens did not take traffic cops seriously. Carbon monoxide levels got dangerously high, and the cardinal rule that one must never turn his back to traffic was irrelevant in four-way intersections. How could anyone face four directions simultaneously? Brazil had questioned this since the academy. Of course it made no sense, and added to the mix was a basic disrespect problem. Already, he’d had half a dozen teenagers, women, and businessmen make fun of him or offer gestures that he was not allowed to reciprocate. What was it about America? Citizens were all too aware of law enforcement officers such as himself, who wore no gun and seemed new at the job. They noticed. They commented.

“Hey, Star Trek,” a middle-aged woman yelled out her window. “Get a phaser,” she said as she gunned onto Enfield Road.

“Shooting blanks, are we, fairy queen?” screamed a dude in an Army-green Jeep with a basher bumper, sports rack, and safari doors.

Brazil directed the Jeep through with a hard stare and set jaw, halfway wishing the shithead would stop and demand a fight. Brazil was getting an itch. He wanted to deck someone
and sensed it was only a matter of time before he busted another nose.

Sometimes, Hammer got so sick of her diet. But she remembered turning thirty-nine and getting a partial hysterectomy because her uterus had pretty much quit doing anything useful. She had gained fifteen pounds in three months, moving up from a size four to an eight, and doctors told her this was because she ate too much. Well, bullshit. Hormones were always to blame, and for good reason. They were the weather of female life. Hormones moved over the face of the female planet and decided whether it was balmy or frigid or time for the storm cellar. Hormones made things wet or dried them. They made one want to walk hand-in-hand in balmy moonlight or be alone.