by Lee Lamothe
“No. Not yet. Unless you got some white guys we can put with them?”
Pious Chan nodded at the mayor’s asparagus and raised his eyebrows. The mayor nodded and Chan started spearing with gusto. “Only white guys I can think of are Mr. Price and his guys down the hall at Planning. Don’t think we want that. Not yet anyway. There’s some Chinese guys gambling in the caverns under east Chinatown.”
The mayor knew what was going on. Pious Chan had already revealed his oriental hand at the Swamp: cops who’d pissed him off over the past twenty years were riding marked scout cars in the dark, piloting the prisoner wagons, adding up paper clips in obscure offices. The mayor had ten years of superior private schooling in Boston and Paris. Chan had two patient decades of accumulated personal slights and centuries of bloody revenge. A hundred generations of time were to the Chinamen as they were to a rock: imperceptible.
“I can’t see a chain gang of young black kids and old Chinese gamblers doing it for us, Pious.”
“Well, sir, we can go back after the cookers. The Feds haven’t got this Captain Cook guy, whose pills killed the kids. Or the cowboy who went nuts with the branding iron last month, on the exchange students. Or the super lab everybody’s talking about. Our special unit is still up, although it isn’t running too well.”
“That where Ray Tate is still? The Chemical Squad? What’s going on with him? I’m still paying his salary?”
Pious Chan nodded. “The gunner’s still with Gordie Weeks’s bunch. They’re doing nothing, sir. Some raids, little stuff. Nothing heavy that Tate can trip over, lose his way. At least he hasn’t killed anyone of the black persuasion. We’ve given the new Fed task force some space and some manpower, but if they ever somehow take down this Cook guy and get his lab the headlines are going to be Federal, out of Washington, how they saved the children because we couldn’t.”
The mayor shook his head, frustrated. “Take it back, Pious. Can you find a way to work around the Feds? Nail this Captain cocksucker, make him ours?”
“No problem, sir. Just send me the paper and I’ll kick Gordie and his gang into gear.” Chan was sick of the buttery asparagus but he asked, “You going to finish that, sir?” He wanted to eat the mayor’s lunch for him, literally and figuratively.
* * *
Gordie Weeks spent the month trying to figure out what was going on with Ray Tate’s scheme to spike Djuna Brown. The pair showed up separately each morning, drudged their way through paperwork, and seemed to get along all right. When the brainiacs down the hall had a fix on a lab they called the skipper and he put together a raiding party. The most likely time for reactive violence on lab raid was the go-in. The skipper mandated that Wally Brodski and the dyed dyke hit the door first, followed by whatever slobs were working. Ray Tate was the keeper of the keys, a fancy clerk who took down the names and numbers of the detectives, technicians, State Haz-Mat, and fire officials who went through the place. Ray Tate was swimming in boredom and seemed to be going downhill quickly under his matted hair and behind his thickening beard. He smelled sharply of paint and linseed oil, his fingertips were crusted with shades from the unhappy end of the rainbow. The raids yielded little mom-and-poppers, chemistry sets in basements, bathrooms, attics. None of the bust-ins had yielded a single double Charlie.
The dep had stopped calling. Gordie Weeks’s calls to Intelligence for intell coming out of the raids were unreturned.
Almost daily, the skipper cornered Ray Tate. “Hey, Ray, what’s going on with the dyke? She dropping today?”
“My partner, skip. She’s my partner.”
The skipper wasn’t sure if Ray Tate was being devious and arch. “You’re not gonna get her for me, are you, Ray? You were fucking me all along.”
Ray Tate just smiled at him and shrugged. “She’s clever, skip. She’s one diabolical dyke, that one.”
The skipper wasn’t sure but he was hopeful. “But, maybe? Maybe soon?”
Ray Tate had enshrouded himself in the safe cloud of non sequitur and had taken to talking about birds. “You ever notice, skip, that there’s a lot of fucking Canada geese in town? All those homeless people starving and there’s a fucking shitload of geese, waiting to be cooked up? How come nobody ever put the equation together? We got skinny folks starving in the streets and we got, like, a million fat fucking geese strutting around like they pay taxes.”
“Ray, Ray.”
