The sensational courtroom drama of the caped crusaders sitting on the front row, while the joker of the judge dissed them, bristled over the airwaves. It was bounced from radio tower to radio tower throughout the Carolinas. Don Imus picked it up, embellishing as only he could, and Paul Harvey told the rest of the story. While Hammer was back and forth to SICU and aware of little else. West drove Charlotte's streets, looking for Brazil, who had not been seen since Thursday. It was Saturday morning now.
Packer was out with the dog again when West called. He got on the phone, irritable and perplexed. He had heard nothing from Brazil, either. In Davidson, Mrs. Brazil snored on the living-room couch, sleeping through Northside Baptist's televised service, as usual. The phone rang and rang, an overflowing ashtray and bottle of vodka on the coffee table. West was driving past the Knight-Ridder building, hanging up her portable phone in frustration.
"Goddamn it!" she blurted.
"Andy! Don't do this!"
Mrs. Brazil barely opened her eyes. She managed to sit up an inch, thinking she heard something. A choir in blue with gold stoles praised God. Maybe that was the noise. She reached for her glass, and it shook violently as she finished what she had started the night before. Mrs. Brazil fell back into old sour couch cushions, the magic potion heating blood, carrying her away to that place nowhere special. She drank again, realizing she was low on fuel with nothing open but the Quick Mart. After noon, she could get beer or wine, she supposed. Where was Andy? Had he been in and out while she was resting?
Night came, and West stayed home and did not want to be with anyone.
Her chest was tight and she could not sit long in any one spot or concentrate. Raines called several times, and when she heard his voice on the machine, she did not pick up. Brazil had vanished, it seemed, and West could focus on little else. This was crazy. She knew he wouldn't do anything stupid. But she was revisited by the horrors she had worked in her career.
She had seen the drug overdoses, the gunshot suicides not discovered until hunters returned to the woods. She conjured up images of cars covered by the clandestine waters of lakes and rivers until spring thaws or hard rains dislodged those who had chosen not to live.
Wft Even Hammer, with all her problems and preoccupations, had contacted West several times, voicing concern about their young, at-large volunteer. Hammer's weekend, so far, had been spent at SICU, and she had sent for her sons as their father settled deeper into the valley of shadows. Seth's eyes stared dully at his wife when she entered his room. He did not speak.
He did not think complete thoughts, but rather in shards of memories and feelings unexpressed that might have formed a meaningful composite had he been able to articulate them. But he was weak and sedated and intubated. During rare lucid flickers during days he could not measure, when he might have given Hammer enough to interpret his intentions, the pain pinned him to the bed. It always won. He would stare through tears at the only woman he had ever loved.
Seth was so tired. He was so sorry. He'd had time to think about it.
I'm sorry, Judy. I couldn't help any of it ever since you've known me.
Read my mind, Judy. I can't tell you. I'm so worn out. They keep cutting on me and I don't know what's left. I punished you because I couldn't reward you. I have figured that out too late. I wanted you to take care of me. Now look. Whose fault is it, after all? Not yours. I wish you would hold my hand.
Hammer sat in the same chair and watched her husband of twenty-six years. His hands were tethered to his sides so he would not pull out the tube in his trachea. He was on his side, his color deceivingly good and not due to anything he was doing for himself, but to oxygen, and she found this ironically typical. Seth had been drawn to her because of her strength and independence, then had hated her for the way she was. She wanted to take his hand, but he was so fragile and inflexible and trussed up by tubes and straps and dressings.
Hammer leaned close and rested her hand on his forearm as his dull eyes blinked and stared and looked sleepy and watery. She was certain that at a subconscious level he knew she was here. Beyond that, it was improbable much registered. Scalpels and bacteria had ravaged his buttocks and now were file ting and rotting his abdomen and thighs. The stench was awful, but Hammer did not really notice it anymore.
