by Lee Lamothe
“He’ll do it.” He took the cigarette from her fingers and took a long drag. “But I have to do something for him.” He sat and she pushed her wine glass to him.
She lit herself another cigarette and looked at the black window. “Bobby, I have to stay. Okay? It’s dark.”
“Take the bed. I’ll take the couch.”
Chapter 11
After teeing up with the sweaty Chinese ISS op who was doing exotic stretching exercises in a halter top and shorts after peeing behind a dumpster, the ISS guy had put the hat on the driver of the old Chev.
“Bobby Preston, I know him from cars. They call him Mr. Presto! He done some stuff back and forth for old Truong there. He’s a border rat.”
As he spoke, Djuna Brown saw him gazing at his partner. She saw in his eyes a look, not pedestrian lust, but something else, as if he didn’t know what he was seeing but it was something he knew was important. Puppy cop love, she thought. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t. When it did, it meant a sweet secret: Paris, maybe, or in the case of Ray Tate and Djuna Brown’s previous partners, a life of retirement and poetry in Barcelona.
When it didn’t work out, it meant violence and sometimes gunfire. It could be tough, an uphill battle. Every policewoman had rumours around her. She fucked all and sundry. She was gay. She was frigid. She was a ballbuster. A lot of men didn’t handle rejection well, and cops didn’t handle it at all.
She was still thinking about that the next morning when she got to the Green Squad office and the security officer buzzed her through and ogled her zany peasant skirt and loose batik top. She boarded an elevator with some secretarial staff, young women who sneaked glances at her silver slippers, her spiked hair, the silver automatic bulging at her waist. She was notorious: she’d killed a man in the line, she’d snagged a single and desirable city gunner, and she was weird and exotic. At the fourth floor she made her way down the long hallway to the task force office, her slippers sliding silently on the shiny linoleum.
From his cubicle, Jim Cash looked up from a motorcycle magazine, raised his eyebrows, and rubbed his fingers together and wiggled his eyebrows.
She made a perfect circle back at him and stuck her head into his office. “We’re going to need those wheels, boss. We took Markowitz last night in the crash car and it was pretty much useless. Short strokes, he went to a whorehouse, then went and met a blond guy, they talked, then split up. We took the blond guy and he easily dumped us out on the Eight. We got the tag, we met up with some ISS bozo and he put the hat on him. Bobby Preston. Border rat. We think maybe this is the guy Marko’s going to use to move dough. I’m gonna put him through.”
“Okay, so you’re in business.” Cash put a key ring on the desk. “Headquarters fleet, blue Ford 500 in the visitor’s slot. It looks like Mother Teresa on valium, drives like crazy Uncle Charlie on meth. Turn back the Chrysler keys. Where’s Ray?”
“Dunno. He called and said he threw his neck out, I think, working out. He’ll be along.”
She went down the corridor to their office. The laptop was linked to various agencies, and access passwords and codes were listed on a strip of paper taped to the keyboard. A badge number was required to get online. She had a State Police badge and it didn’t work for city software. Ray Tate’s number got her in and she started with Tiger Truong. She turned on the little printer, humming an Edith Piaf tune.
Chapter 12
Just before noon Bobby Preston stood at the front windows of the flat sipping at a mug of coffee. There were new cars on the street, ones he didn’t recognize. But it was the beginning of the new school year. He stared at the vehicles for a few moments, then went down the hallway to the bedroom.
Julia Gurr had ground her teeth through the night. He heard it clearly from the living room. There were grunts and keening noises and thumps as parts of her hit the wall as she struggled with her thoughts and dreams. He got up and crept down the hall and looked in. The lights were on. Her fists were clenched around the coverlet and her body moved in spasms and jerks.
Spicetown, he thought. She’s got her Spicetown and I’ve got my river.
From the doorway he softly called, “Jools? I’m heading out to meet Jerry.”
She was gun shy. He waited until she stirred. When he saw she was fully aware of her surroundings, he stepped into the room and handed her his coffee. “I should be back tonight.”
“If you’re going with Jerry, you should take the gun.”
