Hornet's Nest (27 page)

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 biological 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 sh’im.” 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.”

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.

Packer was thinking about Brazil, too, as the editor carried 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 . . .”

Packer was already dialing the phone, bag of potato chips falling out of his lap, scattering over the rug.

“. . . an individual the FBI has profiled as a sexual psychopath, a serial killer who will not stop . . .” Webb went on.

“Are you listening to this?” Packer exclaimed when Panesa picked up his phone.

“I’m taping it,” he said in a homicidal tone Packer rarely heard. “This has got to stop.”

B
razil never watched television because his mother monopolized the one at home, and he did not frequent Charlotte’s many sports bars, where there were big screens in every corner. He knew nothing about what had been on the eleven o’clock news this Thursday night, and no one paged him or bothered to find him. All was peaceful as he ran on the Davidson track in complete darkness, close to midnight, no sound but the rhythm of his breathing and falling feet. As pleased as he was about his amazing nonstop journalistic home runs, he could not say that he was happy.

Other people were getting a lot of the same stuff. Webb was, for example, and no matter how informative or compassionate the story, the bottom line was the scoop. Brazil, of late, was scooping no one, if the truth be told. It just seemed he was because what he wrote routinely ended up on the front page and changed public opinion and seemed to rattle a lot of cages. Brazil would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his days writing pieces that did just this and nothing else. Prizes didn’t matter much, really. But he was realistic. If he didn’t beat everybody to the quote, the revelation, or the crime scene, one of these days he might not get paid anymore to write.

At which point he could become a cop, he supposed, and
this turned his mind to West again, sailing him off firm ground into a dark, tangled, painful thicket that hurt and frustrated him the more he tried to fight his way out of it. He ran harder, bending around goal posts, passing empty bleachers filled with the memories of games, mostly lost, during fall nights when he had usually been studying or walking the frosty campus beneath stars he tried to describe as no one ever had. He would tuck his chin into his hooded sweatshirt, heading to the library or a hidden corner of the student lounge, to work on a term paper or poetry, not wanting couples he passed to notice him.

Even if West hadn’t wanted to play tennis, there was no need for her to have been rude about it unless she hated him.
Forget it
. Her voice saying those heartless words followed him as he ran harder, lungs beginning to burn, catching fire around the edges as his legs reached farther and sweat left a trail of scattered spots. He tried to outrun the voice and the person who owned it, anger flinging him through the night and past the fifty yard line. Legs wobbled as he slowed. Brazil fell into cool, damp grass. He lay on his back, panting, heart thundering, and he had a premonition that he was going to die.

Virginia West felt like it. She lay in bed, lights out, a hot water bottle held close as contractions prepared her for birth for no good cause. Ever since she was fourteen, she’d gone into labor once a month, some episodes worse than others. On occasion, the pain was debilitating enough to send her home from school, a date, or work, lying about what was wrong as she gulped Midol. After a sullen Raines, the paramedic, had dropped her off, she’d taken four Motrin, a little too late. Hadn’t Dr. Bourgeois told her to take two hundred milligrams of ibuprofen four times a day
three days before
trouble started so it could be prevented,
and don’t cut yourself or get a nosebleed, Virginia
? West, as usual, had gotten too busy to bother with anything so mundane, so trivial, as her health. Niles recognized the cyclical emergency and responded, curling around his owner’s neck and head, keeping
her warm. He was pleased she wasn’t going anywhere and he didn’t have to share their bed.

Chief Judy Hammer was having morbid premonitions and was bedside, too, in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) of Carolinas Medical Center, where Seth’s condition was serious and on the wrong side of getting better. Hammer was in shock, dressed in gown, mask, and gloves, sitting by his bed. High dose penicillin, clindamycin, and immunic globulin dripped into her husband’s veins in an effort to counter necrotizing fasciitis (NF). It was a rare infection associated with systemic infection and a fulminant course, according to Hammer’s personal observations and the notes she had been taking every time the infectious disease doctor spoke.

