by Lee Lamothe
“Keep your eyes in your head, pervo.”
Preston asked. “You guys, you … ah?” He stopped. “Never mind, not my business.”
Djuna Brown, as though imparting a secret, whispered loudly, “For now. But maybe not much longer.” She glanced at Ray Tate and then at Preston. “He’s got these beatnik tastes, you know? Weird. Strange.” He smiled at him. “Occult stuff, Presto. You don’t want to go there, really. It’s subterranean.”
Ray Tate gave her a happy smile. “Okay, what’s happening back there?”
“The three mutts have fucked off, dunno where. But empty-handed. Gurr’s on the set, and crazy Jerry and Marko. Unless there’s other guys inside, or maybe your kid, Presto, we’re down to just the three of them. Three vehicles, an old beater, a cube truck, and a van. That’s manageable, because we’ll know where they’re going to go, right?”
Bobby Preston asked: “How many of your guys are around?”
Djuna Brown looked at Ray Tate and raised an eyebrow. He nodded. She told Preston: “Us. We’re trying to get some bodies, but it’s tough.” She watched him look back and forth at them, absorbing this. He went to speak, but she said: “We had to play it soft. If we told the bosses the dough was definitely in there, it’d be raining cops, they’d swat the place. We don’t want that, right? Until we get your kid. So we’ll play it loose, see where it goes.”
Ray Tate put the van in gear and took a roundabout route back to the factory. They could see Julia Gurr talking to Markowitz out front; in the window behind them, like a ghost in a mirror, Jerry Kelly’s smudged grinning face.
“Okay, Mr. Preston. Let’s get ’er rolling. You need to let her know you’re watching, that you can see her. You want to ask her how many guys in the place. She should take one step away from Marko for each mutt on the scene, if there’s any inside. Ask if she’s seen your daughter. She should touch her face with her free hand for yes. Has she seen any guns around, on Jerry or Marko? Same thing, touch her face with her free hand for yes. Then tell her to get them rolling out of there in an hour, head to where you want them to go.”
Preston nodded. Djuna Brown thought he was staring at Julia Gurr the same way Ray had been staring at her a few minutes ago.
“Should I tell her what’s going on?”
Djuna Brown said, “Let’s hold off for a while on that, okay?”
Preston punched in the numbers into his cellphone and they watched Julia Gurr take out her phone and turn away from Marko. He flipped a toggle switch on his phone and started asking the questions, telling her how to respond. As she spoke she looked around for him, her eyes skipping off every vehicle, examining every corner of every building. He said he loved her and her free hand started up to her face; it paused halfway and she touched her left breast, where her heart was. Djuna Brown put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
He disconnected and watched her put away the phone and start speaking to Markowitz. Then they walked arm in arm across the parking lot toward the donut shop.
Ray Tate’s cellphone chirped and he answered. He gave a location, then backed the bubble van out and went out into traffic. He went four blocks and pulled in behind a tire store.
Joey Jeff Watson leaned on the side of a Ford four-by-four. Beside him on the ground was a toolbox. “I got May set up with an eye. And I got this stuff. It isn’t great, but you didn’t want to go official, so this is stuff we have on hand. It transmits, but can’t receive, okay? You can hear, but you can’t broadcast to the guy rigged up. You hear, he doesn’t.” He looked at each of them. “We’ll do it in the back of your van.”
They all climbed into the back of the bubble van. Watson looked Preston over. “This what you’ll be wearing? You sweat a lot? Profusely?” He turned to Ray Tate. “What’s the setup? They going to feel him up?”
“No, this isn’t for evidence, just tactical. I mean, I don’t want antennas coming out of his ears, but if anyone gets close enough to touch him, having a pack on is going to be the least of his worries. We just have to monitor a play.”
“Fuck, I wish I’d known.” He motioned for Preston to turn around. “I wouldn’t have brought the rectal battery. They leak sometimes, and vaseline’s a conductor, so don’t move around too much, eh, buddy? Drop your pants and grab your ankles.”
“Rect what?” Preston turned back, fast. “What the fuck.”
