Hornet's Nest

  "He was nice," Brazil told her.

  "I guess in some ways he was old-fashioned, but that was the time he lived in." He picked at his fingernails, his head bent.

  "He was crazy about my mother. But she's always been spoiled. She grew up that way. I've always thought the biggest reason she couldn't deal with his death is she lost the person who doted on her the most and took care of her."

  "You don't think she loved him?" West was curious, and she was very aware of how close they were sitting on his bed. She was glad the door was partially open, the knob off.

  "My mother doesn't know how to love anybody, including herself."

  Brazil was watching her. She could feel his eyes like heat. Thunder and lightning played war outside the win dow as rain came down hard.

  She looked at him, too, and wondered if life would ruin his sweetness as he got older. She felt sure it would, and got up from the bed.

  "What you've got to do is call the phone company first thing in the morning," she advised him.

  "Tell them you want Caller ID. This little box won't do you a bit of good until they give you that service, okay?"

  He watched her, saying nothing at first. Then it occurred to him, "Is it expensive?"

  "You can manage it. Who's been hitting on you at work?" she wanted to know as she moved closer to the door.

  "Axel, a couple women back in composing." He shrugged.

  "I don't know, don't notice." He shrugged again.

  "Anybody able to get into your computer basket?" she said as more thunder cracked.

  "I don't see how."

  West looked at his computer.

  "I'm going to move that to my apartment. I didn't have room in my car the other day," he volunteered.

  "Maybe you could write your next story on it," she said.

  Brazil continued to watch her. He lay back on the bed, hands behind his head.

  "Wouldn't do any good," he said.

  "Still has to go into the newspaper computer one way or another."

  "What if you changed your password?" West asked, slipping her hands in her pockets and leaning against the wall.

  "We already did."

  Lightning flashed, rain and wind ripping through trees.

  "We?" West said.

  W Brenda Bond was sitting at her keyboard in her room of mainframes, working on Sunday because what else did she have to do? There was little life held for her. She wore prescription glasses in expensive black Modo frames, because Tommy Axel looked good in his. She imitated him in other ways, as well, since the music critic looked like Matt Dillon, and was clearly cool. System Analyst Bond was going through miles of printouts, and was not pleased by whatever she was finding.

  The general architecture of the newspaper's computerized mail system simply had to be reconfigured. What she wanted was plain and not so much to ask, and she was tired of trying to convince Panesa through presentations that the publisher obviously never even bothered to look at. Bond's basic argument was this: When a user sent a mail message for the UA to relay to the local MTA, the MTA then routed the message to the next MTA, which then routed it to the next MTA, and the next, until the message reached the final MTA on the destination system. With a Magic Marker, Brenda Bond had vividly depicted this in Figure 5. 1, with colorful dashed lines and arrows showing possible communication paths between MTAs and UAs.

  Bond's ruminations crystallized and she stopped what she was doing.

  She was startled and confused as Deputy Chief Virginia West, in uniform, suddenly walked in at quarter past three. West could see that Bond was a cowardly little worm, middle-aged, and exactly fitting the profile of people who set fires, sent bombs by mail, tampered with products like painkillers and eye drops and harassed others with hate notes and anonymous ugly calls over the telephone. West pulled up a chair, and turned it backwards, straddling it, arms resting on the back of it, like a guy.

  "You know it's interesting," West thoughtfully began.

  "Most people assume if they use a cellular phone, the calls can't be traced. What they don't realize is calls come back to a tower. These towers cover sectors that are only a mile square."

  Bond was beginning to tremble, the bluff working.

  "A certain young male reporter has been getting obscene phone calls," West went on, 'and guess what? " She paused pointedly.

  "They come back to the same sector you live in, Ms Bond."

  "I, I, I ..." Bond stammered, visions of jail dancing through her head.

  "But it's breaking into his computer basket that bothers me." West's voice got harder, police leather creaking as she shifted in the chair.

  "Now that's a crime. Leaking his stories to Channel Three. Imagine! It would be like someone stealing your programs and selling them to the competition."

  "No!" Bond blurted.

  "No! I never sold anything!"

  "So you gave stories to Webb."

  "No!" Bond panicked.

  "I never talked to him. I was just helping the police."

  For an instant, West was quiet. She wasn't expecting this.

  "What police?" she asked.

  "Deputy Chief Goode told me to." Bond confessed all, out of fright.

  "She said it was part of an undercover departmental operation."

  The chair scraped as West got up. It was when she called Hammer's home that she learned the terrible news about Seth and felt sick.

  "Oh my God," West said to Jude, who had answered the phone.

  "I had no idea. I don't want to bother her. Is there anything at all I can do ?"

  Hammer took the phone away from her caretaking son.