This was all somehow related to everyday group A betahemolytic streptococci and
Staphylococcus aureus
, which Hammer could not comprehend beyond figuring out that the microscopic bastards were eating her husband alive. Meanwhile, Seth’s oxygen content in his bloodstream had dropped below normal, and the medical center was in a panic. Personnel had made Seth, the V.I.P., a top priority, and specialists were in and out. Hammer could not keep them straight. She could not think as she stared at her husband’s slack, feverish face and smelled his death through the mask she wore.

During the Civil War, surgeons would have diagnosed her husband’s condition as simple gangrene. No fancy Latin term changed the reality of flesh turning black and green at a wound site, with limbs and eventually the person rotting alive. The only treatment for NF was antibiotics, surgery, and amputation. About a third of the three to five hundred people who got the disease in the U.S. annually died, or approximately thirty percent, according to what Hammer had found through searches on America Online.

Nothing she had discovered about the disease had consoled or given hope. The deadly bacteria burst upon the scene in recent years when it killed eleven people in Great Britain. KILLER BUG ATE MY FACE, screamed the
Daily Star
.
DEADLY FLESH-EATING BACTERIA, other tabloids proclaimed. It had killed Jim Henson of the Muppets, Hammer had discovered on the Internet, and was believed to be a virulent form of a strep that had caused scarlet fever in the 1800s. In some cases, NF spread too rapidly for antibiotics to work, and it was feared that Seth would be the latest statistic. His V.I.P. status had ensured aggressive treatment since admission, so the problem lay not in the hospital, but in his general condition.

Seth had poor nutrition. He was clinically depressed. He had a history of heavy drinking and arteriosclerotic vascular disease. He had received a trauma resulting in an open wound and a foreign body that could not be removed. Seth, according to Dr. Cabel, was immunosuppressed and was losing approximately a pound of flesh per hour. This did not include layers lost by surgeons fileting to the next level of healthy, bleeding tissue, which soon after turned black and green, despite all efforts and prayers. Hammer was motionless in her chair, reliving every word she’d ever spoken to her husband, every deed that had been angry or unkind. None of his flaws would come to her now.

This was all her fault. It had been her .38 special, her Remington hollowpoint +P cartridge. It had been her order that he root under the sheets for that gun and hand it over to her
this minute
. It had been Hammer giving him the ultimatum about his weight, and she halfway believed that what he suffered from now was no coincidence but a functional illness. Seth was melting before her eyes, an inch smaller every hour, slabs lighter after every surgery. This was not the weight-loss plan she would have wished for him. He was punishing her for all those years he had lived in her shadow, the wind beneath her wings, her inspiration and biggest fan.

“Chief Hammer?”

She realized someone was speaking, and her eyes focused on Dr. Cabel in surgical greens, cap, mask, gloves, and shoe covers. He was no older than Jude. God help me, Hammer thought with a deep, quiet breath as, once again, she got out of her chair.

“If you’ll give me a minute with him,” Dr. Cabel said to her.

Hammer went out into the antiseptic, bright corridor. She watched nurses, doctors, family members, and friends alight on different rooms where more suffering lay tethered to narrow hydraulic beds and machines monitored the life force as it struggled on. She stood, in a daze, until Dr. Cabel returned, slipping Seth’s chart in the envelope on the back of the door.

“How is he?” Hammer asked the same question, pulling her mask down around her neck.

Dr. Cabel left his mask on. He took no chances and didn’t even shower at home anymore without lathering from head to toe with antibacterial soap. He shut Seth’s door, eyes troubled. Hammer was shrewd and not interested in further euphemisms, convolutions, and evasions. If this young infectious disease doctor thought he could hide the truth from her, she was about to add to his education.

“We’re going to take him back into surgery,” Seth’s doctor said. “Which is fairly typical at this point.”

“And which point is this point, exactly?” Hammer wanted to know.

“Day two of progressive streptococcal gangrene and necrotizing fasciitis,” he replied. “The necrosis is visibly beyond the margins of the original debridement.”

While Dr. Cabel respected Chief Hammer, he did not want to deal with her. He cast about for a nurse. Shit. All were busy elsewhere.

