Hornet's Nest (31 page)

West was not as frightened by the rifle with thirty rounds as most people would have been, and her brain was powering up. It seemed this was the creep from The Firing Line who had gotten arrested for exposing himself in Latta Park. She had a pretty good idea why she had found Super Glue in her shrubs, and she wished like hell that Brazil hadn’t busted the guy’s nose. All the same, West was ready for violence. When anyone pointed a gun at her, there was a true cause and effect that rapidly clicked into gear. Unhooking the mike, she placed it next to her hip. She keyed it with her right hand, locking out all radio traffic in her response area. Dispatchers, cops, reporters, and criminals with scanners could hear nothing but her. She rolled down her window a few inches.

“Please don’t shoot,” she said loudly.

Bubba was surprised and pleased by her rapid submission. “Unlock the doors,” he ordered.

“Okay, okay,” West continued in the same loud, tense voice. “I’m going to unlock the doors real slowly. Please
don’t shoot. Please. We can work this out, all right? And if you start shooting here, everyone at the Seventy-six truck stop will hear, so what good will it do?”

Bubba had already thought about this, and she was right. “The two of you are getting in my truck,” he said. “We’re taking a ride.”

“Why?” West kept on. “What do you want from us? We have no problem with you.”

“Oh yeah?” He gripped the carbine tighter, loving the way the bitch in uniform was groveling before him, the great Bubba. “How about at the range the other night when Queerbait there hit me?”

“You started it,” Brazil said to him and all listening to channel two.

“We can work this out,” West said again. “Look. Let’s just get right back on Sunset, maybe meet somewhere where we can talk about this? All these trucks coming in here, they’re looking. You don’t want witnesses, and this isn’t a good place to be settling a dispute.”

Bubba thought they had already gone over this point. What he planned to do was shoot them out near the lake, weigh their bodies down with cinder blocks, and dump them where no one would find them until mud turtles had eaten important features. He heard that happened. Crabs were bad on dead bodies, too, as were household pets, especially cats, if locked up with dead owners and not fed and eventually having no choice.

As Bubba deliberated, eight Charlotte patrol cars with flashing lights were speeding along I-77, now within minutes of the truck stop. Shotguns were out and ready. The police helicopter was lifting from the helipad on top of the LEC, sniper shooters poised. The SWAT team had been deployed. The FBI had been called and agents were on standby in the event hostage or terrorist negotiators or the Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit or the Hostage Rescue Team might be what it took to save the day.

“Get out of the car,” said Bubba.

In his mind, he was not in plaid shorts, white tube socks, Hush Puppies, and a Fruit of the Loom white tee shirt that
had never been washed with bleach. In his mind, he was in military fatigues, with black grease under his eyes, hair a buzz cut, sweaty muscles bunching as he gripped his weapon and prepared to score two more points for his country and the guys at the hunt club. He was Bubba. He knew the perfect sliver of undeveloped lake property where he could do his duty, having his way with the woman first.
Take that
, he would think as he drove home his point.
Now who’s got the power, bitch?

Police cars turned onto Sunset East. They traveled single file, lights going, in a neat flashing line. Inside the truck stop, several truckers, who believed they had been stagecoach drivers in an earlier life, had lost interest in microwave nachos, cheeseburgers, and beer. They were looking out plate glass, watching what was going on at the edge of the parking lot as pulsing blue and red lights showed through trees.

“No way that’s a rifle,” Betsy was saying as she chewed on a Slim Jim.

“Oh yeah it is too,” said Al.

“Then we should go on out and help.”

“Help which one?” asked Tex.

All contemplated this long enough for police cars to get closer and the sound of chopper blades to be barely discernible.

“Looks to me like Bubba started it,” decided Pete.

“Then we should go get him.”

“You hear about the guns he’s got?”

“Bubba ain’t gonna shoot us.”

The argument was moot. Bubba could feel dark armies closing around him and he got desperate.

“Git out now or I’m going to let loose!”
he screamed, racking a cartridge into a chamber that already had one.

“Don’t shoot.” West held up her hands, noting the double feed that had just jammed his gun. “I’m opening the door, okay?”

“NOW!” Bubba pointed and yelled.

West positioned herself before the door as best she could and planted a foot on it. She raised the handle and kicked with all her strength as eight police cars roared in, sirens ripping the violent night. Bubba was slammed in his midsection and flew back, landing on his back, the rifle skittering across tarmac. West was out and on him before her feet hit the ground. She did not wait for her backups. She didn’t care a shit about the big, burly drivers boiling out of the truck stop to help. Brazil leapt out, too, and together they threw Bubba on his fat belly and cuffed him, desperate to beat him half to death, but resisting.

