Hornet's Nest (32 page)

“Since when are you a cat shrink?” West glanced at him, experiencing that same giddy sensation again, a wiggling in her bowels, as if tadpoles had hatched somewhere down there.

Brazil shrugged. “It’s all about human nature, animal nature, whatever you want to call it. If we take the time to try and look at reality from someone else’s perspective, try a little compassion, it can make a difference.”

“Gag,” West said as she flew right by the Sunset East exit.

“You just passed the truck stop. And what do you mean,
gag?”

“You sure got your lines down pat, don’t you, boy?” She laughed in a not-so-nice way.

“I’m not a boy, in case you haven’t noticed,” he said, and he realized for the first time, to his shock, that Virginia West was scared. “I’m a legal adult, and I don’t deliver lines. You must have met a lot of bad people in life.”

This honestly amused her. She started laughing as rain fell harder. She turned on wipers and her radio while Brazil watched her, a smile playing on his lips, although he was clueless as to what he had said to amuse her so.

“Met a lot of bad people.”
She sputtered, almost helpless. “What do I do for a living, for Christ’s sake? Work in a bakery, serve ice cream cones, arrange flowers?” More peals of laughter.

“I didn’t mean just what you do for a living,” Brazil said. “The bad people you meet in policing aren’t the ones who
really hurt you. It’s people off the job. You know, friends and family.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” She sobered up fast. “I do know. And guess what?” She shot him a glance. “You don’t. You don’t know the first thing about me and all the shits I’ve come across when least expecting it.”

“Which is why you’re not married or close to anyone,” he said.

“Which is why we’re changing the subject. And you’re one to talk, by the way.” She turned the radio up loud as rain beat the top of her personal car.

Hammer was watching the rain out the window of her husband’s room in SICU, while Randy and Jude sat stiffly in chairs by the bed, staring at monitors, watching every fluctuation in pulse and oxygen intake. The stench got worse every hour, and Seth’s moments of consciousness were like weightless airborne seeds that seemed neither to go anywhere nor to land. He drifted and his family could not tell whether he had any awareness of their presence and devotion. For his sons, this was especially bitter. This was more of the same. Their father did not acknowledge them.

Rain streaked glass and turned the world gray and watery as Hammer stood in the same position she had maintained for most of the morning. Arms crossed, she leaned her forehead against the window, sometimes thinking, sometimes not, and praying. Her divine communications were not entirely for her husband. Hammer was more worried about herself, in truth. She knew she had reached a crossroads and something new was meant for her, something more demanding that she might never do with Seth weighing her down, as he had all these years. Her children were gone. She would be alone soon. She needed no specialist to tell her this as she watched the continuing ravenous ingestion of her husband’s body.

Whatever you want, I’ll do
, she told the Almighty.
I don’t care what. Why does it matter, really, anyway? Certainly, I’m not much of a wife. I would be the first to confess that
I haven’t been much in that department. Probably not been much of a mother, either. So I’d like to make it up to everyone out there, okay? Just tell me what.

The Almighty, who actually spent more time with Hammer and was more related to her than she knew, was pleased to hear her say this, for the Almighty had a rather big plan in store for this special recruit. Not now, but later, when it was time. Hammer would see. It was going to prove rather astonishing, if the Almighty didn’t say so Its-Almighty-self. As this exchange went on, Randy and Jude fixed their eyes on their mother for the first time that day, it seemed. They saw her head against the glass, and how still she had gotten for one who generally never stopped pacing. Overwhelmed with the profound love and respect they felt for her, they both got up at once. They came up from behind and arms went around her.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Randy sweetly said.

“We’re here,” promised Jude. “I wish I could’ve grown up into some big-shot lawyer or doctor or banker or something, so you’d know you were going to be taken care of.”

“Me too,” Randy sadly agreed. “But if you’re not too ashamed of us, we’ll at least be your best friends, okay?”

Hammer dissolved into tears. The three of them hugged as Seth’s heart slowed because it could not go on, or perhaps because some part of Seth Bridges knew it was okay for him to leave just now. He coded at eleven minutes past eleven, and the cart and team could bring him back no more.

W
est had missed the Sunset East exit deliberately. Retrieving Brazil’s BMW was not what she intended to take care of first. It was quarter past eleven, and most of the world sat in church and wished the minister would hurry up and end the sermon. West was deep inside her preoccupations. She felt a terrible heaviness that she could not explain and wanted to cry, which she blamed on the time of month, which, of course, had passed.

“You all right?” Brazil felt her mood.

“I don’t know,” she said, depressed.

“You seem really down,” he said.

“It’s weird.” She checked her speed, glancing around for sneaky state troopers. “It just hit me all of a sudden, this really bad feeling, as if something is horribly wrong.”

“That happens to me sometimes, too,” Brazil confessed. “It’s like you pick up on something from somewhere, you know what I mean?”

She knew exactly what he meant, but not why she should know it. West had never considered herself the most intuitive person in the world.

“I used to get that way about my mom a lot,” he went on. “I would know before I walked in the house that she was not in good shape.”

“What about now?”

