Hornet's Nest

  She drove her personal car for this, a Ford Explorer with dual air bags. It was a white sports utility vehicle with four-wheel drive that ate snow for a snack. She roared into his driveway at three p. m. " and he was out the door before she could open hers. The obvious range would have been the one at the police academy, but this she could not do because volunteers were not allowed, nor were guests. West chose The Firing Line on Wilkinson Boulevard, just past Bob's Pawn Shop, and a number of trailer parks, the Oakden Motel, Country City USA, and Coyote Joe's.

  Had they continued another block or two, West realized, they would have ended up in the parking lot of the Paper Doll Lounge. She had been in there before on fights. It was disgusting. Topless women were on the same block as gun and pawn shops, as if breasts and g-strings somehow belonged in the same category as used merchandise and weapons.

  West wondered if Brazil had ever visited a topless lounge and sat stiffly in a chair, his hands in a white-knuckle grip on armrests, as a naked woman rubbed against his inner legs, and got in his face.

  Probably not, West decided. She had a feeling he was a foreigner who didn't speak the language, hadn't tried the food or seen the sights.

  How could this have happened? He didn't have girls after him in high school, in college? Or boys? She did not understand Andy Brazil as he foraged through shelves of ammunition inside the firing range shop, picking out Winchester 95 grain full metal jacket . 380, Luger'll5 grain ball nine-millimeter cartridges, and contemplated . 45 automatic 230 grain, Federal Hi-Power, Hydra-Shok hollowpoints, and Super X 50 Centerfire that were too expensive for practice. He was going nuts.

  This was a candy shop, and West was buying.

  Gunshots sounded like a war going on inside this range, where NRA rednecks worshiped their pistols, and drug dealers with cash and leather hightops got better at killing. West and Brazil were loaded down with hearing protectors, safety glasses, and boxes of ammunition.

  She was a woman in jeans, carrying two pistol hard cases.

  Dangerous-looking men gave her hostile glances, not happy about girls invading their club. Brazil was picking up danger signals as he surveyed his surroundings.

  The men didn't seem to like him, either. He was suddenly conscious of being in Davidson tennis sweats and having tied a bandana around his head to keep his hair out of his eyes. These guys all had guts and big shoulders, as if they worked out with forklifts and cases of beer. He had seen their trucks in the parking lot, some of them with six wheels, as if there were mountains and streams to climb and cross along 1-74 and 1-40. Brazil did not understand the tribe of Male he had grown up around in North Carolina.

  It was beyond biology, genitals, hormones, or testosterone. Some of these guys had naked pinups on the mud flaps of their tractor trailers, and Brazil was frankly horrified. A guy saw a foxy woman with a body, and he wanted her protecting his radials from gravel? Not Brazil. He wanted her at the movies, the drive-through, and in candlelight.

  He was using the staple gun, fastening another target to cardboard and attaching it to the frame in his lane. West, the instructor, was examining her pupil's latest target. The silhouette she held up had a tight spread of bullet holes in the center of the chest. She was amazed. She watched Brazil push cartridges into the magazine of a stainless steel Sig-Sauer . 380 pistol.

  "You're dangerous," she let him know.

  He gripped the small gun with both hands, in the position and stance his father had taught him in a life he scarcely recalled. Brazil's form wasn't bad, but it could be improved, and he fired one round after another. He dropped out the empty magazine and smacked in a new one. He fired nonstop, as if he couldn't shoot fast enough and would kill anybody else in life who hurt him. This would not do. West knew the reality of the street.

  She reached for a button in his booth and held it in. The paper target suddenly came to life and screeched along the lane toward Brazil, as if it were going to attack him.

  Startled, Brazil shot wildly. BARNI BARNI BARNI Bullets slammed into the target's metal frame, into the back rubber wall, and then he was out of ammo. The target screeched to a stop, rocking from its cable in his face.

  "Hey! What are you doing?" He turned to West, indignant and bewildered.

  She did not answer at first as she pushed cartridges into black metal magazines. She smacked one into her big bad black . 40 caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic, then looked at her student.

  "You shoot too fast." She racked back the slide and it snapped forward. She aimed at her own target in her own lane.

  "You're out of ammo." She fired. BAM BAM

  "And out of luck." BAM BAM

  She paused, and fired twice again. She set down her pistol and moved close to Brazil, taking the . 380 from him, and opening the slide to make sure the gun was unloaded and safe. She pointed it down the lane, hands and arms locked, knees slightly bent, in the proper position and stance.

  "Tap-tap and stop," she told him as she demonstrated.

  "Tap-tap and stop. You see what the other person's doing and adjust." She returned the . 380 to him, butt first.

  "And don't slap the trigger. Take it home tonight and practice."

  ^/A-^ _

  tw> That night, Brazil stayed in his room and dry-fired West's . 380 until he had a significant blister on his index finger. He aimed it at himself in the mirror, that he might get used to seeing a gun pointed at him. He did this with music playing and fantasies spinning, the deadly tiny black eye staring at his head, his heart, as he thought of his father, who had not drawn his gun. His father had not had time even to key his radio. Brazil's arms were beginning to tremble, and he had not eaten supper.

