by Lee Lamothe
“Naw, chicks are trouble, they’re work, they shoot their mouths off. I don’t feature myself as a pimp.”
“Oh, okay, Harv. Tell you what: you figure out what you need to get a business going, tell me how much, and we go partners. If you think dope’s the way to go then we go that way. I’m just a tourist here. Hey, what’d’you think’s a better car, the Camaro or the Corvette?”
“Camaro. Corvette’s for homos.”
“Homos. Got it. And, hey, Harv, there’s something I want you to get for me. This young broad up on the lake, I want her, I want you to get her for me. Can you do that?”
Harv thought the Captain was doing a kidnapping, maybe something to do with one of his Chicago business deals, muscling a commodities broker. He clocked Agatha Burns, snaffled her up, and a few months later Harv had a black Camaro with the rims.
They were in a restaurant one night and the waiter made a comment about desserts and calories. The Captain took umbrage.
“Hey, Harv, you know any construction guys? That can get dynamite or something?”
“Sure, Connie. How much, what for?”
“That place we had dinner at, with the lippy waiter? You think two sticks’ll do it?”
Two sticks did it. Two sticks did the restaurant, took the arms off the cook who’d stayed back to braise lamb shanks for the next day’s special, and shut down Stonetown for a week.
* * *
The windows of the diner vibrated from the heavy trucks left rumbling in the parking lot. Harv thought of Agatha Burns and her knocking knees. She’d been a perfect little thing, the kind of unattainable item Harv instinctively hated, the kind of thing that had the perfect life in the perfect neighbourhood with the perfect mum and dad. It took him weeks of keeping a clock on her movements. One night she came out of her boyfriend’s house and Harv was waiting with a panel van and a sleeping bag and she was in the back and on the way to a drop house in the badlands. The waiting, impatient Captain took over from there, squiring her up to the farm in Indian country.
Hey Harv, how much of this stuff do you have to take, like, how long, before you’re a zombie, a scuzzy little slave who’ll do anything to anybody for more?
Harv had seen insanity in the streets and in the joints. He always backed away from it silently, never judged. Judgment was a smirk in those places and there were guys who would just slice the smirk right off your lips. You nodded and slowly backed away from them, but you never backed down.
But what the Captain did to Agatha Burns in that farmhouse put him into the mood of watching gang pile-ons in the joint: Whoa, that’s weird. Not for me, but you pull your time however you have to. No judgment.
Her knees knocked and when the old speeder lady with the shotgun peered in through the window and cackled a smile, Harv felt he was in someone else’s strange landscape.
Agatha Burns told him of her shame.
She touched his scars.
She apologized.
The gap-toothed, balding old speeder lady was in her fifties or sixties. Agatha Burns was twenty. How did one get such a long life of misery, and the other a short life that had been mostly okay?
The pickup truck with the camper van in the back had squeaked on rusted springs as he helped her into it, telling her, Don’t worry, Ag, you just took too much stuff.
She turned and looked at him and her eyes were clear.
She’d said, “I know, Harv. It’s okay, okay?” Her mouth trembled a little when she said, “Can you let my mom and dad know? Somehow? Where to find me? Harv?”
* * *
Harv’s minion lived halfway between Widow’s Corners and the city. He arrived almost two hours after Harv summoned him. He came into the diner, spotted Harv and nodded, got a coffee to go, and went out to a black chromed F-250 pickup. Harv paid his tab and went into the washroom to retrieve his gun. Boiling down the Interstate in the F-250, the minion talked about what happened to the Chinamen in the city who’d fucked with the brand. He rattled about the cooker who went up in the truck explosion. “They say it was a broad, maybe.”
Harv told the driver to slow down. “We’re heavy.”
“Oh, fuck, okay.” The driver changed to the centre lane and kept inside a handful of traffic. “That fat guy we’re working for. What’s he about?”
Harv liked the minion, a failed striker for the Riders. The kid had done some time but he’d done no heavy lifting. Things like that put you in your position on the scale of things. Going the hard distance wasn’t something just anyone could do, although everybody thought they could until they were face to face with it. You had to be a certain way. Harv had known he was that way since he was a teenager. It wasn’t until he met the Captain and his weird ways that he thought maybe there was nothing lower than himself in the cold swamp.
