Hornet's Nest, стр. 67

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.

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-looking." She smiled.

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

"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.