“I’m a reporter for the Charlotte Observer” Brazil was quick and proud to say.
“I’m doing a story on a woman who played on your boys’ team a long time ago.”
Wagon might be deleting a lot of files these days, but he’d never forget Virginia West. Shelby High School had no women’s team back in those days, and she was too good to ignore.
What hell that had caused. At first, the state wouldn’t hear of it.
That kept her off the team her freshman year while Wagon battled the system on her behalf. Her sophomore year, she played third racket, and had the hardest flat serve for a girl that Wagon had ever seen, and a slice backhand that could go through hot bread and leave it standing.
All the boys had crushes on her and tried to hit her with the ball whenever they could.
She never lost a match, not singles or doubles, in the three years she played tennis for Coach Wagon. There had been several stories about her in the Shelby Star, and the Observer when she blazed through spring matches, and the regionals. She had reached the quarter finals of the state championship before Hap Core slaughtered her, thus ending her career as a male athlete. Brazil found the articles on microfilm after he got back to the newspaper. He rolled through more stories, like someone possessed, as he made copious notes.
W The pervert was also possessed, but beyond that distinction, there were no similarities between her profile and Brazil’s. The pervert was writhing in her chair in her dim den in her small house where she lived alone in Dilworth, not far from where Virginia West lived. The two were not acquainted. The pervert was in a La-Z-Boy brown vinyl recliner, footrest up, pants down, as she breathed hard. Information about her was not forthcoming, but the FBI would have profiled her as a white female between the ages of forty and seventy, since the female sex drive wasn’t known to develop transmission problems as early as the male’s. Indeed, profilers had noted that women got into overdrive about the same time they ran out of estrogen.
This was why Special Agent Gil Bird at Quantico, busy working on the Charlotte serial murders, would have pinned the female pervert’s age at a reasonable forty or fifty, her biological clock a phantom-pain of time, ticking only in her imagination. Her periods were simply that, an end of sentence, a coda. It wasn’t that she really wanted Brazil.
She just thought she did. Her lust was far more complicated. Bird would have offered a possible scenario that might have explained it, had he been officially invited into the case.
Special Agent Bird would have accurately hypothesized that it was payback time. All those years the pervert was dissed, and not nominated for the homecoming court, and not worshiped, and not wanted.
As a young woman, the pervert had worked in the cafeteria line at Gardner Webb, where basketball players, especially Ernie Presley, always grunted and pointed, as if she were as low on the food chain as the greasy scrambled eggs and grits they desired. Andy Brazil would have treated her in precisely the same fashion. She did not have to know him to prove her case. At this stage in her frustrated life, she preferred to screw him in her own time, and in her own way.
Blinds were drawn, the television turned low and playing an old Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn movie. The pervert was breathless as she whispered on the phone, drawing it out, enunciating slowly.
“Saw you driving. Shifting gears. Up and down in overdrive…”
Her power over him was the most exciting thing she’d ever known in her nothing life. She could not contain it as she thought of his humiliation. She controlled him as completely as a fish in a tank, or a dog, or a car. Her heart was on a drum roll as she heard his confused silence over the line, and Hepburn walked into the bedroom, dressed in a satin robe. What incredible bones; The pervert hated her, and would have switched channels, but she did not have a free hand.