WA Mrs. Brazil barely opened her eyes. She managed to sit up an inch, thinking she heard something. A choir in blue with gold stoles praised God. Maybe that was the noise. She reached for her glass, and it shook violently as she finished what she had started the night before. Mrs. Brazil fell back into old sour couch cushions, the magic potion heating blood, carrying her away to that place nowhere special. She drank again, realizing she was low on fuel with nothing open but the Quick Mart. After noon, she could get beer or wine, she supposed.
Where was Andy? Had he been in and out while she was resting?
Night came, and West stayed home and did not want to be with anyone.
Her chest was tight and she could not sit long in any one spot or concentrate. Raines called several times, and when she heard his voice on the machine, she did not pick up. Brazil had vanished, it seemed, and West could focus on little else. This was crazy. She knew he wouldn't do anything stupid. But she was revisited by the horrors she had worked in her career.
She had seen the drug overdoses, the gunshot suicides not discovered until hunters returned to the woods. She conjured up images of cars covered by the clandestine waters of lakes and rivers until spring thaws or hard rains dislodged those who had chosen not to live.
tw Even Hammer, with all her problems and preoccupations, had contacted West several times, voicing concern about their young, at-large volunteer. Hammer's weekend, so far, had been spent at SICU, and she had sent for her sons as their father settled deeper into the valley of shadows. Seth's eyes stared dully at his wife when she entered his room. He did not speak.
He did not think complete thoughts, but rather in shards of memories and feelings unexpressed that might have formed a meaningful composite had he been able to articulate them. But he was weak and sedated and intubated. During rare lucid flickers during days he could not measure, when he might have given Hammer enough to interpret his intentions, the pain pinned him to the bed. It always won. He would stare through tears at the only woman he had ever loved.
Seth was so tired. He was so sorry. He'd had time to think about it.
I'm sorry, Judy. I couldn't help any of it ever since you've known me.
Read my mind, Judy. I can't tell you. I'm so worn out. They keep cutting on me and I don't know what's left. I punished you because I couldn't reward you. I have figured that out too late. I wanted you to take care of me. Now look. Whose fault is it, after all? Not yours. I wish you would hold my hand.
Hammer sat in the same chair and watched her husband of twenty-six years. His hands were tethered to his sides so he would not pull out the tube in his trachea. He was on his side, his color deceivingly good and not due to anything he was doing for himself, but to oxygen, and she found this ironically typical. Seth had been drawn to her because of her strength and independence, then had hated her for the way she was. She wanted to take his hand, but he was so fragile and inflexible and trussed up by tubes and straps and dressings.
Hammer leaned close and rested her hand on his forearm as his dull eyes blinked and stared and looked sleepy and watery. She was certain that at a subconscious level he knew she was here. Beyond that, it was improbable much registered. Scalpels and bacteria had ravaged his buttocks and now were file ting and rotting his abdomen and thighs. The stench was awful, but Hammer did not really notice it anymore.
"Seth," she said in her quiet, commanding voice.
"I know you may not hear me, but on the off chance you can, I want to tell you things.
Your sons are on their way here. They should arrive sometime late this afternoon and will come straight to the hospital. They are fine. I am hanging in there. All of us are sad and sick with worry about you. "
He blinked, staring. Seth did not move as he breathed oxygen and monitors registered his blood pressure and pulse.
"I have always cared about you," she went on.
"I have always loved you in my own way. But I realized long ago that you were attracted to me so you could change me. And I was drawn to you because I thought you'd stay the same. Rather silly, now that I look at it." She paused, a flutter around her heart as his eyes stared back at her.
"There are things I could have done better and differently. You must forgive me, and I must forgive myself. You must forgive me and you must forgive yourself."
He didn't disagree with this, and wished he could somehow indicate what he thought and felt. His body was like something unplugged, broken, out of batteries. He flipped switches in his brain and nothing happened. All this because he drank too much in bed, while playing with a gun to punish her.
"We go on from here," Chief Judy Hammer said, blinking back tears.
"Okay, Seth? We put this behind us and learn from it. We move ahead."
It was hard to talk.
"Why we got married isn't so important anymore.
We are friends, companions. We don't exist to procreate or perpetuate endless sexual fantasies for each other. We're here to help each other grow old and not feel alone. Friends. " Her hand gripped his arm.
