by Lee Lamothe
“Willard. I’m a local entrepreneur and benefactor to this community.” He smiled modestly. “If I can be of assistance in this tragedy? I’m a friend of police.”
“You can be gone, Willy, if you want to assist in this tragedy.”
Willard Wong remained in place, smiling, confused.
Djuna Brown caught sight of Brian Comartin come up on the edge of her vision. She stepped back two paces and pulled her gun and held it straight down her leg. “Brian, frisk this friend of Willy here. He’s got a lumpy suit. I fear for officer safety and the well-being of the community.”
Brian Comartin told Willard Wong’s companion to put his hands on the wall. The man stretched lazily, keeping his balance.
Comartin had to go to school.
“You can step him back a little and go wider, Brian, reach him a little higher.”
“Step back, spread, hands higher.” He seemed surprised that the man obeyed him and he got into it. He looked like he felt pretty good. “Don’t you move.” He thought that sounded weak. “Don’t you fucking move.”
The other three men came down the sidewalk. Djuna Brown took two more long backwards steps to make a wide controlling arc and put her gun up on them. “Okay, everybody, shadows on the wall.”
Willard Wong said it wasn’t necessary. “These men are all legally permitted to carry weapons in concealment. Signed by Pious Man Chan, the illustrious police chief. A personal friend.”
“Well, Willy, I’m State. I don’t give a fuck about Pious Chan and the city. He’s just another Chinaman with an attitude, this city is just another shithole, you’re just another douche with a stickpin.”
“I know you, Officer. You were involved in the … unpleasantness that hurt our community last year? You were on television for that. You shot a fat man. A bad fat man who tortured the children of Chinatown. A trafficker. I thank you. All of Chinatown thanks you.”
“Just so you know, Willy,” she said, not looking at him. “I don’t just shoot fat white guys. I’m no racist. First come, first served.”
“Yes, you worked with Sergeant Tate. Ray Tate. Last year. Those drug traffickers. Now Sergeant Ray Tate is solving this trouble in Chinatown for me.”
Comartin took a gun from a waist holster off the man on the wall. He didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
“Secure the firearm in your belt, Brian. When you’re done one, put him on his knees, hands behind the head, forehead on the wall. He’s mine, then, I got him, you don’t think about him. Concentrate and do the next one. ” She shifted back to allow her gun arc to encompass Willard Wong and the men.
“Sergeant Ray Tate and I are friends. You should call him, Officer.”
“Sergeant.”
“Yes, Sergeant. You should call my friend, Sergeant Ray Tate.”
“Sure, Willy, later, maybe. Right now we’re removing firearms and bad elements from Chinatown.”
“But, but the paperwork? The licences?”
“We’ll sort it out, down at the Sector. If it checks out, you come down and pick them up. For now, just relax, Willy. Chill.”
Comartin put the next two guys through the routine, taking a gun from each of them. He was running out of belt to tuck them into.
The last guy, spread up the wall like wings, cleared his sinuses loudly and casually horked on the ground, very vaguely in her direction.
Willard Wong murmured a warning.
“Oh-kay then.” Djuna Brown said with exaggerated vivacity. “This fellow we’ll do a little different, Brian. This guy is a bit more of a risk, with the health hazard, the horking and the like, in this time of medical crisis.” She told the guy to keep his hands on the wall. “Good, good. Now, Brian you’d like him to step back for you, step back … step back. Okay, perfect. You’re a natural. Now tell him to lean forward for you, put his forehead on the wall. Weight on his palms and forehead. Nice, nicely done. Now, you need him to take his hands off the wall, to clasp his hands behind his head for you, lace his fingers.” When the man was at a sharp angle, she said, “Brian, with your left hand gather his fingers, keep your arm straight, push, keep that forehead on the wall. Pat him down from the side. Now change hands on his fingers, go and do the other side. Very nice.”
Comartin took a gun from the man’s shoulder holster. He put it into the back of his belt.
“I observe he’s getting agitated, Brian.”
The man was calm, impassive, and almost good- humoured. It was a form of insolence, she decided. Disrespect.
“Brian? Scalp that guy.”
