Hornet's Nest

by Patricia Cornwell

"Did you drink all these tonight?" she demanded to know as he shut his door.

  "No."

  "How many have you had tonight?"

  "I didn't count." His eyes were hard and defiant on hers.

  "Do you always elude police lights and sirens?" she said, furious.

  "Or is tonight special for some reason?"

  He opened the back door of his BMW, and angrily grabbed out a T-shirt.

  He had no comment as he peeled off his wet polo shirt, and yanked on the dry one. West had never seen him half naked.

  "I ought to lock you up," she said with not quite as much authority.

  "Go ahead," he said.

  W Randy and Jude Hammer had flown into the Charlotte- Douglas International Airport within forty-five minutes of each other, and their mother had met them downstairs

  in baggage. The three were somber and distracted as Hammer returned to Carolinas Medical Center without delay. She was so happy to see her boys, and old memories were reopened and exposed to air and light.

  Randy and Jude had been born with their mother's handsome bones and straight white teeth. They had been blessed with her piercing eyes and frightening intelligence.

  From Seth, they had received their four-cylinder engines that moved them slowly along, and with little direction or passing power or drive. Randy and Jude were happy enough simply to exist and go nowhere in a hurry. They drew gratification and joy from their dreams, and from regular customers in whatever restaurant employed them from one year to the next. They were happy with the understanding women who loved them anyway. Randy was proud of his bit parts in movies no one saw. Jude was thrilled to be in any jazz bar he and the guys got gigs in, and he played the drums with passion, whether the audience was ten people or eighty.

  Oddly, it had never been their rocket-charged mother who could not live with the sons' something less than stellar accomplishments in life. It was Seth who was disgusted and ashamed. Their father had proved so totally lacking in understanding and patience, that the sons had moved far away. Of course. Hammer understood the psychological dynamics. Seth's hatred for his sons was his hatred for himself. It didn't take great acumen to deduce that much. But knowing the reason had changed nothing. It had required tragedy, a grave illness, to reunite this family.

  "Mom, you holding up?" Jude was in back of Hammer's personal car. He was rubbing her shoulders as she drove.

  "I'm trying."

  She swallowed hard as Randy looked at her with "Well, I don't want to see him," said Randy, cradling flowers he had bought for his father in the airport.

  "That's understandable," Hammer said, switching lanes, eyes in the mirrors. It had begun to rain.

  "How are my babies?"

  "Great," Jude said.

  "Benji's learning to play sax."

  "I can't wait to hear it. What about Owen?"

  "Not quite old enough for instruments, but she's my boogie baby. Every time she hears music, she dances with Spring," Jude went on, referring to the child's mother.

  "God, Mom, you'll die when you see it. It's hilarious!"

  Spring was the artist Jude had lived with in Greenwich Village for eight years. Neither of Hammer's sons was married. Each had two children, and Hammer adored every fine golden hair on their small lovely heads. It was her bleeding, buried fear that they were growing up in distant cities with only infrequent contact with their rather legendary grandmother. Hammer did not want to be someone they might someday talk about but had never known.

  "Smith and Fen wanted to come," said Randy, taking his mother's hand.

  "It's gonna be all right. Mom." He felt another stab of hate for his father.

  ^^ W West didn't know what to do with her prisoner of the evening. Brazil was slumped down in the seat, arms crossed, his posture defiant and decidedly without remorse. He refused to look at her now, but stared out the windshield at bugs and bats swirling beneath lights. He watched truckers in pointed cowboy boots and jeans strolling out to their mighty steeds, and leaning against cabs, propping a foot on the running board, hands cupped around a cigarette, as they lit up like the Marlboro Man.

  "You got your cigarettes?" Brazil asked West. She looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

  "Forget it.

  "I want one."

  "Yeah, right. You've never smoked in your life, and I'm not going to be the reason you start," she said, and she wanted one, too.

  "You couldn't possibly know whether I've ever smoked a cigarette or pot or anything else," he said in the strange tone of intoxication.

  "Ha! You think you know so much. You don't know shit. Cops. And their dark, narrow alleyways for minds."

  "Really? I thought you were a cop. Or have you quit that, too?"

  He stared miserably out his side window.

  West felt sorry for him, mad as she was. She wished she knew what was wrong, exactly.

  "What the hell's gotten into you?" She tried another tactic, poking Brazil, this time not playfully.

  He did not respond.

  "Trying to ruin your life? What if some other cop spotted you first?"

  She was no-nonsense.

  "Got any idea how much trouble you'd be in?"

  "I don't care," he said, and his voice caught.

  "Yes, you do, goddamn it! Look at me!"

  Brazil stared out, his eyes swimming as he dully watched bleary images of people in and out of the truck stop, men and women whose lives were different from his, and who would not understand what it was like to be him. They would look at all that he was and despise him for being privileged and spoiled, because they could not comprehend his reality.

  V> Bubba felt precisely this, and just so happened to be parking his King Cab at the pumps. He spotted the BMW first, then the cop car with the enemy in it. Bubba could not believe his good fortune. He went in for Pabst Blue Ribbon and Red Man, and picked up the latest Playboy.

  t^ Brazil was struggling to control himself, and West could be hard but so long. She cared about him in a way that fit no easy definition, and this was partly why he unsettled and confused her so much. She enjoyed him as a talented, precocious recruit, someone she could mentor and get a kick out of watching as he learned. She did not have a brother and would have liked one exactly like him, someone young, smart, sensitive and kind. He was a friend, although she did not give him much of a chance. He was a pretty incredible-looking guy and didn't seem to notice.

