Cornwell, Patricia - Andy Brazil 01 - Hornet's Nest.txt

by Hornet's Nest (lit)

  The coach was prowling the fence, clipboard in hand, dressed in long white Wimbledon pants, a white shirt, a shapeless hat, zinc oxide on his nose, and all of it out of fashion and old.

  "Move your feet. Move! Move!" he called out to a boy who would never move anything fast.

  "I don't want to see those feet stop!"

  The boy was overweight, and wore glasses. He was squinting and hurting, and Brazil remembered the suffering inflicted by coaches and drills. But Brazil had always been good at everything he tried, and he felt pity for this kid and wished he could work with him for an hour, and maybe cheer him up a little.

  "Good shot," Brazil called out when the boy managed to scoop one up and push it over the net.

  The boy, who did not play in the top six positions, missed the next shot, as he searched for his fan behind the green windscreen covering the fence. The coach stopped his tour, watching this blond, well-built young man heading toward him. He was probably looking for a job, but the coach didn't need anyone else for this camp, which was the most worthless crop in recent memory.

  "Coach Wagon?" Brazil asked.

  "Uh huh?" The old coach was curious, wondering how this stranger knew his name. Oh God. Maybe the kid had played on the team some years back and Wagon couldn't remember. That was happening more and more these days, and it had nothing to do with Johnnie Walker Red.

  "I'm a reporter for the Charlotte Observer^ Brazil was quick and proud to say.

  "I'm doing a story on a woman who played on your boys' team a long time ago."

  Wagon might be deleting a lot of files these days, but he'd never forget Virginia West. Shelby High School had no women's team back in those days, and she was too good to ignore.

  What hell that had caused. At first, the state wouldn't hear of it.

  That kept her off the team her freshman year while Wagon battled the system on her behalf. Her sophomore year, she played third racket, and had the hardest flat serve for a girl that Wagon had ever seen, and a slice backhand that could go through hot bread and leave it standing.

  All the boys had crushes on her and tried to hit her with the ball whenever they could.

  She never lost a match, not singles or doubles, in the three years she played tennis for Coach Wagon. There had been several stories about her in the Shelby Star, and the Observer when she blazed through spring matches, and the regionals. She had reached the quarter finals of the state championship before Hap Core slaughtered her, thus ending her career as a male athlete. Brazil found the articles on microfilm after he got back to the newspaper. He rolled through more stories, like someone possessed, as he made copious notes.

  W The pervert was also possessed, but beyond that distinction, there were no similarities between her profile and Brazil's. The pervert was writhing in her chair in her dim den in her small house where she lived alone in Dilworth, not far from where Virginia West lived. The two were not acquainted. The pervert was in a La-Z-Boy brown vinyl recliner, footrest up, pants down, as she breathed hard. Information about her was not forthcoming, but the FBI would have profiled her as a white female between the ages of forty and seventy, since the female sex drive wasn't known to develop transmission problems as early as the male's. Indeed, profilers had noted that women got into overdrive about the same time they ran out of estrogen.

  This was why Special Agent Gil Bird at Quantico, busy working on the Charlotte serial murders, would have pinned the female pervert's age at a reasonable forty or fifty, her biological clock a phantom-pain of time, ticking only in her imagination. Her periods were simply that, an end of sentence, a coda. It wasn't that she really wanted Brazil.

  She just thought she did. Her lust was far more complicated. Bird would have offered a possible scenario that might have explained it, had he been officially invited into the case.

  Special Agent Bird would have accurately hypothesized that it was payback time. All those years the pervert was dissed, and not nominated for the homecoming court, and not worshiped, and not wanted.

  As a young woman, the pervert had worked in the cafeteria line at Gardner Webb, where basketball players, especially Ernie Presley, always grunted and pointed, as if she were as low on the food chain as the greasy scrambled eggs and grits they desired. Andy Brazil would have treated her in precisely the same fashion. She did not have to know him to prove her case. At this stage in her frustrated life, she preferred to screw him in her own time, and in her own way.

  Blinds were drawn, the television turned low and playing an old Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn movie. The pervert was breathless as she whispered on the phone, drawing it out, enunciating slowly.

  "Saw you driving. Shifting gears. Up and down in overdrive ..."

  Her power over him was the most exciting thing she'd ever known in her nothing life. She could not contain it as she thought of his humiliation. She controlled him as completely as a fish in a tank, or a dog, or a car. Her heart was on a drum roll as she heard his confused silence over the line, and Hepburn walked into the bedroom, dressed in a satin robe. What incredible bones; The pervert hated her, and would have switched channels, but she did not have a free hand.

  "Screw yourself," Brazil's voice rewarded her with its presence.

  "You have my permission."

  The pervert didn't need permission.

  W Packer scrolled through Brazil's latest and most masterful article.