“He’s co-operating. He’s okay.”
“Brian, he’s going to make a move. Officer safety is paramount. Scalp him. Swing him wide, both feet.”
“Djuna.”
“Right now, Brian. He goes down hard.”
Brian Comartin used his right foot to sweep both of the last man’s feet and at the same time let go of his fingers. The man’s hands, still finger-locked behind his head were useless to control his fall. He’d been wall-scalped before; it was clear when he turned his head to protect his face and only the right side smeared down the bricks, but it left a lot of skin and meat behind.
Djuna Brown handed the wallet to Willard Wong. “Everything’s in order, Mr. Wong. Your companions can pick up their weapons at Sector Eight. Thank you for your co-operation in this stressful time, and have a nice day.” She smiled gaily at him.
Chapter 14
They walked the guns to the local Sector and gave them to the desk sergeant. “We got four pieces. Someone’ll have to punch it all into the system, serial numbers. Some Chinese guys’ll pick them up later. They said they worked for someone named Wong? Willy Wong?”
“Fuck. You braced Willy’s boys? In Chinatown?”
“Sure. Chinatown is still in America and only we get to beat people there at random. This isn’t Canada.”
“I’m gonna hear about this, girl.”
“Hey, they were acting suspicious. Intimidating our witnesses. Disrespecting.”
“You know who he is? Willy Wong?”
“Yep.” Djuna Brown nodded and said, “A local douchebag. How come your guys don’t scoop him up?”
The desk sergeant stared at her. “You’re not from around here, are you, honey?”
“Nope,” she said, giving him the white picket smile. “I be from Bohemia.” She had a thought. “You got a sergeant around here, Ray Tate? Hippie-looking dude?”
“He’s in interviews.”
“Marty Frost?”
“Black chick? She’s with him, too. They’re gonna be a while.”
They went outside of Chinatown for something American to eat and found a deli with a vacant table in the back. A waitress came down with menus, saw their badges, and said, keeping the menus in her hand, “Brisket today. Not too lean, not too fat. Or egg salad. Rye or kaiser?”
They went for the egg salad. Meat was out of the question.
“On light rye,” Djuna Brown said. “And a couple of Coors.”
“I’ll have to ask about the beer.”
Djuna Brown said, “We’ll pay.”
The waitress shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” and went away.
“Nice, nice work, there, Brian. You slimed that mutt pretty good.”
“I’ve, ah, I haven’t done a … takedown? … in ten years.” He looked back at her. “I’m Traffic, you know.”
“Well, man, you’re natural born cop.”
He felt pretty good at that. “I guess you guys, you and Ray and Marty, do this all the time?”
“Brian. Let me tell you how it is. How it is with me, anyway. Guys like Willy Wong get nothing. Absolutely nothing. So, fuck them. Parasites. That guy horking on the sidewalk near my slippers? That gives me licence. They eye-fuck you, they give you licence. So you humiliate them, every chance you get. Guys like the immigrant that wouldn’t talk to us? He gets every break we can cut. He’s a victim. If you got any heart, that’s where you spend it. With Willy Wong and guys like that
, you do ’em hard, every chance.”
“I thought, I wondered how it would be if Marty was there.”
“You saw Marty at the chief’s task force? Taking out that idiot from headquarters yesterday? Well, today was Willy Wong’s lucky day.”
“She’s pretty tough, Marty. She’s, ah …” He didn’t know what to say.
“You’re digging Marty, eh, Brian? She’s a cool chick, no question. She’s cop.” She sat back, pleased with the romantic drama. When the waitress put two bottles of beer on the table, she held hers up to clink. “I think she digs you too.”
Marty Frost said she wanted to get home to get a few hours’ sleep.
Ray Tate said he’d see her at the task force briefing that night. “We did good work today, Marty, or at least you did. No closer on our poor ladies case, but Intell or Homicide should be able to get us a suspect list. We’ll go at them. One of them will break out. This is closing.”
