Hornet's Nest

  "That sounds absolutely awful," the publisher sympathized.

  "I actually need to lose a few pounds," Hammer confessed.

  "But I tend to put it on around my middle, not my legs."

  Panesa searched for parking around the Carillon, where Morton's Of Chicago steak house was doing quite a business without them.

  "Watch your door there. Sorry," Panesa said.

  "I'm a little close to the meter. I don't guess I need to put anything in it?"

  "Not after six," said Hammer, who knew.

  She thought how nice it would be to have a friend like Panesa. Panesa thought how nice it would be to go sailing with Hammer, or jet skiing, or do lunch or Christmas shopping together, or just talk in front of the fire. Getting drunk was also a thought when, normally, it was a big problem for the publisher of a nationally acclaimed newspaper or the chief of a formidable police department. Hammer had overdone it with Seth now and then, but it was pointless. He ate. She passed out.

  Panesa had gotten drunk alone, which was worse, especially if he had forgotten to let the dog back in.

  Being drunk was a rarified form of beaming-out-of- here, and it was all about timing. It was not something that Hammer ever discussed with anyone. Panesa did not, either. Neither of them had a therapist at this time. This was why it was rather much a miracle that the two of them, after three glasses of wine, got on the subject while someone from US Bank was pontificating about economic incentives and development and company relocations and the nonexistent crime rate in Charlotte. Panesa and Hammer hardly touched the salmon with dill sauce. They switched to Wild Turkey. Neither of them fully recalled receiving their awards, but all who witnessed it thought Hammer and Panesa were animated, witty, gracious, and articulate.

  On the way home, Panesa got the daring idea of tucking his car near Latta Park in Dilworth, and playing tunes, and talking, with headlights out. Hammer was not in the mood to go home. Panesa knew that going home was soon followed by getting up in the morning and going to work. His career was not as interesting as it used to be, but he had yet to admit this even to himself. His children were busy with involved lives. Panesa was dating a lawyer who liked watching tapes of Court TV and talking about what she would have done differently. Panesa wanted out.

  "I guess we should go," Hammer volunteered, about an hour into their sitting inside the dark Volvo and talking.

  "You're right," said Panesa, who had a trophy in the back seat and an emptiness in his heart.

  "Judy, I have to say something."

  "Please," said Hammer.

  "Do you have a friend or two you just have fun with?"

  "No."

  "I don't either," Panesa confessed.

  "Don't you think that's rather incredible?"

  Hammer took a moment to analyze.

  "No," she decided.

  "I never had a friend or two. Not in grammar school when I was better than everyone in kick ball Not in high school, when I was good in math and the president of the student body. Not in college. Not in the police academy, now that I think about it."

  "I was good in English," Panesa thought back.

  "And dodge ball I guess.

  A president of the Bible Club one year, but don't hold that against me. Another year on the varsity basketball team, but horrible, fouled out the one game I played in when we were forty points behind. "

  "What are you getting at, Richard?" asked Hammer, whose nature it was to walk fast and rush to the point.

  Panesa was silent for a moment.

  "I think people like us need friends," he decided.

  Vs9 West needed friends, too, but she would never admit this to Brazil, who was determined to solve every crime in the city that night. West was smoking. Brazil was eating a Snickers bar when the scanner let them know that any unit in the area of Dundeen and Redbud might want to look for a dead body in a field. Flashlights cut across darkness, the sound of feet moving through weeds and grass, as Brazil and West searched the dark. He was obsessed and managed to get ahead of West, his flashlight sweeping. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt, yanking him behind her, like a bad puppy.

  "You mind if I go first?" West asked him.

  ^' W Panesa stopped in Fourth Ward, in front of Hammer's house, at twenty minutes past one a. m.

  "Well, congratulations on your award," Panesa said again.

  "And to you," Hammer said, gripping the door handle.

  "Okay, Judy. Let's do this again one of these days."

  "Absolutely. Award or not." Hammer could see the TV flickering through curtains. Seth was up, and probably eating a Tombstone pizza.

  "I really appreciate your allowing Brazil to be out with your folks.

  It's been good for us," Panesa said.

  "For us, too."

  "So be it. Anything innovative, I'm all for it," said Panesa.

  "Doesn't happen often."

  "Rare as hen's teeth," Hammer agreed.

  "Isn't that the truth."

  "Absolutely."

  Panesa controlled his impulse to touch her.

  "I need to go," he said.

  "It's late," she completely agreed.

  Hammer finally lifted the door handle, letting herself out. Panesa drove off in the direction of his empty house and felt blue. Hammer walked into her space, where Seth lived and ate, and was lonely.

