by Lee Lamothe
“The Staties had a fatal truck explosion sometime overnight. A lab on wheels went up in the badlands. One dead and a bunch of double Cs scattered around.”
“Strange doings.”
“The deal is: we’re doing the guys that rustled the Chinamen, the Staties’ll work the lab explosion. They figure we’ll meet someplace in the middle. So, bring me up to speed. What were you guys on, when I called?”
“Djuna’s play.” Ray Tate looked at her and waited. This was partner territory and he kept to the rules.
She didn’t look at the skip. Her voice was desultory and resentful, unlike her upbeat lilt in the car. “There’s a girl I’ve been working, guy keeps her in a stash house up in the north end. Mutts that loot pharmacies here and over the state line, bring their swag in, get paid off. The chick copped to two things: one is she works for Captain Cook. Other is that there’s a super lab around. We went up there to her pad and before we could visit you called us down to the hospital, then over here.”
“Super lab. What’s up with that, Ray?”
Ray Tate looked at Djuna Brown and waited.
“We didn’t get into it,” she muttered. “I hadda let her go so she wouldn’t be missed. We arranged a series of meets, but she hasn’t showed up yet.”
“You get her name? You run her?”
“I ran the name she had on the library card in her purse. Ginny Wallace. Not on file. Once I called her Ginny and she looked at me, like, who? Then she said, oh yeah, that’s me, right. Duh.”
“But she said super lab?” The skipper looked at Ray Tate. “You know about this? Before?”
“Hey, skip, we were working it. You told us to get out and work and we did. You thought, what? We’d come back with nothing? C’mon, keep some faith.”
Djuna Brown said, “I said super lab to her. I was just fucking with her. She went for it and said this Captain guy’s got a super lab on the go someplace.”
“She tell you about this guy, the Captain?” The skipper didn’t like talking to Djuna Brown; his nose wrinkled as if he could smell the bleach in her hair. “Anything?”
“Nope. She was throwing stuff my way to steer me off, let me get her free. She gave up a pill drop, she copped to the super lab. She’s shitless of him, I can tell you that. He’s gonna pack me to death, she said.”
The skipper mulled. He looked at the photos on his desk. “What have we got on the Phantom of the Opera here?”
Ray Tate had gone through intell reports and leaned forward. “Phil Harvey. Whacko. Cooker, seems like. Looks like he had a pot of stinky red soup bubble up on his face. Either that, or last Halloween he was the dunce bobbing for onion rings. One of the Chinese victims today said the guy that led the guys laying waste in the house looked like this.”
“Ideally, we take the super lab and the Captain, solve the fatal fire along the way. Leave the Staties with their dicks in their hands.” The skipper didn’t know where to go next. “Ugly fuck.”
Ray Tate waited then said, “So, I guess you want us to go back up there, sit on the chick’s place and scoop her up?”
“Exactly.”
“Take Harvey away if he rolls up? In case he takes us to the Captain?”
“You read my mind, Ray.”
“We getting more bodies? We got deps and Feds around and who knows what all else. This thing could grow pretty fast.”
The skipper chewed on his lips. “Let me see. You think we can take down this lab. The super lab? Get the guy behind it? Ray?”
“Well, the way to find out is we get out of here and out there. Start grabbing folks up, lay some torture on them.” He shrugged. “Basic police work.”
“Okay, okay. Go. Keep me in the loop. Continuations at the end of shift.”
Tate stood up.
“Stay a sec, Ray. Some personnel stuff we got to go over.”
When Djuna Brown was out of the room he shut the door. “Nice, pretty good, that. I almost thought you guys were real partners for a minute. If this thing begins to go on its own, we’ll shove her over the side and bring in someone new for you, someone reliable.”
“Naw, skip. Leave her in. She’s got the only lead so far. She’s shaky, anyway.” He made a smirk. “I think she’s gonna drop before this thing is over.”
“No shit?”
“Well, it’s just the first day but I have to tell you: she’s on the edge.”
“Beautiful, beautiful. If we drop her and get the lab, and get this Captain Cook guy, I think, Ray, with this interest from the Swamp, you just might get your own kingdom of cops to terrorize. No promises but I’ll go the distance for you.”
