by Lee Lamothe
Harv thought about sleeping in a drafty barn with the smell of chemicals in the dust. But he nodded. “Sure. I’ll get a tent, pitch it in there. But what if things don’t work out. The … groceries don’t get delivered, one reason or another?”
“Needless to say, I’ll be disappointed. We’ll have to come up with another plan. But you go back up anyway and I’ll probably come up. If we’re both up there, we might as well do some … baking? You know? Get back in the game.” He shook his head. “I hope you don’t break my heart, Harv.”
“No worries, Connie.” Harv sucked some meat off some bones. “A jacking. I’ll make it look somebody tried to jack her car, maybe whacked her, and took the body away with him.”
“Nice. Good thinking.” He’d made a tall box out of interlocked rib bones, fashioned into a log cabin.
Harv stared at it, mesmerized.
“I got a lot of love in me, Harv. A whole lot of love.”
* * *
Djuna Brown made her security bubble and cruised along inside it. Not many cars passed the Xterra. She seemed to know when to change lanes and when to idle along in the slow lane. Ray Tate found some cigarettes and they both smoked, the windows cracked, the SUV swooshing along. Late season cottagers clogged the slow lane, their backseats and roof racks stacked with all manner of lost summer fun. Trailers pulled boats of all kinds; canoes seemed balanced on car roofs. The white lines zipped by. In the light of oncoming traffic her face was perfect and mysterious. Policing was a learning curve, he thought, a discovery about the without and the within. She wasn’t the same deadbeat, slipper-wearing, morose, feral creature he’d first encountered at the elevator at the Chem Squad. But it wasn’t just one way. He’d come to understand that loving was in the small things, in the hints of possibility, of change. It was in the laughter, the sadness, the surprises. Now he couldn’t imagine a life without her in it. Even his daydreams of Paris were populated with her nimble fingers, her sly eyes, the on-again, off-again Caribbean breeze in her accent. He’d learned as much as he’d taught and he’d learned about balance, that he didn’t have to play out the cards he’d been dealt. There were more cards in more decks and you just played a hand as far as you could then folded and got a new round.
He hadn’t told her there was probably surveillance around. The dep’s horrid little minions, he assumed, looking to knife a buyout into his back. He’d seen the same car in the city near his apartment a couple of times, clocked it a few times in his rear-view mirror. But he was used to it. Catching him drunk on the streets with a loaded gun on his ankle would do the trick. But he’d been careful now because he’d had a mission since he met her.
She didn’t know it but she was an agent of change. She’d brought the skipper face to face with his hatred of her. It was about a dead child who froze in a fetal posture with goo stuck to her face. Ray Tate had no doubt the skipper would put her down if he had to, but no longer would he take as much pleasure in it. Ray Tate assumed the skipper knew about the little headquarters’ squirrels who were tracking him. He was sure the skip would tip him off when it was time. The skipper, as much as Djuna Brown, was a cop and no amount of booze or nasty business would take every drop of that out of him.
“Ray? Talk to me, man. Keep me awake.”
He offered to take the wheel but she said city guys couldn’t drive worth shit. “You like me, don’t you, Ray? I gotcha.”
“You do. Got, be I.”
“I haven’t had a guy in a long time. I mean …” She gave him a sideways look. “I mean I’ve had to bang a few for personal maintenance, put the nightstick to a few others, but none of that was, like, romance.”
He smiled. “Tell me about Harv. What’s up with him? That shit with the tree under the ground?”
She straightened out her arms and put her head back against the headrest. Her eyes flicked across her mirrors as she spoke. “Harv. Harv’s deep. I was surprised that he wanted to talk to me at all. I don’t think he likes you, Ray. You must’ve said something while I was getting the melons.”
“I did. I told him your friend’s kid deserved to get French-fried for being an idiot, playing with solvents. Harv didn’t like that, much.” He slipped his cigarette butt out the window. The air outside was fully cold with an ice edge. “The kid? How’d you make that up, like that on the fly?”