  It was a few minutes past nine, and his mother had refused to eat earlier when he had offered to fix her a hamburger patty and a salad of fresh tomatoes and Vidalia onions, with oil and vinegar. More alert than usual, she was watching a sitcom, and in the same faded blue flannel robe and slippers she wore most of the time. He could not grasp how she could live the way she did, and had given up thinking he could change her or the life she hated. In high school, he, her only child, had been the expert detective, rooting through the house and her Cadillac, seeking her hidden stashes of pills and liquor. Her resourcefulness was amazing. Once she had gone so far as to bury whisky in the yard beneath the rose bushes she used to prune when she still cared.

  Muriel Brazil's greatest fear was to be present. She did not want to be here, and the nightmare of rehabilitation and AA meetings darkened her memory like the shadow of a monstrous bird flying over her and splaying its claws, ready to snatch her up and eat her alive. She did not want to feel. She would not sit in groups of people who had only first names and talked about the drunks they once were, and binges they used to go on, and how wonderful it was to be sober. All spoke with the sincerity of contrite sinners after a religious experience.

  Their new god was sobriety, and this god allowed plenty of cigarettes and black decaffeinated coffee. Exercise drinking copious amounts of water and talking regularly to one's sponsor was critical, and the god expected the recovering one to contact all he had ever offended and apologize. In other words, Mrs. Brazil was supposed to tell her son and those she worked around at Davidson that she was an alcoholic. She had tried this once on several of the students she supervised at the ARA Slater food service that catered the cafeteria in the new Commons building.

  "I've been away a month at a treatment center," Mrs. Brazil told a junior named Heather, from Connecticut.

  "I'm an alcoholic."

  Mrs. Brazil tried the same line on Ron, a freshman from Ashland, Virginia. The expected catharsis was not there. Students did not respond well and avoided her after that. They regarded her fearfully as rumors floated around campus. Some of what was said got back to Brazil, heightening a sense of shame that drove him deeper into his isolation. He knew he could never have friends because if anyone got close, the truth would be known. Even West had been confronted the first time she had called his house. Brazil was
still perplexed, if not stunned, that this had not seemed to affect the deputy chief's opinion of him.

  "Mom, how about I cook us up some eggs?" Brazil paused in the doorway.

  Light from the television flickered in the dark living room.

  "I'm not hungry," she said, staring at the screen.

  "What have you eaten? Probably nothing, right? You know how bad that is for you.

  Mom. "

  Pointing the remote control, she changed to another channel, where people were laughing and exchanging bad lines.

  "How 'bout a grilled cheese?" her son tried again.

  "Well, maybe." She changed channels again. It was hard for her to be still when her son was nearby. It was hard to look at his face and meet his eyes. The nicer he was to her, the more abusive she felt, and she had never figured out why. She would not make it without him. He bought food and kept the house going. Her social security checks and a small pension from the police department supplied her liquids. It didn't take as much to get drunk these days, and she knew what this said about her liver. She wished she would go on and die, and she worked at it every day. Her eyes filled with tears and her throat closed as her son rattled around in the kitchen.

  Alcohol had been the enemy the first time she'd ever touched it, when she was sixteen and Micky Latham took her to Lake Norman at night and got her drunk on apricot brandy. She vaguely remembered lying in the grass, watching stars reconfigure and blur as he breathed hard and clumsily worked on her blouse as if buttons had just been invented. He was nineteen and worked in Bud's Garage, and his hands were calloused and felt like claws on breasts that had never been touched before this intoxicated moment.

  That was the night sweet Muriel lost her virginity, and it had nothing to do with Micky Latham, and everything to do with the bottle in its ABC store brown paper bag. When she drank, her brain lifted as if it might sing. She was happy, brave, playful, and witty. She was driving her father's Cadillac the afternoon Officer Drew Brazil pulled her over for speeding. Muriel was seventeen and the most beautiful, worldly woman he'd ever met. If he thought he smelled alcohol on her breath that afternoon, he was too mesmerized to put it in perspective.

  He was rather glorious in his uniform, and the ticket never got written. Instead, they went to Big Daddy's fish camp after he got off duty. They married that Thanksgiving when she had missed her period two months in a row.

  Muriel Brazil's son reappeared with grilled cheese on wheat bread, cooked just right and cut diagonally, the way she liked it. He'd put a dollop of ketchup on the side so she could dip, and he brought her water that she had no intention of drinking. He looked so much like his father, it was more than she could bear.

  "I know how much you hate water, Mom," he said, setting the plate and napkin in her lap.

  "But you got to drink it, okay? Sure you don't want salad?"

  She shook her head and wished she could thank him. She was impatient because he was blocking her view of the TV.

  "I'll be in my room," he said.