“I got to tell you, that wasn’t very challenging, but it was fun.” She frowned a little, harsh and painful but pretty. “In that room, with those guys? That was the real me. The girl driving around in the ghoster, playing kiddie cop? Not so much me. I can do that, but I just like to sit talking to people. You say the stupidest things, right off the wall, and it works, they relate. And they for some reason like talking to me. I don’t get that much on the job.”
Ray Tate stood with her near the desk sergeant’s table. “Marty, I’m going to go off the wall here, okay? Tell me it’s okay and I’ll do it.”
She gave him the same smile he imagined she had when she was in her teens. “Sure, Ray. Just remember, I got a gun.”
“Comartin. You ask that desk sergeant for his cell number and he’ll call the duty desk and get it for you. Give yourself an afternoon. I’ll see you tonight.”
He didn’t have Djuna Brown’s cell number. He called the Whistler and the woman on the reception desk said she’d check the room, then came back and said no one was answering.
The desk sergeant had a ghoster take him back to East Chinatown to pick up his car. On the way, the wheelman said he worked East Chinatown and it was a mess.
“Things are going to be weird down there for a long time.” He suddenly stopped on California Street in front of an old woman dragging a bundle of clothing around puddles. “Just be a second, Sarge.” He got out and helped the woman across the street to where a city bus was moving the homeless to a community centre. After helping her up the step and passing up her stuff, he reboarded the ghoster and looked at the wreckage of California Street through his windshield. “This makes me ashamed to be an American.”
“How long you been working down here?”
“Two years. Punishment detail. I slagged my desk sergeant up in Sector Two.” He pulled in behind the Taurus. “First six months? I was a hard-on. Pissed right off, how could they do this to me? Vegetable stalls impeding pedestrian passage? Hundred and twenty bucks, confiscate the cart, the bok choy, the whole shebang. Fuck you. Loiter on the sidewalk? Impede safe pedestrian passage, ninety bucks. Fuck you. I made a lot of fucking money for this city until I got trampled in a gambling raid and a kid pulled me out of the way of the exodus. That old lady, there, that I just helped? You know who she is, who I ticketed on my first day for a week’s wages of selling vegetables she hoed in her backyard? Mae. She’s the mother of a Hong Kong Homicide cop who put down the first no-body murder in the city’s history. Guy was a hero over there until they killed him.” He realized he was talking too much to someone he didn’t know well enough to talk too much to. “Sorry. Babbling. That’s your car, the Taurus?”
“Hey, hey, you’re doing okay. You can show your heart.”
“These poor fucking fuckers.” He bit his lip, looking around. “I hope they get the guys that did this.”
“Don’t worry about that. As we speak they’re dressing for the arraignment ball.”
In the Taurus, he drove to the Whistler. People slouched along in the blazing sunshine, cowering, barely dressed except for shorts and T-shirts. And, in spite of the CDC experts saying the plague was coming under control, the masks. They looked like furtive spacemen, having trouble with the new gravity.
There was a perky receptionist at the hotel. It seemed she had no idea of the horror of Chinatown and, in spite of his wrecked street clothes, beamed at Ray Tate across the wide marble countertop in the freezing lobby. “Welcome to the Whistler, sir. May I help you?”
He picked his badge up from his chest and showed it to her. “I’m meeting State Police Inspector Brown in her room.”
“I’ll call up, sir.” She waited out the rings. “I’m sorry, Inspector Brown isn’t answering. You can wait in the lounge or the bar, sir.”
“Get me house security, please.”
She picked up the phone and spoke quietly.
A big, beefy man in a tight suit, with an earpiece coiling out of his jacket, appeared at Ray Tate’s elbow. “Is there a problem, sir?” His tone suggested there’d better not be.
“Ray Tate, sergeant, city police. I need to get into a room.”
“You’re Ray Tate? Fuck, I knew your father-in-law when I was on the job. He was Ident, photography. Great guy. Almost a cop.”
“We’re working the Chinatown fires. I’m teeing up with a State cop. I’m early and I’m fucking tired. Could use the shower.”
“If Chinatown smells like you smell, man, the whole place needs a shower.” The security officer asked the receptionist, “What’s the room he needs?”