“Can’t ask for more than that, skip.”
* * *
Djuna Brown worked the phones, filling pages of a legal pad with notes. Ray Tate sat across from her at his desk and watched her. Her fingernails were bitten back to the quick and she dug them into her bleached head, scratching. He’d done nothing except let her drive him around and keep the branded Chinamen busy while she cleaned out the girl in the wheelchair. She looked up and caught him looking. She was using a soft voice with a guy in Records, was distracted, and she had a beautiful smile until she looked over his shoulder towards the skipper’s office. Then her face changed, closed, and she looked down.
Chapter 9
The basement smelled of fresh burning flesh and old chemicals, and Phil Harvey had wanted to punch out the covered windows to get away from the smell of seared meat that wasn’t so different from his own pork when it sizzled. The stove was rocking, the electric burners glowing red in the corner. The room was sweltering. Cornelius Cook sweated.
The wreckers had found wads of money stashed throughout the first floor of the rooming house. Cornelius Cook told them to take it. The men had been whooping plunderers earning a square day’s pay until the Captain heated up the branding iron on the red coils and went to work on the Chinamen and the girl. One, the gym owner, had turned away and stared at Phil Harvey when the Captain had taken the double C brand to the girl’s breasts.
Phil Harvey said nothing when the Captain told him to round up the bottles of chicklets. He kept his teeth pressed together against the taste of the air. The Captain took baggies of double C tablets, meticulously ground them up, and washed the powder down the sink. Satisfied, he’d then gone to the stove, muttering. The double C branding iron was red. He spit saliva on the Cs and smiled when it danced off, was steam before it could hit the floor. He pretended to putt.
“We’re outta here, Harv,” the gym owner said, taking Harvey aside. “You need something else, just call. But this guy? No.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the Captain who, with a slow, fat dance, made his way to the Chinese guys and the girl. When the brand hit the girl’s breast and she screamed the gym owner had looked at Harv for a few seconds, absolutely neutral, which to Harv was the most diminishing of raw looks. The three men clattered up the stairs and didn’t look back.
Harv went out and sat on the porch, wrapped in his black sunglasses and leather coat. The chicklets were in garbage bags beside him on the top step. For a long time faint screams came from the leaks around the cellar windows. Once, Harv thought he heard laughing and loud conversation.
Harv had found his limit. When Captain Cook had manipulated him into taking Agatha for a ride to the badlands he’d felt his first spark of change. He had somewhere to go now. There was a possibility of change, of a different life. He’d already made a couple of moves in anticipation, but this, in the basement, was an afterburner that torqued him. On every level this, what was going on in the basement, was wrong. Phil Harvey had once had to take a hammer and begin breaking a guy’s bones from the toes up, but that was to find a stash. Once he had the location he stopped swinging the hammer, even bundling the guy into a car and dumping him a block from St. Francis Heart. That was the game. Even when you had to take someone out, you just did it as a piece of business. Spending an hour terrorizing and tuning a guy who was going to be dead before the day was out didn’t
make sense in any way to a normal person.
He knew to the nickel how much he had stashed. He knew how much money he had out on the street with degenerate gamblers and inept small businessmen who tried to keep bistros and boutiques afloat in swanky Stonetown. He had almost enough money and he had the vaguest of dreams, of direction. He’d planned to spend another year, max, with the Captain, then strike out. But the keening thin noises from the basement window got him thinking that a year was a long time.
It was that first step that eluded him, he thought, but a shower wouldn’t hurt.
* * *
At Agatha Burns’s apartment building Phil Harvey scouted out the area and spotted the red Intrepid right away. A beatnik looking guy and a black woman with a wild frizz of blond hair that was almost white. He parked the Camaro with a view and waited for the woman’s head to disappear and drop down to the man’s lap. The man would give her money and she’d exit the car and totter away, her job done, instantly looking into passing vehicles. But she didn’t. And she was behind the wheel. No dealer plate. Cops.
Harv laid back and waited for them to leave. He looked around for other cops.