  % West and Brazil were working hard and unmindful of the time. They had just pulled up to the federally subsidized housing project of Earle Village and entered apartment 121, where there were suspicious signs of money. A computer was on the coffee table, along with a lot of cash, a calculator, and a pager. An elderly woman was composed on the couch, her raging old drunk boyfriend dancing in front of her, his finger parried at her. Police were in the room, assessing the problem.

  "She pulled a .22 revolver on me!" the boyfriend was saying.

  "Ma'am," West said.

  "Do you have a gun?"

  "He was threatening me," the woman told Brazil.

  Her name was Rosa Tinsley, and she was neither drunk nor excited. In fact, she didn't get this much attention except once a week, when the police came. She was having a fine time. Billy could just hop around, threaten away, like he always did when he went to the nip joint and lost money in poker.

  "Come in here doing all his drug deals," Rosa went on to Brazil.

  "Gets drunk and says he's gonna cut my throat."

  "Are there drugs here?" West asked.

  Rosa nodded at Brazil, and gestured toward the back of the house.

  "The shoe box in my closet," she announced.

  Chapter Fourteen.

  ^f^ There were many shoe boxes in Rosa's closet, ^ flf'Q and West and Brazil went through all of ' them. They found no drugs, the boyfriend was evicted, and Rosa was rewarded with instant gratification. West and Brazil headed back to their car. Brazil felt they had accomplished a good thing. That rotten, stinking, besotted old man was out of there. The poor woman would have some peace. She was safe.

  "I guess we got rid of him," Brazil commented with pride.

  "She was just scaring him, like she does once a week," West replied.

  "They'll be back together by the time we drive off."

  She started the engine, watching the old boyfriend in her rearview mirror. He was standing on the sidewalk, carrying his things, staring at the dark blue Crown Victoria, waiting for it to disappear.

  "One of these days he'll probably kill her," West added.

  She hated domestic cases. Those and dog bite reports were the most unpredictable and dangerous to the police. Citizens called the cops, and then resented the intervention. It was all very irrational. But perhaps the worst feature of people like Rosa and their boyfriends was the co dependency the inability to do without the other, no matter how many times partners brandished knives and guns, slapped, stole, and threatened. West had a difficult time dealing with people who wallowed in dysfunction, and went from one abusive relationship to the next, never gaining in
sight, and hurting life. It was her opinion that Brazil should not live with his mother.

  "Why don't you get an apartment, and be on your own for once?" West said to him.

  "Can't afford it." Brazil typed on the MDT.

  "Sure you can."

  "No, I can't." He typed some more.

  "A one-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood is about five hundred a month."

  "So?" West looked over at him.

  "And your car is paid for, right? You owe any money to Davidson?"

  It wasn't any of her business.

  "You could afford it," West preached on.

  "What you got is a sick relationship. You don't get away from her, you'll grow old together."

  "Oh really?" Brazil looked up at West, not appreciating her remarks in the least.

  "You know all about it, do you?"

  "I'm afraid so," West said.

  "In case you haven't figured it out yet, Andy, you aren't the first person in the world to have a co dependent enabling relationship with a parent or spouse. Your mother's crippling, self-destructive disease is her choice. And it serves one important function. It controls her son. She doesn't want you to leave, and guess what? So far you haven't."

  W This was also Hammer's problem, although she had yet to face it fully. Seth, too, was a cripple. When his powerful, handsome wife breezed in with her trophy in the early morning hours, he was surfing hundreds of cable channels made possible by his eighteen-inch satellite dish on the back porch. Seth liked country western music, and was looking for just the right band. It was not true that he was eating a Tombstone pizza. That had been earlier, when it had gotten to be midnight and his wife still was not home. Now he was working on popcorn drenched with real butter he had melted in the microwave.

  Seth Bridges had never been much to look at. Physical beauty was not what had attracted Judy Hammer to him long ago in Little Rock. She had loved his intelligence and gentle patience. They had started out as friends, the way everyone would, were the world filled with good sense. The problem lay in Seth's capacity. He grew as his wife did for the first ten years. Then he maxed out, and simply could stretch no further as a spiritual, enlightened, big-thinking entity. There was no other way to broaden himself unless he did so in the flesh. Eating, frankly, was what he now did best.

  Hammer locked the front door and reset the burglar alarm, making sure the motion sensors were on stay. The house smelled like a movie theater, and she detected a hint of pepperoni beneath a buttery layer of chilled air. Her husband was stretched out on the couch, crunching, fingers shiny with grease as he stuffed popcorn inside a mouth that never completely rested. She walked through the living room without comment as stations changed as fast as Seth could point and shoot. In her bedroom, she angrily set the trophy on the floor, in a closet, with others she never remembered.

