by Lee Lamothe
He didn’t stop at the restaurant south of Widow’s Corners. The place was poisoned. He had bags of groceries in the back of the rental and a pound of coffee to float him through the night. For a while, on a stretch of dark road with no traffic going either way, he allowed himself to think he’d already left the life and was driving to his cabin on a mountainside in the far west, returning perhaps from a dinner out in a nearby mining town, maybe with a woman beside him for company, someone who saw through the scars on his face and hands, who believed it was from fucked-up work on an oil rig. The idea of Alaska came to him. He knew guys who’d lammed out and headed north. Half the state was guys named Smith and Jones who said they came from a general direction instead of a town or city. People accepted that. You could reinvent yourself, he thought, although not in that exact term, and he wondered if you had to hate yourself to do it or if you just had to have had enough of yourself in general.
He decided he’d do the work to satisfy the funny little black girl cop. He’d genuinely liked her, although her partner was just a cop like every other cop he’d ever met. A thug with no heart, a guy chasing his pension and fuck everybody else. But the little cop had been funny and sad and angry, all in one package. He’d bet living in her life wasn’t easy. She’d said she’d pull back the legions of Chem Squad detectives and give him two days to come up with a stash of double Charlies.
“Me and him, out there in the truck,” she’d said, “we’re the two you see, Harv. It’s the guys you don’t see that are gonna give you problems. I just want to put this case down, get promoted, and get away from all those white city fuckers. He’s okay most of the time, but really, at the end of it, he just wants his pension, dump his wife and kids, and go to Paris to fuck all day and drink all night. Nice guy, but limited.”
“And you can get me free for a couple of days? What’ll you tell him, or your bosses?”
“Fuck them, Harv. I’d tell you about my life as a cop but believe me, you wouldn’t believe me. You can get vitamin E cream, go for skin grafts. Doesn’t work like that for black folks.” She’d looked over his shoulder at Ray Tate in the truck. “You know who he is, eh? Who they fucking partnered me with? He’s the guy shot those black guys, down in the city.”
He decided he’d put the double Charlie head on the pill presser and make her the two-hundred-thousand pills. He’d switch heads and crank out lightning bolts until the sound drove him crazy. Then he’d return to the city and do the final grab-up job for the Captain. The deal with the Chinamen to dump the next batch of lightnings would require careful thought and planning: he’d have no backup, with Barry and his crew waiting in the weeds to whack the fat Captain. Then he’d gather up his dough and take a train west to the ocean and work his way back east a while and north into the foothills.
As he peered into the darkness for the turnoff to the farm he thought about Barry and the crew. He couldn’t have any part in Barry’s plans for the Captain. Betraying a partner was as bad as ratting him out. But if the next twenty-four hours went smoothly it probably wouldn’t matter anyway. Connie would find his entire life changed. Harv had a plan for his pal.
In front of the farmhouse he sat and thought about looking at the moon a while.
There was a light on in the front window.
He went into the barn and turned on the lights, pulled the drop cloth from the pressing machine, and turned on some space heaters. A half hour, he decided, until the place was warmed up enough to work in. Then he’d have to kill the heaters: they were an ignition source and when he was mixing the fumes would fill the place so gradually he wouldn’t notice their thickness through his mask.
He went to the rental, gathered his groceries and clumped up the steps to the farmhouse, pretending it was his western refuge. “Jesus fuck,” he said, “home at last.”
Chapter 28
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown met for breakfast at a coffee shop near the satellite. While he went to the counter to order food, she called Gloria at the office and said they were in the area and would be in in an hour. Gloria said the skipper hadn’t made it in yet and there were calls stacking up from the chief’s office, from the dep, from the Federales, and from the hammers of Homicide. Djuna Brown said to give her a call if he showed up before they got back. She folded the phone and watched Ray Tate bullshitting with the girl behind the counter. She could tell the counter girl liked him, was flirting. He looked fit and slim and nothing like a killer beatnik cop in a short, brown leather jacket, blue sweater, blue jeans, and hiking boots. He looked like an old perpetual student or a cool, young professor. The girl at the counter laughed and he laughed with her. Djuna Brown had trouble believing he was the same bent guy she’d seen that first morning, standing with the skipper outside the elevator, looking at her appraisingly through red eyes above a grey beard. Of course, she wasn’t the same shuffling depressive wearing embroidered slippers, either.