The Captain had been sweating when he’d come out of the rooming house with his suit coat neatly over his arm. There were moons of wet under his armpits and he carried the branding iron on his shoulder like an ax.
“Where’s the guys?”
Harv said they’d taken off, they had other work.
“Cool. I guess they made out okay? They found some money around, right? Good guys, those guys. Didn’t say much but, wow, they could do the job. Place looks like a train wreck.” Cornelius Cook’s face was red and petulant. His translucent hair was damp and his pale flesh was filled with a blush. “Fuck, Harv, I don’t know how you guys do this shit, day after day. Me, I couldn’t. Once a week, maybe, but this? Too much weirdness.” He rubbed his crotch and babbled. “Fuck, I’m hard. I’d really like to go back down there and pack the chick. You sure you don’t know where Ag is? I could sure use her ass right now.”
“She run off on us, Cookie. Joined the circus.”
“I guess. Anyway, you’ll take care of the stuff at her place? Shut it down, clean it out?”
“I’ll head over now.”
The cops in the Intrepid seemed to laugh a lot. When a white girl in tight skirt and leather jacket stumbled from the fire door, the black woman behind the wheel made is if to get out, opening her door before sitting back and easing it shut. The girl in the skirt lit a joint beside the door and leaned back, her face to the sun. The same black player who’d loaded the Camaro hustled slowly up beside her and circled her, a beer bottle in his hand. The two shared a joint and the man ran his hand up the woman’s ass. She shoved him away and scooted back into the building.
Shut down, the black guy looked around to see who’d witnessed his humiliation and he spotted the black Camaro throbbing off the corner of the building.
“Yo, you, Yo fuck.” He grabbed his crotch with his free hand and drained the beer with the other. Winding up, he pitched the bottle at the Camaro. It landed short, but the two cops in the Intrepid looked to see where it went. The beatnik in the passenger seat stared at Harv and he peeled out of there.
Chapter 10
Djuna Brown sat the car off the fire door of Agatha Burns’s building. “She’s pretty fucked up, old Ginny Wallace or whatever her name is, you can’t miss her. Stringy thing, dresses like a slut in a music video. She comes out the door I’ll take her, chat her up a little, and get her in here. We make her sit here in plain sight until she talks and invites us in, she won’t want to get spotted by the guy. No warrant. We’re guests.”
Ray Tate didn’t care. It was cop work. He didn’t care what the actual work was, it was cop work, even if he had to look like some degenerate with his hair tickling his ears. He had a gun on his ankle, a badge in his pocket, and a partner beside him. The sweet voices of the dispatchers took him back to long, slow nights cruising the streets. Once his daughter, in a rare pique of curiosity, had asked him what his favourite recent memory was and he’d said sitting on the hood of his cruiser the previous night, out on the edge of the river, watching two bums hugging after fighting over a bottle of hooch. Two guys who loved each other, once they got the tough stuff out of the way. They’d cried and consoled each other when the bottle shattered, each of them taking fault: “I’m sorry buddy.” “No, buddy, I’m sorry.”
“People, Ax,” he said. “People will surprise you if you let them. You know what I do, right? I control people.”
“Granddad calls them dogs.”
“Mutts. Yeah, I do, too. Sometimes. But that’s just bad habits you let yourself pick up, make you feel like you’re better than them.” He’d had a moment of insight. “The danger is that you don’t be who you are or who you’re meant to be. Instead, you become part of the people around you, separate from everybody else. For better or worse.”
They’d been sitting on the freshly cut steps of his new deck. He let her sip at one of the beers he’d brought over from Canada. He inhaled the hot new wood smell of the deck.
With daring curiosity, she asked, “Do you ever worry about shooting someone?”
* * *
Djuna Brown started to get out of the car. “That might be her.”
Ray Tate saw a scrawny girl slip out the fire door.
“Nope.” Djuna Brown sat back. “Wrong one.”
“She’s got admirers though. Look at this dude. Mr. Smooth.”
They watched a tall, thin man glide in on the girl, weaving with a beer in his hand. The pair shared a joint. The man put a move on the girl and she shut him down, sliding back through the fire door. The man looked around, his mouth moving, and looked out past the Intrepid. He grabbed his crotch, wound up, and heaved the bottle.
