by Lee Lamothe
Two weeks later, Harv was leaning on his door when the fat fuck came in. He nodded pleasantly and Harv nodded back. The fat fuck walked a little off-kilter but he had a big smile for the waitress and dealt out his hundreds.
The Captain waved him over when the peelers changed shifts. “How you doing? You making any money?”
“Fuck off.” Harv thought the fat fuck looked pretty pleased, seeing how he’d been given the special vitamin and stomped up a bit. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re Harv, right? Harv. Phil Harvey. Philip One-L Harvey. November six, nineteen fifty. Been up in Craddock, what? Three times? Now you live upstairs, park your bike out back most of the time because most of the time it doesn’t run. You drive an old rattletrap bubble van the owner of this place lends you, weekends, so you can go and cook up some stuff for some other guys who make all the dough while you make gas mileage and walking around money. Were you born stupid, or was it the fire or what?”
Harv started to reach across the table and the fat fuck skidded his chair back a bit and put his hand under the tabletop.
“The fuck do you want? Get out of here.” Harv had taken twenty-eight hundred dollar bills off the guy, the bartender got five hundred. Harv had seventeen hundred left. He’d take a bullet, if that’s what the fat fuck was doing under the table, before he’d give back a nickel.
“You’re getting on in years, Harv. You’ve got too much hair and not enough face. Soon you’ll be a pensioner.” The Captain saw Harv glancing at the tabletop. “Yeah, I got something down there. But what’s more important, I’ve got three guys with me. Ex-cops, city guys. They’re not ex-cops because they got to retire with the pension, you know? They’re the ones who told me about you. The other day they visited the bartender and he’s been off work, since, right?” Captain Cook closed his eyes. “I’m having a vision, Harv. I predict that the next time you see him he’ll be in a motorized wheelchair. And he said he only got five hundred from you, which means: from me.”
Harv looked around and instantly spotted the three guys with the fat fuck. They sat like middle-aged bikers, sprawled at a round table between Harv and the side door. One of them, a short-haired guy with a glittering earring and a gold chain around his neck, smiled and nodded encouragingly.
Harv had taken beatings and he’d never run from one in his life. “How you want to do it, you fat cocksucker?”
“Lunch. How’s that, Harv? We have lunch tomorrow and you tell me how you’re going to give me back my twenty-eight hundred. Or we can do something else, and you can make twenty-eight.”
* * *
It was probably, Harv thought, because they were two freaks that they got along.
At the lunch Connie Cook had explained about boredom and the emptiness of his life.
“If I was this fat and broke at the same time,” he said over hamburgers and fries at a Kelso’s in the swanky Stonetown, “I’d ’a killed myself. No shit, Harv. But I’m fat, I know it and there’s nothing I can do about it, but also I’ve got dough. My wife and I go to the art gallery, nobody turns away, nobody goes wow look at that guy, is he one fat number or what. Nope. They all come over. Mr. Cook, you like another canapé? You’re losing weight, Mr. Cook. Mr. Cook, you want to fund an exhibit next season? Hundred and sixty thousand, we’ll put your name in the program. Gee, thanks. Then the fucker signals another sleek fucker and boom, I got a fundraising guy from the museum over in Chicago on me: Gee, Mr. Cook, we could use some dough to bring an exhibit of Inuit art down from Canada. Your dad used to kick some dough our way, how about it, family tradition? Say, two hundred thousand and we’ll put your name in the program.” Connie Cook laughed bitterly. “So, my wife’s on me to pony up all this dough so she can be in the Post on the parties page, looking good with a ballerina or a fucking opera singer. A real good day, she winds up in the Chicago Trib.”
“Huh.” Harv was only mildly interested. “What’s this you said, about making twenty-eight?”
“Those guys, those three ex-cops last night, with me at the club? They’re security guys from one of my companies. They —” Connie Cook stopped for a moment, chewing the last of his burger, staring at Harv’s face. “That hurt? I mean, it probably hurt when it happened, but what about now?”
“No. I know it’s there, sure, it feels tight. But you get used to it.” He shrugged. “Like anything else.”