“You goddamn son-of-a-bitch piece of chicken-eating shit!”
Brazil bellowed.

“Move and your head’s all over with!”
exclaimed West, her pistol pressed hard against the small of Bubba’s thick neck.

The force hauled Bubba away, with no assistance from the truckers, who returned their attention to snacks for the road and cigarettes. West and Brazil sat in silence for a moment inside her car.

“You always get me into trouble,” she said, backing up.

“Hey!” he protested. “Where are you going?”

“I’m taking you home.”

“I don’t live at home anymore.”

“Since when?” She tried not to show her surprised pleasure.

“Day before yesterday. I got an apartment at Charlotte Woods, on Woodlawn.”

“Then I’ll take you there,” she told him.

“My car’s here,” he reminded her.

“And you’ve been drinking all night,” she said, buckling her shoulder harness. “We’ll come back and get your car when you’re sober.”

“I am sober,” he said.

“Compared to what?” She drove. “You won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”

He would remember every second of it for the rest of his tormented life. He yawned and rubbed his temples. “Yeah,
you’re probably right,” he agreed, deciding it had meant nothing to her. It also meant nothing to him.

“Of course I’m right.” She smiled easily.

She could tell he was indifferent. He was one more typical asshole-user guy. What was she anyway but a middle-aged, out-of-shape woman who’d never been to a city bigger or more exciting than the one she had worked in since she had graduated from college? He was just trying her on for size, taking his first test drive in an old, out-of-style car that he could afford to make mistakes in. She felt like slamming on the brakes and making him walk. When she pulled into the tidy apartment complex parking lot and waited for him to get out, she offered not a word of friendship or meaning.

Brazil stood outside her car, holding the door open, staring in at her. “So, what time tomorrow?”

“Ten,” she said, shortly.

He slammed the door, walking away fast, hurt and upset. Women were all the same. They were warm and wonderful one minute and turned-on and all over him the next, which was followed by moody and distant and didn’t mean what happened. Brazil didn’t understand how he and West could have had such a special moment at the truck stop and now it was as if they weren’t even on a first-name basis. She had used him, that’s what. It was empty and cheap to her, and he was certain this was her modus operandi. She was older, powerful, and experienced, not to mention good-looking with a body that caused him serious pain. West could toy with anyone she wanted.

So could Blair Mauney III, his wife feared. Polly Mauney could not help but worry about what her husband might engage in when he traveled to Charlotte tomorrow, on USAir flight number 392, nonstop from Asheville, where the Mauneys lived in a lovely Tudor-style home in Biltmore Forest. Blair Mauney III was from old money and had just come in from the club after a hard tennis match, a shower, a massage, and drinks with his pals. Mauney had come from many generations of banking, beginning with his grandfather, Blair
Mauney, who had been a founding father of the American Trust Company.

Blair Mauney III’s father, Blair Mauney, Jr., had been a vice president when American Commercial merged with First National of Raleigh. A statewide banking system was off and running, soon followed by more mergers and the eventual formation of North Carolina National Bank. This went on and, with the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, banks that had not been bought up were offered at fire sale prices. NCNB became the fourth-largest bank in the country and was renamed USBank. Blair Mauney III knew the minutia about his well-respected bank’s remarkable history. He knew what the chairman, the president, the vice chairman and chief financial officer, and CEO got paid.

He was a senior vice president for USBank in the Carolinas and routinely was required to travel to Charlotte. This he rather much enjoyed, for it was good to get away from wife and teenaged children whenever one could, and only his colleagues in their lofty offices understood his pressures. Only comrades understood the fear lurking in every banker’s heart that one day Cahoon, who tolerated nothing, would inform hard workers like Mauney that they were out of favor with the crown. Mauney dropped his tennis bag in his recently remodeled kitchen and opened the door of the refrigerator, ready for another Amstel Light.

“Honey?” he called out, popping off the cap.

“Yes, dear.” She briskly walked in. “How was tennis?”

“We won.”

“Good for you!” She beamed.

“Withers must have double-faulted twenty times.” He swallowed. “Foot-faulted like hell, too, but we didn’t call those. What’d you guys eat?” He barely looked at Polly Mauney, his wife of twenty-two years.

“Spaghetti Bolognese, salad, seven grain bread.” She went through his tennis bag, fishing out cold sweat-soaked, smelly shorts, shirt, socks, and jock strap, as she always had and would.