“No, Ray. True story. Maybe the burns aren’t quite as bad as I made out, but for sure the kid is scarred up.” She was silent a few minutes. “He didn’t say much, old Harv. He did say he didn’t kill Agatha Burns. Funny that. We know it wasn’t him on the branding iron in Chinatown, but we said it was and he didn’t deny it. He didn’t seem to mind we thought that. But he didn’t like it when I said we thought he did Agatha in. He said he didn’t kill nobody, ever, which we know is a lie. But he specifically said, Nope, he didn’t do her. What do you think?”
“Fuck if I know. I don’t actually care, at this point. The hammers from Homicide can figure it out. What did he say about the Captain, about the lab?”
“He didn’t talk about the Captain at all. He said if all we wanted was pills, how many would it take? To make me happy, make us go away? I said couple of hundred thousand, but what would really make me happy is getting the lab. Bodies? Sure, I said, if we have to. But the lab, the pressing machine, the precursors they’re using? Hog heaven for the poor little black girl working with the heartless beatnik.” She glanced over at him and reached a hand onto his thigh. “I know you got a heart, Ray-o. I seen it.”
“So, how’d you leave it? With Harv? I think we should’ve either chained him up for being ugly or stayed on him, see where he went.”
“He’s gonna call. He has some thinking to do, some stuff to weigh in his mind, and he says then he’ll call. If he does, he does. If he don’t, he don’t. There’s issues old Harv has to work out.” She indicated a lane change, slipped out, and indicated her way back in front of a sports car having trouble in the gathering wind. They were closer to the lake. A few streamers of snow came off a field to the west. The Canada Express. “Harv’s been a crook for, like, forty years. He’s careful. He thinks a lot, but he doesn’t think like we think, you and me. He thinks about … I think he thinks that ratting someone in would mean he wasted forty years of his life, toiling in the fertile fields of crime. I think he’s thinking about a way to give us what we need, keep us off his back, and not have someone do time for it, especially him.”
Ray Tate didn’t like it much, but it was her play. Free-form jazz wasn’t without some flat notes, some riffs that didn’t go anywhere. And, he thought, what’s the worst that could happen? The dep put him down, the dep put her down. Worst case: they go to Paris and eat snails on a wide boulevard of shady trees. “Okay, so we wait for him to call.”
“He’ll call, Ray.” She was quiet a few minutes. “All that stuff him and me talked about? I don’t think it mattered. I think what he really wanted to say, for some reason, was that, about the trees. To share it. About there being more tree under the ground than on top of it. He seemed dazed, thinking about it.”
“Weird.” He didn’t care, actually, he thought. He wanted her to push the Xterra as fast as it would go, to activate the lights and noise, and speed to her place or his place.
“Yeah, weird. I said to him, Maybe people are like that too, Harv. Maybe what we see in people is only what there is to see. That there’s more of the person underground and out of sight than there is walking the earth.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing. But he nodded as though I’d received some message he’d been trying to send.”
They were quiet until they reached to top edge of the city. She said, “Ray, sixteen grand. That’s not much for a dope dealer like Harv. How come you think he didn’t just go and get his face fixed?”
“What did he say? Be who you are?”
PART THREE
Chapter 26
They spent the night at Djuna Brown’s duplex because they needed mix and Ray
Tate knew he had none. They didn’t get around to the refreshments for several hours. She’d laughed when his hands were on her on the stairs, hushing him but laughing.
“Jesus, Ray.” In bed she ran her hand up his back. “You could hang a knitting needle around your neck, use it as a bullet proof vest. Who’s been feeding you, boy?”
They were hungry and they sat at the kitchen table. She wore his sweater and looked in the fridge and found some prepared salad. There was mix in the fridge door but she swore out loud and said she was out. She mixed gin and taps at the sink, her reflection in the window smiling at him.
They poked at the salad and sipped at the gin and taps. Twice she caught him staring at her, about to speak. She was concerned, but she waited. It might be a time for revealing moments: afterglow blues or the emergence of a hitherto unexhibited facet of his character. If, she decided, he asked her to do anything, to get him a drink or turn on the radio, anything at all, she’d decline.
But he simply nodded to himself and got up and went into the other room. When he came back he had his shirt and jacket on and he sat down opposite her with his elbows on the table.
