Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  Harv smiled back. “Ag told me.”

  The three pigtailed men pulled on leather lifting gloves. One zipped open the sports bag and handed around a sawn-off baseball bat, a hammer, and a lug wrench. Harv looked around at the passing traffic. He took off his leather coat, rolled it inside out, and handed it to Connie Cook.

  The pigtailed gym owner asked Harv, “What’s the play? We wrecking the place or just doing the people in there?”

  “We get them then we take the place apart. There’s any dough, we split it. Powder, we split.”

  The gym owner huddled with his companions for a moment then they all trooped up the steps. The biggest of the wreckers examined the lock, then stepped back and bulled his shoulder into it. It gave easily and they ran down the hallway, whooping. A Chinese teenager wearing Snoopy undershorts came out of the kitchen with a steaming bowl in his hands. He went down under the stampede. A pigtailed man swung a hammer. A plump girl, naked, flashed out of a bedroom off to the side. The gym owner whacked her legs out as he passed.

  A long-haired Asian wearing a suit and an untucked, white shirt popped out of a doorway. He saw Harv and said his name. Harv was on him with the guy with the lug wrench. Harv took the wrench and began bashing at the man’s long hair. “I told you,” he said, swinging. “I fucking told you, cocksucker.” He stood and began stomping.

  Connie Cook stayed in the doorway listening to the place being busted up. When the house was secure he told Harv to get everyone to the basement.

  The pigtailed guys threw everyone down the steps. The basement was unfinished and had a strong chemical odour. A blackened stove sat in one corner and buckets, tubing, and bottles of chemicals were littered over a sagging chesterfield. There were cheap Dutch pill-pressing machines with different heads scattered among them. The windows were covered with taped on, ripped up green garbage bags.

  There were five prisoners. One of them remained unconscious. The girl was crying and huddling herself off to the side, sobbing and examining her knees.

  Harv didn’t like the scene. The chemical smell made his scars ripple and sing, the crying girl reminded him of Agatha. He decided the thing should be over. That’s the way it was done. They’d take the powder and the dough, bust everything in sight, and give everyone a farewell tune-up.

  But Cornelius Cook stood at the bottom of the steps looking at his fracas with satisfaction. “Cold in here, Harv. Turn on the stove.” He began stripping the green garbage bag from his package.

  Chapter 8

  When the skipper arrived at the Chem Squad to do his morning prowl he found Ray Tate behind a desk, most of his hair back in a ponytail. Right away the skipper noticed the Captain Cook chart had been untacked from the corkboard. There was a steaming cup of coffee at Ray Tate’s elbow and across from it, on Djuna Brown’s desk, were a bottle of water and a yogurt container with a plastic spoon sticking out of it.

  “The fuck you doing, Ray? It’s the crack of dawn. Where’s the twat?”

  Ray Tate glanced around and shook his head, then nodded at the skipper’s glass office. The skipper led the way. They sat opposite each other.

  “Okay, spill.”

  “I was thinking, last night. I’m not going to get her watching her sit at her desk filing paper, right? So, I figure we’ll get a little project going, get her out where there’s mistakes to be made, and trip her into a hole.”

  The skipper nodded. “And? What you come up with?”

  “This Captain Cook guy. I figure that’s the way. We start up a little project, start moving around where there’s money and dope, see if she trips. It’s perfect.”

  “If there is a Captain Cook.”

  “Well, even if there isn’t, we get her out there in the land of the bad habits. We’re never going to get her sitting here watching her head glow.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. You got a better plan? She can wait out all of us.”

  The skipper stared at the beaming eyes behind the grey beard. Taking down Captain Cook and the dyke and Ray Tate would be a hat trick. While the douchebag was out splashing in shit, Tate would be right there beside her, getting a little on his shoes. A hat trick would get the skipper noticed down at the Swamp where all the goodies were being dealt out in the Big Chan’s fan tan game. Not being noticed was worse than not sticking your head up, even if you were fucking things up. If you fucked up under the Chan regime you hung in there anyway, maybe be a hero in the next dynasty.

  “Done. Very nice, Ray. We’re gonna work out just fine. If you get her for me, what do you want?” He looked troubled. “A bump? To duty sergeant, when all this stuff passes? I got to be honest with you: I can try but I can’t promise.”