Connie Cook reached into his suit jacket and put a small tube on the table. “Vitamin E. I told my doctor, I knew a guy with some burns and he said smear this on, twice a day. Tone things down a bit, maybe.”
Harv let the tube sit on the table. “So, these guys, your ex-cops?”
“Right. Sometimes I have to spend some time with them, you know? I do a deal and somebody gets pissed off, they lost their equity or their company’s been taken out from under them. Or union guys who lost their jobs come skulking around my house. So I get security for a while, move into a hotel. Anyway, those ex-cops love to tell stories. Busting this crook, chasing that guy. Being a cop, they say, except for the shitty pay and the rules, best job in the world. Makes my life look more boring than it is.”
Harv casually picked up the tube of vitamin E. “So? You want to be a cop?”
Connie Cook laughed and choked on a fry. “The fuck? Fuck, no. Harv, you’re a funny fucking guy. I want to be a crook.”
* * *
The vitamin E cream didn’t work out well, even though Phil Harvey used it religiously. But fuelled by Harv’s expertise and connections, and suitcases of the fat fuck’s cash, Cornelius Cook’s dark enterprises quickly became multi-faceted. He had water farms all over the state, partnered up with Vietnamese body smugglers who staffed the operations with slave labour smuggled down from Canada, who chopped the weed and baled it. He had the X business, he had the crank labs, he had a network of pan cookers throughout the projects where baby mammas stood over non-stick pans on coil burners, baking rocks of crack. It always surprised Harv that the black folk liked the fat Cornelius, but he figured it was because he was so pasty and translucent that he wasn’t white at all but a whole other non-colour, a whole other species. It didn’t hurt that everybody made out well off the Captain’s operations.
But at root, Harv knew, it was the evil that emanated off the porky bastard that curled his toes. Harv himself was a hard man. He’d done hard things and he’d done hard Craddock time. He was getting old and had done almost a quarter of his life in custody. He’d done the hardest thing four times, leaving little trace of the activity, no trace of the victim except once, when a message had to be sent. But he still thought of himself as having a chip left of his soul.
Cornelius Cook, though, was evil because he didn’t need to be. He didn’t need to reach down into the netherworld for profit, didn’t need to do what he did. He could have it by exercising his family’s portfolio, by crushing adversaries with financial clout and then picking up the lucrative pieces, sentencing enemies to the poorhouse gulag. Connie had once bombed out a Stonetown bistro because of rude service when he could have bought the place and fired the staff.
People moved into Connie’s orbit for a while then they were gone suddenly, without rhyme or reason, like shooting stars that burned themselves out and just vanished as if they’d never existed. Some of them were young women, Harv realized, young women who rotated through the clubs, vacant women who he’d brought around for the Captain’s perusal. They came in gorgeous and witty and thought themselves lucky, and wound up hollow and stuttering and chewed and ultimately gone. Not Agatha though. She didn’t come from the ranks of peelers. Agatha had been the test: Captain Cook had given Harv the address where she lived and said go get her for me. Take her on a crank holiday and when you come back make sure she needs us — needs me, anyway.
* * *
Agatha Burns droned. CD prices were supposed to come down after the technology was paid for. But they were higher than they were at the beginning. What was up with that? She could download music off the Internet to s
ave money but the Internet, Connie had told her, was an evil plot by the government. Who knew what subliminal messages were hidden in there, like, flashing into your brain before your eyes even registered it? Hey, look, she said, there’s a sequential licence number on that van. You think the guy asked for it or it was random? Random was weird. There was no … well, random to it. Well, there was, she thought, in a random way, if Harv got her meaning.
She was deathly afraid, Harv suddenly realized. She’d figured it out. He made sure her seatbelt stayed fastened. The chatter was beyond crank patter. She probably hadn’t been out of the apartment in months, waiting for pills to be dropped in the stairwell, waiting for the Captain to come by and pirate her ass, piping himself aboard.