Watson laughed. “ISS humour, man.” He asked Ray Tate how long Preston would be transmitting, how far. The weather conditions, the terrain. He worked at Preston, using a thick tape to affix a battery pack to his lower back. “This ain’t cutting edge stuff, so don’t hook it up until the last minute, there’s not a lot of juice in the pack. Save it for when you need it.” He put together a receiver and attached a dangling earplug. He plugged into his ear and asked Preston to say something.
“There once was man from Assizes; whose balls were two different sizes; One ball was small, almost no ball at all; But the other was huge and won prizes.”
Watson laughed and nodded in appreciation. “Better than a ten count.” He told Ray Tate: “Remember, don’t make this stuff hot until you absolutely have to, okay? And keep to a hundred yards or less if you can. Me, I’d stay closer. Poets are rare in this world since Charles Bukowski.” He crossed himself, bit his knuckle, and whispered, “Charlie.”
Chapter 33
Djuna Brown followed Preston’s directions off the Eight, across the top of the city, and slowly piloted the bubble van down the steep hill to the river. At the bottom she eased into a turnabout and parked amongst a scatter of a half dozen sagging old beaters suffering rust and sunburn. At the rear of one car a man was boiling water in a tin can over a gas barbecue set on the ground. He had a stack of white Styrofoam cups, some stir sticks, and cans of sweetened condensed milk. Everybody was Asian male except for a woman bouncing on her toes holding a bundled baby. A man rose from the line of fishermen squatting along the riverbank. He picked up his creel, shouldered his long fishing pole, and made his way to the woman and baby. They walked close together to an old, broken-back brown sedan. Others remained behind on the riverbank, casting and reeling or watching white homemade bobbers for a strike.
The river was audible. The moving surface was of different hues, one of them an alarming green with traces of reddish foam streaked through it. Two hundred yards away, on the Canadian side, the ground rose steeply and it seemed much darker there.
Djuna Brown went to the man with the ad hoc concession stand and bought three cups of coffee. He poured sweetened condensed milk thickly into the bottom of Styrofoam cups then carefully and slowly filled them with coffee. He stood a wooden stir stick in the centre of each cup. She gathered the cups together and walked to where Ray Tate and Preston were silently examining the movements of the river.
Ray Tate asked, “So, what was the plan?”
Preston shook his head. “I told you, there is no plan. We get Zoe here, and the money, and … dunno.”
Djuna Brown vigorously stirred the thickened milk up from the bottom of her cup. She sipped and looked across the water. “Doesn’t look far. River’s moving a little, but how hard can it be, even if it gets too dark? Drop a little boat in there and motor like a motherfucker. You might not hit the exact spot you’re aiming for, but you’ll make it over, right?”
Preston stood staring at the river, his eyes blinking rapidly, his Adam’s apple moving up and down his throat. He cleared his throat of something. “The river’s moving a lot, you just can’t see it on top. There are a lot of currents, all fighting each other. There’s one stream pumped from some industrial place upriver. When you go from current to current there’s a lot of pressure on the boat. Unless you get a big bastard and then, why bother? If someone sees you back some cruiser down here, it’s going to be wall-to-wall Homeland Security. Anyway, people have died trying to make that crossing, even in the best of times. I’ve heard.”
“But some make it, right?”
“Sure. Snakeheads use this plac
e a lot for pig trains, the migrants, because of the double elbow in the river. The elbows restrict the view from both ends, but it makes the river crazy. The snakes are the Chinese folk that organize the runs. But if they lose a load they write it off and just go back to China and get more. If I lose the dough today, I can’t go back for more.” He seemed mesmerized and horrified by the moving water. “For this thing, to use the river, you’re looking at a lot of crossings, one after the other.” He dragged his eyes off the water and looked at her and seemed to want to explain something. “When they get here, you know what some of them do? They laugh and cry and they hug and kiss you as if you’ve given them life. Some of them faint dead away. They call us Gold Mountain.” He held her eyes. “When did we forget that America is America? This dirt we’re standing on is the hill people are willing to die on?”
She thought about that. Bobby Preston, patriot. Like Ray Tate, patriot. They had a belief of what the country was, or should be. It was a lot different than hers. They saw a land of hope, of opportunity. She saw an abused girl wear a dog mask in a house full of pit bulls. She saw Native drunks weeping over broken bottles. “How’s it work? Getting them over here?”