When Ray Tate brought down coffee and a plate of breakfast buns she asked about his night. She saw the black dust in his fingernails, the charcoal in the creases in his knuckles. “You could’ve come over, you know? I got gin and the water was on.”
“I wanted to. I got to … I did some drawing and before I knew it the sun was coming up. I grabbed an hour or two. This thing I think is going to break soon. Unless Harvey conned you.”
“Nope.” She was positive. “He’ll call. We’ll get the pills, be a hero to our kind. One thing I’d like, though, and if you overrule it that’s okay. We’re pretty sure we know where the super lab is, right? We could go up there right now and grab up Harv in action and probably a shitload of pills. But me? I’d rather wait. Let Harv do his thing and when we get our stuff and he gets clear, we take the lab.”
“You like our Harv, don’t you?”
She dug into her jacket and brought out her fist. Ray Tate stared at it. When she opened it there was a wrinkled half tube of vitamin E cream. “He gave it to me at the coffee place. So I wouldn’t get the wrong stuff for the kid. Yeah, I like Harv. He’s a bandit and probably, they say, a killer.” She made a sad smile. “But nobody’s perfect, right?”
“Not me, that’s for sure.”
They sat chewing on scones and sipping their coffee. A crowd of cattlemen with exaggerated bowed legs moved up the sidewalk outside like a posse, in their ten-gallon hats and western-style suits. They wore convention ID cards around their necks.
“So, what’s our plan?”
He shrugged. “Wait for Harv to call, I guess, if you don’t want to nail down the lab right off.”
“We’ll give Harv a couple of hours. If nothing, then we’ll get the skipper to put together a raiding party.” She made a cat smile. “So, what’d you draw? All night?”
He looked out the window. “Ah, you know. Jugs of water, flowers in pots. Student stuff.”
“I’m sure.”
He made a small smile. “When this is over? We should talk.”
She touched his hand on the table. “When this is over, Ray, we should talk French in Paris. I got lots of lieu time. And the way you live I figure you’ve got some dough put aside. You can keep me in the style I’ve become accustomed to. Beatnik glory.”
“Cool.”
Her phone buzzed. “Oh, please, let it be my buddy, Harv.” She answered with her last name, nodded at Ray Tate, and listened. “No, I can talk. I’m sitting with my buddy, Bongo … Yeah, him … How many? … When? … Where? … Any chance you want to help us out with the other guy? The Captain? …” She laughed. “I know you’re not, but I hadda ask … You know, I know you don’t know, but if you did know, it’d be nice to give some closure to Agatha Burns’s family … Like I said, Harv, I hadda ask … I’m cool with that …” She nodded as though Phil Harvey could see her and held up the tube of vitamin E. “I got it right here. After we do our thing today I’m gonna take it over to him … You know, you didn’t have to do that, right? … I know … I know … I know … Tommy’s his name …” She got a very sad look on her face
. “Harv … Harv, I know you don’t want to hear this from a cop, but maybe you should look at yourself, I think there’s probably some roots under there, a little different than the tree up top, you know? … Harv? Hello? …”
“Gone?”
“Yeah. I think I mighta fucked it there, at the end. I just wanted him to know … you know?”
“Sure. So, what’d he say?”
“Today. Today’s the day. He’ll call in a couple of hours, let us know where to pick them up. We’re not going to see him at all. We won’t see him again, he said.”
“Okay, Djun’. First we get the pills, then we’re going to the lab, raise a ruckus, lay waste in Indian country.”
