Hornet's Nest - Cornwell Patricia (читать книги онлайн бесплатно полностью .txt) 📗

"Tell me what she did," Raines choked, wiping his eyes.

West motioned to the waitress for another round.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Oh come on, Virginia. Tell me, tell me. You got to." He straightened up a bit.

"Tell me what Hammer did when she saw the tape."

"No," West said.

Hammer hadn't done much, in truth. She'd sat in her usual spot at the head of the table, staring without comment at the twenty-four-inch Mitsubishi. She'd watched the entire tape, all forty-two minutes of it, every bit of Brazil's long promenade and indistinct conversations with the city's unsavory downtown folks. West and Hammer had watched Brazil point, shrug, jot, scan, and squat to tie shoelaces twice, before finally returning to the All Right to retrieve his BMW. After a pregnant silence, Chief Hammer had taken off her glasses and voiced her opinion.

"What was this?" she had said to her deputy chief in charge of investigations.

"I don't know what to tell you," West had said, feeling dark hate for Mungo.

"And this all began the day we had lunch at the Presto and you saw a man with a banana in his pocket." Hammer had wanted to make sure she was clear on the facts of the case.

"I really don't think it's fair to link the two."

Hammer had gotten up, but West knew not to move.

"Of course it's fair," Hammer had said, hands in her pockets again.

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you, Virginia." She'd begun pacing.

"How could Mungo not recognize Andy Brazil? He's out there morning, noon and night, either for the Observer or us."

"Mungo is deep cover," West had explained.

"He generally avoids any place police or the press might be. I don't think he reads much, either."

Hammer had nodded. She could understand this, actually, and she was raw. Hammer was not ready or willing to react violently to the embarrassments and honest mis takes of others, whether it was Horgess, Mungo, or even West, who really had made no error, except perhaps in her choice of Mungo to do anything in life.

"Do you want me to destroy it?" West had asked as Hammer popped the tape out of the VCR.

"I mean, I'd prefer not to. Some of that footage includes known prostitutes. Sugar, Double Fries, Butterfinger, Shooter, Lickety Split, Lemon Drop, Poison."

"All of them were in there?" Hammer was perplexed as she had opened the conference room door.

"They blend in. You have to know where to look."

"We'll hang on to it," Hammer had decided. Raines was laughing so hard. West was furious with herself for telling him the rest of the story. He had his head on the table, hands covering his face. She wiped her forehead with a napkin, perspiring and flushed, as if she were in the tropics. The band would be cranking up soon, and Jack Straw's was getting crowded.

She noticed Tommy Axel walk in, recognizing him from his picture in the paper. He had another guy with him, both dressed a lot like Raines, showing off. Why was it most of the gay guys were so good-looking? West didn't think it was fair. Not only were they guys in a guy's world, with all the benefits, but their DNA had somehow managed to appropriate the good stuff women had, too, like gracefulness and beauty.

Of course, gay guys got some of the bad stuff, too. Sneakiness, game playing, compulsive grooming, vanity, and shopping. Maybe it had nothing to do with gender, after all. West considered. Maybe there was no such thing as gender. Maybe biologically people were just vehicles, like cars. She'd heard that overseas the steering wheels were on one side, while here they were on the other. Different genders? Maybe not. Maybe just different cars, the behavior of all determined by the spirit in the driver's seat.

"I've had enough," West hissed at Raines.

She drained her Sierra Nevada and started on another one. She might just tie one on tonight. Raines was driving.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He took another deep breath and was spent.

"You look like you don't feel too good," he said with one of his concerned expressions.

"It is a little hot in here."

West mopped her face again, her clothes getting damp, but not in the way Raines might have hoped. She was feeling the heaviness in her lower nature, the goddess of fertility reminding West with more volatility every month that time was running out. West's gynecologist had warned her gravely and repeatedly that troubles would begin about her age. She, Dr. Alice Bourgeois, spoke of punishment when there were no children and none on the way. Never underestimate biology, Dr. Bourgeois always said.

West and Raines placed an order for cheeseburgers, fries, and another round of drinks. She wiped her face again and was getting cold. She wasn't sure she could eat anything else, not another fried pickle. She watched the band setting up, her attention wandering to people at other tables. She was quiet for a long time, overhearing a couple not so far away speaking a foreign language, maybe German. West was getting maudlin.

"You seem preoccupied," said Raines the intuitive.

"Remember when those German tourists got whacked in Miami? What it did to the tourist industry?" she said.