“You go in good conditions if you can. Cold night, no moon. Only a couple at a time. You can’t get greedy. I give them whistles so if the craft flips I can try to find them.”
“You lose any?”
He stared at her for a long moment, as if remembering that she was a cop. “That’s not a question you get to ask.”
“You have, though, right? Presto, the good crook. Unless they die. I bet you were down here, oh, maybe last winter?”
“Fuck you.” He turned away and then back on her with tears in his eyes and spoke in a torrent as if he’d been waiting a long time to say it to someone. “They travel eight thousand fucking miles to get to here. They sit in the holds of leaky ships, eat almost nothing. They sometimes spend months in there, no sunshine, little water, bowl of rice a day, shitting in buckets. The guys get beaten, the women get raped. Some boats leave China for here and just vanish, voooosh, straight down to the bottom, all hands aboard. Those that do get here are packed into drop houses. Same thing: beatings, robberies, torture.
“Then, if they get to that riverbank across there they can see America. They can smell it. They can almost touch it. Two hundred yards. They’ve been brutalized and held prisoner and when they get here they’ll have to work years of debt bondage to pay off their debts to the snakeheads. But you ask them? Worth it? There’s no question about it.” He was silent for a long time. “Anyway, what now?”
Ray Tate said, “The plan that isn’t. If you were going to do it, or at least make it look like you were going to do it, how would you do it? Enough of a plan anyway to make them produce your daughter?”
“I figured to get everybody in one place, down here. Have the dinghy inflated, the bags ready to go. First I’ve got to see her and talk to her, make sure she’s okay. Because I’m picking the spot to trade, I thought maybe I get down here first, plant a shotgun in the weeds. I up with it on them, smoke Jerry, and we walk.”
“That’s no plan at all, is it?” Djuna Brown looked at him sympathetically. “That’s a cartoon, not even the hope of a dream.”
“Worst case, I’ll start making runs over with Zoe in the first load, get her free, then come back and start doing the rest.” He looked at the river. “I can do it, you know? Two hundred yards?” He shrugged. “Candy.”
She felt angry. “Bullshit. You’ll die out there.” She put her hand on his arm. “You’ll fucking die and your kid, too.”
“You guys just make sure Zoe gets clear. If I have to I’ll make one run, just for good faith, show how it’s done. You’ll only lose one bag, plenty enough left for you guys. If things go fucked out there, there’s no point in holding onto Zoe, right?”
“Sounds lame, Presto. Lame-o, bucko. All this would be great except for a couple of things. Like Jerry Kelly and Jerry Fucking Kelly. Myself, I don’t think we’re going to see your daughter down here today.”
Ray Tate nodded. “We have to think about what everybody wants. We want your daughter and the dough. But we’ll settle for your kid if we have to, don’t doubt us on that, okay? Marko wants the dough over there. Jerry Fucking Kelly wants … Well, who knows? To move the money across anyway, so the back-end doesn’t core him from the ass up, like an apple. Other than that, I don’t see an end for Jerry here, if he goes sinister. Then there’s your wife, she just wants Zoe safe. Trick is to make it work our way. So, like I said: if you were going to do it and at least make it look real for as long as possible, what would you do? Exactly?”
Djuna Brown made a curving smile. “Lay it out, Presto. No free form jazz. Not today, pal.”
Julia Gurr hated even the thought of the river. She’d never run anything across it but she’d heard tales. She’d heard about amateurs wiring up trolling motors to car batteries and making an overloaded run in rickety wooden boats. She’d heard bodies shattered by the frozen rockery, their heads and shoulders shredded. Bodies of mothers and children locked in frozen embrace, the patrollers unable to separate them at the morgue until they thawed. That Bobby Preston might have to use the river at all told her he’d exhausted all other possibilities, his usual variations disrupted by Homeland Security. She hoped the hints toward a river crossing were just smoke, false clues he was laying out to keep everyone off guard while he arranged a less dangerous land crossing. The railway bridge, maybe.
