Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  The drone lifted off from her hand and buzzed away, and Nick released her wrist. Kathryn continued to stare at her bare hand, astonished at its vulnerability and at her simultaneous absence of fear. A moment later the bee returned and landed once again on her open palm.

  “I guess he does like me.” She grinned broadly.

  “By the way,” Nick said, bracing himself to hoist the fourth super, “you might be interested to know that I did a little interview of my own last night.”

  “Who did you punch this time?”

  “I was at the Glam-O-Rama Coin Laundry, and who do you suppose I happened to run across? Jenny McIntyre.”

  “That is a coincidence.”

  “I think she’s in the market for a new relationship,” Nick said, looking directly at Kathryn. “Things don’t seem to be going well with her current boyfriend.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s very odd. She says he seems distant, distracted—as if his mind is always someplace else. He takes her to public places, but doesn’t care to spend time with her alone—as though he were only interested in the appearance of a relationship. And she said, ‘He never touches me.’ That’s very strange with such an attractive woman, don’t you think?”

  “So you find her attractive?” Kathryn said casually. “Do you think you’ll be seeing her again?”

  “I doubt it. She already told me everything I need to know.”

  “And what did you need to know?”

  “Why a man who loves you so single-mindedly would dabble in another relationship.”

  Nick waited, but Kathryn said nothing. She stood silently, arms folded, looking as indifferent as possible.

  “Well?” he said. “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  Nick smiled. “Have you ever seen a reduviid? It’s commonly known as an assassin bug. It carries a long, curved beak underneath its abdomen like a sheathed sword. It stalks its victim with incredible patience. Sometimes it will run after its prey and then suddenly stop, almost as if it’s lost interest. And that’s what the victim thinks, too, until the assassin bug slowly raises that beak and—”

  “I’m getting fed up with all these bug analogies,” she broke in. “We’re talking about my species, remember?”

  “The sheriff is not interested in Jenny McIntyre,” Nick said. “He’s interested in you. Jenny knows it—and according to her, so does everybody else in town—except, apparently, you. My bet is that he was pressing in on you, and he sensed you were getting nervous—why is your business—so he decided to take the pressure off by acting disinterested. And what better way than by appearing to have another relationship?”

  “That’s what you believe,” she said crossly.

  “That’s what you believe too—if you’ll open your eyes.”

  “Why are you so suspicious of Peter?”

  Nick shrugged. “He smells funny.”

  “He what?”

  He turned and looked at her. “Did you know that a male lasiocampid moth can detect a female from more than two miles away? Two miles. Do you know how he does that? By smell, Mrs. Guilford. Insects navigate the world by smell. Only a few of the so-called ‘higher life forms’ are limited to sight and reason.”

  “So you have no real reason? This is nothing more than a hunch?”

  Nick smiled at her. “Maybe we’re not so different after all.”

  By now, the hive was reduced to a single super covered by a thin sheet of metal perforated with small holes.

  “Are you having fun playing with your blocks?” she said. “One more and you’ll have a brand-new hive over there.”

  “We’re not moving this last one,” he said, lifting away the sheet of metal. “We’re looking for something.”

  “What?”

  “Her royal highness, the queen.”

  Kathryn looked again at the tiny piece of fuzz that wandered harmlessly over her hand. “What does the queen look like?”

  “She’s huge,” he said ominously. “Didn’t you see Alien?”

  “How do you know she’s in there?”

  “Because of this,” he said, leaning the sheet of metal against the base of the hive. “This is a queen excluder. The small holes allow the workers to pass between the supers, but keep the larger queen below in the brood chamber. That restricts her egg laying to the lower level and reserves the top ones for honey. That makes it a lot easier for the keeper.”

  He removed the outermost frame and set it aside, then began to work his way toward the center, examining each frame carefully and moving it toward the outside.