Then he wouldn’t look at her at all. He began speaking.
* * *
Devon Johnson was first: twenty-one, six-four, Jamaican black, father of four, and husband of none. He had three baby-mothers, young welfare women in the projects, and by all accounts a nice guy, a stickman with the ladies, part-time dent puller in a body shop. His mother’s grief, afterwards, was genuine and palpable.
“At the inquest she called him My Boy,” Ray Tate told Djuna Brown staring and remembering in the middle ground. “Almost never by his name. My Boy was a good boy. My Boy had had some trouble, but never with guns. My Boy smoked a little reefer but no crack.” Ray Tate rattled the ice in his gin and taps. “She bore me no ill will, she said. She said she didn’t like cops, but she wanted to be truthful. I remember she looked at me with pity at what I’d done.”
In the middle of a blistering afternoon Devon Johnson and three other fellows came out of a mom-and-pop on Clinton Street. One guy had the money, one guy balanced a stack of cartoned cigarettes as he waddled comically across the sidewalk like a dizzy circus clown, one was stuffing the lottery tickets into his jacket, and Devon Johnson had nothing in his hands but the gun and was halfway to the car when Ray Tate, then a charger in a one-man ghost car, swung into the one-way street the wrong way, bailed out with his gun in his hand, and said clearly in an incredibly calm voice: “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you.”
Devon Johnson fired cowboy-style, his pistol swung to bear vaguely on the sound of Ray Tate’s voice. He fired a shot that broke the front passenger window of the ghost car, skipped off the steering wheel, exited the open front driver’s window, and splintered off a piece of wooden telephone pole across the street. Ray Tate felt his heart beat twice, then very quickly he shot Devon Johnson dead, emptying his gun into the centre of Devon Johnson’s considerable body mass, making a hit ring you could cover with a coffee mug. Ray Tate thought he’d missed completely with every shot — there was no discernible or immediate effect on Devon Johnson, except for a slight rippling of his black Free Mumia sweatshirt as he died on his feet. Watching the dead man standing in front of him, Ray Tate held his breath and gathered his stones, and reached for another clip: Can I do this again? Fall, you motherfucker.
After Devon Johnson fell, Ray Tate held his empty gun on the other suspects until the troops arrived. Witnesses told investigators Devon Johnson had pointed the pistol directly at Ray Tate and was firing when he was killed. It was a heavily Italian neighbourhood and witnesses referred to the main players as “the officer” and “the eggaplanta.” Ray Tate detailed the shooting close enough to the witness statements. He was made a sergeant by the end of the summer, was named Policeman of the Month, and got a three day weekend down in the capital.
“So,” he said, “that’s Devon Johnson. Stickman. Gunman. My Boy.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Ray. I know.”
“Let’s get ’er out of the way, Djuna. I’ll talk now, here, tonight, but I won’t do it again, okay? You got questions, ask them anytime.” His glass was empty, the ice melted. She went to the sink and mixed a couple more.
He didn’t wait until she sat back down.
“Mkumba Masi was a schizophrenic,” he said to her reflection in the window above the sink. “He didn’t take his medication. There’d been a snowstorm down from over the border and he was trapped in his rooming house. He couldn’t get out to fill his script and for four days he looked out the third-floor window at the snow building up, coming to smother him. There’d been a suicide in another rooming house up the block and I was heading there on foot, through the snowdrifts, to sign notebooks for my guys, and he just came howling through the snow.”
Mkumba Masi, screaming at the gods in the sky to make it stop snowing, came out of nowhere. Ray Tate, calm and focused to the point of super reality, saw every detail of the tribal scars carved into the pores of Mkumba Masi’s cheeks, saw the frayed neck of his denim shirt, even smelled on his breath the boiled goat of the rancid putari stew he’d eaten earlier in the day.
“I thought he was calling for help, I couldn’t see the machete he had down the back of his belt. When I did, well, it was out and he was too close for me to pull my gun. We went down in the snow. He wasn’t that big, but he was wiry. That strength, you know? They get from someplace when they really need it?”