  "This is great stuff!" Packer was ecstatic about every word.

  "One hell of a job! Wild, Wild West. Love it!"

  Packer got up from a chair pulled close. He tucked in his white shirt, his hand jumping around as if his pants were a puppet. His tie was red and black striped and not the least bit elegant.

  "Ship it out. This runs one-A," Packer said.

  "When?" Brazil was thrilled, because he had never been on the front page.

  "Tomorrow," Packer let him know.

  X? That night, Brazil worked his first traffic accident. He was in uniform, with clipboard in hand, the appropriate forms clamped in.

  This was a lot more complicated than the average person may have supposed, even if the damage was non reportable or less than five hundred dollars. It appeared that a woman in a Toyota Camry was traveling on Queens Road, while a man in a Honda Prelude was also traveling on Queens Road, in this unfortunate section of the city where two roads of the same name intersected with each other.

  v9 The pervert was nearby in her Aerovan, stalking and listening to the police scanner and Brazil's voice on it. She was working her own accident about to happen as this young police boy pointed and gestured, all in dark blue and shiny steel. She watched her prey as she rolled past flares sparking orange on pavement in the dark of night, crossing Queens as she traveled west on Queens.

  X Streets having the same name could be attributed to rapid hormonal growth, and was similar to naming a child after oneself no matter the gender or practicality, or whether the first three were christened the same, as in George Foreman and his own. Queens and Queens, Providence and Providence, Sardis and Sardis, the list went on, and Myra Purvis had never gotten it straight. She knew that if she turned off Queens Road West onto Queens Road East and then followed Queens Road to the Orthopedic Hospital, she could visit her brother.

  She was doing this in her Camry when she got to that stretch she hated so much, somewhere near Edgehill Park, where it was dark, because the day was no longer helpful. Mrs. Purvis was the manager of the La Pez Mexican restaurant on Fenton Place. She had just gotten off work this busy Saturday night and was tired. None of it was her fault when Queens ran into Queens and the gray, hard-to-see Prelude ran into her.

  "Ma'am, did you see the stop sign there?" The boy cop pointed.

  Myra Purvis had reached her limit. She had turned seventy last February and didn't have to take this sort of shit anymore.

  Ts it in Braille? " she smartly asked this whippersnapper in blue with a white tornado on his arms, reminding her of something she once used to mop her kitchen
floor. What was the name of that? Genie in a Bottle? No. Lord, this happened a lot.

  "I want to go to the hospital," that man in the Honda was complaining.

  "My neck hurts."

  "Lying like a rug," Mrs. Purvis told the cop, wondering why he wasn't wearing any hardware beyond a whistle. What if he got in a shootout?

  W Deputy Chief West didn't often get out to cruise so she could check on her troops. But this night she had been in the mood. She floated along rough, dark streets in David One, listening to Brazil's voice on the scanner in her car.

  "One subject requesting transport to Carolinas Medical Center," Brazil was saying.

  West saw him in the distance, from the vantage of her midnight-blue car, but he was too busy to notice as he filled out a report. She circled the intersection as he worked hard, talking to subjects in barely damaged cars. Flares languished along the roadside, his grille lights silently strobing. His face was eerie in blue and red pulses, and he was smiling, and seemed to be helping an old biddy in a Camry.

  Brazil lifted his radio, talking into it.

  tw He marked EOT for End Of Tour and drove to the newspaper. Brazil had a ritual few people knew about, and he indulged himself in it after zipping through a small story on Charlotte's quirky traffic problems. He went up the escalator three moving steps at a time. The workers in the press room had gotten used to him long months before, and didn't mind when he came into their

  off-limits area of huge machinery and deafening noise. He liked to watch some two hundred tons of paper fly along conveyor belts, heading to folders, destined for bundles and driveways, his byline on them.

  Brazil stood in uniform and watched, not talking, overwhelmed by the power of it all. He was used to laboring on a term paper that took months and was read by maybe one person. Now he wrote something in days or even minutes, and millions of people followed every word. He could not comprehend it. He walked around, avoiding moving parts, wet ink, and tracks to trip on as the roar filled his ears like a nexus on this sixth night before the seventh day of his career's creation.

  Y^,?

  W It was chilly out the next morning, Sunday, and sprinkling rain.

  West was building a high wooden fence around her yard on Elmhurst Road, in the old neighborhood of Dilworth. Her house was brick with white trim, and she had been fixing up the place since she'd bought it. This included her latest, most ambitious project, inspired, in part, by people driving through from South Boulevard, and pitching beer bottles and other trash in her yard.

  West was wet, as she hammered, with tool belt on. She held nails in her mouth, and vented her spleen, as Denny Raines, an off-duty paramedic, opened her new gate and helped himself to her property. He was whistling, had jeans on, and was a big, handsome guy and no stranger to this industrious woman. She paid him no mind as she carefully measured a space between two boards.