* * *
When the call came from Pious Chan, via the dep, the skipper was in his office with his feet up, thinking idly about Gloria the receptionist and the .45s. He’d seen Djuna Brown and Gloria in deep chitchat a couple of times and wondered if the dyke had lured her over to the other team. The concept destroyed his dozing dreams. Something was different with the dyke. She made effort to keep her unruly white hair in some kind of shaped ’do. The exhaustion that had slumped her bones inside her body had evaporated, as though she’d had some kind of marrow work done on her skeleton. Djuna Brown still looked at him with her bitter eyes spitting hate, but when he wasn’t noticeably around she seemed to bustle with efficiency. She and Ray Tate laughed a lot.
The dep called, his voice jocular, “Gordo, you douchebag. Where you been? I call and I call and you’re never home. Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Hey, hey, dep.” The skipper knew he’d been swinging on a hook in the wind since the Feds had set up their own task force with the Staties. He played it low. “I been busy. Sorry I haven’t got back to you.”
“No matter. I know you guys been busy.” The dep said it without laughing. “What’d you get last night? Thousand pills?”
“Well, eight hundred.” The skipper had been disappointed. The tip from the local sector had suggested hundreds of thousands, based on the anxious rap of a strung out speeder.
“Wow, great. A little here and a little there, eh, Gordo? Chip away at the criminal infrastructure, it’ll collapse.”
“How’s the Fed task force working out, dep?” The skipper didn’t laugh but he took his shot. “They knocking down the double Chucks yet, got Captain Cook in the chain gang?”
“Well, Gordo, my boy, that’s why I’m calling you.”
* * *
The month for Ray Tate and Djuna Brown had been a cycle of rote. Raids on cookers had been amusing for a while but the media lost interest in minor takedowns and didn’t show up for the photo op. Ray Tate noticed that Wally the boozer and Djuna Brown were first through the doors. There were some scuffles but none of the speeders or cookers had much muscle tone or firepower. Wally Brodski took an elbow in the face while subduing an inside keeper and got two weeks off. Djuna Brown got into a tussle with a landlord who thought it was a home invasion and Wally stood watching her get her shit handed to her until Ray Tate climbed over him and put the chains on the guy. Djuna restrained him from going after Wally.
Afterwards, alone at the satellite, Ray Tate took Wally aside. “Don’t let them do this to you, Wally. We go into a place, we’re all one gang. You fucking know that.”
“She’s a fucking dyke, Ray. C’mon.”
“Right now she’s my partner. My dyke partner, sure, but she’s got the yellow letters on her back same as you, same as me, and the rest of us. What happens in here, that’s one thing. Out there, that’s another.” Ray Tate laid on some bullshit. “My father-in-law told me you were a good cop, you’d never watch another cop get his shit shuffled. Don’t you fucking do this, man.”
“Ah, fuck you, Ray.” But he had to listen: Ray Tate had the authority of dead bodies. Wally took the next door ahead of Djuna Brown and got his nose broken.
Djuna Brown somehow heard about it. “Don’t do that to me, Ray, okay?”
“It isn’t about you, Djun’,” he told her. “Wally forgot something, that’s all. I reminded him. I don’t care if it’s the fucking skipper on the floor: if he goes under them and you stand by and let them do it, well, we won’t be partnering at all, you and me. The tribe comes first.”
In the evenings t
hey sometimes had drinks at out of the way bars on the river unless there was a door kick on the go. No one else wanted to socialize with them. Ray Tate wouldn’t let his partner be excluded. She didn’t offer to wrestle him and he didn’t offer to paint her. They talked endlessly. They drove to Chicago to listen to a bunch of white college kids do imitation Junior Wells tunes. One night in the cold they sat by the river beyond the lights of Gastown and she came to know about his dreams of becoming a painter, of his girlfriend’s father luring him into the cops, of his wife booting him. He came to know about her father, a taxi driver down in the capital, who finally accepted that she was going to be a miniature cop and signed her up for jiu-jitsu lessons. Ray Tate never spoke about the dead black guys and she never spoke about her dyke jacket.
The skipper avoided her when he could and buttonholed Ray Tate about the progress of the conspiracy to spike her into the ground. Ray Tate pulled on a shroud and wrapped himself in bird life and blank stares.
One morning, the skipper bounded out of his office. “Okay, Ray, we’re back in business.”