Tears spilled from Seth's eyes. It was the only sign he gave, and his wife dissolved. Hammer cried for half an hour as his vital signs weakened. Group A strep oozed toxins around his soul, and did not give a damn about all those antibiotics and immunoglobulin and vitamins being pumped into its plump host. To his disease, he was a rump roast. He was carrion on life's highway.
Randy and Jude entered their father's SICU room at quarter of six, and did not see him conscious. It was not likely Seth knew they were by his bed, but knowing they were coming had been enough.
West cruised past the Cadillac Grill, Jazzbone's, and finally headed to Davidson, deciding that Brazil might be hiding out in his own house and not answering the phone. She pulled into the eroded driveway, and was crushed that only the ugly Cadillac was home.
West got out of her police car. Weeds grew between cracks in the brick walk she followed to the front door. She rang the bell several times, and knocked. Finally, she rapped hard and in frustration with her baton.
"Police!" she said loudly.
"Open up!"
This went on for a while until the door opened and Mrs. Brazil blearily peered out. She steadied herself by holding on to the door frame.
"Where's Andy?" West asked.
"Haven't seen him." Mrs. Brazil pressed her forehead with a hand, squinting, as if the world was bad for her health.
"At work, I guess," she muttered.
"No, he's not and hasn't been since Thursday," West said.
"You're sure he hasn't called or anything?"
"I've been sleeping."
"What about the answering machine? Have you checked?" West asked.
"He keeps his room locked." Mrs. Brazil wanted to return to her couch.
"Can't get in there."
West, who did not have her tool belt with her, could still get into most things. She took the knob off his door and was inside Brazil's room within minutes. Mrs. Brazil returned to the living room and settled her swollen, poisoned self on the couch. She did not want to go inside her son's room. He didn't want her there anyway, which was why she had been locked out for years, ever since he had accused her of taking money from the wallet he tucked under his socks. He had accused her of rummaging through his school papers. He had blamed her for knocking over his eighteen-and-under singles state championship tennis trophy, badly denting it and breaking off the little man.
The red light was flashing on the answering machine beside Brazil's neatly made twin bed with its simple green spread. West hit the play button, looking around at shelves of brass and silver trophies, at scholastic and creative awards that Brazil had never bothered to frame, but had thumbtacked to walls. A pair of leather Nike tennis shoes, worn out from toe-dragging, was abandoned under a chair, one upright, one on its side, and the sight of them pained West. For a moment, she felt distressed and upset. She imagined the way he looked at her with blue eyes that went on forever. She remembered his voice on the radio, and the quirky way he tested coffee with his tongue, which she had repeatedly told him wasn't a smart way to determine whether something was too hot. The first three calls on his machine were hang-ups.
"Yo," began the fourth one.
"It's Axel. Got tickets for Bruce Hornsby."
West hit a button.
"Andy? It's Packer. Call me."
She hit the button again and heard her own voice looking for him. She skipped ahead, landing on two more hang-ups. West opened the closet door, and her fear intensified when she found nothing inside. She, the cop, went into drawers and found them empty, as well. He had left his books and computer behind, and this only deepened her confusion and concern. These were what he loved the most. He would not abandon them unless he had embarked upon a self-destructive exodus, a fatalistic flight. West looked under the bed and lifted the mattress, exploring every inch of Brazil's private space. She did not find the pistol he had borrowed from her.
West drove around the city much of the night, mopping her face, popping Motrin, and turning the air conditioner on and off as she vacillated between hot and cold. On South College, she slowly passed street people, staring hard at each, as if she expected Brazil to have suddenly turned into one of them. She recognized Poison, the young hooker from Mungo's videotape, undulating along the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette and enjoying being watched. Poison followed the dark blue cop car with haunted, glassy eyes, and West looked back. West thought of Brazil, of his sad curiosity about bad people and what had happened to make them that way.
They make choices. West said that all the time, and it was true.
