Hornet's Nest

  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? It 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."

  Well, 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-y owl-yowl. Then he's quiet, and does the same thing again. Always three syllables."

  "Sounds to me like Niles is trying to tell you something, 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.

  "Since when are you a cat shrink?" West glanced at him, experiencing that same giddy sensation again, that 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, and she flew right by the Sunset East exit.

  "You just passed the truck stop. And what you do you mean, gagV " 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. " I 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.

  "W 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 land. He drifted, not here or there, and his family could not tell whether he had any awareness

  of their presence and devotion. For his sons, this was especially bitter. For them, 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 communi cations were not entirely for her husband. Hammer was more worried about herself, in truth. She knew she had reached a crossroads, and so
mething 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 for 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 behind her, 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."

  The, 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.

  Chapter Twenty-four.

  West 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 she 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 some 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 gA-' " 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 had 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 ID 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 and turned into a man, and where he had dreamed. Another hot flash was coming on, her face turning red as she plugged the Caller ID 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 has 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 look at 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-look
ing." She smiled.

  "There was a lot of talk about that, and that he seemed nice."