She nodded. “I hope he doesn’t get caught in this thing.”
“Djun’? He’s still a mutt, you know, old Harv.”
“I know,” she said sadly.
* * *
The skipper had fallen. His eyes looked like angry red orbs, veins like purple tortured worms writhed in his forehead. He was sitting with his feet up, listening to someone rag him out, massaging his temple with his free hand.
From the doorway Ray Tate could hear the voice and the tone of the voice on the phone but not the words. He held his thumb up.
“Hang on, hang fucking on,” the skipper said into the phone, palming the receiver. “Tell me, Ray, oh please, Jesus.”
“Today’s the day, skip. Waiting on the coordinates. We get the pills then, I think, we’re going for the super lab.”
“You know where the lab is?”
“Yep, probably. First the pills, then the lab. Has to be in that order. Clean sweep, unless you want bodies in chains. Bodies, we don’t got.”
“The Federales want back in. They want all you got.” The skipper held up the receiver. “The Big Chan’s cut a deal with the Feds, I don’t know why, the fucking mayor’s gonna go nuts, this gets away from us. But I made a deal for us with the dep. We take down the double Chucks, they get the lab.”
Ray Tate stared at him.
“C’mon, Ray.”
“Skip, you drunken fucking cocksucker,” he said, “I’m booking medical-off. My ulcer’s acting up.”
“Ray.”
“Fuck off.”
* * *
They left the building without speaking. They didn’t take a company car. Instead they walked up the hill, huddling arm in arm against a north wind. Lake effect snow had blown in sometime and stopped and the headstones in the cemetery were edged in pure white relief. He steered her past the local station and up the street towards his apartment.
“My place, Ray. I got a fireplace. I got mix. I even got bedding we can shred.”
She tugged him off course and they went through the streets to her duplex. At the foot of the steps something caught her eye along the block. “They never fucking give up.”
He looked and saw a grey car with the engine idling at the corner. “Let’s give ’em something to report in their dailies,” he said and wrapped her up in his arms.
Laughing, she flipped the finger at the surveillance car and slapped his ass as they went up the steps.
* * *
The flames in the fireplace came from Union Gas. They took bedding from the bedroom and made a nest on the floor. She mixed drinks and put on a Cesaria Evora CD.
“They got you, Ray, you know that? Dereliction. Insubordination. Beatnik goofiness.” She sipped and sparkled her eyes at him. “Weird. You don’t do the job and they get you. You do do the job and they get you anyway.”
“Paris. I got the early pension already. I got some dough put aside.”
“Cool. How do you say Cool-ee-oh in French?”
They played around. He had his hand trapped inside her bra. “What do you think? Paris?”
“Sure, whatever. Right now,” she said, “let’s do sixty-eight. I really like that, Bongo.”
He laughed. “Sixty-nine, you mean.”
She made a wicked smile. “Nope. Sixty-eight: you do me now and I’ll owe you one later.”
He laughed again. He felt a strange freedom. “So, what do you think? You up for it, for Paris? Bohemian frolics.”
“Me and you? Well, I guess, okay, maybe. No weird stuff, though, okay? No berets, none of those scarf things you wear around your neck like some fruit.” She giggled. “Especially no moustache I’ll have to wax.”
Her mobile rang and she sprang up to get it from her jacket. She answered with her name, listened without saying anything for a few moments, then hung up. “Harv. Our stuff is ready for pickup. What are we going to do about it?”
“Fuck it,” he said. “Call it in to Crime Watch.”
She sat beside him and ran her hand over his face. “I got a better idea, if you’re up for it. Didn’t you say you got a good pal in the Staties?”
Chapter 29
It was colder north of the city. A stiff wind was starting up and the faintest traces of snow gathered then vanished in clouds. The treeline swayed like dancers. An audience of identical grim crows sat in a row on the hydro wires. Ray Tate’s pal on the Statie gun team backed his truck up to their rental car so they could talk door-to-door. The Statie stared across at Djuna Brown. “You clean up good,” he said, making a smile. He was a lean man with wide shoulders and a right eye that had a sniper’s mean squint under a long-billed, blue baseball cap with a crossed rifles logo on the front.