But she envied Brazil's freshness, his innocent clarity of vision. In truth, he saw life with a wisdom equal to her own, but his was born of vulnerability, and not of the experience that sometimes crowded West's compassion and cloaked her feelings in many hard layers. Her condition had been coming on for a long time, and most likely was irreversible.
West accepted that when one is exposed to the worst elements of life, there comes a point of no return. She had been beaten and shot, and she had killed.
She had crossed a line. She was a missionary, and the tender, warm contours of life were for others.
On Tryon Street, she was stopped at a traffic light near Jake's, another favorite spot for breakfast. Thelma could do anything with fried steak and biscuits, and the coffee was good. West stared ahead, several blocks away, just past First Union Bank with its giant painted hornet bursting out of one side of the building. She recognized the dark car's boxy shape and conical tail lights glowing red. She wasn't close enough to see the tag yet, and was going to do something about that.
The light turned green and West gunned the Ford's powerful engine until she was on the old BMW's bumper. Her heart thrilled as she recognized the plate number. She honked her horn and motioned, and Brazil kept going. West followed, honking again and longer, but clearly he had no intention of acknowledging her as she followed his shiny chrome bumper through downtown. Brazil knew she was there and didn't give a damn as he threw back another gulp from the tall-boy Budweiser he was holding between his legs. He broke the law right in front of Deputy Chief West, and knew she saw it, and he didn't give a shit.
"Goddamn son of a bitch," West exclaimed as she flipped on flashing lights.
Brazil sped up. West couldn't believe what was happening. How could he do anything this stupid?
"Oh for fuck's sake!" She hit the siren.
Brazil had been in pursuits, but he had never been the lead car.
Usually, he was back there sitting in the front seat with West. He drank another swallow of the beer he had bought at the 76 truck stop just off the Sunset East exit. He needed another one, and decided he might as well hit 1-77 off Trade Street, and cruise on back for a refill. He tossed his empty in the back seat, where several others clinked and rolled on the floor. His broken speedometer faithfully maintained its belief that the BMW was going thirty-two miles per hour.
In fact, he was going sixty-three when he turned onto the Interstate.
West doggedly pursued as her alarm and anger grew. Should she call for other cars, Brazil was ruined, his volunteer days ended, his real troubles only begun. Nor was there a guarantee that more cops would effect a stop. Brazil might decompensate further. He might feel desperate, and West knew how that might end. She had seen those final chapters before, all over the road, crumpled metal sharp like razors, glass, oil, blood, and black body bags on their way to the morgue.
His speed climbed to ninety miles per hour, and he maintained it, with her steadily behind him, lights and siren going full tilt. It penetrated his fog that she had not gotten on the radio for help. He would have heard it on his scanner, and backup cars surely would have shown up by now. He didn't know if this made him feel better or worse.
Maybe she didn't take him seriously. Nobody took him seriously, and nobody ever would again, because of Webb, because of the unfairness, the heartlessness of life and all in it.
Brazil shot onto the exit of Sunset Road East and began to slow. It was finished. In truth, he needed gas. This chase had its limits anyway. He might as well stop. Depression settled heavier, crushing him into his seat as he parked at the outer limits of the tarmac, far away from eighteen-wheelers and their bright-painted shiny cabs with all their chrome. He cut the engine and leaned back, shutting his eyes, as punishment approached. West wouldn't cut him any slack. She, in her uniform and gun,
was above all else a cop, and a hard, unkind one at that. It mattered not that they were partners and went shooting together and talked about things.
"Andy." She loudly rapped a knuckle on his window.
"Get out," she commanded this common lawbreaker.
He felt tired as he climbed out of a car that his father, Drew, had loved. Brazil took off his father's jacket and tossed it in the back seat. It was almost eighty degrees out, gnats and moths swarming in sodium vapor lights. Brazil was soaked with sweat. He tucked the keys in a pocket of the tight jeans that Mungo believed pointed to Brazil's criminal leanings. West shone her flashlight through the back window, illuminating aluminum tallboy beer cans on the mat in back. She counted eleven.
"Did you drink all these tonight?" she demanded to know as he shut his door.
"No."
"How many have you had tonight?"
"I didn't count." His eyes were hard and defiant on hers.
