Hornet's Nest, стр. 14

Brazil was looking up articles, too, in the Observer file room. It was amazing how little had been written about Virginia West over the years. He scrolled through small stories, and black and white photographs taken back in a day when her hair was long and pinned up under her police hat. She had been the first female selected as rookie of the year, and this impressed him quite a lot.

The librarian was impressed, too. She peeked at Andy Brazil about every other second, her heart stumbling whenever he walked into her domain, which was fairly regularly. She'd never seen anyone research stories quite the way this young man did. It didn't matter what he was writing about, Brazil had to look something up or ask questions. It was especially gratifying when he spoke to her directly as she sat primly at her neat maple desk. She had been a public-school librarian before taking this job after her husband had retired and was underfoot all the time. Her name was Mrs. Booth. She was well past sixty and believed that Brazil was the most beautiful human being she had ever met. He was nice and gentle, and always thanked her.

It shocked Brazil to read that West had been shot. He could not believe it. He scrolled faster, desperate for more details, but the lamebrain who had covered the incident had completely missed an opportunity for a huge lA story. Damn. The most that Brazil could pin down was that eleven years ago, when West was the first female homicide detective, she had gotten a tip from a snitch.

A subject West had been looking for was at the Presto Grill. By the time West and other police arrived, the subject was gone. Apparently, West answered another call in the same neighborhood, and the same subject was involved, only now he was really fried and irritable. He started firing the minute West rolled up. She killed him, but not before he winged her. Brazil was dying to ask her about it, in detail, but forget it. All he knew was that she took a bullet in the left shoulder, a flesh wound, a graze, really. Was the bullet as hot as he had heard? Did it cook surrounding tissue? How much did it hurt? Did she fall, or bravely finish the gunfight, not even realize until she held out a hand and it had blood on it, like in the movies?

The next day Brazil drove to Shelby. Because of his tennis prowess, he had heard of this small, genteel town in Cleveland County, where Buck Archer, friend of Bobby Riggs, who had lost to Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes, was from. Shelby High School was a well-kept brick complex, and home of the Lions, where students with money got ready for college in big cities like Chapel Hill and Raleigh. All around was farmland and cow towns with names like Boiling Springs and Lattimore. Brazil's BMW rumbled around to the tennis courts, where the boys' team was holding a summer camp. Kids were out with hoppers of chartreuse balls. They were whacking serves, overhead smashes, cross-court shots, in pain and sweating.

The coach was prowling the fence, clipboard in hand, dressed in long white Wimbledon pants, a white shirt, a shapeless hat, zinc oxide on his nose, and all of it out of fashion and old.

"Move your feet. Move! Move!" he called out to a boy who would never move anything fast.

"I don't want to see those feet stop!"

The boy was overweight, and wore glasses. He was squinting and hurting, and Brazil remembered the suffering inflicted by coaches and drills. But Brazil had always been good at everything he tried, and he felt pity for this kid and wished he could work with him for an hour, and maybe cheer him up a little.

"Good shot," Brazil called out when the boy managed to scoop one up and push it over the net.

The boy, who did not play in the top six positions, missed the next shot, as he searched for his fan behind the green windscreen covering the fence. The coach stopped his tour, watching this blond, well-built young man heading toward him. He was probably looking for a job, but the coach didn't need anyone else for this camp, which was the most worthless crop in recent memory.

"Coach Wagon?" Brazil asked.

"Uh huh?" The old coach was curious, wondering how this stranger knew his name. Oh God. Maybe the kid had played on the team some years back and Wagon couldn't remember. That was happening more and more these days, and it had nothing to do with Johnnie Walker Red.

"I'm a reporter for the Charlotte Observer" Brazil was quick and proud to say.

"I'm doing a story on a woman who played on your boys' team a long time ago."

Wagon might be deleting a lot of files these days, but he'd never forget Virginia West. Shelby High School had no women's team back in those days, and she was too good to ignore.

What hell that had caused. At first, the state wouldn't hear of it.

That kept her off the team her freshman year while Wagon battled the system on her behalf. Her sophomore year, she played third racket, and had the hardest flat serve for a girl that Wagon had ever seen, and a slice backhand that could go through hot bread and leave it standing.

All the boys had crushes on her and tried to hit her with the ball whenever they could.

She never lost a match, not singles or doubles, in the three years she played tennis for Coach Wagon. There had been several stories about her in the Shelby Star, and the Observer when she blazed through spring matches, and the regionals. She had reached the quarter finals of the state championship before Hap Core slaughtered her, thus ending her career as a male athlete. Brazil found the articles on microfilm after he got back to the newspaper. He rolled through more stories, like someone possessed, as he made copious notes.