“The Captain’s cool. The Captain’s okay. Just a little different.”
The driver laughed. “You got that right.”
They rode in silence for a while. Harv saw trees and thought of Agatha Burns and her riff about more tree being underground than above it. Not something he would have thought of, taking a ride you didn’t expect to come back from. He thought about the conversation about the Chinamen she said she didn’t know, and the radio that had been off and she swore she hadn’t turned it off and how about those fucking CD prices. He chuckled.
The driver said, “What?”
“Nothing.” Harv looked at him. “Let me ask you one. If I asked you to do something, could you do it?”
The driver knew right away. “You need something, Harv? Fuckin’ A.”
“No question, no problem? You’re that way?”
“Gotta be.” The driver nodded at his windshield. He had long, feminine blond hair held back by his ears. “You gotta be, in this life. You do or you’re done. You’re dog or you’re dog food.”
They passed an open pickup with a half-dozen Indians sprawled in the back. Ahead of it was a sway-backed, rusted, bone white Reliant station wagon in the slow lane with a long-haired guy driving. Harv could see a woman’s legs in a long skirt and a kid in the back seat sleeping against a window smeared with drool. “That guy. Him, in the Reliant.”
The driver was puzzled and craned to look. “Sure. Who is he, what’d he do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t care. I ask you and you say … what?”
The driver squirmed a little. “I guess, yeah. But it ain’t right. You don’t just … No, that’s fucked. You’d have to be nuts.” He passed the Reliant and kept an eye on it in the side mirror. “You okay?” He laughed nervously. “You’re a funny fucker, Harv.”
Harv, his face hidden in the cheesy curtain of rock star hair, was thinking about monsters.
PART TWO
Chapter 13
Nothing happened at Harv’s condominium. They chatted and played the tag game. Ray Tate had evens and Djuna Brown had odds. Personalized licence plates didn’t count, neither did taxis or commercial vehicles. Of the first twelve cars to roll through the parking lot eight had even numbers at the end and Djuna Brown was going to buy the drinks after.
They took turns dozing and doing feel-outs.
She started speaking in soft patois. “Hey, Ray, mon, what’s wit’ de painting? Be you some kind of closet artist?”
“Naw,” he said, a little embarrassed. “No. Just fooling around.”
“You like the dark colours, eh?”
He didn’t answer that. “You always lived alone, Djun’?”
“I lived with someone, for a while, before I got recruited.”
“How’d that go?”
“Well, I’m sitting in a shitty car with a beatnik. You tell me.”
After a while he asked, “Why’d you sign up?”
“My dad wanted me to be a nurse, like my mom. When I got accepted at the Staties he was pretty mad. He said I was too small.” She glanced at him. “He was mad as a Chinaman with no thumbs.”
“Chinaman. What the fuck? Why not, say, a Macedonian with no t
humbs. Or, say, a pygmy?”
“Ray, Ray, get a grip, mon. What’s a Macedonian or a pygmy want thumbs for?”
He smiled. “Nice one, Djun’.”
She looked pleased with herself. “What about you, Ray? You a single dude on the make?”
“Well, I’m married, I guess. We’re not together right now.”
“How old’s your kid? The photographer?”
“Seventeen.”
“You a cool dad, Ray?”
“Not lately.”
At nine o’clock Ray Tate tried to raise the skipper on the rover. Walter Brodski came back. There were party noises in the background and someone yelled, “Seven, you cocksucker.”
“He’s gone hours, Ray. Where you at?”
“We’re sitting on a place in the Beach. We’re looking for the guy that boiled out of the projects this afternoon. Anybody on the air, can spell us off?”
The radio was silent. Brodski came back. “I would, Ray, but my ulcer’s acting up again.” The background noise was gone.
A black F-250 pickup dripping with chrome rolled in off the street and did a turn through the parking lot. It slowed passing in front of the Intrepid. Ray Tate saw a young guy with blond hair behind the wheel, scooping them. It rolled off, cut a wide U, and dribbled out of the parking lot. When it was out of sight there was a peel of rubber.