"Do you always elude police lights and sirens?" she said, furious.
"Or is tonight special for some reason?"
He opened the back door of his BMW, and angrily grabbed out a T-shirt.
He had no comment as he peeled off his wet polo shirt, and yanked on the dry one. West had never seen him half naked.
"I ought to lock you up," she said with not quite as much authority.
"Go ahead," he said.
W Randy and Jude Hammer had flown into the Charlotte- Douglas International Airport within forty-five minutes of each other, and their mother had met them downstairs in baggage. The three were somber and distracted as Hammer returned to Carolinas Medical Center without delay. She was so happy to see her boys, and old memories were reopened and exposed to air and light.
Randy and Jude had been born with their mother's handsome bones and straight white teeth. They had been blessed with her piercing eyes and frightening intelligence.
From Seth, they had received their four-cylinder engines that moved them slowly along, and with little direction or passing power or drive. Randy and Jude were happy enough simply to exist and go nowhere in a hurry. They drew gratification and joy from their dreams, and from regular customers in whatever restaurant employed them from one year to the next. They were happy with the understanding women who loved them anyway. Randy was proud of his bit parts in movies no one saw. Jude was thrilled to be in any jazz bar he and the guys got gigs in, and he played the drums with passion, whether the audience was ten people or eighty.
Oddly, it had never been their rocket-charged mother who could not live with the sons' something less than stellar accomplishments in life. It was Seth who was disgusted and ashamed. Their father had proved so totally lacking in understanding and patience, that the sons had moved far away. Of course. Hammer understood the psychological dynamics. Seth's hatred for his sons was his hatred for himself. It didn't take great acumen to deduce that much. But knowing the reason had changed nothing. It had required tragedy, a grave illness, to reunite this family.
"Mom, you holding up?" Jude was in back of Hammer's personal car. He was rubbing her shoulders as she drove.
"I'm trying."
She swallowed hard as Randy looked at her with "Well, I don't want to see him," said Randy, cradling flowers he had bought for his father in the airport.
"That's understandable," Hammer said, switching lanes, eyes in the mirrors. It had begun to rain.
"How are my babies?"
"Great," Jude said.
"Benji's learning to play sax."
"I can't wait to hear it. What about Owen?"
"Not quite old enough for instruments, but she's my boogie baby. Every time she hears music, she dances with Spring," Jude went on, referring to the child's mother.
"God, Mom, you'll die when you see it. It's hilarious!"
Spring was the artist Jude had lived with in Greenwich Village for eight years. Neither of Hammer's sons was married. Each had two children, and Hammer adored every fine golden hair on their small lovely heads. It was her bleeding, buried fear that they were growing up in distant cities with only infrequent contact with their rather legendary grandmother. Hammer did not want to be someone they might someday talk about but had never known.
"Smith and Fen wanted to come," said Randy, taking his mother's hand.
"It's gonna be all right. Mom." He felt another stab of hate for his father.
West didn't know what to do with her prisoner of the evening. Brazil was slumped down in the seat, arms crossed, his posture defiant and decidedly without remorse. He refused to look at her now, but stared out the windshield at bugs and bats swirling beneath lights. He watched truckers in pointed cowboy boots and jeans strolling out to their mighty steeds, and leaning against cabs, propping a foot on the running board, hands cupped around a cigarette, as they lit up like the Marlboro Man.
"You got your cigarettes?" Brazil asked West. She looked at him as if he had lost his mind.
"Forget it.
"I want one."
"Yeah, right. You've never smoked in your life, and I'm not going to be the reason you start," she said, and she wanted one, too.
"You couldn't possibly know whether I've ever smoked a cigarette or pot or anything else," he said in the strange tone of intoxication.
"Ha! You think you know so much. You don't know shit. Cops. And their dark, narrow alleyways for minds."
"Really? I thought you were a cop. Or have you quit that, too?"
He stared miserably out his side window.
West felt sorry for him, mad as she was. She wished she knew what was wrong, exactly.
"What the hell's gotten into you?" She tried another tactic, poking Brazil, this time not playfully.
