by Lee Lamothe
In spite of his alley rat appearance, she could smell soap and shampoo off him. His breath was soft against her face, a mixture of toothpaste and stout. There were some fading blemishes on his neck that looked like the after-boil of insect pincers.
“What do you want?”
He shook his head. “Later. You reading the Harry Potter series? Good wizard action. Magic potions, flying stuff. My kid says she seen all the movies and the first one was the best. You think?” His eyes scanned the room behind her. “You got kids?”
She twisted her mouth at him and didn’t say anything.
“Hey, there’s test tubes and stuff. You don’t want to miss out. How’d you feel about stem cell research? Now, there’s an ethical issue. Science bumps up against morality. I’ve listened to Bush and the other guys, but myself, I haven’t sorted out all the —”
“Look, let’s just get this done, okay? I don’t know why you set this up. I don’t know who sent you, or why. I’m not comfortable. I don’t give a fuck about stem cells. I don’t give a fuck about Harry fucking Potter. I don’t like being felt up in a bar and, mostly, I don’t like racists.”
He wasn’t listening to her words. The sound of her voice was lilting, a bit of the Islands in there, perfect pronunciation. He could tell she was apprehensive but curious. “Okay,” he said, shrugging into his jacket, “let’s drain ’em and get ’er done. See where we’re at.”
* * *
They paused on the stairway to the rooftop patio and he gave her a more thorough pat-down. He ran his fingers around the base of her ruined bleached hair. There were loose valiums in her handcuff case and she wore her gun, a nifty little automatic, over her right hip. He offered to let her do him. She poked indifferently and he could tell she didn’t know what she was doing or didn’t care. The patio was vacant except for four smokers huddled at the far end against the cool night breezes. A waitress, hugging herself by a serving station, looked unhappy to see them arrive. Ray Tate ordered another G&T and half a dark.
Djuna Brown sat opposite him at the empty side of the patio. He saw her shiver and took his jacket off. Without consultation he draped it over her shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t know what to say so she gave him a simmering look. The umbrellas shimmered in the breezes. Above them the ambient light of the city sky was silvery. Traffic noises rose from the bum side of Stonetown. The waitress brought their drinks and left and the four smokers clattered down the steps.
He held his hand out. “I’m Ray Tate.”
“The guy that’s gonna spike me, right?” She looked at his hand out over the table and finally took it. “Or shoot me.”
“I’m not going to talk about shooting people. I’m not going to talk about racism. You’re not going to talk about beating cops with sticks. We’re not going to talk about you being a dyke. I don’t care about any of that, and you shouldn’t either. We’re going to talk about being partners.”
“Bonus.” She looked at his bland face. “Not much left, then, to talk about.”
“Well,” he said, “we could talk about fucking up the skipper.”
She was interested but cautious. “And how’d we do that?”
“By doing our job.” He looked at her raised eyebrow and studied her face. She was actually quite attractive under the white frizz. She had long catlike eyes, high cheekbones, and a pointed little chin. Her teeth were small and even. Stress and maybe hatred had worked into her face, giving it a mean repose, making her lips halfway to a twist. Her hand, when it had been in his, was small but strong and firm, and he knew someone had taught her how to shake hands. Her body, when he’d given her the pat-down, had some long muscle.
He got up and went around the table. She shrank back from his hand. “I just want my smokes.” He dug in the jacket, found a pack of Marlboros and a lighter, and went back to his seat. He formally offered her one then lit them both.
She suddenly looked afraid. Politeness was antique to her. “I called Gay-Glo. Just so you know. People know I’m with you right now. If anything happens to me, it’s documented.”
“Gay-Glo.” He shook his head. “Whatever. Relax. I’m going to talk for a while, then if you want to talk you can, okay?”
She stared at him, silent.
“Okay. We’re both fucked. You’re never going to be a working cop again, I’m never going to be a working cop again. Our lives as we know them are over. The skipper wants me to bury your ass. Probably, he’s told you the same thing: bury my ass. I don’t know. If I sink you, he says, I’m on my way back to the streets, riding around, doing the job. I don’t know what, if he promised you anything, and I got to say I doubt it, I don’t know what he promised you.”
“Nothing. I don’t talk to the fucker.”
“Sure. It doesn’t matter, anyway. As long as we’re partners working in the office, there’s no real problem. We can both be careful around each other. That’s cool. But if we go outside and do stuff, well, there’s a lot of things that can happen and the only two people who’ll know what happened is the guy that did it and the guy that saw it. You want to think about that.”
She stared at his friendly, expectant eyes. “You think that’s why he partnered us? One of us is a rat, going to eat up the other?”
“Most people, they look at something and they say to themselves, what would I do in that situation? The skipper, being what he is, assumes he’s normal, so he looks at what he’d do and expects anyone else to do the same normal thing. I’d rat, he figures, so they will too.”
“So, he partnered us up because he thinks we’re going to spike each other?”
“I guess. I said if I work close with you that when you step on your dick or whatever, I’ll be there to tap two behind your ear, get you written out.”
“But you won’t, right?” Her lips went into full twist. “All this, all this could just be technique.”