  “Nothing, skip. The blue suit, the round hat, and the red lights over my head. You’ll never fucking see me again.”

  “Okay. How you want to do it?”

  “Soft. Just memo us both to set up on this Captain guy, give us some room and some time, and we’ll have her zipped in a body bag in no time. Maybe get Captain Cook too, if he’s real.”

  “I can’t give you paper on this thing, Ray, what we’re doing to take her down. If it gets to the fags at Gay-Glo we’re all in the shit. I’ll make verbals to the brass about what I’ve got you doing, but that’s it. You okay with that?”

  Ray Tate sipped his coffee and stood up. “Hey, skip, fuck, come on. If I can’t trust another copper, who can I trust?”

  * * *

  They were meticulous in their notebooks. Time in and time out, the memo number when they received the skipper’s memo to set up on Captain Cook, the serial numbers of their cellphones were written in each other’s books, the assignment number of their rovers. They signed out a company car, noting who gave them the keys and at what time. They noted the mileage on the leased Intrepid and that she was driving and he was the shotgun.

  The red Intrepid was a Federal lease with a radio hidden in the dash behind a false-front CD player, a red gumball on the dash, and a sign that thanked you for not smoking. Djuna Brown tossed the gumball on the floor and the non-smoking ticket out the window. She lit a cigarette, pulled out onto Huron Street, and headed for the Hauser South Projects. “What’d he say? We’re working, right?”

  “We be. I’m supposed to tempt you into malfeasance, make you fall in with evil company.” He dropped the false front of the CD player and dialed in channels to the city divisions. He had dried paint crusted around his fingernails and worked at them with a penknife, glancing up every few seconds to read the street.

  “But you won’t, right?”

  “Nope. Like I told the skipper, if you can’t trust a copper, who can you trust?”

  “What’s with the paint, there, on your hands? You redecorating?”

  “Yeah. Change of scene, change of pace.”

  She gave him a catlike grin. “Right. Purple. It’s the new black.”

  “Tell me about this chick we’re seeing. That knows this Cook guy.”

  “She said she works for a guy running some labs. I just started working on her, so when we get up there I’ll go it alone, see how it shakes out. Anyway, it was one of those things. I was getting a prescription filled and the pharmacist caught her down behind the counter, jamming cold pill bottles into her pockets. I pinched her and while we were waiting for prisoner transport I give her a pat-down. She’s got two of these little pills, double Cs on them. She freaks a little and she says she can give me somebody’s stash if I let her go.” She shrugged. “I waved off the pick-up cruiser and spoke to the pharmacist. He was cool, so I took her to a Seattle’s for coffee.”

  Unwillingly, Ray Tate took a glance at her.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter. We just had coffee and out of the blue I asked her about this Captain Cook guy whose pills she got. She just about shit. How you know about him, she said. She said she didn’t know him and if she had said she did know him, she didn’t really say it. See, she was flying low when she was boosting, forgot what she’d already told me. So I said, Look, you just tol
d me you knew him, he was your pal. She said, I said that? I said, Yup. She said, Okay, so you know. Then she clammed about him but said if I wanted a pinch there was a guy bringing a bag of pills to an apartment building up in Hauser South that evening. So I kick her and went up there and there was a jittery guy with a bag going in the fire door. He comes out later with nothing. He goes to a ground floor patio and a guy sitting there with a big fucking pooch hands him some coin. My guy leaves and I take him out there, lose him in the projects. I go back to sit and bingo, another guy goes in. Same thing. White guy with a bag. A mutt. He’s in and he’s out. Sees the guy with the dog, gets some dough, and he’s away. I’m going, whoa.”

  Ray Tate laughed and shook his head. “Holy fuck. I can’t believe you just said all that. There’s a guy and a bag and a guy with a dog and fucked if I know what all else you said.”