Chapter 15
The day after Phil Harvey’s pal had cruised his black F-250 pickup through the parking lot and spotted the beatnik and the black cop in the red Intrepid in the handicap spot, Connie Cook gave Phil Harvey a stack of money and they both vanished in different directions.
Phil Harvey never said where he was going. The Captain took his wife on a cruise through the Pacific Islands. When he returned, fatter and tanned, he swung into the cultural whirl of autumn parties, handing out donations to all manner of culture and art. He kept his eyes and antennae out for someone who could be the recipient of his peculiar true love. But no one set off his twisted tripwire and he brooded and ate copiously. He grew lonely. He missed Agatha and her blood and flesh, and he missed Harv and their collegial banter.
The labs had shut down. The water farms rusted. Thieves and boosters wandered the streets with their bottles of pills, looking for a buyer. The double Chucks dried up. They’d become notorious death pills and even the Chinamen weren’t copying them anymore.
When Phil Harvey turned up he had no tan but he seemed relaxed when the Captain met him for hamburgers at a beer joint in the southern industrial section of town. They sat in the window and watched autumn snow outside, falling in a glittering sunshine.
“The ship was pretty good,” the Captain said. “Buffet, all you can eat.” He laughed. “When they saw me coming in for the buffet they just said, fuck it, called the head office in Atlanta and adjusted the bottom line.” He chewed slowly. “No grilled hamburgers, though. What is it with cruise lines? You can get anything but a grilled fucking hamburger. Fuck, Harv, I missed this, buddy. What you been doing? You go away?” He looked closely at Harvey. There was something different but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “You get laid a lot?”
“Naw. I hung out. Stayed away from the condo. Went out of town a little, hooked up with a pal. A lot of people are missing us, Cookie. A lot of people aren’t making much dough. Anyway, I got bored and I went up to the farm and just hid out. You know there’s a lake up there, way in on our property? Not a big thing, but I came across it out walking. Saw a fish jump in the air. There was a bear on the other side.”
“Yeah? Yeah, really? Fish? No shit. A bear. But no mischief-making up there? You didn’t pull out the recipe book, start baking little pink cakes in the barn?”
“Naw. No, Cookie. There’s nothing up there to cook with. I decided: Fuck it, take it easy. Just me and the fishes and the beasts.”
Phil Harvey was amazed that it could snow while the sun was shining. Things like that were sometimes coming to him, unbidden. In the north the mornings had been crusted with frosted dew and he’d sat for hours wrapped in his sleeping bag in the kitchen, watching through the window the crack and refreeze, watching the little footprints of small foragers melt. Shadows seemed blacker up in Indian country, edges sharper. The sky at night was vast and undiluted by ambient city light. He’d had an original thought, he believed, that the stars were holes poked into the sky, letting another light from another planet peek through. The only times before that he’d had that feeling were in the minutes after being released from prison: a rebirthing that suggested that the world was full of new smells and new possibilities. And although he’d returned to his old bad ways as quickly as he could, this time he thought might be different.
When he’d remotely picked up messages on his home phone that the Captain was back in town he’d felt a lot of disappointment and a bit of dread, the ebbing of the possibility of change for himself.
“So, we got no product to move, Harv?”
“Nope. I’ll get cooking once you give me the word to go get some stuff. We’ll have to use another stamp. Those double Cs are too notorious right now.” He smiled at the Captain. “The heat didn’t slow the Chinamen down, though. That Chinatown bunch are cooking with stuff they brought down from Canada. Making a fucking killing.”
The Captain realized the difference about Harvey: he’d had left his curtain of hair tied back, indifferently exposing the scar tissue. And he didn’t hide his angry, blurred hands. Connie pirated Harv’s fries. “You seeing anything going on? Those cops in the red car? Any of that stuff?”
“Nope. Nothing. I haven’t gone back to the condo since my guy saw them there in the parking lot. I haven’t gone near Ag’s old trap. The Camaro’s under tarps up north and I’m driving rentals. I think it might have just been a blip, Cookie. They thought they had something, then when nothing happened they fucked off to frame some other innocent guys.”
“You’d think with those fucking kids overdosing there’d be something.”
“Well, there’s been people around. When they grabbed up somebody with double Charlies they put them through pretty good, but nobody knows nothing. Then the Charlies ran out and headlines died down and things have been back to normal.” Harv grabbed a fry before the Captain could.