Djuna Brown gave him a minimal smile. Staties weren’t her favourite people.
“So, Ray, bring me up-to-date. What the fuck are we doing here?”
Ray Tate gave him a brief rundown on the double Charlie pill pickup and the possibility of a super lab in Indian country. “There might be a tie-in to a woman who died in a truck fire, a lab that exploded just over a month ago. Maybe murder.”
“These pills, they the ones that killed the kids in the city?”
“Yep. Double Chucks. Death on the tip of your tongue.”
The Statie nodded. “Hmmm. They any good?” He sat and thought, sighting distances to trees, parsing the wind and its effect on a travelling bullet. He stared at the line of crows, appraising regret. “So I get this straight: you guys have a stash being dumped for you. You might have a monster lab. You might have a hook into a fatality that might or might not be a homicide. All this, right? So how come you don’t go pick up the pills, set up on the lab, solve the case, be a hero to your people?”
“City politics. You don’t want to know. We can just call Crime Watch and pick up five hundred bucks under my wife’s name if you don’t want it.”
The Statie shrugged. “Sure. Yeah. I think so. I should touch base with my brother. He’s a major at headquarters. What do you guys want out of it?”
“Dick.”
“Hang on.” The Statie reversed and creeped his truck back up the road a little. Through the windshield they could see him talking into a mobile.
“What do you think, Ray?” Djuna Brown made little fists and stretched.
Ray Tate shook his head. “Dunno. They want it. I mean, who wouldn’t? There’s going to be a lot of press, drinks all around. I can see him being suspicious simply because it’s a gimme.” He watched her dig in her pockets and take out a cigarette. “Someone hands you something for no reason you can think of, when they could keep it themselves, they go, Whoa, what’s wrong with this?”
“This is the guy you called, right? About me, back at the beginning? The guy who figured I’d been in the shit before they put me in the shit?” She lit the cigarette with a match and waved out the flame. He could see she was nervous.
“Yeah. Good guy. He’s got some funny stories about Indian country.”
“Here he comes.”
The black truck rolled forward down the sideroad and stopped, driver to driver. “He wants to know about bodies. The guy dropping the stash? Can we get him?”
Djuna Brown leaned forward. “Nope. The dump’s already been done. The stuff’s just sitting there. Waiting. Nobody around.”
“Can we track him?
”
“Nope. He’s our guy. I think he’s already long gone.” She handed Ray Tate the cigarette. “Maybe, maybe when you hit the lab, maybe there’s some guys hanging around there. I dunno.”
“And you’ve got good coordinates on the lab?”
She nodded. “I haven’t been there, but I think I can find it.”
The Statie tapped his mobile on the top of the steering wheel. “A warrant would be nice, for the lab. What about that?”
Ray Tate shrugged. “Sure. But we don’t have tight coordinates, we don’t have a talking co-operator to put into the warrant. What we have is someone who told us about a bad smell in the air, chemical stuff. It’ll be: you go where your nose takes you.”
Djuna Brown leaned to speak across Ray Tate. “And there’ll probably be no major kingpin guys in there, anyway. No trial, no lawyers, so who gives a shit?”
“You guys write anything down in your books? About this meeting or anything else?”
Ray Tate shook his head. “We’re someplace else right now, entirely.”
She said, “Yeah, we’re someplace, getting it on, doing sixty-eights.”
The Statie smiled. “Who owes who?” He backed up his truck and went back on the phone. They watched him nod. When he came back he nodded. “Okay. He says first things first. We get the stash and we keep it quiet, if there is a stash. Then we set up on the lab tonight if we can find it and go in, first light.”
Ray Tate said, “Who we? We who?”