  //l/i "w He dry-fired until his finger bled. He was remarkably steady because years of tennis had strengthened the muscles of his hands and forearms. His grip was crushing. The next morning, he woke up excited.

  The sun was shining, and West had promised to take him to the range again late afternoon to work with him further. It was Monday, and he had the day off. He didn't know what he would do between now and then, or how he would make hours pass. Brazil could not endure free time, and usually gave it away to some project.

  The grass was heavy with dew when he slipped out of the house at half past seven. Carrying tennis rackets and a hopper of balls, he walked first to the track, where he ran six miles and did push-ups, sit-ups, and crunches, to get his fix of endorphin. By now, the grass was warm and dry, and he lay in it long enough for his blood to stop pounding.

  He listened to the buzzing of insects in clover, and smelled bittersweet green vegetation and wild onions. His gym shorts and tank top were saturated as he trotted downhill to the outdoor tennis courts.

  Ladies were playing doubles, and he politely trotted behind them on their court, going to the other end, so he could be as far away from anyone as possible. He didn't want to disturb people with the hundreds of balls he intended to kill. Brazil served in deuce court and ad court, on one side, then the other, picking up after himself with the bright yellow hopper. He was slightly annoyed. Tennis was unforgiving if he didn't practice. His usual precision wasn't there, and he knew what this boded. If he didn't start playing again, he was going to lose one of the few things he'd ever been good at. Damn. The ladies on court one noticed a marked deterioration in their own games as they continued to watch with envy the young man on court four hit balls so hard they sounded like baseballs cracking against bats.

  v^y W Chief Hammer's concentration was in and out, too.

  She was presiding over an executive staff meeting in her private conference room, in her sizeable corner of the third floor. Windows overlooked Davidson and Trade, and she could see the mighty US Bank Corporate Center topped by its silly aluminum headdress, which oddly brought to mind a wild man with a bone in his nose, perhaps from some Little Rascals episode from long years past. At exactly eight this morning as Hammer was carrying her first cup of coffee to her desk, the CEO of that sixty-story erection had called her.

  Solomon Cahoon was Jewish, and the Old Testament factored into his mother's choice of names for her firstborn male child. Her son would be a king who would make wise decisions, such as the one this Friday, when he had informed his police chief that she would hold a press conference to let citizens know that the serial killings in Charlotte were homosexual and of no threat to normal men visiting the Queen City on business. Northside Baptist Church would be holding a prayer vigil for victims' families and the souls of those killed. Police were following very good leads.

  "Just a reassurance thing," Cahoon had relayed to the chief over the phone.

  Hammer, and her six deputy chiefs, along with people from strategic planning and crime analysis, were discussing this latest commandment delivered on high. Wren Dozier, deputy chief of administration, was especially incensed. He was forty with delicate features and a soft mouth. Unmarried, he lived in a section of Fourth Ward where Tommy Axel and others had condominiums with dusky rose doors. Dozier had known he would never be promoted beyond captain. Then Hammer had come to town, a woman who rewarded people for good work. Dozier would take a bullet for her.

  "What a bunch of shit," Dozier said as he slowly and angrily twirled his coffee mug on the table.

  "So what about the other side of this, huh?" He met eyes all around.

  "What about the wives and kids back home? They're supposed to think the last thing Pop did was pay for a homosexual encounter out on some city street somewhere?"

  "There's no evidence to support such a thing," West said, and she was unhappy, too.

  "You can't say something like this." She stared at Hammer.

  The chief and Cahoon could agree on nothing, and she knew he was going to have her fired. It was all a matter of time, and would not be a first, either. At her level, it was all politics. The city got a new mayor, who brought along his own chief, which was what had happened to her in Atlanta, and would have in Chicago, had she not left. She really could not afford to get reshuffled again.

  Each city would get only smaller, until one fine day she ended up right where she'd started, in the economically languishing one-horse town of Little Rock.

  "Of course I will not get up in front of reporters and spread such crap," the chief said.

  "I won't."

  "Well, it can't hurt to remind the public that we are following leads and are on the case," said the public information officer.

  "What leads?" said West, who headed investigations, and should be privy to such things.

  "If we get any, we'll follow them," said Hammer.

  "That's the point."

  "You can't say that, either," worried the P
IO.

  "We have to leave out the ;/ we get any part of ..."

  Hammer impatiently cut her off.

  "Of course, of course. That goes without saying. I didn't mean literally. Enough of this. Let's move on. Here's what we're going to do. A press release." She regarded the PIO over reading glasses.

  "I want it on my desk by ten-thirty and out to the press by midafternoon so they can meet their deadlines. And I will see if I can get up with Cahoon, talk him down from this."

  This was very much like securing an audience with the Pope. Hammer's secretary and another assistant traded phone calls with Gaboon's people for most of the day. Finally, the meeting was barely arranged for late that afternoon, sometime between four-fifteen and five, depending when a gap appeared in the CEO's impossible schedule. Hammer had no choice but to show up at the early end of this interval and hope for the best.