  She was overwhelmed with fury, and slammed the door, tore her clothes off, and threw them in a chair. She put on her favorite nightshirt, and grabbed her pistol out of her pocketbook, and walked back out into the living room. She'd had it. No more. Enough.

  Every mortal had limits. Seth froze mid-shovel when his wife marched in, armed.

  "Why drag it out?" she said, towering over him in blue and white striped cotton.

  "Why not just kill yourself and get it over with? Go ahead."

  She racked the pistol and offered it to him, butt first. Seth stared at it. He had never seen her like this, and he propped himself up on his elbows.

  "What happened tonight?" he asked.

  "You and Panesa get into a fight or something?"

  "Quite the opposite. If you want to end it, go ahead."

  "You're crazy," he said.

  "That's right, well on my way to it, thanks to you." His wife lowered the gun and put the safety on.

  "Seth, tomorrow you go for help. A psychiatrist and your primary care physician. You straighten yourself out. Starting this minute. You're a pig. A slob. A bore. You're committing slow suicide and I do not intend to watch a minute longer."

  She snatched the bowl of popcorn out of his oily hands.

  "You don't get it fixed, I'm out of here. Period."

  y^? W Brazil and West also were suffering aftershocks from their confrontation in her unmarked car. They had continued arguing about his living situation, by now both of them in a lather as they drove through another rough area of the city. Brazil was glaring at her, and not particularly cognizant of the area or its bad people who were thinking violent thoughts about the cop car cruising past. Brazil wondered what possessed him to want to spend so much of his valuable time with this rude, insensitive, inappropriate deputy chief who was old and backward and, in truth, a jerk.

  twIt seemed that fighting was a cloud layer over the Queen City, and Panesa's pleasant mood had deteriorated as well when his lawyer friend called at the precise moment Hammer was locking her bedroom door and West was telling Brazil to grow up and Bubba was on the prowl in his King Cab. The lawyer had been thinking about Panesa, whom she had observed on the late news, in his stunning tuxedo, receiving a trophy.

  The lawyer was thinking about Panesa and his silver hair, and wanted to drop by and maybe stay over. Panesa made it clear that this was not possible, and never would be again, as Bubba parked in dark shadows near Latta Park.

  ^j Vft Bubba was in camouflage, a black cap pulled low.

  When he stealthily reached West's house, he was pleased that she wasn't home. Bubba could only suppose that she was being screwed by her sissy boyfriend, and Bubba smiled as he imagined her getting screwed again by Bubba, as he sneaked closer to the front of the brick house. His intention wasn't felonious but would ruin the bitch's mood when she couldn't open her front or back doors because someone had filled the locks with Super Glue. This idea had come from yet another of his anarchist manuals, and might well have worked like a charm had circumstances not conspired against him as he unfolded his Buck knife and cut off the tip from the tube of glue.

  A car was coming, and Bubba wisely supposed it might be the cop returning home. It was too late to run, and he dove into the hedge. The Cavalier wagon passed, carrying Ned Toms to The Fish Market, where he was about to start his shift, unpacking seafood from boxes of ice. He noticed a big dog moving around in bushes in front of a house where he often saw an unmarked cop car parked, then his Cavalier was gone like a breeze.

  Bubba emerged from the hedge, his fingers glued together and left hand completely fastened to the right inner thigh of his fatigues. He rapidly hobbled away, looking remarkably like a hunchback. He could not unlock his truck or drive without freeing one hand, and this required his removing his pants, which he was in the process of doing when Officer Wood happened by on routine patrol, checking the park for perverts. Bubba was arrested for indecent exposure.

  tw West and Brazil heard the call over the scanner, but were not even close, and were busy discussing Brazil's life.

  "What the hell do you know about my mother or why I choose to take care of her?" Brazil was saying.

  "I know a lot. Social services, juvenile court, are overwhelmed by cases just like yours," West said.

  "I've never been a social service case. Or in juvenile court."

  "Yet," she reminded him.

  "Mind your own business for once."

  "Get a life," she said.

  "Declare your independence. Go out on a date."

  "Oh, so now I don't date, either," he snapped.

  She laughed.

  "When? While you're brushing your teeth? You're out every night working, and then show up in the newsroom by nine, after you've run your ass off around the track and hit a million tennis balls. You tell me when you date, Andy? Huh?"

  Fortunately, Radar the dispatcher hailed them exactly at this moment.

  Apparently there was an assault on Monroe Road.

  "Unit 700 responding," Brazil irritably said into the mike.

  They call you Night Voice," West told him.

  "Who's they?" he wante
d to know.

  "Cops. They know when you get on the radio that you're not me."

  "Because my voice is deeper? Or maybe because I use proper grammar?"

  he said.

  West was making her way through more menacing- looking government-subsidized housing. She was constantly checking her mirrors.