“Could be, I guess.” He chain lit another cigarette. “Look, I don’t know you. I know your story, or some of your story, anyway. I talked to a State guy I know about what happened and he said there were weird doings in Indian country. The guy I talked to is a good guy. He said you beat the face off your partner, but he said you did some good work up there. He said he’s the first to say he doesn’t know it all, but you were a good cop.”
“For a black dyke.”
“He mentioned that, I gotta admit.” He drank some dark and looked at her. She had a smile, not a full smile, but an almost friendly twist to the edges of her lips. He could see chicks going for her, could see a meatheaded partner making a move after dark on a dirt road. He saw her shiver under his coat from the growing wind off Michigan. “But I don’t think he gives a shit. Mostly he was curious why they put a black dyke up there in Indian country, what you call it? The Spout?”
“The Spout. Where they drop you in and pour you out.”
“He said they must really fucking hate you when they do that. He said that tells him a lot.”
“Why?”
“Well, he said it means your problem wasn’t beating your partner. The problem was long before that, before you got there, that you fucked up someplace before, and they sent you up there because you were already fucked.”
“Smart guy, your pal.” She stared at him. “What did you mean, on the phone, when you asked if I ever wanted to be a cop?”
That was what he was waiting for. It was time. Up to now he’d just been bullshitting on the teeter-totter, finding equilibrium. He could chat all night. He’d learned from a Chicago Homicide detective that you solve more cases with the art of conversation than with a nightstick. There was a point in any interview when it was time to make a move. “Reveal who you are, then, when you get a feeling,” the Chicago dick had said, “if you’re an asshole that’s the time to say something, reveal yourself as an honest asshole. If you’re a good guy just doing a job, no personal offence, then you say something then. Don’t think about it. You’ll never be a detective, Ray, but you�
�ll be a hell of a duty sergeant some day. You like cops and you probably, for all I know, like people, you dumb bastard. So, that’s what you show. Find that point, where the balance between what you are and what your subject is, then ride it like a little kid standing in the middle of a teeter-totter.”
Ray Tate said: “Did you?”
“I did. I wanted to be a cop. I am a cop.” She was biting at her lip, trying to prevent herself from saying much of anything.
Her defences were her coat, not her skin. He saw that. He had an urge to put his hand on hers, on the table. But it wasn’t a pure enough urge, and his Homicide buddy had told him: “It’s got to be total. When you make the human — the physical — connection, you have to be dead certain sure. You have to be able to separate the certainty from the impulse. If you fuck that up, you’ll never unfuck it.”
“Okay.” Ray Tate put his elbows on the table and said her name for the first time. “Djuna, you can play the rest of this out anyway you want. We can drink another drink and talk about Harry fucking Potter, the little fag, or whatever. Tomorrow morning we’re going to be doing stuff. I don’t know what you’re going to be doing, but I’m going to be making a case, with you or without you. If I’m flying solo, that’s okay. It just means I have to keep an eye on my back with you around. I’ve been doing it for a long time, anyway. This,” he waved his hand over the table, “this is just me laying out the land for you.”
“What case are you going to make? There are no cases. It’s fill time.”
“I dunno. There’s that guy on the board, Commander Coke.”
“Captain Cook.”
“Him. If he exists.”
She stared at him for a few minutes. He felt he was being evaluated and took it, looking back with calm. She said: “He exists. Captain Cook is a master fucking bandit and an all round fuckhead.”
“You’ve seen him? You’re working him?”
“Working him, but I haven’t seen him. But I got someone who has. She’s seen him a lot and doesn’t want to, much, anymore.”
Chapter 7
Phil Harvey chewed slowly on a sinker, dipping it into his coffee, and watched the block through the window while the crazy Captain waited for service at the counter. There was a convention in town. He saw cars with Illinois plates, Minnesota plates, some Michigans, and some Ontario, Canada. Drones on their morning coffee break filled the Donut Hole and although there were seats at Harv’s table, no one availed themselves of his company. Three office girls carrying blue, rolled up yoga mats stood nearby, raving about the flavour of the chai and sneaking glances at him. Phil Harvey knew he was a thing of the night, not of the morning. The oversized aviator sunglass and the curtain of hair didn’t quite hide the scars and his long, black leather pimp coat was tucked around him as though he was suffering a perpetual winter. There was no hiding his twisted claw clutching the sinker. His facial burns glistened with the vitamin E cream he uselessly and constantly massaged into them.
Connie Cook carried his cup through the yoga girls and dropped heavily opposite Phil. He put a leather briefcase on the seat beside him. “You look like you didn’t sleep. You up all night, Harv, wreaking havoc?” Connie Cook’s rippled jowls were smooth with knowing kindness.
“Ah, you know, Connie. Running, running, running. Either chasing or fleeing. Spent half the night looking for Agatha but she wasn’t around, so I fucked off to do something else. I guess she didn’t want to become a cook after all.”
“You didn’t see her, eh?”
“Nope. Not a sign.”
“Can’t figure that,” Connie Cook said, shaking his head. “She was hungry to move up, become a cooker.” He had a sudden thought. “What about the chicklets?”