“I need to get started,” he said.

“Not so fast,” Hammer let him know. “Exactly what are you going to do in surgery?”

“We’ll know better when we go in.”

“How about hazarding a guess.” She might slap him.

“Generally, at this stage, the wound is debrided again down to bleeding, healthy tissue. We’ll probably irrigate with saline and pack the wound with Nu-Gauze. We’ll continue with hyperbaric oxygen therapy twice a day, and I recommend total parenteral nutrition.”

“Multivitamins then,” she said.

“Well, yes.” He was mildly surprised by her ability to connect the dots.

Hammer had been buying vitamins for years and failed to see anything special about the suggestion. Dr. Cabel started to walk off. She snatched him back by his greens.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” she said. “Seth has had strep throat a dozen times in his life. Why has it turned into this now? Aside from his lousy immune system.”

“It’s not exactly the same thing as the strep that causes a sore throat.”

“Clearly.”

This lady was not going to let him go. Dr. Cabel felt sorry for Seth in a different way, now. Living with this woman would wear out anybody. Imagine asking her to fetch coffee or take your word for it? When all else failed, Dr. Cabel switched to the language that only his super race understood.

“It’s quite possible strep has acquired new genetic information, picked up genes. This can happen through infection by a bacteriophage,” Dr. Cabel informed her.

“What’s a bacteriophage?” She wouldn’t give up.

“Uh, a virus that can incorporate its DNA into a bacterial host,” he said. “The hypothesis is, that some M1 strain of group A strep in approximately forty percent of recent invasive infections seems to have acquired genetic material from a phage. This is according to WHO.”

“Who?”
Hammer frowned.

“Exactly.” He looked at his watch long enough to give her a broad hint.

“Who the hell is
who?”
She would get an answer.

“World Health Organization. They have a strep reference laboratory. The long and short of it, this may all be connected to a gene that encodes a toxin called superantigen which is widely believed to be connected to toxic-shock syndrome.”

“My husband has the same thing you get from a tampon?” Hammer raised her voice.

“A distant cousin.”

“And since when do you amputate for that?” she demanded as passersby glanced curiously at the two people in greens arguing in the spotless, well-lit corridor.

“No, no.” He had to get away from this woman, so he, the English major, threw Shakespeare at her. “Ma’am, with what your husband’s got, surgery remains the most effective treatment. ‘Be bloody, bold and resolute,’” he quoted.
“King Lear.”

“Macbeth,”
Hammer, who loved the theater, said as Dr. Cabel hurried off.

She lingered long enough to see her husband wheeled back to the O.R., then Hammer went home. By nine o’clock she had collapsed in bed, too exhausted and distressed to remain in a conscious state effectively. She and her deputy chief, in their respective homes, one with a pet, one without, slept fitfully the rest of the night.

Brazil tossed and yanked sheets this way and that, over his feet, under them, back over them again, on his side, on his belly. Finally, he lay on his back, staring up into the dark, listening to the TV murmur through the wall as his mother lay passed out on the couch again.

He kept thinking about what West had said. He should move out, find an apartment. Yet whenever he followed this scary, exciting path a few steps further, he always ran slam into the same scarecrow that sent him fleeing the other way. What was he supposed to do about his mother? What would happen to her if he left her alone? He supposed he could still bring by groceries, stop in to check on her, fix things, and run errands. Brazil worried as he thrashed in bed, listening to the eerie strains of what must have been some three
A
.
M
. half-a-star horror flick. He thought about West and felt depressed again.

Brazil decided that he did not like West in the least. She was not the kind, enlightened woman that Hammer was. One day, Brazil would find someone like Hammer. They would enjoy and respect each other, and play tennis, run, work out with weights, cook, fix the cars, go to the beach, read good fiction and poetry, and do everything together, except when they needed space. What did West know about any of this? She built fences. She cut her own grass with a rider mower
because she was too lazy to use a push one, and her yard was barely half an acre. She had disgusting eating habits. She smoked. Brazil turned over again, hanging his arms off either side of the mattress, miserable.