He did not respond.
"Trying to ruin your life? What if some other cop spotted you first?"
She was no-nonsense.
"Got any idea how much trouble you'd be in?"
"I don't care," he said, and his voice caught.
"Yes, you do, goddamn it! Look at me!"
Brazil stared out, his eyes swimming as he dully watched bleary images of people in and out of the truck stop, men and women whose lives were different from his, and who would not understand what it was like to be him. They would look at all that he was and despise him for being privileged and spoiled, because they could not comprehend his reality.
Bubba felt precisely this, and just so happened to be parking his King Cab at the pumps. He spotted the BMW first, then the cop car with the enemy in it. Bubba could not believe his good fortune. He went in for Pabst Blue Ribbon and Red Man, and picked up the latest Playboy.
Brazil was struggling to control himself, and West could be hard but so long. She cared about him in a way that fit no easy definition, and this was partly why he unsettled and confused her so much. She enjoyed him as a talented, precocious recruit, someone she could mentor and get a kick out of watching as he learned. She did not have a brother and would have liked one exactly like him, someone young, smart, sensitive and kind. He was a friend, although she did not give him much of a chance. He was a pretty incredible-looking guy and didn't seem to notice.
"Andy," she quietly said, 'please tell me what happened. "
"Somehow he got in my computer basket, my files. Everything over the news channels before the paper came out. Scooped." His voice trembled, and he did not want West to see him like this.
West was stunned.
"He?" she asked.
"Who's he?"
"Webb." He could barely bring himself to say that name.
"Same piece of shit screwing your deputy chief!"
"What?" Now West was truly lost.
"Goode," he said.
"Everybody knows."
"I didn't." West wondered how she could have missed intelligence like that.
Brazil's heart was broken forever. West wasn't quite sure what to do as she mopped her face again.
Bubba stealthily made his way back to his truck, his thick face with its misshapen nose averted and shadowed by an Exxon baseball cap.
Climbing up into his cab with his purchases, he sat watching the cop car out his windshield. For a while, he nipped through his magazine, pausing at the really big stories. There were many of them, and he tried not to think about his wife or make comparisons as he calculated the best method of attack.
He had packed light tonight, just a Colt. 380 caliber seven-shot pistol in an ankle holster, which would not have been his first choice had he known he might have a standoff with the cops. It was a good thing he had aback up between the seats, a Quality Parts Shorty E-2 Carbine,223 caliber, with thirty-shot magazine, adjustable sights, chrome-lined barrel finished in manganese phosphate that didn't shine at night. For all practical purposes, this was an M-16, and with it, Bubba could riddle West's car Bonnie and Clyde style. He turned a page, and massaged more big ideas as he enjoyed the dark.
Vy West had never really been called upon to comfort a member of the male gender. Rarely was such a thing needed or requested, and having no precedent to follow, she used common sense. Brazil was hiding his face in his hands. She felt terribly sorry for him. What an unfortunate state of affairs.
"It's not that bad, really," she kept saying.
"Okay?" She patted his shoulder.
"We'll find a way out of this. Okay?"
She patted him again, and when this did not make a dent, she finally broke down.
"Come here," she said.
West put an arm around him, and pulled him close. Suddenly, he was in her lap, his arms clamped around her, as he held her like a child, which he was not. West's hot flashes seemed worse as she thought fast and hormones spiked. He nuzzled her, holding tight, and her insides woke up, startling her. Brazil was suffering from a similar response, and moved up her body, to her neck, until he found her mouth. For moments, at least, they were completely out of control and out of orbit. Their traumatized brains went into shock, allowing other instincts to have their way, for Mother Nature worked in this fashion to trick couples into procreating.
West and Brazil had not gotten to the point of worrying about what sort of birth control was best suited to their anatomies, needs, tastes, belief systems, personal choices, fantasies, secret pleasures, or faith in consumer reports. This way of communicating with each other was new, so they took the time to linger in places they had always wondered about. Then reality asserted itself with alacrity, and West suddenly sat up and looked out the windows of her police car, remembering she was on duty with a man in her lap.