“Naw. Anything Jerry’s gonna do, he’s going to do after the money crosses.”
“I dreamed.” She sat up and worked her jaw. “I dreamed bad.”
“I know. I could hear you.”
“I dreamed about Zoe. What if what happened to me is happening to her? I’ll die.”
“We’ll get ’er done, get her back. Stay here today. There’s food in the fridge.”
“Jesus, Bobby. What if she … If they …”
“She’s fine. She’s going to be fine. I’ll get Marko’s thing done, she’ll come back.”
She nodded. “I was thinking. The timing for this to happen to Zoe? That you need Marko’s help just when he needs something from you?”
“I know. That’s for later. We’ll work that out. Good news is, if it was Marko she’ll be safe. He loves her. Nothing’s going to happen to her if it was him. He just wants it to look bad.”
“I can’t believe Marko would do that to her. To me, us.”
“He’s in with bad people now. He’s desperate. But she’ll be safe.”
At noon he walked from the apartment and down to Creek Street, past frat houses with beer bottles and cans littered on the lawns and Greek symbols printed on bed sheets across the windows. He found Jerry Kelly reclined back in the driver’s seat of a silver Saab. He boarded and muttered, “Hey.”
Jerry Kelly stirred and yawned, cracking his jaws. He made a wide clown smile and racked his seat upright. He wore a black leather windbreaker, a black T-shirt, black jeans, and worn white running shoes. He held his finger to his lips, then used the same finger to make circles around his right ear. “Let’s go for a spin. You like my Cadillac?”
It was an invitation to be stupid, to correct him. Preston knew a single phrase would set Jerry Kelly off, completely change the complexion of the day, turn the rays of the sun paranoid and the air poisonous. He himself had had people wearing wires rub up against him, awkward nervous folks who said dumb things that identified where they were, or who they were with, or where they were going, or what they were going to get up to.
Preston played. “Caddie always looks good in the dark blue.” He strapped himself in.
They drove aimlessly into the downtown core, making idle turns, left and right, into a one-way street, then a lazy U-turn and out again. Near the Tower Mall Jerry Kelly sat a few moments, parked among taxis, checking his mirrors. He said, “Let’s go up to Grattelli’s, get some clams.”
Instead he pulled quickly around the taxis and down into an underground parking garage, squealing his tires deep into the bowels of the building where radio transmissions would be affected. He slipped the Saab into a slot beside a white van with smoked windows and indicated to Preston to disembark.
“A quickie for now, Presto,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Later we’ll really get intimate.” He ran his hands quickly around Preston’s body, plucking a cellular phone off his belt and tossing it into the Saab. He pulled back the sliding side door of the van and with a light hand ushered Preston into the rear seat.
In the driver’s seat a man with long biker locks and tattoos on the backs of his hands sat caressing the steering wheel. Jerry Kelly slid the door shut and showed Preston a cellular phone. “This one’s for you.” He looked at his watch. “Marko says you’ll get the call in couple of hours, so we’ll put the battery in later and I’ll give it to you then, okay?” He spoke to the driver. “Well, let’s fucking go.”
The van made its way out of the underground and into mid-town traffic, the
driver careful to signal and obey the lights. He sedately worked his way to the Eight. Beside Preston, Jerry Kelly appeared to be catching a nap.
On the Eight the driver sped up into traffic, keeping to the centre lane. He checked his three mirrors regularly without moving his head, about every ten or fifteen seconds. At the airport off ramp he smoothly drifted three lanes and ran north into the airport where he spent some time scrubbing the air over the car, the airport’s no-fly zone out-of-bounds to police surveillance planes. He went into the long-term parking and immediately went to the exit. They came out of the airport, running eastbound in the express lanes to the interstate, going much faster, very steadily.
At the ramp off to the Badlands, the driver studied the mirrors again and said, “It’s good.”
“Okay,” Jerry Kelly said. “You’re betting your fucking nuts on this.”
The driver went around his mirrors again and nodded positively. “It’s good.”
“Okay. We go.”
When the van pulled in behind an abandoned gas station an hour north of the city, Bobby Preston stretched as though he’d been napping. “We there?”