When she came in he was in the tub, having mastered the technique of adding water using his toes. He’d dozed and gained some rest, awakening only to warm up the water as it chilled. He’d avoided the bed; stretching out flat with the billowy pillows under his head would send him off for hours. There was some satisfaction that he and Marty Frost had put it to the Volunteers for Chinatown. But it hadn’t moved the dead ladies case ahead except for maybe allowing Intelligence to drill into the group and maybe sight in on a good viable.
Laying in the smooth tub with the late afternoon light glowing outside the window, and a triple gin and double tap in a water glass on the rim, he had a strange sense of unreality. It was brought on by the realization that the bathtub and water and lotions and bathrobes could possibly be in the same world as the pain gripping Chinatown. Was it like a smell, he thought, how pain thinned as it gained distance from the source, thinned and thinned and finally was gone?
But it never was gone. Somewhere someone was being hurt. Somewhere someone’s life was changing, probably for the worse.
Was it possible that only hours earlier he was in a world of smoke and burning flesh, thinking about shooting the tie pin of a Chinatown thug?
Was it possible that three hours ago he was in a room with brain-dead killers and having a good time, teetering on the edge of giddiness?
Was it possible that he hadn’t seen Djuna Brown in six hours?
They’d love Paris, he knew. He’d paint and sketch and she’d find something for herself to do. When his ex-wife had bitched that she did nothing all day and night while he roamed his city with a gun on his ankle having adventures, he’d gone by the community college and picked up some schedules. None had attracted her interest. When he said they could take up something together, golf or tennis or a euchre club, she said no, you’re patronizing me. In the end he’d realized that some people were only happy in a life they could complain about.
Djuna Brown might find herself to be a poet or a weaver or a memoirist or a photographer or a dancer in the dark. It was the possibilities of her, or them, that kept the dream alive. If only they could break away from their lives, turn their backs on the predatory burning cities that needed them.
In his mind were images of his life’s work, most of it unpleasant but some of it not. Dim dawns with long streets of orderly garbage cans, of yellow square lights in windows above them. Men asleep on stoops, smiling dreamily in the dreamland of another place. Unlike his ex-father-in-law, he
didn’t need the day-to-day slugfest of pain and suffering to engage him. He could paint a tree, he could charcoal sketch a sad car at dawn, up on blocks, the hood yawning up, forgotten.
He could go blind and never see another image and the library of his mind would keep him busy forever, keep his knuckles black with charcoal, his shirt dripped with paint.
In the tub, his beard soaked and his long hair sodden, he was suddenly overwhelmed by his life, wondering if he could carry it any longer. That young cop who carried an old woman’s bundles onto a bus and feared he’d revealed too much of who he was. The cadet cop unable to process what his eyes were seeing in East Chinatown, frozen in awe at the magnitude of what people could do to other people. The volunteer firefighter having failed to save a life, pounding his fists into the concrete. Marty Frost sagged in exhaustion outside the interview room, then rubbing something off her face with her brisk hands before they went in.
But there was also the sprite-like Djuna Brown in the restaurant, putting the chargettes on about her batik clothing and sparkly slippers, rising from her stool and wrapping her arms around him, calling him a beatnik in relief, that sweetest of voices. Momentarily, she’d sagged against him as if he were a lifeline.
And, on cue, the outside door of the suite opened and a soft voice called, “I detect a beatnik hipster in my house. Ooo, oui, oui.” He’d left his clothing on the bed, his boots by the door.
He heard the mini-bar popping open, the twist of bottle caps, the gurgle of liquid, then the running of water from the spigot into glasses. There was quiet for a few seconds, or almost quiet, anyway: the silent slide of her clothing coming off, the thump of her holstered automatic on the thick carpeting.
She came in naked, twirling, almost dancing, and put her holster on the toilet seat beside his. Without pause she stepped into the bathtub, balancing the glasses on her palm. She handed him both while she fitted herself into the tub, half beside him, half across him. He could tell she’d had an interesting day. Paris, he decided, as they shifted around. Somehow, sometime soon. If love felt like this in the chaos of the city, how great it could be in Paris. They’d have a room with a sloping ceiling at the top of a flight of steps, a place where they could close the world out.