"Andy," she said.
He was busy.
"Andy," she tried again.
"Andy, get up. You're on my… gun."
She tried to move him, with no energy or enthusiasm, not wanting him to go anywhere ever again. Hell was here and she was finished.
"Sit up," she said, wiping her face again. Her life was ruined.
"This is incest, pedophilia," she muttered, taking a deep breath as he went on with what he was doing.
"You're right, you're right," he mumbled with absolutely no conviction, as he explored the wonders of her existence in a way that was unknown and overwhelming to her.
It was difficult to predict exactly where this might have gone had Bubba not intervened. There was a Holiday Inn Express not too far away on 1-77, and it had an indoor pool, 42-channel cable TV, and free local calls and newspaper, and complimentary continental breakfasts.
Possibly, West and Brazil would have made their way to one of those rooms before morning, and gotten into even more trouble at a bargain price. They possibly would have slept together, and that was where West always drew the line. Sex was one thing, but she did not sleep with someone she was not in love with, meaning she slept with no living soul except Niles.
Again, such contemplations are moot when there is a sharp rap on the window and one peers into the barrel of a carbine rifle reminiscent of Bosnia, or perhaps Miami. West did not have her glasses on, but the redneck with his assault rifle outside her police car looked familiar in a fuzzy sort of way.
"Sit up very slowly," she said to Brazil.
"What for?" He wasn't ready yet.
"Trust me," she told him.
vft It was just as well that condensation had formed on the glass.
Bubba could not see exactly what was going on inside the dark blue Ford Crown Victoria, but he had a pretty good idea. This heightened his excitement, making him more certain that he was going to waste these two after doing something really, really bad to them first. If there were two things Bubba could not endure in life, they were queers making out, and straights making out. When he saw queers flirting,
touching, Bubba wanted to beat the shit out them and then leave them dying in a ditch. When he saw what he thought he was looking at right now inside this police car, he felt pretty much the same impulse.
People with money, importance, or a good sex life, and especially all three, made Bubba insane with righteous outrage. It was his calling, he was sure, to smite them in the name of America.
West was not as frightened by the rifle with thirty rounds as most people would have been, and her brain was powering up.
It seemed this was the creep from the Firing Line who had gotten arrested for exposing himself in Latta Park. She had a pretty good idea why she had found Super Glue in her shrubs, and she wished like hell that Brazil hadn't busted the guy's nose. All the same. West was ready for violence. When anyone pointed a gun at her, there was a true cause and effect that rapidly clicked into gear. Unhooking the mike, she placed it next to her hip. She keyed it with her right hand, locking out all radio traffic in her response area. Dispatchers, cops, reporters, and criminals with scanners, could hear nothing but her.
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.
"Mrs. Mauney," her plastic surgeon had told her.
"I don't think you're going to be happy with the results. The lines most troublesome are too deep."
He traced them on her face so gently. She relaxed, held hostage by tenderness. Mrs. Mauney was addicted to going to the doctor. She liked being touched, looked at, analyzed, scrutinized, and checked on after surgery or changes in her medication.
"Well," Mrs. Mauney had told her plastic surgeon.
"If that's what you recommend. And I suppose I am to assume you are referring to a face lift."
"Yes. And the eyes." He held up a mirror to show her.
The tissue above and below her eyes was beginning to droop and puff.
This was irreversible. No amount of cold water splashes, cucumbers or cutting down on alcohol or salt would make a significant difference, she was informed.
"What about my breasts?" she then had inquired.
Her plastic surgeon stepped back to look.
"What does your husband think?" he asked her.
"I think he'd like them bigger."
Her doctor laughed. Why didn't she state the obvious? I Unless a man was a pedophile or gay, he liked them bigger. His gay female patients felt the same way. They were just better sports about it, or pretended to be, if the one they loved didn't have much to offer.
"We can't do all of this at once," the plastic surgeon warned Mrs. Mauney.
"Implants and a face lift are two very different surgeries, and we'd need to space them apart, giving you plenty of time to heal."
"How far apart?" she worried.