West was curious about all this and not certain she knew what was happening to her. She used to be very pragmatic and in control. Now she was picking up extraterrestrial signals and discussing them with a twenty-two-year-old reporter she had just made out with in a police car.

“My mother’s never in good shape now.” Brazil’s voice got hard. “I don’t want to sense much about her anymore.”

“Well, let me tell you a word or two, Andy Brazil,” said West, who did know about a few things in life. “I don’t care if you’ve moved out of her house, you can’t erase her from the blackboard of your existence, you know?” West got out a cigarette. “You’ve got to deal with her, and if you don’t, you’re going to be messed up the rest of your life.”

“Oh good. She messed up all my life so far, and now she’s going to mess up the rest of it.” He stared out his window.

“The only person who has the power to mess up your life is you. And guess what?” West blew out smoke. “You’ve done a damn good job with your life so far, if you ask me.”

He was silent, thinking about Webb, the memory of what had happened washing over him like icy water.

“Why, exactly, are we going to my house?” Brazil finally got around to asking that.

“You get too many hang-ups,” West replied. “You want to tell me how come?”

“Some pervert,” Brazil muttered.

“Who?” West didn’t like to hear this.

“How the hell do I know?” The subject bored and annoyed him.

“Some gay guy?”

“A woman, I think,” said Brazil. “I don’t know if she’s gay.”

“When did they begin?” West was getting angry.

“Don’t know.” His heart constricted as they pulled into the driveway of his mother’s home and parked behind the old Cadillac. “About the time I started at the paper,” he quietly said.

West looked at him, touched by the sadness in his eyes as he looked out at a dump he called home and tried not to think of the terrible truths it held.

“Andy,” West said, “what does your mother think right now? Does she know you’ve moved out?”

“I left a note,” he answered. “She wasn’t awake when I was packing.”

By now West had ascertained that
awake
was a code word for reasonably sober. “Have you talked to her since?”

He opened his door. West gathered the Caller I.D. system from the backseat and followed him inside the house. They found Mrs. Brazil in the kitchen, shakily spreading peanut butter on Ritz crackers. She had heard them drive up, and this had given her time to mobilize her defenses. Mrs. Brazil did not speak to either one of them.

“Hello,” West said.

“How ya doing, Mom?” Brazil tried to hug her, but his mother wanted none of it and waved him off with the knife.

Brazil noticed that the knob had been removed from his bedroom door, and he looked at West and smiled a little. “I forgot about you and your tools,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I should have put it back on.” She looked around as if there might be a screwdriver somewhere.

“Don’t worry about it.”

They walked inside his bedroom. She took off her raincoat, hesitating, looking around as if she had never been here before. She was disturbed by his presence in this intimate corner of his life, where he had been a boy, had turned into a man and dreamed. Another hot flash was coming on, her face turning red as she plugged the Caller I.D. system into his phone.

“Obviously, this won’t help when you get your new phone number at your apartment,” she explained. “But what’s more important is who’s been calling this number.” She straightened up, her work complete. “Does anybody besides your mother and me know you’ve moved?”

“No,” he replied, his eyes on her.

There had never been a woman in his room before, excluding his mother. Brazil glanced about, hoping there was
nothing here that might embarrass him or reveal something to her that he did not want her to know. She was looking around, too, neither of them in a hurry to leave.

“You’ve got a lot of trophies,” she remarked.

Brazil shrugged, moving closer to crowded shelves he paid no mind to anymore. He pointed out especially significant awards and explained what they were. He gave her a few highlights of dramatic matches, and for a while they sat on his bed as he reminisced about days from his youth that he had lived with no audience, really, but strangers. He told her about his father, and she gave him her own vague recollection of Drew Brazil.

“I only knew who he was, that was about it,” she said. “Back then I was pretty green, too, just a beat cop hoping to make sergeant. I remember all the women thought he was good-looking.” She smiled. “There was a lot of talk about that, and that he seemed nice.”

“He was nice,” Brazil told her. “I guess in some ways he was old-fashioned, but that was the time he lived in.” He picked at his fingernails, his head bent. “He was crazy about my mother. But she’s always been spoiled. She grew up that way. I’ve always thought the biggest reason she couldn’t deal with his death is she lost the person who doted on her the most and took care of her.”

“You don’t think she loved him?” West was curious, and she was very aware of how close they were sitting on his bed. She was glad the door was partially open, the knob off.

“My mother doesn’t know how to love anybody, including herself.”

Brazil was watching her. She could feel his eyes like heat. Thunder and lightning played war outside the window as rain came down hard. She looked at him, too, and wondered if life would ruin his sweetness as he got older. She felt sure it would, and got up from the bed.

“What you’ve got to do is call the phone company first thing in the morning,” she advised him. “Tell them you want Caller I.D. This little box won’t do you a bit of good until they give you that service, okay?”

He watched her, saying nothing at first. Then it occurred to him, “Is it expensive?”

“You can manage it. Who’s been hitting on you at work?” she wanted to know as she moved closer to the door.

“Axel, a couple women back in composing.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, don’t notice.” He shrugged again.

“Anybody able to get into your computer basket?” she said as more thunder cracked.

“I don’t see how.”