Harv gave him a frown. “Dunno about that, Connie. She didn’t come down. I hung around then I went up and knocked. No answer. I wasn’t about to go in there. I guess where she went the chicklets went. Unless she left them up there.”
“Well, you’re gonna have to go in there, now, Harv. Shut the thing down. Get the guy in the stairwell out of there, tell the money guy on the ground to stand by. Then you go clean out her apartment in case she left the chicklets or something dirty behind. We’ll need a new place, maybe in Hauser North.” Connie Cook pondered creases into his fat forehead. “What else? What else? Fuck, I think I’ve been ripped off. You really never saw her, eh?”
“I told you, Connie: no. I planned to take her and the chicklets up to the truck lab but she didn’t show and she didn’t show and I took off. You sure she understood? To wait for me?”
“It’ll sort itself out. Anyway, Chinamen.”
Harv nodded and finished his doughnut. “I got guys ready. Some real wreckers. You give me the place and the when and we’ll go and put an end to their bullshit.”
“Well, today, I think, at noon, not too late. You want to catch them sleeping. I got a thing I want to get for you first then you go. You go in there, you guys, and you lay waste. I mean it, Harv. Everybody that comes out of there that aren’t our guys, they’re walking funny. Take the pressing machines, any chicklets or powder they got, everything. There’s going to be some money laying around, I’m sure. You guys split it up.”
“You want to come?”
“No.” Connie Cook reflected a moment. “Yeah, you know what? I do. Yeah, I’m gonna. I got to pick something up, though, something I was going to give you, but if I’m going I’ll need it.” He gave Harv a knowing look. “You think something happened to her? To Ag? Boy, I’d like to know the details of that horror story, sometime.”
Harv sat back and disappeared himself into the folds of his leather coat. “What do I know? You were the last guy I know of to see her alive. And she was okay when you left her, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well then, nothing for us to worry about.”
* * *
Phil Harvey drove the Camaro close behind Connie Cook’s Mercedes. They wound through the city, the Captain trying to lose him at stale lights. Harv could see the Captain on his phone, hands-free, head bobbing as he yelled at the windshield as though deranged. At one point the Mercedes went into a skid, bumped the curb, and straightened itself out on the roadway.
On the edge of east Chinatown the Captain slowed, lowered his window, and waved Harv up beside his driver’s door. “Turn on the all news, Harv. Strange events up in the badlands.” He laughed and sped away. Harv fiddled his way awkwardly to an AM station and heard a roundup of headlines. One of them was about a truck explosion and fire far northeast of the city. Smoking remains had been found; unknown gender, unknown cause of death.
The Mercedes went through east Chinatown and just over the city line it pulled into a metalwork shop. The Captain waved Harv to wait and held up his hand: five minutes. He disappeared inside in a swaggering waddle and came out two minutes later with a long thin item wrapped in a green garbage bag. He popped his trunk, put the package in, and slammed it.
He waved Harv over. “You hear? That truck fire, there, up north? What’s that all about, I wonder.”
“Fuck if I.” Harv shrugged. “I got a rock solid alibi, anyway.”
“Yeah? You do?”
“Yep, I was with you.” Harv waited a beat. “Back me up or I’ll kill you too.”
The Captain laughed. “Nice one, Harv. Okay, I’ll follow you. You get your thugs over to east Chinatown and we’ll meet them there. They cool, these guys?”
“Princes, these guys are, Connie.” He punched numbers into his cellphone.
They wended their way down through the city. In east Chinatown Harv pulled the Camaro onto a side street. Connie Cook parked on the opposite side of the street, ahead. He popped the trunk, took out the long package, and held it like a golf club, putting aimlessly.
A few minutes later a black Tundra pulled up further down the block and three beefy men got out. They all had pigtails, thick faces, and wore leather jackets. One carried a long sports bag. They bounced on their toes on the sidewalk as they looked
around for Harvey.
Harv climbed out and greeted them with handshakes that changed into biker brotherhood hugs. He waved Connie Cook over. The pigtailed men looked at him curiously as he crossed the road, taking in his perfect suit, the puddle of jowls, the short painful steps.
“That the guy we’re doing, Harv? He’s one fat fuck.”
Harv laughed. “No, that’s the guy we’re doing it for. We’re doing a home renovation. He’s okay. He’s weird, but we’re earning.”
One of the men took a coupon from his jacket pocket. “Give him this. He signs up for a year, he gets a lifetime membership at my new gym.”
“Wait,” Harv said. “Hold on to that and if you want him to have it, after, well, you tell him he’s a fat fuck when you give it to him. He likes it when people call him names.”
The Captain came up beside them and Harv introduced him all around. The Captain seemed pleased at meeting some real badlands thugs.
The Chinese chemistry students lived in a tall, narrow rooming house sandwiched between a massage parlour and a beauty salon. There were half a dozen mailboxes studded beside the entry door and a Room for Rent sign in the window.
The gym owner looked the building over. “What’s the plan, Harv? We know what floor they’re on?”
“They got the whole first floor and the basement. First floor is a long hallway, all the rooms on the left. There’s a kitchen at the back with stairs down. They cook in the basement.”
Connie Cook smiled. “Good that you know that, Harv. I didn’t know that.”