“Got any pasta left?”

“Plenty. I’d be delighted to fix you a plate, dear.”

“Maybe later.” He fell into stretches. “I’m really getting tight. You don’t think it’s arthritis, do you?”

“Of course not. Would you like me to rub you down, sweetheart?” she said.

While he was drifting during his massage, she would bring up what her plastic surgeon had said when she had inquired about a laser treatment to get rid of fine lines on her face and a copper laser treatment to eliminate the brown spot on her chin. Polly Mauney had been filled with terror when her plastic surgeon had made it clear that no light source could substitute for a scalpel. That was how bad she had gotten.

“Mrs. Mauney,” her plastic surgeon had told her. “I don’t think you’re going to be happy with the results. The lines most troublesome are too deep.”

He traced them on her face so gently. She relaxed, held hostage by tenderness. Mrs. Mauney was addicted to going to the doctor. She liked being touched, looked at, analyzed, scrutinized, and checked on after surgery or changes in her medication.

“Well,” Mrs. Mauney had told her plastic surgeon, “if that’s what you recommend. And I suppose I am to assume you are referring to a face lift.”

“Yes. And the eyes.” He held up a mirror to show her.

The tissue above and below her eyes was beginning to droop and puff. This was irreversible. No amount of cold water splashes, cucumbers, or cutting down on alcohol or salt would make a significant difference, she was informed.

“What about my breasts?” she then had inquired.

Her plastic surgeon stepped back to look. “What does your husband think?” he asked her.

“I think he’d like them bigger.”

Her doctor laughed. Why didn’t she state the obvious? Unless a man was a pedophile or gay, he liked them bigger. His gay female patients felt the same way. They were just better sports about it, or pretended to be, if the one they loved didn’t have much to offer.

“We can’t do all of this at once,” the plastic surgeon
warned Mrs. Mauney. “Implants and a face lift are two very different surgeries, and we’d need to space them apart, giving you plenty of time to heal.”

“How far apart?” she worried.

I
t did not occur to West until she was home and locking herself in for the night that she would have to set her alarm clock. Perhaps one of her few luxuries in life was not getting up on Sunday morning until her body felt like it, or Niles did. Then she took her time making coffee and reading the paper as she thought about her parents heading off to Dover Baptist Church, not far from the Chevon or from Pauline’s Beauty Shop, where her mother got her hair fixed every Saturday at ten in the morning. West always called her parents on Sunday, usually when they were sitting down to dinner and wishing her place wasn’t empty.

“Great,” she muttered to herself, grabbing a beer as Niles sat on the windowsill over the sink. “So now I’ve got to get up at eight-thirty. Can you believe that?”

She tried to figure out what Niles was staring at. From this section of Dilworth, West would have no reminders of the city she protected were it not for the top thirty stories of USBank rising brightly above West’s unfinished fence. Niles had gotten really peculiar lately, it struck West. He sat in the same spot every night, staring out, as if he were ET missing home.

“What are you looking at?” West ran her fingernails
down Niles’s silky, ruddy spine, something that always made him purr.

He did not respond. He stared as if in a trance.

“Niles?” West was getting a bit worried. “What is it, baby? You not feeling well? Got a hairball? Mad at me again? That’s probably it, isn’t it?” She sighed, taking a swallow of beer. “I sure wish you’d try to be more understanding, Niles. I work hard, do everything I can to provide you a secure, nice home. You know I love you, don’t you? But you gotta try and cut me a little slack. I’m out there all the live-long day.” West pointed out the window. “And what? You’re here. This is your world, meaning your perspective isn’t as big as mine, okay? So you get pissed because I’m not here, too. This isn’t fair. I want you to give some serious thought to this. Got it?”

The words of the owner were chatter, the buzzing of insects, the drone of sounds drifting out of the radio on the table by the bed. Niles wasn’t listening as he stared out at the forlorn King Usbeecee staring back at him. Niles had been called. There was disaster looming in the land of the Usbeeceeans, and only Niles could help, because only Niles would listen. All others looked up to the mighty King and mocked him in their minds and among themselves, thinking the benevolent monarch could not hear. They, the people, had wanted His Majesty to come. They had wanted his child-care centers and frescos, his career opportunities, and his wealth. Then they had turned jealous of his omniscience, of his all-powerful and praiseworthy presence. Those here and from distant ports were lustful and plotting a takeover that only Niles could stop.