“A mutt.” Ray Tate noted down the plate. “I think this is a wash, Djun’. We should pack it in. Even if Harvey and the Captain came and went, we’ve only got this one vehicle and that got burned off this afternoon. We’re going to need more bodies, more cars.”
She started the engine. “Who gets this one for the night? Let’s go someplace and have a few drinks and wrestle for it.” She gave him a bland look. “No, don’t answer that. I’ll drop you and take it home.”
“Just as well,” he said loftily, a little disappointed. Wrestling sounded interesting. “I’m not into black chicks.”
“Not even black dykes?”
“Well, black dykes. That’s a different thing. Black dykes I can dig.”
“Cool-ee-oh.”
* * *
There were three messages on her phone from Hazel, the needy former cop at Gay-Glo, and she listened and deleted. Sober, in daylight, Hazel was a professional organizer and just a little aggressive in a flirtatious, hinting way. Late nights, Hazel was a different matter: she wailed and cried and declared undying love. She cursed and swung between wishes of suicide and dreams of violence. She promised a velvety tongue and threatened with the vengeance of the betrayed and abandoned.
Djuna Brown stirred together a rum and coke and felt creepy until she smiled, thinking of Ray Tate’s bohemian artist’s pad and the foul gin and taps and the paintings. She’d’ve never, she thought, figured him for having a creative side. She wished she’d turned around the canvases lining the baseboards and seen what lived inside Ray Tate. She laughed at herself and reflected on her flirt. Wrestling, how artless was that clanger? Aloud she said: “What a fucking clunker, you fucking lesbo.”
She sat with her drink at the window overlooking the Intrepid illegally parked in front of her duplex. A very faint dusting of early snow had accumulated on the roof. It wasn’t officially a police car, but it had the red dash light in there, a radio, and probably a switch somewhere to activate the siren. She had a gun and handcuffs and if she wanted she could go out and chain someone up, take away their liberty, put a hinge in their life.
Almost a cop, and somehow because of Ray Tate, artistic gunner of blacks.
* * *
In his apartment the gin and taps glasses were in the sink. He washed them then put on a Miles Davis CD and went on a binge into the night, wiping down surfaces, cleaning dying food from the fridge, scrubbing the bathtub. He thought about painting and realized he almost had a sense for the bright colours but he didn’t trust it and stayed away from the oils and the canvases.
There was a cop lurking in that trim lesbian body, he thought. She had some fear, which was good: awkwardly juggling her gun in the stairwell at the stash house, just nervous enough that she wasn’t a cowboy about it. Or maybe a cowgirl. Or something in between. What did you call a dyke wrangler? And she could generate fear. Watching the skipper’s reaction when she was in firing range was amusing and instructive, both. As Ray Tate dug a wire brush into the toilet and worked it he wondered where she was at that moment. Had she gone down to Erie Road and made a new friend, met up with an old one? Were they already at her place, tangled in sheets and confusion, sorting out who’d do what to who? He felt a bit of envy but also a bit of stirring.
At two o’clock he was still at it, energetically working in an endless cycle of Miles Davis when the phone rang.
“Cocksucker, Ray, they woke me up, I’m waking you up.”
“What’s up, skip?”
“Everyfuckingbody, seems like.” He sounded drunk and sleepy. “Two kids, white kids, OD’d on X. DOA at St. Frankie’s. What’s that shit in the background? You got cats on the stove? You drop my dyke for me?”
“Some jazz shit, skip. My daughter left it on.” He didn’t want to play drop-the-dyke bullshit.
“Sounds like fucking mad cats. Anyway, these kids are white and their families live in the mayor’s ward. We had a game, Ray, but I think we’re gonna lose it.” A glass or bottle clinked against the receiver at the skipper’s end. “Little assholes had double Chucks in their pockets. We’re so fucking fucked.”