At the hook north of Stateline he stayed on the Interstate, easing into the slow lane to catch the ramp off to the badlands while he thought. He’d done stupid things but he wasn’t stupid. He’d acted without heart, but he had heart. The Captain was a manipulator, but that didn’t matter: Harv had more money than he’d ever earned either legitimately or in the life. That was the name of the game: to make out, to collect your end. But the Captain didn’t seem to care. The family money had been there for generations before he was born, the golden road was paved for him. All he had to do was follow his ancestor’s footprints. It was impossible for the Captain to be so stupid he’d ever be broke. There was just too much money.
“You know,” Agatha Burns said, “when you look at a tree like that tree over there, that there’s actually more of the tree underground, roots and stuff, than we see. Harv, you ever think about that? What we see and what we don’t see. I mean, sure, if we don’t see it, it probably isn’t actually real for us, but there’s a lot more to the tree than the … well, the tree. Weird, eh?”
One night, when Harv and the Captain got drunk and high, the real Cookie got loose. “You should’ve seen her when she was in high school,” he’d said as they sat in their underwear in a hotel room overlooking Michigan, watching Agatha Burns go through jerky cheerleader moves, trying to please them, her eyes on the little baggie of crank on the coffee table. “Perfect. Absolute fucking perfection. Perfect boobs. An ass that was on ball bearings. Legs up to here. She’d have her pals over and they’d go in the backyard of her house and do their routines. Fucking amazing, Harv. I watched from my house, the six of them, little skirts, pretending they didn’t know their boyfriends were watching over the fence. All perfect.” He called over the music. “Right, Ag? You and the team?”
She nodded, breathless, a plastic smile on her face, not missing a beat. “Yes, Connie. We were hot.”
“Did you know I was watching? From my window, Ag?”
She nodded again. “Yes, Connie. It turned us on.”
“Looks don’t mean for shit, though, right, Ag?”
Her breath was short. “Right, Connie. I was superficial then, but I’m okay now.”
“Take off the top, show Harv how they bounce.” He’d turned to Harv. “Watch this. Elastic.”
Harv had been uncomfortable. There was a sick aspect to the Captain’s jowly, pinched face, a hatred he couldn’t imagine, even on his own face when he had to do the hard things. He felt a stirring of feeling for her, for her open face and her fading beauty. “It’s okay, Cookie. I seen boobs before.”
“Yeah, but not like this. C’mon, Ag, give us the old one-two-three-four. Swing ’em.”
The night had ground on. At one point Agatha Burns blew them both, but Harv had been too far gone to remember it afterwards, if it was good or not.
He did remember the Captain, twirling a little baggie of crank, had enticed her to lick away at the scar tissue on the side of Harv’s face and suck at his destroyed fingers, tell him she loved him, his scars were beautiful.
Harv did remember that.
And he remembered walking into the bedroom of the suite at dawn, looking for his jacket, and she was almost invisible under the pounding blubber of the howling Captain, her face stuffed into a pillow, her screams muffled, the Captain looking up with blood running down his chin under his huge wreath of smiling jowls.
* * *
Phil Harvey checked the odometer and slowed, looking for the sideroad that would take him away from the feeder highway to one of the mom-and-pop labs scattered in the area. Beside him, Agatha Burns’s knees were white and knocking. She was talking to the passenger window. The scarf had looped away and he glanced at her, could see she was still leaking blood from the punctures at the nape of her neck. She was essaying a soliloquy on alternative cultures, telling how she’d got an A-plus in high school for paralleling 1960s America with 1930s Berlin.
He found the sideroad and sped the Camaro absolutely straight for several miles, into the heart of the badlands, passing only scattered farms, a few shacks, and remote houses with yellow geometric windows lit in the distance. A cloud of Riders on noisy bikes flashed past him. In his rear-view he could see on their backs the smudged oval colours of the club. He slowed until they’d vanished, then turned onto a rough track, mindful of the washboards and dips, worrying for the undercarriage of the car.
In the middle of a speed revelation about the temperature at the core of the Earth, she turned to him. “Harv? Harv?”
“Nearly there, Ag. Relax.”