“Anyway,” West was saying, popping open another beer as her weird-ass cat continued staring out at the night, “I’m chasing him south on Seventy-seven at about ninety miles an hour? Can you believe it? He should be in jail right now, you ask me.”

She took another swallow of Miller Genuine Draft, wondering if she should eat something. For the first time since she’d had the flu several years ago, West was not hungry. She felt light and foreign inside, and awake. She thought back on how much caffeine she’d had this day, wondering if that might be the problem. It wasn’t. Hormones, she decided, even though she knew that the beast was no longer raging and in fact had been quiet most of the day, on its way back to its cave until the moon was in position again.

King Usbeecee was a potentate of few words, and Niles had to watch carefully to hear what the King was saying. Sunrise and sunset were the King’s most chatty times, when windows flashed white and gold in a firestorm of pontifications. At night, Niles mainly studied the red light winking on top of the crown, a beacon saying to him, repeatedly,
wink-wink-wink
. After a barely perceptible pause, three more winks, and so on. This had gone on for weeks, and Niles knew that the code was directing him to a three-syllable enemy, whose armies this very minute were marching closer to the Queen City that the King ruled.

“Well, since you’re so friendly,” West said in a snippy tone to her cat, “I’m going to do laundry.”

Startled, Niles stretched and stared at her, his eyes crossed as a similar firestorm flared inside his head. What was it the King had said? What, what, what? Earlier this evening, when Niles had been watching the King send him signals with the sun, hadn’t the King flashed an agitated pattern, light going round and round the building, back and forth, back and forth, very similar to how the owner’s big white box worked when she did
laundry?
A coincidence? Niles thought not. He jumped off the sill, then the counter, and followed his owner into the utility room. The fur stood up on his back when she dipped into pants pockets, pulling out
money
before wadding clothes and dunking them into the machine’s basket. Other flashes of insight exploded in Niles’s brain. He frantically rubbed against his owner’s legs and nipped her, sharpening his claws on her thigh, trying to tell her.

“Goddamn it!” West shook the cat off. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

• • •

Brazil lay back in the sleeping bag on the floor of his new one-bedroom unfurnished apartment. He had a headache and couldn’t seem to get enough water. He’d been drinking beer for two days, and this frightened him. His mother had probably started exactly the same way, and here he was following her path. He knew enough from all the interest in genetics these days to deduce that he might have inherited his mother’s proclivity for self-destruction. Brazil was deeply depressed by this realization. He was ashamed of his behavior and knew for a fact that West had only humored a drunk kid, and the performance would never be repeated.

He lay still, hands beneath the back of his head, staring up at the ceiling, lights out, music on. Beyond his window he could see the top of the USBank Corporate Center almost touching the slivered moon, a red light blinking at the top of the crown. Brazil stared, zoning out again, an unsettling realization coming over him. Tomorrow would be two weeks since the last Black Widow slaying.

“Christ.” He sat up, sweating and breathing hard.

He kicked off sheets and stood. He began pacing, with nothing on but gym shorts. He drank more water and stood in his bare kitchen, staring out at USBank, thinking, worrying. Out there somewhere was another businessman about to become a victim! If only there were some way to prevent it. Where was the killer now? What was the bastard thinking as he loaded his gun and thought his evil thoughts, waiting on the web of Five Points for the next rental car to innocently creep into the city?

Niles was following West all over the house. She was certain the cat had gone haywire and knew this was a danger with Siamese, Abyssinians, and all overbred, cross-eyed creatures that had been around for thousands of years. Niles wound through her moving legs, almost tripping her twice, and she had no choice but to boot him across the room.

Niles cried out, but persisted. Then he got angry. One
more boot, he thought, and you’ve had it. West gave him the side of her foot, sending him under the bed, scoring another point.

Niles watched from his dark space between the box spring and hardwood floor, his tail twitching. Niles waited until his owner had taken off shoes and socks, then he shot out and bit the soft spot at the back of her heel, right behind the ankle bone. He knew this hurt because he’d tested it before. His owner chased him around the house for ten minutes, and he ran with sincerity because he recognized true homicidal rage when he saw it. Niles returned to the bed and stayed under it until his owner got tired and wanted to sleep. Sneaking out, Niles returned to the kitchen. He curled up on the sill, where his kind and loving King kept watch over him during dark, lonely nights.