  “These are the brood frames. The comb is exactly the same, but instead of honey each cell contains a single egg. Take a look.” He held one of the frames up for Kathryn. Some of the cells appeared empty, some contained a single plump, white larva, and still others were capped off with wax.

  “This is the queen’s domain. Her job is to wander over the comb looking for open cells. When she finds one she inserts her abdomen and deposits an egg. All we have to do is search these frames carefully, and … bingo.”

  There in the center of the frame was one bee that was clearly different. She was larger overall than the surrounding workers and her egg-producing abdomen was twice as long as any other.

  “Watch her for a minute,” he whispered. “She even moves differently.”

  The queen wandered quickly from cell to cell, searching determinedly for the empty nursery she would require in the next few seconds. Her wings, long unused, were folded back along the top of her thorax. Nick reached down and gently pinched her wings together, plucking her from the comb.

  “Can she sting?” Kathryn shivered.

  “As many times as she wants. Her stinger is straight, not barbed like the workers. But she only uses it to kill other queens. We can’t have anyone usurping the throne, now, can we?”

  Nick picked up a piece of screen wire rolled into the shape of a tube about the size of a roll of quarters. A wooden plug sealed each end, and in one plug was a hole no wider than a pencil. He started the queen into the hole headfirst. She seized the edges with her forelegs and willingly proceeded inside. Nick sealed the hole behind her with a rubber cork, then held the contraption and its prisoner aloft by a string attached to each end like a kind of living necklace.

  “No thanks.” Kathryn shook her head. “It’s not exactly my style.”

  “It is a necklace,” Nick said, “but it’s not for you. It’s for me.”

  He turned to a small cage about the size of a thick briefcase. It was framed in thin cypress, but the sides were covered with fine screen wire. In the top panel was a hole a baseball could just fit through.

  “This is a bee crate. This is how bees are shipped—you can order them by mail, in case you’re interested. Now, the first thing we do is put in the queen.” He dangled the queen’s wire cage into the bee crate until she hung suspended, halfway to the bottom, like an ousted ruler condemned to the gibbet. He secured the shoestring with a thumbtack, then inserted into the hole a large funnel rolled from galvanized sheet metal. From the stack of relocated supers he selected a frame thick with workers and held it above the funnel. With one well-practiced flip of the wrist he shook off a fist-sized clump of bees into the funnel and down into the throne room below.

  “Will they just stay there?” Kathryn asked.

  “They’ll stay. That’s where the queen is. The queen constantly emits a pheromone from her mandible. It’s sort of like a powerful perfume that tells the workers, ‘I’m the queen. You’re safe here. This is where you belong.’ For a honeybee, the hive is not home; the queen is home. Wherever the queen is, that’s where they belong—and they’ll follow her anywhere.”

  Nick continued to fill the bee crate with the inhabitants of a second frame, then a third, continuing on until several thousand honeybees huddled around the queen in her tiny cage and wandered over the wire sides of the box. Satisfied with the size of his collection,
Nick removed the funnel and sealed off the hole with a simple wooden plug. Then he picked up a plastic spray bottle and began to wet the screened faces of the box with a clear, viscid liquid.

  “Sugar syrup,” he said. “Bees love any source of sugar. For the next day or so the bees will engorge themselves on it. It makes them fat and happy, and when they’re fat and happy they forget about little things—like stinging you.”

  “I still don’t get it. What exactly are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to make a bee beard, of course.”

  Bee beard. Kathryn remembered hearing the phrase only once before, at the age of nine, when her mother took her to the state fair in Raleigh. She had accidentally wandered into a demonstration by the North Carolina Beekeepers Association where a man had purposely covered his face and neck with thousands of wriggling bees—and she had to be carried screaming from the pavilion.

  “You’re going to make a bee beard,” she corrected him. “Look, Nick, I know what you’re trying to do. And I appreciate it, really I do—”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “And I’ve already got the message: Insects are your friend. I believe you, okay?”