  She smiled. “I know. They had me at the capital listening to wiretaps before they kicked me down here. I picked up the rhythm.” She made an Italian accent softened by Caribbean breezes. “Hey, you know that fuh-kin guy, hangs around with the guy with the red fuh-kin hair, you fuh-kin know, with the guy that’s always fuh-kin moochin’? Well, go see that guy, not the redhead guy or the mooch, but the other fuck, the first fuck, you know?” She steered the Intrepid into an illegal left under the Interstate, ignoring a cloud of horns. “It’s a wonder how those mutts get anything done, how they understand each other.”

  “So,” Ray Tate was laughing, “this chick.”

  “Right. I’m back at the Hauser South building a couple days later and she comes creeping out the fire door. I bag her. She’s really afraid, Ray, she pissed herself. Turns out the guy she works for won’t let her go outside, keeps her in a stash house on the fifth floor. That’s why she rolled so quick for me when I grabbed her up at the pharmacy. She doesn’t mind going in the bucket for a few nights, waiting for a bail hearing, but if the guy she works for finds out she went out, well, not pretty, she said.”

  “You think she’s up there, now?”

  “Dunno. Anyways, we’re talking and I see she’s jittering, so I say, out of the blue, So where’s this super lab you were talking about the other day, that punches out of the double Cs? Fuck, she said, I told you about that? He’s gonna kill me. She started crying and shaking. Oh, God, he’s gonna pack me to death.”

  “Pack?”

  “She didn’t want to talk about it. This is three days ago. I tell her that each day, right about now, she should come down to the fire door, we’ll talk if I can make it, if she can make it. I missed the past couple of days, but I think now’s the time.”

  Ray Tate was impressed. “So she copped to Captain Cook and she copped to a super lab.” When she drove behind a grimy high-rise building he asked, “So, why’d you do it at all? We’re both walking dead, anyway. You could bring in the Big Chan with his moon face glued to a Boy Scout’s ass cheeks and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “I told you, I’m a cop. I didn’t need you to come along and rag me out.” But she had a slightly wider feline curve to her lips. She expertly parked the Intrepid with a view to the fire door. “But the gin and tonics were nice.”

  A happy man, Ray Tate eased back his seat, electronically adjusted his side mirror, and listened to a litany of calls streaming over the city frequency.

  * * *

  The Big Chan’s new dep called the skipper.

  “Hey, Gordo, you awake over there? I catch you snoozing? You drop my body for me, yet?”

  “Naw. But I got something going. I partnered Ray Tate up with that Statie dyke, turned ’em loose in the land of temptation. Just a matter of time now.”

  “The black dyke? You fucking partnered an armed Ray Tate up with a spook that beats her partners half to death? You’re a diabolical man, Gordo. I better start watching my back over here. You’re gonna have my job and I’ll be out farting my whistle at parades.” The dep laughed without mirth. “Anyway, there’s a call over in east Chinatown you might be interested in. Mailman finds a door busted, smells something foul, and he goes in and finds a bunch of Chinese kids all beat to shit in the basement.”

  “I didn’t know it was Chinese New Year.”

  “Huh. But there’s a stove, buckets down there, stuff taped over the windows, and a strong chemical smell.”

  “Sounds like another lab.”

  “But here’s the good part: you’re looking for the interlocking Cs, right? On the pills? Well, you go down to St. Francis’s Heart and you’re gonna find those Cs all over the place. But mostly on the victims. Someone took looks like a branding iron to them.”

  “Ooops.”

  “These are guest students down from Canada via Hong Kong, Gordo. Brought in by Willy Wong, a friend of the mayor’s, one of his donors. We can’t be seen fucking around on this.”

  “I’m already on it.”

  “Well, be on it, but be on it better, okay? Let me tell the Big Chan something.”

  “Tell him we already have a task force targeting the double Cs. We’re up and running, my guys are already out there working it.”

  “Bullshit. If I’m bullshitting him you can’t be bullshitting me. You have to tell me, Gordo.”

  “No, dep. No shit. We’ve got a task force just set-up on the double Cs. The twat and the gunner are out there, riding around like they’re a dozen.”

  The skipper hung up and voiced out to Ray Tate and Djuna Brown on the Federal radio. “Where you guys at, Ray?”

  Ray Tate came back: “Sitting on a place, might be a lead to the Captain. What’s up, skip?”

  “Head down to St. Frankie’s Heart. They got some Chinamen in the Emergency, been branded like fucking cowboys. Double Cs.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Gloria came into the office and waved at him. The skipper told Ray Tate to stand by.