Chapter 14
A month after Pious Man Chan’s dep shut down the Captain Cook task force and the Feds set up a bureaucracy operating from the Swamp, Chan told the rumpled mayor it was out of his hands. Pious Chan noticed with satisfaction the smudgy thumbprints of exhaustion pressed under the mayor’s rat’s eyes. Subtle makeup didn’t help. The mayor was in the tubes and losing sleep over it. His hair was dull pewter and the word was he was back to bingeing on fast food and midnight takeout.
“We were making progress, sir,” Chan told him sadly over lunch at City Hall. They sat at a table in the window of the mayor’s den, overlooking the city square where the drab homeless were carrying signs and trudging in a circle. “Our guys were on the edge of penetrating the whole thing, but then.” He shrugged. “Anyway, now we’ve got to move on the Bik-Bigs soon. Winter’s coming on and they’re all going to fly south, back to the Carolinas or Florida, scheme up another season of discontent. Which means a whole new generation of Black Kids Big Guns and dead bodies come springtime.”
“Fuck, Pi.” The mayor shook his dead locks and fired a weak probe. “How’d you let it all get away from you, the Chemical Squad?”
Chan too had aged visibly behind the mahogany desk but he’d grown some hard bark. The long, black, single hair had been plucked and the mole looked like a red small-calibre bullet hole verging on leakage. Somehow, the mayor thought, he’d become even more Asian looking. His eyes were sleepy but ready and predatory. He’d taken on the mantra of an old, disgraced police chief from another dynasty. Politicians come and go but cops will fuck you forever. Pious Man Chan let the mayor wait and affected deep thought and commiseration.
The mayor’s serfs were getting restless. There were growing rumors of corruption among the wardmen. The community groups were wearying of broken campaign promises, of blame being kicked up to other governments, of the mayor and his soaked crying towel. Led by the inscrutable Willy Wong, the Chinese Menu lobbied for a crackdown on the white thugs coming into Chinatown and disrupting the community, torturing the children. Promised bicycle lanes weren’t painted on the downtown streets. The lakefront was a mess of indifferent reconstruction. Building contracts were falling apart because the mayor hadn’t found a way to free up state or federal funding. The unions were howling for the jobs. The homeless were a whole other matter. The sleeping bags the city was handing out to the bums weren’t of Arctic quality and the social groups were calling the mayor a fascist killer who left the needy to freeze in the streets. The sleeping bags, they said, we
re body bags. You couldn’t, a cheerful dep told Chan, take a shit in Memorial Park without dumping on some shivering bum.
Pious Chan shrugged. “It was those kids, sir. Those kids in your ward who went south on the ecstasy. A little restraint, a little more time, sir, and we could’ve got the cooker, the labs, and wrapped the Bik-Bigs into it all.” He jabbed an asparagus spear and rolled it in a little pot of melted butter.
“Well, what are you guys doing?”
“Us? We’re policing, sir. We’re not arresting homeless people. We’re not arresting those guys down the hall, who, by the way, are getting pretty brazen. Price is back at it, losing tons of money in the Italian gambling clubs over in Stateline. Don’t know how he does it, the salaries the city gives those guys. The wife’s sailing around in a new Lexus. Me, I’d’ve gone broke, killed the wife, and sold the car by now to pay for a lawyer. Ten grand Mr. Price dropped this weekend, but he’s driving a new car too. Some of my guys are wondering why we haven’t started up a project on him, see if there’s a connection between his dough and the building tenders.”
“Pious. Those tenders are for jobs. Union jobs. Union jobs that vote.”
“I know, sir. I’m just letting you know. In case the media gets a hold of it. You might want to send me some backdated paper, asking me to start drilling into corruption. I’ll sit on it and if the newspapers start their shit, we can say we’re on it but can’t talk because it’s active.”
The mayor had no appetite. He looked at the bums stamping a circle in the dirty snow outside his castle, the lights from the camera crews bright in the dim noontime. It was well-organized and destined for the front page, for the tricks at six. They used to love him, the media and the bums and the bum organizers, because he could weep on cue over his heartbreak at their plight. “I need something big, Pi. What’ve you got?”
“Bik-Bigs. We can take them down anytime. Seven homicides, statewide trafficking, smuggling shit down from Canada.”