  “No, you don’t. Mrs. Guilford, you don’t just have a fear of insects, you have a pathological fear of insects. The most effective form of therapy for that kind of phobia is immersion therapy.”

  “You want me to immerse myself in bees? You’re out of your mind.”

  “No, I’m going to immerse myself in bees. I just want you to watch—and maybe help a little. It’s a remarkable experience. It’s a therapeutic experience.”

  Kathryn looked at him doubtfully. “How exactly does this bee beard work?”

  “You’ve probably guessed most of it. We’ve removed the queen from the hive and placed her in a kind of collar. We’ve gathered two or three pounds of workers around her and we’ll sedate them for a day or two on sugar water. The bees have been removed from the hive so they have no honey to protect or brood to defend. Their instincts will tell them to stick to the queen. So in a couple of days I’ll pull out the queen and I’ll tie the collar around my neck—and then all the bees come to Mama.”

  “And you won’t get stung? Not at all?”

  “Maybe once or twice, but only by accident. You have to be careful, of course.”

  She looked down again at the single bee that still clung tenaciously to her hand. She slowly rotated her wrist this way and that. Each time the bee simply crawled to the upper surface and remained.

  “I think I’ve made a friend.”

  Nick reached out and gently took Kathryn by the wrist again.

  “I wouldn’t get too attached,” he said. “You’ve been holding a female.”

  Before Kathryn could jerk her hand away Nick clamped a paralyzing grip on her arm.

  “Or is it? Maybe it’s a male, too, just like the first bee. Or maybe I was lying to you all the time—maybe there never was a male. Maybe they’re impossible to tell apart. Or maybe this is the queen, and she can sting you as many times as she wants. Think about it, Mrs. Guilford. A moment ago you thought you had made a new friend, and now you feel that old bogeyman crawling up your spine again. What changed? Your enemy is not out here,” he said, pointing to her hand. “It’s in your head.”

  He gave her wrist a quick flip and the bee soared away, back to what remained of the hive.

  Nick began to reassemble the hive from the nearby stack of supers, while Kathryn stood rubbing the white imprints of his fingers from her wrist. He picked up the lid and began to reposition it atop the hive. At the last moment the lid slipped from his fingers and dropped, crushing two workers lingering on the edge. The faint smell of smashed bananas floated up to Kathryn, triggering an ancient, haunting memory.

  “We’d better wrap things up,” Nick said. “That alarm pheromone will make them more aggressive, and I’m a wee bit underdressed for that party.”

  He collected the smoker, the funnel, and the other tools of their morning’s work, then headed back toward the lab.

  “Well?” Kathryn called after him. “Aren’t you going to tell me what it was? Was it a drone or a worker? A male or a female?”

  Nick stopped. “What do you think it was?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think it was,” she said irritably. “What was it?”

  “On the contrary, Mrs. Guilford. It makes no difference what it was; it only matters what you perceived it to be.”

  Kathryn watched as he turned and walked away.

  “Meet you at the car,” he called back. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

  We need gas.” Nick nodded toward his fuel gauge. He draped his left arm out the window in a halfhearted signal as Exit 83 approached.

  “How can you tell?” Kathryn shouted above the hot afternoon wind that rumpled past the open windows. She pointed to the bottom of the fuel gauge where the red needle indicator had long ago fallen and lain to rest.

  “It’s an intuitive thing for me. You live with someone long enough, you get to know their needs.”

  “You two make a great couple.”

  He turned off I-95 just north of Richmond, Virginia, and steered the smoking Dodge into the Parham Road Texaco. Kathryn was glad for the break. They had been on the road for over three hours now, and she felt half-beaten by the combination of pummeling wind, stifling heat, and bone-jarring vibration. The thirty-five-year-old Dodge had no suspension left at all and handled each dip and pothole like a bowling ball on a stairway. The wind constantly whipped wisps of auburn hair across her face where it clung to her lipstick. She took a tissue from her purse and wiped her face clean, then pulled her hair back in a thick ponytail.