  "Jude, it's all right," she said to him, patting his shoulder.

  "Virginia?" she said.

  W Goode was watching a videotape of True Lies, and relaxing on the couch with her gas fire lit and the air conditioning on high, waiting for Webb to call. He had promised to sneak by before the six o'clock news, and she was getting anxious. If he didn't show up within minutes, there wouldn't be time to do or say a thing. When the phone rang, she snatched it up as if all in life depended on whoever it was.

  Goode was not expecting Chief Hammer. Goode was not expecting Hammer to somberly tell her that Seth had died, and she, the boss, would see Goode in Goode's office at four-thirty sharp. Goode jumped off

  the couch, energized and euphoric. This could mean but one thing.

  Hammer was taking a long leave to get her pathetic affairs in order, and she was naming Goode acting chief.

  ^ Hammer had quite another scenario in mind for Deputy Chief Jeannie Goode. Although those around Hammer did not entirely understand how she could think of work at a time like this, in fact, nothing could have been more therapeutic for Hammer. Her mind cleared. She woke up, anger a blue flame burning through her veins. She felt she could vaporize someone just by looking at him, as she dressed in gray polished cotton slacks and blazer, a gray silk blouse, and pearls. She worked on her hair, and sprayed a light mist of Hermes on her wrists.

  Chief Judy Hammer went out to her midnight-blue police car, and flicked on wipers to slough out leaves knocked down by rain. She backed out of her drive, and turned onto Pine Street as sun broke through moiling clouds. A lump formed in her throat, and she swallowed hard. Tears burned her eyes, and she blinked and took a deep breath, as she saw her street and the world around it, for the first time, without him. Nothing looked different, but it was. Oh, it was. She took deep breaths as she drove, and her heart felt bruised while her blood roared for righteous revenge. Goode could not have picked a worse time to pull such a stunt and get caught, of this Hammer was certain.

  ^/A-?

  W Goode was filled with confidence and self-importance, and she didn't see any point in putting on her uniform or a suit that might have suggested respect and consideration for her troubled leader. Instead, Goode drove back down town, dressed in the short khaki skirt and T-shirt she had been in all day, waiting for Webb, who was busy working in the yard, his wife keepin
g a close eye on him these days. Goode parked her Miata in her assigned spot, and was more arrogant than usual to all she met as she took the elevator to the third floor, where her fine office was just around the corner from the suite that soon would be hers.

  She shut her door and began her usual routine of dialing Webb's number and hanging up if someone other than the handsome news reporter answered. Goode enjoyed a feature on her police line that scrambled signals and rendered Caller ID useless. She was hanging up on Webb's wife when Goode's door suddenly flew open. Chief Hammer walked in, about to live up to her name. Goode's first reaction was how sharp her boss looked in gray. Goode's second and final reaction was that Hammer did not seem to be in mourning as she strode to the desk and snatched up Goode's brass nameplate.

  "You're fired," Hammer said in a voice not to be questioned

  "I want your badge and gun. Your desk gets cleared out now. Let me help you start."

  Hammer threw the nameplate into the trash. She turned without another glance and walked out. Hammer was fury traveling down the corridors of her department, yet she was forthcoming in her nods and salutations to troops she passed. Word was already out on the radio about her husband, and members of the Charlotte Police Department were overwhelmed with sorrow and newfound respect for their leader.

  Throughout it all, she was here, damn it, and she wasn't going to let them down. When a sergeant saw Goode sneaking out to her car with her office crammed in bags and boxes, there was rejoicing throughout Adam, Baker, Charlie, and David response areas, and investigations and support. Cops high-fived and low-tenned in the parking deck and the roll call room. The duty captain lit a rum crook cigar in his nonsmoking office.

  w Brazil got the good word by pager as he was out in the parking lot changing the oil in his car. He went inside and dialed West's home number.

  "Bond won't be bothering you anymore." West tried to be cool, but she was intensely proud of herself.

  "Goode won't be getting your stories from the little shit and leaking them to Webb."

  Brazil was shocked and ecstatic.

  "No way!"

  "Oh yeah. It's done. Hammer's fired Goode and Bond is in a state of paralysis."

  "Bond was making those calls?" To Brazil, this seemed incongruous.

  "Yup."

  He was oddly disappointed that it wasn't someone more dynamic and attractive thinking such thoughts about him.

  West sensed this and told him, "You aren't looking at this the right way."

  "Looking at what?" He played dumb.

  "Andy, I see this kind of thing all the time, doesn't matter whether it's a man or woman doing it, except that women aren't likely to expose themselves to you, so at least you can be grateful for that," she explained.

  "This sort of thing is not about sex or being attracted to someone in the normal sense of things. It's all about control and power, about degrading. A form of violence, really."

  "I know that," he said.