  “The Staties got a truck fire up in the badlands,” she said. “One fatality.”

  “So?”

  “It was a camper van, dead body inside,” she said. She held her nose. “Strong smell of chems.”

  “Let the Staties handle it.”

  “Around the truck, when they put it out? Double C tablets all over the ground. They heard we were asking about them.”

  The skipper went on the air. “Okay. Ray, you guys do the hospital then get in here. We’re having a task force meeting.”

  There was silence. Then Ray Tate said, “What task force?”

  The skipper laughed bitterly. “You, you lucky fuck.”

  * * *

  The Chinese kids weren’t talking. Every time Ray Tate or Djuna Brown asked a question, the older of them, with interlocking Cs burned into his cheeks and forehead, murmured in Mandarin and the others clammed. The older guy spoke robotically to Ray Tate in flat English: “Contact please my uncle Willard Wong.” He sounded like he’d memorized his line.

  “We should get ICE down here,” Djuna Brown said, “see what kind of immigration status these guys got.”

  “If they’re with Willy Wong, they’re all papered up clean. Willy runs the Chinese Menu for the mayor.”

  Djuna Brown wheeled the girl with the casts on her legs down the hall to an empty examination room. The girl’s face had been spared but her breasts and been badly burned. Djuna Brown held the girl’s hand and made sympathetic tsks. “Oh, baby, what they did to you.”

  When she stroked the girl’s hair, the girl began talking.

  * * *

  Ray Tate asked the Chinese mutts a litany of questions. The mutts were sullen and looked at the floor. Only the murmuring guy made any sound. “Contact please my uncle Willard Wong.”

  Djuna Brown wheeled the girl back into the room and told Ray Tate she got nothing.

  “Fuck ’em,” he said. “Mutts.”

  “Mutts be right,” she said. She looked at them. “You fucking goofs.”

  They went out to the Intrepid, noted the time in their books, that Ray Tate was driving, and they headed to the satellite.

  As s
he wrote in her book, Djuna Brown said: “Five white guys. They went into the place and just went ape.”

  “She talked?”

  “Yep. Sisterhood is powerful. Anyway, three guys in leather jackets. They were the wreckers. One other guy had long, black hair and burns all over his face. The last guy, the one with the branding iron, was a big fat fuck in a suit. He was in charge. He had ‘ghosty skin,’ she said. He kept screaming, ‘Tell it to Coco Chanel.’ He laughed a lot, she said. He really liked her tits, gave them a lot of attention.”

  “The guy with the scars? That’s probably the guy on the wall, in the Captain Cook chart. Three wreckers? Who knows? The fat guy. The fat guy, he could be our Captain Cook. Sounds like a boss, anyway.”

  * * *

  They saw the skipper had big eyes. He sat in his office with a Federale detached from the Feds’ Hazardous Unit who wore his jacket like a matador. The Federale was deputized so he got to carry a gun and he didn’t mind shifting it every few minutes as he squirmed about in his chair. A third man wearing a buttoned three-piece suit leaned with his ass on the windowsill, his arms folded. Ray Tate recognized the be-suited man as one of the Big Chan’s new dynasty of cunning deps.

  The skipper saw them across the room and held his palm up and out. Ray Tate and Djuna Brown went to their desks and pawed through a stack of photos and reports. When the Federale and the dep left the skipper’s office neither looked at them.

  The skipper waved them in. “We’ve got to do everything right, Ray. This is real work and they’re wanting continuation reports daily.” He completely ignored Djuna Brown. “They wanted to take you guys off it, bring in their own tactical crew from Washington, but I stood ’em down. I got us a week, max. Can we do it in a week, Ray?”

  Ray Tate put a mug shot and a surveillance photograph of Phil Harvey on the desk. “This is the mutt did the havoc in east Chinatown today. I’m pretty sure.”

  “The cowboy branding the herd?”

  “Nope. This guy Harvey was just there, leading the charge. The guy with the branding iron is a big fat fuck that laughs a lot.” He hooked his thumb out the door. “Brass and the Feds? For some guys got tuned up in east Chinatown?”