  The car shuddered several times and lurched to a stop at the pump, followed by an angry complaint of hisses, clicks, and groans. Nick turned and looked at Kathryn.

  “You expect me to pump the gas?” she asked.

  “Of course not.” He tossed aside his seat belt. “I expect you to pay. ‘Plus expenses,’ remember?”

  Kathryn enthusiastically slammed the door and flashed a look of mock remorse back at Nick before heading toward the service center. She set a Mountain Dew and a convenience pack of Extra-Strength Tylenol on the counter.

  “Pump six,” she muttered to the cashier, who glanced out the window and slid a quart of 10W-40 and a paper funnel across the counter.

  “It’s on the house,” he said with a note of genuine sympathy in his voice.

  “How far to D.C.?” she asked, tearing through the foil of her Tylenol.

  “An hour and a half—that’s just to the Beltway. Where you headed?”

  “Walter Reed Hospital.” She rolled the capsules to the back of her tongue. “On the north side—almost to Maryland.”

  “Then add forty-five minutes. Double if you hit the traffic.”

  As they pulled back onto I-95 North, Kathryn slid a yellow foilwrapped sausage biscuit across the seat to Nick. He peeled back the foil with his teeth and took a bite.

  “What’s this?”

  “Plus expenses. Eat hearty.”

  Nick reached down by his feet and took a chocolate chip cookie from a plastic bag. “They’re from Teddy,” he said through a mouthful. “He made them for you.”

  “How am I enjoying them?”

  The Dodge slowly accelerated to cruising speed like a jet approaching the sound barrier. It vibrated and shook until Kathryn was sure the frame would come apart beneath her—but then it somehow settled into a relatively smooth and even ride.

  “She just has to hit her stride,” Nick said, and Kathryn wondered silently why unreliable equipment is always referred to in the female gender.

  They had passed most of the journey in silence, neither one wanting to expend the energy to shout above the constant roar of the wind, but by this point the ennui was becoming more stifling than the heat. Kathryn stopped rubbing her temples and glanced up at Nick.

  “We could have taken my car, you know. It has this n
ew thing called ‘air conditioning.’ ”

  “I thought my car would fit the image better.”

  “What image?”

  “The image of a down-and-out Desert Storm veteran and his poor wife, their lives plagued by his lingering Gulf War Syndrome—mysterious rashes, fibromyalgic symptoms, chronic fatigue, and memory loss.”

  “How long have we been married?”

  “You’re asking me? I’m the one with memory loss.”

  Kathryn smiled in spite of herself. “And why is this little charade necessary?”

  “I’ve been doing a little research. It seems Walter Reed Army Medical Center is the premier treatment unit for Gulf War Syndrome in the entire U.S. Several years ago they opened a Specialized Care Program for Gulf veterans and their families. It’s a three-week outpatient program. According to Amy, her brother took part a couple of times.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Our interview with Amy raised some interesting questions. Who was the last one to see Jim McAllister alive? Amy didn’t know—no one in Rayford seems to know. It may have been someone up at Walter Reed.”

  “Is there some prize for being last in line?”

  “The last one to see your friend alive may be able to give us some insight into his state of mind just before the time of death. Was he angry again? Did he seem out of control? Did he say where he was going or what he planned to do? Did he appear in any way suicidal?”

  Kathryn felt a knot tightening in her stomach. “I don’t like all this pretending. Can’t we just request Jimmy’s medical records or something?”

  “Sure, if you’re the next of kin. I suppose you could tell them you almost married him …”

  Kathryn shot him a look. “I just don’t want this to turn into another Schroeder’s Funeral Home. All right? Okay?”

  Nick smiled. “Did you bring the things I asked for?”

  “I packed an overnight bag, if that’s what you mean.”

  He paused. “Does the sheriff know we’re making this trip together?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Does he know we’re staying overnight?”

  She narrowed her eyes to tiny slits. “Why shouldn’t he know?”