W The pervert was also possessed, but beyond that distinction, there were no similarities between her profile and Brazil's. The pervert was writhing in her chair in her dim den in her small house where she lived alone in Dilworth, not far from where Virginia West lived. The two were not acquainted. The pervert was in a La-Z-Boy brown vinyl recliner, footrest up, pants down, as she breathed hard. Information about her was not forthcoming, but the FBI would have profiled her as a white female between the ages of forty and seventy, since the female sex drive wasn't known to develop transmission problems as early as the male's. Indeed, profilers had noted that women got into overdrive about the same time they ran out of estrogen.

This was why Special Agent Gil Bird at Quantico, busy working on the Charlotte serial murders, would have pinned the female pervert's age at a reasonable forty or fifty, her biological clock a phantom-pain of time, ticking only in her imagination. Her periods were simply that, an end of sentence, a coda. It wasn't that she really wanted Brazil.

She just thought she did. Her lust was far more complicated. Bird would have offered a possible scenario that might have explained it, had he been officially invited into the case.

Special Agent Bird would have accurately hypothesized that it was payback time. All those years the pervert was dissed, and not nominated for the homecoming court, and not worshiped, and not wanted.

As a young woman, the pervert had worked in the cafeteria line at Gardner Webb, where basketball players, especially Ernie Presley, always grunted and pointed, as if she were as low on the food chain as the greasy scrambled eggs and grits they desired. Andy Brazil would have treated her in precisely the same fashion. She did not have to know him to prove her case. At this stage in her frustrated life, she preferred to screw him in her own time, and in her own way.

Blinds were drawn, the television turned low and playing an old Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn movie. The pervert was breathless as she whispered on the phone, drawing it out, enunciating slowly.

"Saw you driving. Shifting gears. Up and down in overdrive…"

Her power over him was the most exciting thing she'd ever known in her nothing life. She could not contain it as she thought of his humiliation. She controlled him as completely as a fish in a tank, or a dog, or a car. Her heart was on a drum roll as she heard his confused silence over the line, and Hepburn walked into the bedroom, dressed in a satin robe. What incredible bones; The pervert hated her, and would have switched channels, but she did not have a free hand.

"Screw yourself," Brazil's voice rewarded her with its presence.

"You have my permission."

The pervert didn't need permission.

W Packer scrolled through Brazil's latest and most masterful article.

"This is great stuff!" Packer was ecstatic about every word.

"One hell of a job! Wild, Wild West. Love it!"

Packer got up from a chair pulled close. He tucked in his white shirt, his hand jumping around as if his pants were a puppet. His tie was red and black striped and not the least bit elegant.

"Ship it out. This runs one-A," Packer said.

"When?" Brazil was thrilled, because he had never been on the front page.

"Tomorrow," Packer let him know.

X? That night, Brazil worked his first traffic accident. He was in uniform, with clipboard in hand, the appropriate forms clamped in.

This was a lot more complicated than the average person may have supposed, even if the damage was non reportable or less than five hundred dollars. It appeared that a woman in a Toyota Camry was traveling on Queens Road, while a man in a Honda Prelude was also traveling on Queens Road, in this unfortunate section of the city where two roads of the same name intersected with each other.

The pervert was nearby in her Aerovan, stalking and listening to the police scanner and Brazil's voice on it. She was working her own accident about to happen as this young police boy pointed and gestured, all in dark blue and shiny steel. She watched her prey as she rolled past flares sparking orange on pavement in the dark of night, crossing Queens as she traveled west on Queens.

X Streets having the same name could be attributed to rapid hormonal growth, and was similar to naming a child after oneself no matter the gender or practicality, or whether the first three were christened the same, as in George Foreman and his own. Queens and Queens, Providence and Providence, Sardis and Sardis, the list went on, and Myra Purvis had never gotten it straight. She knew that if she turned off Queens Road West onto Queens Road East and then followed Queens Road to the Orthopedic Hospital, she could visit her brother.

She was doing this in her Camry when she got to that stretch she hated so much, somewhere near Edgehill Park, where it was dark, because the day was no longer helpful. Mrs. Purvis was the manager of the La Pez Mexican restaurant on Fenton Place. She had just gotten off work this busy Saturday night and was tired. None of it was her fault when Queens ran into Queens and the gray, hard-to-see Prelude ran into her.