The two men engaged in the middle of the street and went down into the snow. Ray Tate remembered going you-asshole-you-asshole-you-asshole at himself, holy fuck where’s the machete? Where’s his right hand? When he got control and got his gun out he fired blind. The rounds went through Mkumba Masi’s denim shirt, through the left-hand pocket, the Virginia Slims package within, through the thin body, and out the back, all three being later found lodged in a parked car. One of us, Ray Tate thought, is on fire: flames from his gun had ignited both their clothing.
“There was trouble afterwards,” he told Djuna Brown in her kitchen in the middle of the night. “All those folks who never gave a shit about Mkumba Masi when he was alive, all of a sudden he’s their cause. A little rioting, a lot of editorializing. Those buttons came out, you saw them? My photograph with a red line through it. Killer Kop. Ray Gun. Tate Equals Hate. No promotion this time for old Ray. We’d got a new mayor by then and it was goodbye Charlie. A month off and then into the weeds, looking for a guy that was poisoning dogs. Then this.”
“Silver lining, right?” She came around the table. “You got the girl.”
“Jeez,” he said, “I sure fucking hope so.” He bit his lip. “You know, the first one? Devon? That never bothered me. He had a gun, I had a gun. Fair fight. But Mkumba Masi? I was a bigger guy then, I lost a lot of weight since. But I was bigger than him by about forty pounds and a good six inches. I should’ve been able to control him, crazy strength or not.” He took a deep breath. “That’s what we do. We’re cops. We control. But …”
She wrapped him up and put her face next to his. She felt his body make a small convulsion but it might have been a silent hiccup.
* * *
At the office while they waited for the skipper to go through his morning messages they checked their phone mailboxes. Ray Tate had one from a man named Carl who said the guy with the scars on his face had come in the day before, driving an old grey pickup truck. You know, the guy said, Carl, at the restaurant up Widow’s Corners way, and is there a reward? Ray Tate deleted it with a laugh.
Djuna Brown had one from Buck, who talked slowly and endlessly about her coming back up north, bringing justice to Dodge, and he had a new venison recipe she’d love. He warned her that if she had to ever prepare bear she should cut every single trace of fat from the meat; it went rancid very quickly. What else, what else? Oh, yeah, by the way, that place up Passive way? Ten clicks north of the town, driveway to the left with a white gate at the entry. Watch out, he said, for t
he old, snaggly dude, he was heap bad medicine. Djuna Brown laughed too.
The skipper hung up his phone and waved them into his office. He looked pale and drawn but his eyes were clear. A bottle of anti-nausea tablets and a black coffee stood on his desk. Ray Tate recognized the signs: the skipper was taking a cure and his body wasn’t liking it much. He’d lost the aggressive look he habitually wore. He looked shaky and weak. He didn’t look at Djuna Brown as if she was a celestial. He gave Ray Tate a friendly nod.
“So, where we at, after you guys disappear up in Indian country?”
Djuna Brown said, “A quarter million.”
“Dollars?”
“Nope. The evil X. With double Chucks on each of them.”
“Where? When? Should I call public affairs?” He looked at her as though without the blond madness on her head she was another person, a cop almost. “Set up a press conference?”
Ray Tate briefed him on their day up north without actually saying anything. “We got a lead. There’s gonna be a quarter million double Chucks, at least, in a place we don’t know yet. We’re waiting for the call.”
“Quarter million. Beautiful. At twenty-five bucks a pop that’s …” The alcohol cells screaming in his brain left him confused. “Fuck, that’s a lot.”
“Six million, street value. In real terms, just between us,” Djuna Brown said, “fuck all, really. But they’re killer pills and we’re going to get them. Nice double Cs stamped in ’em.”
“Strange that they’d bring back the Cs after those kids died.”
“I thought so, too,” she said. “I figure they figure the logo is so well-known folks’ll go for it, just to be cool.” She shrugged. “Get high and cheat death.”
“What about the lab, Ray? Can we get the lab? The super lab?”
Ray Tate nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Separately, from another source, we might have a fix on where their smoky cauldron is. Not likely we’re going to get bodies to go with it. Maybe an old fucker who guards the place.”