Ray Tate followed the arc of the bottle and beyond it saw Phil Harvey jackrabbiting a black Camaro backwards out of the parking lot, sliding into the street in a Chicago bootleg. He went on the air and voiced out for Chem Squad workers. There was no response. He went over again and the radio burst static.
“Yeah, Chem Six.” The voice yawned. “Whaddayawant? Whofuckzat, anyway?”
“Chem Four. Tate and Brown. What’s your Twenty?”
“Me? What do you want to know that for? Tate? Ray Tate?”
“I be. I got a black Camaro spinning out of the Hauser projects. Male, white, long hair, burned-up face. He’s alone in the vehicle. You nearby?”
“Naw, no. Fuck, Ray Tate. This is Wally Brodski. I knew your father-in-law. How’s he doing?”
“Look, Wally, where you at?”
“Uh, south of you.”
“Can you haul over to River Street, count the traffic in case he comes through?”
“Sure. I guess. I dunno, I got to get gas.”
The skipper came over from the base station. “Brodski, this is Chem One. Get the fuck over there.”
“Fuck.” Ray Tate rolled his eyes at Djuna Brown. “Here we go.”
Brodski came back instantly. “Hey, whoa.” There was a pause. “This is Chem Six, I’m booking out, medical. My ulcer’s flaring. I’ll be off at Mercy, getting checked out.”
The skipper called out for him several times but there was no answer. “Ray, you’re on your own.”
“It was Phil Harvey. He’s gone, skip. We’re going to take the apartment.”
“You got no warrant. Don’t go in there.”
“Djuna’s concerned for Ginny Wallace’s well-being.” He put the microphone back behind the false CD player.
The black guy watched them approach for a moment then began sliding away from the fire door. Djuna Brown put her right hand out, patting the air. “Hey, hold up, brother, c’mon. I don’t shoot too good, but my partner, well, he’s a deadeye. Just hold up a sec.”
Ray Tate saw some little cellophane wraps on the ground near the black guy’s feet. “Hey, you drop something? Those yours?”
“Those what? What those?” The man s
eemed entranced by Djuna Brown’s hair. “Hey, cool ’do, sister. That’s good. I like that.”
Ray Tate stood a few feet away. Djuna Brown moved up close beside the guy. She was tiny next to him. Ray Tate watched his hands.
“What’s that about?” she asked him. “With the flying bottle? You know him, that guy?”
“What guy?”
“Scarface there, in the Camaro.” She waited. “You want a job? Cleaning up? There’s these baggies on the ground, there. We can call a city crew to sweep them up, or you can be a citizen, do your part and keep the ’hood clean of litter.”
“The guy? Yeah, in the Camaro, I seen him. Riddle me: how’s he get prime stuff like that, all that devil marks burned up on his face?”
“He had a girl in the car?”
“No, not now. The last night. He had a girl and he had a piece. Big silver thing with cuts down the barrel. Was gonna shoot me but I stood him down, ran his old hippy ass right off my place. White, fucked-up-face motherfucker.”
“He took a girl out of here? What she look like? White girl?”
* * *
The lock on the fire door was jammed with a bent Coca Cola can with scorch marks on it. They crept up the stairs to the fourth floor. Far up, a cellphone chirped and a man’s voice rumbled softly. Ray Tate craned his neck to look up the stairwell and saw a bushy head ducking over to look down at him, what looked like a piece of pipe in one hand, the cell in the other.
He dodged back and took his gun from his ankle. He whispered: “Mutt. I think with a gun, a scattergun. Up at about, oh, twelve.”
Djuna Brown took her pistol from the clamshell on her waist. She didn’t know where to point it and clutched it like she’d never held it before. To calm her down, Ray Tate put his into the pocket of his leather jacket. He ducked his head out again but saw nothing. Below them a door creaked open and a dog growled.
“Hey, you fuckers.” A man’s voice echoed up the stairwell. “You don’t want to be here. Get the fuck down here or I’m sending the dog up.”