Morning came and brought rain. The unfriendly alarm clock buzzed loudly and stung West awake. She groaned, lying in bed, refusing to get up as heavy drops of water drummed the roof. This was perfect sleeping weather. Why should she get up? Memories of Brazil and his stranded BMW, of Niles and his outrageous behavior last night, depressed and excited her at the same time. This made no sense. She pulled the covers up around her chin and images came, disturbing ones somehow relating to whatever she had dreamt. When she was absolutely still, she could almost feel Brazil’s hands and mouth all over her. She was horrified and stayed in bed for quite some time.

Niles, having free rein of the house for a bit, had crept into the laundry room. He was interested in the big white box with wet clothes in it. On top were several folded bills and some change. He jumped up, having yet another idea of how to pass along King Usbeecee’s message to Niles’s owner. Of course, Niles knew with joy that his owner could do something about the King’s endangerment. She could act on it, roar in wearing her important suit with all its leather and metal and dangerous toys. That’s what this was all about, Niles was convinced. The King had spoken to him and wanted him to pass along the information to his owner. She
in turn would alert other fierce leaders. The troops would be called, the King and all Usbeeceeans saved.

Niles spent a difficult five minutes flipping open the cover on top of the washing machine. He dipped in a paw and pulled out a small, wet article of clothing. He grabbed a folded five-dollar bill in his mouth and jumped back down, excited, knowing his owner would be so pleased. She wasn’t. His owner did not seem the least bit thrilled to see Niles, and sat up in a rage when her face was draped with a pair of wet panties that had been dragged across the house. She stared at the panties and the five-dollar bill on her chest, and a chill settled over her.

“Wait a minute,” she said to Niles, who was fleeing. “Come back. Really.”

Niles stopped and looked at her, thinking, his tail twitching. He didn’t trust her.

“Okay. Truce,” West promised. “Something’s up. This isn’t just your acting kooky, is it? Come here and tell me.”

Niles knew her tone was honest, and maybe even a little contrite. He walked across the bedroom, and hopped three feet up to the bed, like it was nothing. He sat staring at her as she began to pet him.

“You brought me a pair of panties and money,” she said. “Mean something?”

His tail twitched, but not enthusiastically.

“Has to do with panties?”

His tail went still.

“Underwear?”

No response.

“Sex?”

He didn’t budge.

“Shit,” she muttered. “What else? Well, let me retrace this thing, work it like a crime scene. You went to the washing machine, opened the lid, fished this out, it’s wet, and not been in the dryer yet. So what exactly did you intend to fetch and then bring to me? Clothes?”

Niles was getting bored.

“Of course not,” West reprimanded herself. Niles could get clothes from anywhere, the chair, the floor. He had gone
to a lot of trouble for one pair of panties. “You went into the laundry,” she said.

Niles twitched.

“Ah, getting warm. Laundry? Is that it?”

Niles went crazy, twitching and nuzzling her hand. West next started on the five-dollar bill. It took only two tries to affirm that
money
was the operative word.

“Laundry money,” West muttered, mystified.

Niles could help her no further and believed he had carried out his assignment. He jumped off the bed and returned to the kitchen, where water washed out the King’s morning greeting to his faithful subject. Niles was disappointed, and West was late. She dashed out the door, then dashed back in, having forgotten the most important item, the little box she disconnected from her own telephone. She sped along East Boulevard to South Boulevard and turned off on Woodlawn. Brazil was wearing a windbreaker with a hood and waiting in the parking lot, because he did not want her to see his small place with nothing in it.

“Hi,” he said, getting in.

“Sorry I’m late.” She could not look at him. “My cat’s lost his mind.”

This was certainly starting off well, Brazil dismally realized. He was thinking about her, and she was thinking about her cat.

“What’s wrong with him?” Brazil asked.

West pulled out of the parking lot as rain sprinkled. Her tires swished over wet streets. Brazil was acting as if nothing had happened. It just went to corroborate her belief that all males were the same. She supposed that his foray through her private possessions was no different than flipping through a magazine full of naked women. A thrill. A passing turn-on like a vibrating motorcycle seat or the right person sitting in your lap when the car was packed with too many passengers.

“He’s just crazy, that’s all,” West said. “Stares out the window all the time. Drags things out of my washing machine. Bites me. Makes weird yowling noises.”

“This is new and different behavior?” asked Brazil, the psychologist.

“Oh yeah.”

“What kind of yowling sounds?” Brazil went on.

“He goes
yowl-yowl-yowl
. Then he’s quiet and does the same thing again. Always three syllables.”

“Sounds to me like Niles is trying to give you information and you’re not listening. Quite possibly he’s pointing out something right under your nose, but either you’re caught up in other preoccupations, or you don’t want to hear it.” Brazil enjoyed making this point.