Suspicious, Jerry Kelly glanced at him. He didn’t like it that Preston showed no fear, had had a nap. “Why you want to know that for?”
“Just making conversation.” He yawned. “Relax.”
Jerry Kelly studied him for a few moments. “Oh, I’m relaxed all right. I got to spend the night talking to fuckin’ beaners and transferring money. Your kid should learn some of the tricks of the trade. She had a half-kilo of powder in a bag marked medicine. Tried to bribe the cop. Called his wife a whore. Spit on the Madonna or something then started a fucking fistfight. A bad kid, your kid. It’s bad, she’s got to make it worse.”
“She out?”
“If she wasn’t, you’d be taking this ride in a bag.”
He pointed at a black Oldsmobile up ahead behind the gas station and said to the driver, “We’re taking that. You plug the alley.” He told Preston to get out.
“It’s like this,” Jerry Kelly said, taking two two-inch adhesive gauze bandages out of his pocket. “Close your peepers, pal.” He applied the gauze squares over Preston’s eyes, and covered them with wrap-around sunglasses. “We’re gonna get out of this and into something else. I’ll guide your arm, you just walk, get in the back, and lay on the floor. I’m gonna give a real pat-down. You stay down, don’t say a fucking word, okay? Not one.”
Preston waited a bit, then: “Okay, Jerry.”
“Fuck. Cocksucker. Shut up.”
Preston waited a beat. “No problem …” he paused, “… Jerry.”
“Oh, you. You and your fuckin’ kid.” But he laughed. Guiding Preston by the elbow, he rotated his body quickly to disorient him and walked him into a brick wall. “Oops. Sorry, bud.”
Casually he ushered Preston to the black Oldsmobile. A muscular man in a vast white T-shirt and painter’s pants stepped out and pulled the seat forward. Jerry Kelly guided Preston into position in the rear passenger-side seat, shoved him over, and got in beside him. “Okay, go.”
As the Olds slid off, he began meticulously searching Preston, taking off each shoe and inspecting it, then dropped it over the front seat. Wallet, key ring, money clip, belt, each were inspected and examined and he began searching his clothing, feeling through collars and cuffs, seams and buttons. He ran his fingers through Preston’s hair, back to front, tugged at his goatee, and stuck his fingers into his ears. “This is a fucking waste of time, anyway, Presto. They got a thing they put the transmitter right under your skin or up your ass, like a little wafer, sends out a signal. We’re gonna have to start skinning guys alive. Fuck me, the things they make us do. Okay, you’re clean, but stay down there, okay?”
The driver snorted.
“Just fucking drive.” Jerry Kelly sat with his hand lightly on the back of Preston’s head and watched as town turned into country, as cars were replaced by old pickups and stuttering tractors along the shoulder.
After an hour the driver pulled off onto a concession road and roared up a cloud of gravel and dust then cut a U-turn facing back the way they’d come. The Oldsmobile was motionless for ten minutes. The driver fired up again, spun a one-eighty, and sped along a concession road. At one point he pulled onto the shoulder for five minutes watching for oncoming vehicles, then started up and made a series of seemingly random turns, and ran another concession road, then stopped again for five minutes with the engine off, studying the sky, before again firing up and racing through a half dozen side roads.
The road surface deteriorated very quickly and the Olds pulled into a narrow rutted cut, brushes and scrub trees scratching at the paintwork. It stopped at a chain fence with a gate set in the centre. The driver got out and unlocked a thick chain secured with a padlock. He drove through and started up the road.
Jerry Kelly leaned forward and grabbed his shoulder. “Hey, stop. Close the fuckin’ gate.”
“I’m going right back out with Tommy and Max to pick up the dump cars and take ’em back to the city.”
“Fine. So close the gate, then lock it. You leave, you open it, you go through, you stop, you close it, lock it, and away you go. You fuckin’ stupid or something?”
The driver sighed, got out, and walked back up the road.
“Presto, these guys … I dunno. You okay down there, pal?”
“I’m okay, Jerry. We there yet? Smells like the country. We in the country, Jerry? Up north, the Badlands, maybe?”