  "Anyone ever tell you you're anal-retentive?" he said. She hammered, which was suggestive of what he felt like doing to her the first time they met, at a crime scene, when he could only suppose she had been called from home $ince she was in charge of investigations, and the victim was a businessman with the weird orange paint over his parts, and bullets in his head. Raines took one look al ^e babe in brass and that was the end of his rainbo^ She hammered, eating nails, in the rain.

  "I wA thinking about brunch," he said to her.

  "Maybe Chili's."

  Raises approached from the rear and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed her neck, and found it wet, and a little sAy- West didn't smile or respond or take the nails out of her mouth. She hammered and didn't want to be bothefod- He gave up, and leaned against what she was building- He crossed his arms, and studied her as water dripped off Ac bill of his Panthers baseball cap.

  "I take it you've seen the paper," he said.

  He would bring that up, and she had no comment. She measured another space.

  "This is an affirmative. Now I know a celebrity. Right there. This big on the front page." He exaggerated with his ha^ds, as if the morning paper with West in it was ten feet tall- "Above the fold, too," he went on.

  "Good story. I'm impressed."

  she measured and hammered.

  "Triith i8? I learned stuff even I didn't know. Like the part about high school. Shelby High. That you played on the boys' tennis team for Coach Wagon? Never lost a matfh? How 'bout that?"

  He was more enchanted with her than ever, roaming her with his eyes and not getting charged a dime a minute. She wA aware of this and feeling ripped off as she tasted metal Ad hammered.

  "Yoi1 go1 aA idea what it does to a guy to see a eood-loo^111^ woman in a tool belt?" He finally got to his fe^h.

  "It's like when we roll up on a scene and you're in that goddamn uniform. And I start thinking thoughts I shouldn't, people bleeding to death. Right now I got it for you so bad I'm busting out of my jeans."

  She slipped a nail from between her lips and looked at him, at his jeans. She rammed the hammer into her belt, and it was the only tool that was going to be intimate with her this day. Every Sunday, without fail, they had brunch, drank mimosas, watched TV in her bed, and all he ever talked about was calls he had been on over the weekend, as if she didn't get enough blood and misery in her life. Raines was a doll, but boring.

  "Go rescue somebody and leave me alone," she suggested to him.

  His smile and playfulness fled as rain fell in a curtain from heaven.

  "What the hell did I do?" he complained.

  Chapter Six.

  West stayed outside in the rain alone, hammering, measuring, and building her fence as if it were a symbol of what she felt about people and life. When her gate opened and shut again at three p. m. " she assumed it was Raines trying again. She slammed another nail into wood and felt bad about the way she had treated him. He had meant no harm, and her mood had nothing to do with him, really.

  "W Niles could have done with the same consideration. He was in the window over the kitchen sink, looking out at his owner in a flood. She was swinging something that looked like it might hurt Niles if he got in her way. Niles had been minding his own business earlier, walking in circles, kneading the covers, finding just the right warm spot to settle on his owner's chest. Next thing, he was an astronaut, a circus acrobat shot out of a cannon. It was just a darn good thing he could land on his feet. He stared through streaming water at

  someone entering the yard from the north. Niles, the watch cat, had never seen this person, not once in his ancient feline life.

  %< Brazil was aware of a skinny cat watching him from a window as he trespassed and West hammered, calling out to someone named Raines.

  "Look, I'm sorry, okay?" she was saying.

  "I'm in this mood."

  Brazil carried three thick Sunday papers wrapped in a dry-cleaning bag he had found in his closet.

  "Apology accepted," he said.

  West wheeled around, and fixed him in her sights, hammer mid-swing.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" She was startled and taken aback, and did her best to sound hateful.

  "Who's Raines?" Brazil got closer, his tennis shoes getting soaked.

  "None of your damn business." She started hammering as her heart did.

  He was suddenly shy and tentative in the rain as he got closer.

  "I

  brought you some extra papers. Thought you might . "

  "You didn't ask me." She hammered.

  "You didn't give me a warning. Like you have some right to investigate my life." She bent a nail and clumsily pried it out.

  "Ride around all night. The whole time you're a spy."

  She stopped what she was doing to look at him. He was soaked and dejected, wanting her to be pleased. He had given her the best he knew.

  "You got no fucking right!" she said.

  "It's a good story." He was getting defensive.

  "You're a hero."

  She went on, enraged and not certain why, "What hero? Who cares?"

&
nbsp; "I told you I was going to write about you."

  "Seems to me that was a threat." She turned back to her fence and hammered.

  "And I didn't believe you meant it."

  "Why not?" He didn't understand any of this, and didn't think it was fair.

  "No one has before." She hammered again, and stopped again, trying to stay mad but not doing a good job of it.