Kids were out with hoppers of chartreuse balls. They were whacking serves, overhead
smashes, cross-court shots, in pain and sweating.
The coach was prowling the fence, clipboard in hand, dressed in long white Wimbledon pants, a white shirt, a shapeless hat, zinc oxide on his nose, and all of it out of fashion and
old.
“Move your feet. Move! Move!” he called out to a boy who would never move
anything fast.
“I don’t want to see those feet stop!”
The boy was overweight, and wore glasses. He was squinting and hurting, and Brazil
remembered the suffering inflicted by coaches and drills. But Brazil had always been
good at everything he tried, and he felt pity for this kid and wished he could work with
him for an hour, and maybe cheer him up a little.
“Good shot,” Brazil called out when the boy managed to scoop one up and push it over
the net.
The boy, who did not play in the top six positions, missed the next shot, as he searched
for his fan behind the green windscreen covering the fence. The coach stopped his tour,
watching this blond, well-built young man heading toward him. He was probably
looking for a job, but the coach didn’t need anyone else for this camp, which was the
most worthless crop in recent memory.
“Coach Wagon?” Brazil asked.
“Uh huh?” The old coach was curious, wondering how this stranger knew his name. Oh
God. Maybe the kid had played on the team some years back and Wagon couldn’t
remember. That was happening more and more these days, and it had nothing to do with
Johnnie Walker Red.
“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.