She felt dread when she pulled off the highway and found Marko in the cube truck and Jerry Kelly in the crash car sitting on the shoulder of a side road. She flashed her lights and they started their engines. The dinghy shifted in the back of her minivan. She led the way. Behind her came Marko, his cube dragging a little from the weight of his legendary millions. Behind him in the crash car, an anonymous old Dodge, was Jerry Kelly.
At a fast food place they parked, leaving an empty space on each side of the cube. Carrying a plastic bag, Jerry Kelly led the way inside. He found a window seat that allowed a clear view of the cube containing the money, and Julia Gurr went to the counter to order coffee. Marko watched her; she looked clean and confident and in command. Her cellphone emitted and she stepped out of line and went outside the restaurant, holding it to her ear.
“Nearly there, Jer. Just about.” Marko felt good with the end in sight. “What’s your plans, for after, later?”
“Well, Marko, if nobody goes near the van and I don’t have to go warpy, I see it that we do the deal and just go our own ways. Presto might get a little perturbed that his kid hasn’t arrived yet, but we’ll help him overcome that disappointment, give him Julia, there, as the consolation prize. Send Zoe home when we finally fucking find her.”
“I’d feel a lot better if we had her, or even knew where she was. I tried The Mig’s number again, but still no answer. We’re going to have to get on that right away, after.”
“The Presto’ll calm down, he gets into his variation.”
“No, Jerry, I’m worried. Something’s gone wrong and someone’s going to have to go down there and sort it out. Really sort it out, okay?”
Julia Gurr brought over three coffees on a tray. She took a piece of paper and a pen from her pocket and started sketching. “Okay. Bobby wants us on the move in about ten minutes. He wants it dim, but not dark. The deal is this: Jerry goes down the hill first, in the crash car. Presto wants to get a look at him. Then the next vehicle is either me or Marko, whichever has Zoe aboard. Which we don’t have, of course, I don’t know how you’re gonna fix that.”
Marko, feeling filthy, said, “Any minute now.”
“Sure. Anyway, all the vehicles have to be backed in. He’ll call, and when he sees Zoe he’ll come out and go to work. Remember, he said he wants to see Zoe standing at the site with me, away from you guys. No Zoe, he says, no crossing.” She looked at Marko. “I hope you’ve got your shit together, Marko. After all this it’d be a shame to see it all go into
the fucking hopper because you got funny and she doesn’t show up down there.”
Jerry Kelly looked at the map. “Fuck it. I don’t like this. Fuck him. Just drive down a road like a fucking picnic? That’s fucked, Marko.”
“Fine, Jerry,” Julia Gurr said, concentrating on the mechanics of the variation, not on the flesh-and-blood Zoe. “We can sit here and drink coffee and then all go home. Money isn’t crossing unless we follow his instructions. You call it. Me, I don’t give a fuck.” She wavered. “I don’t think … Zoe …” She started to tear up, but focused herself. “Marko, where is she?”
Markowitz looked away. In spite of stemming his bleeder for her, it hurt to see her in angst. “She’s on the way, don’t worry, Jools, okay? She might be a little late.”
Jerry Kelly evaluated this. He tried to make things heavy by staring at the damage on the side of her face. She waited him out, her damp eyes perfectly neutral.
Jerry Kelly wasn’t enjoying this Julia Gurr. She looked at him with absolutely nothing. No fear, no hope, nothing. She was going to need more work. “What’s he got going on the other side, he say?”
“Nothing. He said his job was just to get the dough to the Canadian side. There’s a cube truck hidden over there he’ll load into. He’ll take one of you guys and Zoe over first. Once over there, Zoe walks away, and whoever of you guys goes over waits until all the bags are across, and then gets the keys to the cube. Bobby comes back and him and me split.”
“This is bad, Marko.” Jerry Kelly shook his head. “This isn’t the right way.”
“He’ll have Zoe safe, but I’ll still be on this side until it’s done.” She looked at Marko. “She goes over first and walks, that’s key.”
Jerry Kelly looked at the sketch. He started to wind up again. “He thinks we’re going to drive down there, just the three of us, packed with dough? Walk into a bunch of hitters? I don’t think so, darling. Marko? This is fucked up.” He saw Julia Gurr instantly pick up on this.