West looked at his PC.

“I’m going to move that to my apartment. I didn’t have room in my car the other day,” he volunteered.

“Maybe you could write your next story on it,” she said.

Brazil continued to watch her. He lay back on the bed, hands behind his head. “Wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “Still has to go into the newspaper computer one way or another.”

“What if you changed your password?” she asked, slipping her hands in her pockets and leaning against the wall.

“We already did.”

Lightning flashed, rain and wind ripping through trees.

“We?” West said.

Brenda Bond was sitting at her keyboard in her room of mainframes, working on Sunday because what else did she have to do? There was little life held for her. She wore prescription glasses in expensive black Modo frames, because Tommy Axel looked good in his. She imitated him in other ways as well, since the music critic looked like Matt Dillon and was clearly cool. Systems Analyst Bond was going through miles of printouts and was not pleased by whatever she was finding.

The general architecture of the newspaper’s computerized mail system simply had to be reconfigured. What she wanted was plain and not so much to ask, and she was tired of trying to convince Panesa through presentations that the publisher obviously never even bothered to look at. Bond’s basic argument was this: When a user sent a mail message for the
UA to relay to the local MTA, the MTA then routed the message to the next MTA, which then routed it to the next MTA, and the next, until the message reached the final MTA on the destination system. With a Magic Marker, Brenda Bond had vividly depicted this in Figure 5.1, with colorful dashed lines and arrows showing possible communication paths between MTAs and UAs.

Bond’s ruminations crystallized and she stopped what she was doing. She was startled and confused as Deputy Chief Virginia West, in uniform, suddenly walked in at quarter past three. West could see that Bond was a cowardly little worm, middle-aged, and exactly fitting the profile of people who set fires, sent bombs by mail, tampered with products like painkillers and eyedrops, and harassed others with hate notes and anonymous ugly calls over the telephone. West pulled up a chair and turned it backward, straddling it, arms resting on the back of it, like a guy.

“You know it’s interesting,” West thoughtfully began. “Most people assume if they use a cellular phone, the calls can’t be traced. What they don’t realize is calls come back to a tower. These towers cover sectors that are only a mile square.”

Bond was beginning to tremble, the bluff working.

“A certain young male reporter has been getting obscene phone calls,” West went on, “and guess what?” She paused pointedly. “They come back to the same sector you live in, Ms. Bond.”

“I, I, I. . .” Bond stammered, visions of jail dancing through her head.

“But it’s breaking into his computer basket that bothers me.” West’s voice got harder, police leather creaking as she shifted in the chair. “Now that’s a crime. Leaking his stories to Channel Three. Imagine! It would be like someone stealing your programs and selling them to the competition.”

“No!” Bond blurted. “No! I never sold anything!”

“So you
gave
stories to Webb.”

“No!” Bond panicked. “I never talked to him. I was just helping the police.”

For an instant, West was quiet. She wasn’t expecting this.

“What police?” she asked.

“Deputy Chief Goode told me to.” Bond confessed all, out of fright. “She said it was part of an undercover departmental operation.”

The chair scraped as West got up. It was when she called Hammer’s home that she learned the terrible news about Seth and felt sick.

“Oh my God,” West said to Jude, who had answered the phone. “I had no idea. I don’t want to bother her. Is there anything at all I can do . . . ?”

Hammer took the phone away from her caretaking son. “Jude, it’s all right,” she said to him, patting his shoulder. “Virginia?” she said.

Goode was watching a videotape of
True Lies
and relaxing on the couch with her gas fire lit and the air conditioning on high, waiting for Webb to call. He had promised to sneak by before the six o’clock news, and she was getting anxious. If he didn’t show up within minutes, there wouldn’t be time to do or say a thing. When the phone rang, she snatched it up as if all in life depended on whomever it was. Goode was not expecting Chief Hammer. Goode was not expecting Hammer to somberly tell her that Seth had died and she, the boss, would see Goode in Goode’s office at four-thirty sharp. Goode jumped off the couch, energized and euphoric. This could mean but one thing. Hammer was taking a long leave to get her pathetic affairs in order and she was naming Goode acting chief.

Hammer had quite another scenario in mind for Deputy Chief Jeannie Goode. Although those around Hammer did not entirely understand how she could think of work at a time like this, in fact, nothing could have been more therapeutic. Her mind cleared. She woke up, anger a blue flame burning through her veins. She felt she could vaporize someone just by looking at him as she dressed in gray polished cotton slacks and blazer, a gray silk blouse, and pearls. She worked
on her hair and sprayed a light mist of Herme`s on her wrists.

Chief Judy Hammer went out to her midnight-blue police car and flicked on wipers to slough out leaves knocked down by rain. She backed out of her drive and turned onto Pine Street as sun broke through moiling clouds. A lump formed in her throat and she swallowed hard. Tears burned her eyes, and she blinked and took a deep breath, as she saw her street and the world around it for the first time without him. Nothing looked different, but it was. Oh, it was. She took deep breaths as she drove, and her heart felt bruised while her blood roared for righteous revenge. Goode could not have picked a worse time to pull such a stunt and get caught, of this Hammer was certain.