Raines, as a man, took this personally. He had seen the bodies in the Black Widow slayings, or at least several of them. It was unthinkable to have a gun shoved against your head, your brains blown out. There was no telling what indignities those guys had been subjected to before the fact, and how did anyone really know that their pants hadn't been pulled down first, that maybe they hadn't been raped and then spray-painted? If the killer had been wearing a condom, who was going to know? West had said just the right thing to put Raines in a mood. Now he was totally pissed, too.

"So this is about the tourist industry," he said, leaning across the table and gesturing.

"Forget guys being jerked out of their cars, brains blown all over, balls spray-painted with graffiti!"

West wiped her face again and dug Advil out of her butt pack.

"It's not graffiti. It's a symbol."

Raines crossed his legs, feeling endangered. The waitress set down their dinner. He grabbed the ketchup bottle as he folded a french fry between his lips.

"It makes me sick," he said.

"It should make everybody sick." West could not look at food.

"Who do you think's doing it?" He dipped a bouquet of french fries into a red puddle.

"Maybe a shim." She was soaked in cold sweat. Her hair was wet around her face and neck, as if she'd just been in a foot pursuit.

"Huh?" Raines glanced up at her, biting into his dripping burger.

"She-him. Woman one night, man the next, depending on the mood," she said.

"Oh. Like you." He reached for the dish of mayonnaise.

"Goddamn it." West shoved her plate away.

"I must be about to start."

Raines stopped chewing, rolling his eyes. He knew what that meant. The first twangs on electric guitars shattered the din, and sticks beat-beat and beat-beat-beat. Cymbals crashed and crashed as Axel snaked his foot around Jon's ankle and thought about Brazil for the millionth time this day.

W Packer was thinking about Brazil, too, as the editor earned Dufus out the back door, like a small, squirming football, headed for the same Japanese maple. Dufus had to go in the same place, get used to it, and be able to find his smells. It didn't matter that the tree was in the hinterlands and that it had started to rain. Packer dropped his wife's wall-eyed dog in the same bald spot next to the same gnarled root. Packer was out of breath, watching Dufus curtsey to the Queen.

"Why don't you lift your leg like a man," Packer muttered as bulging eyes watched him, speckled pink nose twitching.

"Sissy," Packer said.

The worn-out editor's pager had vibrated earlier this evening while he was mowing the grass on his vacation- day. It had been Panesa, calling to tell him that the mayor had admitted that even he wouldn't drive downtown at night right now! Jesus living God, this was unbelievable.

Surely the paper was well on its way to winning a Pulitzer for a series that made a difference in society, one that changed history.

Why the hell did this wait to happen when Packer was out of the newsroom? He'd been there thirty-two years. The moment he decided to put life in perspective, ward off that heart attack perched outside the window of his existence, Andy Brazil showed up.

Now it was run-through-the-yard time to get Dufus's bowels wound up that they might unleash what, in Packer's mind, should have been a humiliation to any creature, except maybe a small domestic cat. Dufus would not chase Packer, or come, and this was not new. The editor sat on the back porch steps while his wife's dog chewed mulch until it was time to drop his niggling gifts. Packer sighed and got up. He walked back into the air-conditioned house, Dufus on his heels.

"There's my good little boy," Mildred cooed as the dog hopped and licked until she picked him up and rocked him in loving arms.

"Don't mention it," Packer said, falling into his recliner chair, flicking on television.

He was still sitting there hours later, eating chicken nuggets, and dipping them in Roger's barbecue sauce. He loudly dug into a big bag of chips, swiping them in sauce, too. After several Coronas with lime, he had forgotten about the window and the heart attack perched beyond it. Mildred was watching Home for the Holidays, again, because she thought it was their life. Go figure. In the first place, Packer did not play the organ and she did not wear a wig or smoke, and they did not live in a small town. Their daughter had never gotten fired, at least not from an art gallery. That was one place she had never worked, probably because she was color blind. Nor was their son gay that Packer knew of or cared to know of, and any intimations to the contrary by his wife went into the Bermuda Triangle of their marital news hole. The editor didn't listen and the story didn't run. The End.

Packer pointed the remote control with authority. The volume went up, the ubiquitous Webb staring at the camera in a way that Packer knew meant trouble.

"Shit," Packer said, hitting a lever on his chair, cranking himself up.

"In a rare, if not shocking, moment of candor today," Webb said with his sincere expression, "Mayor Charles Search said that because of the Black Widow serial killings, hotel and restaurant business has dropped more than twenty percent, and he himself would not feel safe driving downtown at night. Mayor Search implored Charlotte's citizens to help police catch a killer who has ruthlessly murdered five…"