“You fucking asshole.” But he laughed and lit a cigarette and tapped ashes onto Preston’s back. “You’re a good guy, Presto. We’re gonna make a lot of dough, you and us, we’ll give you lots of work after this.”
The driver got back into the car.
“Wait.” Jerry Kelly pushed the seat forward, scrunching the driver hard against the steering wheel. He climbed out and walked to the gate. He checked the padlock and rattled the chain. Back in the car he said to the driver, “What are you fucking waiting for?”
The driver sighed and drove to where the road ended at a series of buildings set up in a compound, a main cottage, a half-dozen sleeping cabins, a decrepit collapsing outhouse, and a boathouse on a lake. Secured to a dock, a small red-and-white airplane bobbed on pontoons. Three men stood on the grass in front of the cottage. One man watched the Oldsmobile approach, his hand near a sawed-off shotgun leaning against a tree.
Marko Markowitz, wearing track pants and no top, was side-whipping a hardball to another man, both of them wearing baseball gloves and catcher’s masks, standing too close to each other, both grunting with exertion, laughing as they tried to drive the ball past the glove and into each other. Marko had welts visible in several places on his heavy chest and shoulders
“Grab your shit up, Presto. You’re home.” Jerry Kelly assisted Preston out of the car, removing the sunglasses and gauze. He indicated the shoes and personal items on the front seat. He gave an a-okay finger and thumb circle to Marko, and wandered off toward the boathouse. “You got nothing to worry about anymore, Presto. You’re our bitch now.”
PART TWO
Chapter 13
Hungover and hurting, Ray Tate wasn’t much interested in the stack of computer printouts Djuna Brown had harvested and he suggested they go to lunch. On the way out they stopped at Cash’s office and told him they were going out to start surveillance. Cash asked how his neck was and Ray Tate heard Djuna Brown snicker behind him. He rolled with it, said he’d slept crooked. “Might need to go for a massage.”
“Later for that, Ray. You guys just think about my dough, okay? You can get a bimbo to walk on your back some other time.”
Walking down the long hallway, Ray Tate felt like holding her hand. She seemed to waft beside him, floating, humming a little tune under her breath. They boarded an empty elevator.
They had no real idea what to do. The start of a project was always like that, inert, amorphous, ready to reveal some shape of its own. At the beginn
ing the target was huge and formless, unrevealing.
Ray Tate drove them to a chicken and biscuits place on the edge of Gastown. The place was sketchy and half the customers did the evaporation dance out the backdoor. The sleepy Ford 500 fooled nobody; the bump of the gun on Ray Tate’s ankle and Djuna Brown’s hiked batik blouse and the way they surveyed everything around them gave it away.
They found a booth where they could keep an eye on the car. Ray Tate held up two fingers to the guy behind the cash register and then mimed pouring coffee from a pot. The guy nodded.
“What’d you order us, Ray?”
“Two of anything. The cop special.” He’d loved the food in Paris, the buttery croissants at breakfast, the vegetable tarts at lunch, the chops and stews and steaks late in the evening. But sometimes even with the flavour of thyme and wine in his mouth, he’d missed American dining. Fast food and fry cooks and the smell and sizzle of hot grease. Hotdogs and hamburgers and wings and chicken and biscuits. Plates that were slammed down with an implied fuck-you. Sticky ketchup bottles. Cream in little sweating plastic containers in the water of melted ice cubes.
They sat in the window booth reading the street until the guy behind the cash register brought them a tray of food.
“Okay,” Djuna Brown said, laying her notes beside her platter and glancing at them. “Work. The blond guy, Bobby Preston, is called Presto.” She put a grainy photograph on the table. “This is him, right, from last night? Lost some weight, but that’s him? He’s in some of the Markowitz photo dump. So, okay. If you got something on this side of the border and you want it over there, or vice versa, he’s your guy. Except dope. Drug intel says he doesn’t have anything to do with dope or dopers. They tried to turn him against Markowitz because they were friends when they were kids. No luck. They were pals but they had a falling out over something, dope, maybe.