“Well, then, back to business, Harv. Can you sniff around Willy Wong, see what his guys are up to? He’s got that import firm, that’s how he gets his precursors in from over the border. Labels the drums cleaning solvent or something, trucks them down. If they get grabbed, he goes Holy Fuck there’s a crook in my importing business and somebody goes to jail, but not him.” Captain Cook shook his head. “Fucking guy. Anyway, you want to put some guys together, maybe on standby. And I’ll need you to do something else, Harv. Soon. For me.”
“Something heavy?” Harvey had resolved to not bring the Captain out on any more missions. Lack of restraint was never a good thing. You could feel a thrill at mayhem but you shouldn’t lose yourself in it. Mayhem was a tool, not part of a healthy lifestyle.
“Well, I’m lonely. I need a friend. Since Ag ran away and I been on this fucking trip with my wife, I’m not getting any.” He stared out the window. “I think that’s why I busted the buffet on the boat. I don’t get any, so I eat. I eat, so I get fatter. I get fatter and who the fuck’s gonna want to fuck a blimp on purpose? I need a pal, Harv. Long-term relationship.” He smiled. “I got my eye out for something sweet, I’ll let you know.”
“C’mon, Cookie. There’s hookers, do whatever you want, however you like it. There’s peelers at the club, be glad to make acquaintance. There’s no problem. This, grabbing up another chick, this is trouble. This is not a good time, start fucking around with kidnapping. We got to rebuild the business first.”
“Harv, Harv. I thought you understood me. Anybody can fuck a peeler or a hooker. I tried with the ones you got me, before, those two tire biters. I really tried. But there’s no love there — just money. Like buying a meal. But I want to create love, Harv. I want the ingredients for a loving relationship. I want what everybody wants but very, very few actually get. Once I find her, we’ll use the same tricks as last time, okay?”
The Captain’s appetite hadn’t been sated by Phil’s initial offerings. Predatory peelers had agreed to spend some time with him and were taken up to
the farm. After a week, they were gone. Harv asked what happened to them and the Captain said they weren’t satisfactory, that he’d given them each a wad of cash and dropped them back into their pathetic lives, none the worse for wear.
From his bedroom window the Captain had seen where the Burns family hid the emergency key to their home, under a planter on the rear deck. He’d invited the old couple over for drinks and dinner and sent Harv in while Agatha was out banging her boyfriend. Harv had gone in and filled suitcases with Ag’s clothing and personal effects, then headed over to the boyfriend’s place in a van and waited for her to come out. She was wrapped in duct tape, bundled into a sleeping bag, and on her way north before her parents got home.
“I need this, Harv.” The Captain looked out the window. “Unless my Ag comes back. You think she’s going to come back to me?”
“I don’t think so, Cookie.” Harv looked sad. “Really, I really don’t.”
Harv saw that the Captain had made a sad face but he couldn’t help licking his smiling lips. “Cool, Harv. Get some gear together for my thing, and in the meantime we’ll get up and at it on our thing. Use those wreckers from before, the day of the Chinese roundup. Those were good guys. Did they like me, Harv?”
* * *
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown were in the skipper’s glassed office. Ray Tate was staring out the window as if studying the air currents, divining the invisible paths of birds. Djuna Brown affected boredom. She’d fluffed out her bleached hair into a wild ’do. The skipper wondered if Ray Tate was winding up for an avian lecture. This bird facet was new and the skipper had calls in to see how much documentation was needed for a psych write-out.
“Okay. Okay, you guys. We’re back in business. Orders from headquarters. We’re taking out this Captain Cook guy. We’re taking down the super lab.”
Djuna Brown said, “Cool.”
Ray Tate said, “Wow.”
The skipper glanced at Ray Tate, who now seemed to be documenting how many species of birds flew past the window. Djuna Brown had her eyes on his, a cat smile waiting to pounce. He thought he could smell peroxide in the air and suddenly wanted her out of his office. He was amazed at his enduring hatred of everything about her. He’d heard stories that she’d been a good cop, even though she’d been working up the woods amongst the bears and the wolves, that she’d made some good pinches. But there were other stories and it was those stories that scared him and his fear made his hatred deeper.