  He still wished his verbal assailant had been someone halfway pretty, and he couldn't help but wonder what it was about him that prompted people like the creep at the car wash, and now Brenda Bond, to select him. Why? Did he send out signals that made them think they could take advantage of him? He bet that no one dared do such a thing to West or Hammer.

  "Gotta go," West said, leaving Brazil disappointed and irritable.

  He got back to changing his oil, in a hurry to finish now. He had an idea.

  tv West had one, too. She called Raines, and this definitely was unexpected and abnormal. West never called him or anyone, except Brazil, as all around her knew and accepted as fact. Raines had the night off and was looking forward to watching a just-released sports bloopers video he had acquired over the weekend. West was thinking about pizza. They decided they probably could collaborate on this quite nicely, and he headed over to her house in his rebuilt, fully loaded, black on black '73 Corvette Stingray, with headers, tinted glass top, and window sticker. West usually could hear him coming.

  "W Brazil thought he should come up with a way of showing his appreciation to West for resolving his life's crisis. He also imagined the two of them celebrating, and why not? This was a big day for both of them. She had rid him of Bond and Webb, and she and the entire police department were free of Goode. Brazil sped to the nearest Hop-In and picked up the nicest bottle of wine he could find in the glass cooler, a Dry Creek Vineyard 1992 Fume Blanc, for nine dollars and forty-nine cents.

  She would be surprised and pleased, and maybe he could pet Niles for a while. Maybe Brazil could spend a little more time inside West's house and learn something more about her. Maybe she would invite him to watch TV with her, or listen to music, the two of them sipping wine in her living room, talking, and telling stories about their early years and their dreams.

  Brazil drove toward Dilworth, overflowing with happiness that his problems had cleared up, and he had a friend like her. He thought about his mother, wondering how she was doing, and was pleased that she didn't seem to get him down so much anymore. He didn't seem to feel that her choices were because of what he did or did not do for her.

  t
  "What the hell's gotten into you?" he absently said.

  He tried to look around her as he twirled her hair with the creative enthusiasm of Niles kneading the rug.

  "Yes! Yes! What a dunk! Rip that backboard down! Oh shit! Ahhhh! Look at that! Christ! Right into the pole. Oh, man." Raines sat back down.

  The next five minutes was ice hockey. The goalie got a stick between his legs. A puck ricocheted off two face masks and hit a referee in the mouth. Raines was going wild. There was nothing he liked better than sports and injuries, especially if the two went together. With each tragedy, he imagined rushing in with his medical kit and stretcher, Raines to the rescue.

  West was unbuttoning her blouse. She threw herself on top of him, devouring his mouth, and desperate. Raines put down his pizza.

  "Hormones again?" He had never seen her this frustrated.

  "I don't know." She worked on more buttons and hooks.

  tw They seriously made out on the couch while Niles remained in his sanctuary above the sink. He was not a fan of Tire Man, as Niles called Raines, after noticing some radial ad in the newspaper lining his litter box. Tire Man was offensively loud and never warm and appreciative of Niles. Several times. Tire Man had launched Niles off the couch, and this would have been one of those times, should Niles have tested his luck, which he did not.

  He looked adoringly at his distant, sad King. I'll help you. Fear not.

  My owner knows about laundry money. She is very powerful and will protect you and all Usbeeceeans. Niles twitched an ear, detecting another engine sound, this one a pleasant, deep purring that he recognized. It was Piano Man, the nice one who played his fingers over Niles's spine and ribs, and right behind his ears, until Niles fell over from sheer pleasure, rattling window panes. Niles got up and stretched, excited that Piano Man seemed to be slowing behind the house, where he had parked in the past, on the few times he had stopped by for one reason or another.

  }/^j W West and Raines were not in a good space when the doorbell rang. By now, Raines was completely focused on what he was doing, and was within minutes, at most, of victory. It was most inconvenient and inconsiderate for someone to dare and drop by, unannounced. Raines experienced an intense wave of homicidal rage as he withdrew to his end of the couch, sweating and out of breath.

  "Goddamn son of a bitch," he furiously blurted.

  "I'll get it," West said.
br />   She got up, pulling, zipping, and buttoning, as she walked and combed her fingers through her hair. She was a mess, and as the bell rang again, she hoped it wasn't Mrs. Grabman from two doors down. Mrs. Grabman was a nice enough old woman, but she tended to drop by every weekend West was home, usually offering vegetables from her garden as an excuse to meddle and complain about someone suspicious in the neighborhood. West already had a long row of ripening tomatoes on the counter, and two drawers full of okra, green beans, squash, and zucchini in the refrigerator.

  Safety-conscious West, who had never gotten around to installing a burglar alarm, yelled through the door, "Who is it?"