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

She rolled down her window a few inches.

"Please don't shoot," she said loudly.

Bubba was surprised and pleased by her rapid submission.

"Unlock the doors," he ordered.

"Okay, okay," West continued in the same loud, tense voice.

"I'm going to unlock the doors real slowly. Please don't shoot. Please. We can work this out, all right? And if you start shooting here, everyone at the Seventy-six truck stop will hear, so what good will it do?"

Bubba had already thought about this, and she was right.

"The two of you are getting in my truck," he said.

"We're taking a ride."

"Why?" West kept on.

"What do you want from us? We have no problem with you."

"Oh yeah?" He gripped the carbine tighter, loving the way the bitch in uniform was groveling before him, the great Bubba.

"How about at the range the other night, when Queerbait there hit me?"

"You started it," Brazil said to him and all listening to channel two.

"We can work this out," West said again.

"Look. Let's just get right back on Sunset, maybe meet somewhere where we can talk about this? All these trucks coming in here, they're looking. You don't want witnesses, and this isn't a good place to be settling a dispute."

Bubba thought they had already gone over this point. What he planned to do was shoot them out near the lake, weigh their bodies down with cinder blocks, and dump them where no one would find them until mud turtles had eaten important features. He heard that happened. Crabs were bad on dead bodies, too, as were household pets, especially cats, if locked up with dead owners and not fed, and eventually having no choice.

As Bubba deliberated, eight Charlotte patrol cars with flashing lights were speeding along 1-77, now within minutes of the truck stop.

Shotguns were out and ready. The police helicopter was lifting from the helipad on top of the LEC, sniper shooters poised. The SWAT team had been deployed. The FBI had been called and agents were on standby, in the event hostage or terrorist negotiators, or the Child Abduction Serial Killer Unit, or the Hostage Rescue Team, might be what it took to save the day.

"Get out of the car," said Bubba.

In his mind, he was not in plaid shorts, white tube socks, Hush Puppies, and a Fruit of the Loom white T-shirt that had never been washed with bleach. In his mind, he was in military fatigues, with black grease under his eyes, hair a buzz cut, sweaty muscles bunching as he gripped his weapon and prepared to score two more points for his country and the guys at the hunt club. He was Bubba. He knew the perfect sliver of undeveloped lake property where he could do his duty, having his way with the woman first. Take that, he would think as he drove home his point. Now who's got the power, bitchf

Police cars turned onto Sunset East. They traveled single file, lights going, in a neat flashing line. Inside the truck stop, several truckers, who believed they had been stagecoach drivers in an earlier life, had lost interest in microwave nachos, cheeseburgers, and beer. They were looking out plate glass, watching what was going on at the edge of the parking lot as pulsing blue and red lights showed through trees.

"No way that's a rifle," Betsy was saying as she chewed on a Slim Jim.

"Oh yeah it is too," said Al.

"Then we should go on out and help."

"Help which one?" asked Tex.

All contemplated this long enough for police cars to get closer and the sound of chopper blades to be barely discernible.

"Looks to me like Bubba started it," decided Pete.

"Then we should go get him."

"You hear about the guns he's got?"

"Bubba ain't gonna shoot us."

The argument was moot. Bubba could feel dark armies closing around him, and he got desperate.

"Git out now or I'm going to let loose!" he screamed, racking a cartridge into a chamber that already had one.

"Don't shoot." West held up her hands, noting the double feed that had just jammed his gun.

"I'm opening the door, okay?"

"NOW!" Bubba pointed and yelled.

West positioned herself before the door as best she could, and planted a foot on it. She raised the handle, and kicked with all her strength, as eight police cars roared in, sirens ripping the violent night.

Bubba was slammed in his midsection, and flew back, landing on his back, the rifle skittering across tarmac. West was out and on him before her feet hit the ground. She did not wait for her backups. She didn't care a shit about the big, burly drivers boiling out of the truck stop to help. Brazil leapt out, too, and together they threw Bubba on his fat belly and cuffed him, desperate to beat him half to death, but resisting.

"You goddamn son-of-a-bitch piece of chicken-eating shit!" Brazil bellowed.

"Move and your head's all over with!" exclaimed West, her pistol pressed hard against the small of Bubba's thick neck.

The force hauled Bubba away, with no assistance from the truckers, who returned their attention to snacks for the road, and cigarettes. West and Brazil sat in silence for a moment inside her car.

"You always get me into trouble," she said, backing up.

"Hey!" he protested.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm taking you home."

"I don't live at home anymore."