  "Andy," she quietly said, 'please tell me what happened. "

  "Somehow he got in my computer basket, my files. Everything over the news channels before the paper came out. Scooped." His voice trembled, and he did not want West to see him like this.

  West was stunned.

  "He?" she asked.

  "Who's he?"

  "Webb." He could barely bring himself to say that name.

  "Same piece of shit screwing your deputy chief!"

  "What?" Now West was truly lost.

  "Goode," he said.

  "Everybody knows."

  "I didn't." West wondered how she could have missed intelligence like that.

  Brazil's heart was broken forever. West wasn't quite sure what to do as she mopped her face again.

  "W Bubba stealthily made his way back to his truck, his thick face with its misshapen nose averted and shadowed by an Exxon baseball cap.

  Climbing up into his cab with his purchases, he sat watching the cop car out his windshield. For a while, he nipped through his magazine, pausing at the really big stories. There were many of them, and he tried not to think about his wife or make comparisons as he calculated the best method of attack.

  He had packed light tonight, just a Colt . 380 caliber seven-shot pistol in an ankle holster, which would not have been his first choice had he known he might have a standoff with the cops. It was a good thing he had aback up between the seats, a Quality Parts Shorty E-2 Carbine,223 caliber, with thirty-shot magazine, adjustable sights, chrome-lined barrel finished in manganese phosphate that didn't shine at night. Fo
r all practical purposes, this was an M-16, and with it, Bubba could riddle West's car Bonnie and Clyde style. He turned a page, and massaged more big ideas as he enjoyed the dark.

  Vy West had never really been called upon to comfort a member of the male gender. Rarely was such a thing needed or requested, and having no precedent to follow, she used common sense. Brazil was hiding his face in his hands. She felt terribly sorry for him. What an unfortunate state of affairs.

  "It's not that bad, really," she kept saying.

  "Okay?" She patted his shoulder.

  "We'll find a way out of this. Okay?"

  She patted him again, and when this did not make a dent, she finally broke down.

  "Come here," she said.

  West put an arm around him, and pulled him close. Suddenly, he was in her lap, his arms clamped around her, as he held her like a child, which he was not. West's hot flashes seemed worse as she thought fast and hormones spiked. He nuzzled her, holding tight, and her insides woke up, startling her. Brazil was suffering from a similar response, and moved up her body, to her neck, until he found her mouth. For moments, at least, they were completely out of control and out of orbit. Their traumatized brains went into shock, allowing other instincts to have their way, for Mother Nature worked in this fashion to trick couples into procreating.

  West and Brazil had not gotten to the point of worrying about what sort of birth control was best suited to their anatomies, needs, tastes, belief systems, personal choices, fantasies, secret pleasures, or faith in consumer reports. This way of communicating with each other was new, so they took the time to linger in places they had always wondered about. Then reality asserted itself with alacrity, and West suddenly sat up and looked out the windows of her police car, remembering she was on duty with a man in her lap.

  "Andy," she said.

  He was busy.

  "Andy," she tried again.

  "Andy, get up. You're on my ... gun."

  She tried to move him, with no energy or enthusiasm, not wanting him to go anywhere ever again. Hell was here and she was finished.

  "Sit up," she said, wiping her face again. Her life was ruined.

  "This is incest, pedophilia," she muttered, taking a deep breath as he went on with what he was doing.

  "You're right, you're right," he mumbled with absolutely no conviction, as he explored the wonders of her existence in a way that was unknown and overwhelming to her.

  It was difficult to predict exactly where this might have gone had Bubba not intervened. There was a Holiday Inn Express not too far away on 1-77, and it had an indoor pool, 42-channel cable TV, and free local calls and newspaper, and complimentary continental breakfasts.

  Possibly, West and Brazil would have made their way to one of those rooms before morning, and gotten into even more trouble at a bargain price. They possibly would have slept together, and that was where West always drew the line. Sex was one thing, but she did not sleep with someone she was not in love with, meaning she slept with no living soul except Niles.

  Again, such contemplations are moot when there is a sharp rap on the window and one peers into the barrel of a carbine rifle reminiscent of Bosnia, or perhaps Miami. West did not have her glasses on, but the redneck with his assault rifle outside her police car looked familiar in a fuzzy sort of way.

  "Sit up very slowly," she said to Brazil.

  "What for?" He wasn't ready yet.

  "Trust me," she told him.

  vft It was just as well that condensation had formed on the glass.

  Bubba could not see exactly what was going on inside the dark blue Ford Crown Victoria, but he had a pretty good idea. This heightened his excitement, making him more certain that he was going to waste these two after doing something really, really bad to them first. If there were two things Bubba could not endure in life, they were queers making out, and straights making out. When he saw queers flirting,

  touching, Bubba wanted to beat the shit out them and then leave them dying in a ditch. When he saw what he thought he was looking at right now inside this police car, he felt pretty much the same impulse.

  People with money, importance, or a good sex life, and especially all three, made Bubba insane with righteous outrage. It was his calling, he was sure, to smite them in the name of America.

  ^^ W 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 1-77, 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 T-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, bitchf

  ^/Ak? W 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 intere
st 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.