“You know, I was beautiful, once. I was perfect. It wasn’t my fault, how I was. Tell Connie, okay? It wasn’t my fault.”
“Just a little further.” He didn’t look at her. “Few minutes.”
He felt sad that she knew. Unless someone had fucked you up wickedly, this wasn’t the way to do it. If they were wicked rats you had to make them go hard. But if it was just housekeeping, you were jocular and a pal, lolling them off to sleep until you dropped them as though you flicked off a light switch. There was enough old pain in life without making new stuff.
Her knees were knocking audibly, a mile a minute. Her fingers twisted into one tight fist between the tops of her thighs. “Is it gonna hurt, Harv? Can you do it, fast, without hurting me?”
“Don’t get paranoid, Ag. It’s just the stuff making you think crazy.”
He flashed his headlights three times, then once, eased off the rough track and stopped. A rangy woman in an oilskin with a shotgun under her arm appeared in front of the Camaro, squinting through the windshield. The woman was in her sixties, her dead hair balding back from the front. She flashed a half-a-smile of broken, gapped teeth. She had angry sores around her mouth. Behind her was the lab, a sagging pickup truck with a weathered, peeling camper mounted in the back, the windows cranked open.
From the corner of his eye he saw Agatha Burns’s hands unlock from each other. Ghostly, one of her palms moved in the air between them. He glanced. Her knees had stopped jittering. She was looking directly at him. He felt his curtain of hair being gently moved back from his face, then the freezing of the palm of her flesh against his face, against his scars, stroking.
“I’m sorry, Harv. What he made me do, here —” her fingers traced the mass of ridges and angry boiled skin, “— that night at the hotel was the worst thing I ever did. To anybody. I’m sorry.” She inhaled with a sob, then calmed down and composed herself. “I don’t want to die without you knowing I’m ashamed.”
Chapter 6
She recognized him from that morning at the elevator, standing with the red-faced mug. He sat hunched at the elbow of the bar of an Irish pub on the furthest possible edge of Stonetown, with a half of stout in front of him. As he’d told her on the phone, he wore a striped rugby shirt. The place was packed with groups and couples but he’d saved her a stool by draping a scuffed leather jacket over it. A widescreen showed a satellite soccer game no one was watching. The sound was off and the players seemed to be dancing to the fiddle music blaring from speakers.
People stared at her bleached head and chocolate skin as she moved through the crowd with her hands jammed in the pockets of a blue warm-up jacket with drawstrings and a hood. Under it she wore a dark blue sweatshirt with faded
writing on it, shapeless blue jeans, and battered, dirty sneakers.
Ray Tate stood when she reached him and greeted her with a hug. His hands roamed the back of her waistband, up the middle of her back, and he held her close against him.
“Hey, long time,” he said, smiling as though they were old friends. “You made it.” His hands lingered at her hips and fluttered at her shoulders. “You’re losing weight. You look great. You been working out or what?”
He took his jacket from the stool and she sat. The bartender came down the boards. Ray Tate looked at Djuna Brown and raised an eyebrow. She said gin and tonic. He nodded to the bartender. “And another half for me, Jimmy.”
She saw he was younger than he looked with the grey hair on his collar and hanging off his face. Mid-forties, maybe. He looked glad to see her. In spite of having the head of a bum, his body was thin and solid and his eyes were clear. Except for skipping off her face to check out who came in after her, he seemed to sparkle. She was wary. She didn’t like cops. She wished she’d called Gay-Glo and had someone come to monitor the meeting.
Jimmy put down the drinks and Ray Tate made a motion with his hand as though signing something. After the bartender went away he leaned in close and put his face by her ear as though romancing her. “Look, we’re going to sit here and have one. We’re gonna see who comes through the door for the next while, then we’ll go up on the patio for another round, smoke some smokes, and talk, okay? If you want, you can pat me down. That’s fair, because I’m going to have to pat you down again, for real. I want to talk to you. You can talk to me too, if you want. Or you can fuck off at any time. The drinks’re on me. Right now, we’re old pals on a date. Anything you want to talk about? Good movies? New bestsellers?”