"Since when?" She tried not to show her surprised pleasure.

"Day before yesterday. I got an apartment at Charlotte Woods, on Woodlawn."

"Then I'll take you there," she told him.

"My car's here," he reminded her.

"And you've been drinking all night," she said, buckling her shoulder harness.

"We'll come back and get your car when you're sober."

"I am sober," he said.

"Compared to what?" She drove.

"You won't remember any of this tomorrow."

He would remember every second of it for the rest of his tormented life. He yawned, and rubbed his temples.

"Yeah, you're probably right," he agreed, deciding it had meant nothing to her. It also meant nothing to him.

"Of course, I'm right." She smiled easily.

She could tell he was indifferent. He was one more typical asshole-user guy. What was she, anyway, but a middle-aged, out-of-shape woman who'd never been to a city bigger or more exciting than the one she had worked in since she had graduated from college?

He was just trying her on for size, taking his first test drive in an old, out-of-style car that he could afford to make mistakes in. She felt like slamming on the brakes and making him walk. When she pulled into the tidy apartment complex parking lot and waited for him to get out, she offered not a word of friendship or meaning.

Brazil stood outside her car, holding the door open, staring in at her.

"So, what time tomorrow?"

"Ten," she said, shortly.

He slammed the door, walking away fast, hurt and upset. Women were all the same. They were warm and wonderful one minute, and turned-on and all over him the next, which was followed by moody and distant and didn't mean what happened.

Brazil didn't understand how he and West could have had such a special moment at the truck stop, and now it was as if they weren't even on a first-name basis. She had used him, that's what. It was empty and cheap to her, and he was certain this was her modus operandi. She was older, powerful, and experienced, not to mention good-looking, with a body that caused him serious pain. West could toy with anyone she wanted.

Vy So could Blair Mauney III, his wife feared. Polly Mauney could not help but worry about what her husband might engage in when he traveled to Charlotte tomorrow, on US Air flight number 392, nonstop from Asheville, where the Mauneys lived in a lovely Tudor- style home in Biltmore Forest. Blair Mauney III was from old money, and had just come in from the club after a hard tennis match, a shower, a massage, and drinks with his pals. Mauney had come from many generations of banking, beginning with his grandfather, Blair Mauney, who had been a founding father of the American Trust Company.

Blair Mauney Ill's father, Blair Mauney, Jr. " had been a vice president when American Commercial merged with First National of Raleigh. A statewide banking system was off and running, soon followed by more mergers, and the eventual formation of North Carolina National Bank. This went on, and with the S amp;L crisis of the late 1980s, banks that had not been bought up were offered at fire sale prices. NCNB became the fourth-largest bank in the country, and was renamed US Bank

Blair Mauney

III knew the minutiae about his well-respected bank's remarkable history. He knew what the chairman, the president, the vice chairman and chief financial officer, and CEO got paid.

He was a senior vice president for US Bank in the Carolinas, and routinely was required to travel to Charlotte. This he rather much enjoyed, for it was good to get away from wife and teenaged children whenever one could, and only his colleagues in their lofty offices understood his pressures. Only comrades understood the fear lurking in every banker's heart that one day Cahoon, who tolerated nothing, would inform hard workers like Mauney that they were out of favor with the crown. Mauney dropped his tennis bag in his recently remodeled kitchen, and opened the door of the refrigerator, ready for another Amstel Light.

"Honey?" he called out, popping off the cap.

"Yes, dear." She briskly walked in.

"How was tennis?"

"We won."

"Good for you!" She beamed.

"Withers must have double-faulted twenty times." He swallowed.

"Foot-faulted like hell, too, but we didn't call those. What'd you guys eat?" He barely looked at Polly Mauney, his wife of twenty-two years.

"Spaghetti Bolognese, salad, seven grain bread." She went through his tennis bag, fishing out cold sweat- soaked, smelly shorts, shirt, socks, and jock strap, as she always had and would.

"Got any pasta left?"

"Plenty. I'd be delighted to fix you a plate, dear."

"Maybe later." He fell into stretches.

"I'm really getting tight. You don't think it's arthritis, do you?"

"Of course not. Would you like me to rub you down, sweetheart?" she said.

While he was drifting during his massage, she would bring up what her plastic surgeon had said when she had inquired about a laser treatment to get rid of fine lines on her face, and a copper laser treatment to eliminate the brown spot on her chin. Polly Mauney had been filled with terror when her plastic surgeon had made it clear that no light source could substitute for a scalpel. That was how bad she had gotten.