by Lee Lamothe
Ray Tate took his gun out. “We’re the cops. You send that fucking pooch up here, you’ll be wearing its ass for a hat.”
“Fuck that. I saw you guys go in. You’re not cops.” The dog started barking. “Paulie, Paulie, they’re a couple of goofs. Spook chick and a fucked-up looking white dude. You work down, we’ll work up.”
The man, Paulie, called down, his voice booming in echo. “Hey, they might be real cops. Harv just called, said they’re all over out there. In a red car.”
“Oh, fuck.” The man below was quiet for a few seconds. “Okay, you got a badge, right? Hold it out over the edge so I can see it.”
Ray Tate took out his folder and held it out at arm’s length.
The man at the top of the stairwell yelled, “Cops. Scram.”
Downstairs the door slammed. At the top of the stairwell another door slammed. The well was silent.
Djuna Brown was pale. “Fuck, Ray. Fuck.” She still had her gun in her hand.
“We’re okay. They fucked off. Let’s not get tense. We’re okay, Djun’. Put it away.”
She giggled. “Fucker’s going to wear the dog’s ass for a hat.”
The apartment door had bar marks chipped around the edges. Ray Tate leaned heavily on the door and slid a plastic Bank of America card between the frame and the lock and rattled it open. Inside, the room had a thick, chemical smell. There were empty cold-tablet bottles scattered around, an unmade bed, and brown streaks and bloodstains on the sheets. Dirty clothes were stacked in the corners of the room and in the refrigerator freezer were stacks of chocolate bars. Bent and broken syringes were in the trash and Djuna Brown, prowling, found some double C tablets in a dresser.
“This is the place. Double Chucks.”
“Check this.” Ray Tate used the end of a pencil to unfold a square of white paper fastened to the fridge door with a cockroach magnet. “To who it may concern, My name is Agatha Burns. I was beautiful. If I don’t come back soon ask Connie where he told Phil Harvey to take me to. I think Connie wants me to die. Please call my mother …” The rest was a jerky scrawl.
Djuna Brown leaned in and looked at the note. “Who the fuck’s Agatha Burns?”
Ray Tate stepped back. “Djun’, put your hands in your pockets. Walk out the way we came in. Don’t touch the door, don’t touch nothing.”
In the hallway he called the skipper on the cellphone while Djuna Brown wrote into her notebook every item she remembered touching in the apartment.
* * *
Connie Cook lay under his wife and thought about the breasts of the Chinese girl in the basement in east Chinatown. He didn’t wonder what his wife was thinking about. She probably wanted something expensive and was riding her way to it. Her mouth had a barbed wire smile and a couple of times he caught her looking out the window overlooking the lake, at a house identical to the Cook house but with larger grounds. The people living over there had suffered some grief a year or so earlier and were finally selling to a developer. The orange bulldozers were lined up down the block and there was a bigger house going in and she was bugging him about buying up a couple of lots further along the street so she could create a pink ice cream house of her own.
Connie Cook didn’t pack his wife. They had a relationship that extended to cars and furs and vacations and the ballet and the opera, and occasionally this. But packing was out of the question. Packing was of his other world, a free world with no boundaries or restraints. Besides, Connie Cook loved his wife in a strange way. He’d been gross all his life, as had his father and uncles, and all of them found women who saw beyond the blubber and excess. There was something inside him that Cora recognized, and in his late evenings, when he was alone and she was out, he felt grateful.
The Chinese girl, crouched on the floor, staring at the approaching glow of the branding iron. Now there was an image to make him squirt. Her eyes became impossibly large in disbelief that this could be happening to her. Connie Cookie had imagined she’d been staring not at the branding iron but at his hard dick. Her mouth became round and she shrank back from the sheer horror of being viciously penetrated by that purple piece of oak.
To prolong things, he let his mind wander. Harv had changed. He didn’t have the funster thug about him, like he did back at the beginning when he went out and snaffled up the desirable Agatha Burns, brought her up to Indian country so the Captain could lay a bad habit on her. Agatha had clearly been looking for some edge to her life and she took to the crank and Connie Cook’s loving attentions quickly. Harv had been into the game then, but lately he seemed to be a little off. The Captain thought about Harv taking Aggie for a drive in the country. Maybe something happened up there, something so horrific it rattled Harv’s sense of life’s direction. Whatever, that must have been a scary movie, a betrayed Harv and a duplicitous Aggie. Harv wasn’t into packing. His years in the joint had turned him off doing it. But there were a lot of games he could’ve played with Aggie that made that old camper van rock, Harv in his big leather bat coat and insect glasses, before the place turned into a fireball.
The super lab, she’d said. Maybe, he thought, I sent Aggie and Harv off on a picnic just in time.
He’d love to hear the story of that horror, someday. But one participant wasn’t talking and the other was playing coy.
Under his trim wife, her hands vanished in the thick soft flesh of his shoulders and her bored mind computing real estate, Connie Cook bucked.
Connie the colonizer, diluting the yellow horde.
Chapter 11
The skipper told Ray Tate to cool his jets a sec, he wasn’t about to roll out a murder team because some chick had left some notes stuck to some fridge in some housing project. “We’ll just lay back a minute here, Ray. We’re riding a pretty rich horse with this task force. We call in the Homicide hammers and next thing you know they pull in the Intelligence guys and the narcos and who else knows what?”
“We come in here, skip, after a guy outside tells us he saw the chick get into a car with Phil Harvey. He saw ’em drive off. He says she’s shitless. He doesn’t see her again. He says Harvey’s got a piece. We go into her crib and there’s a note that she’s going to be whacked by Phil Harvey. Somebody should come secure this place at least, just in case.”
“Yeah, I see that. Let me call the dep, see how he wants to do it. You guys stay there until I get back to you. Any stuff in there? Any seizure for us?”
“Cleaned out. A couple of double Cs but just spillage.”
“So I can say we’re on the right track, right? This is part of our mandate?”
“No question.” Ray Tate watched Djuna Brown close her notebook and look at him with a raised eyebrow. He shrugged. “One of us’ll stay on the door, skip. The other’s going to get the witness, take a statement from him.”
“What project you in?”
“Hauser South.”
“This witness, I guess, then, he’s a black guy?”
“Yep.”
The skipper was silent a moment. “Okay, I’ll put out a silent hit on Harvey’s car. You send the douchebag to scoop up the witness. Keep him on ice until I get some more bodies out there then take his statement. You stay by the door, Ray, okay? Just in case.”
Ray Tate clicked off. “He wants one of us on the door, one of us to go get the witness.”
“That’s be me, right?”
“He thinks I might get twitchy. You want to wait until some troops get here, take someone with you?”
“Naw. No, Ray, I’ll sweet talk him.” She made a weak smile. “He’ll talk, or he’ll wear his ass for a hat.”
He laughed and watched her silhouette walk down the long hallway to the fire door. Her slippers whispered on the cheap tile floor. He hadn’t spent much time with dykes but he got the feeling she knew he was watching her sway.
* * *
The Big Chan’s new dep tasted fruit salad. Another scoop on his shoulder boards would look good. He’d be in line — if he was careful and did it all
right — for the big oak desk. He could sit and study the dents made in the surface by the Chinaman’s lumpy skull. He could count the dents and send minions out to wreak all kinds of havoc in the squads and stations. There were fuckers who needed fucking and he was just the fucker to fuck them.
“Gordie, Gordie, Gordie. That pouty-faced motherfuck at City Hall is all over us. The Chinese Menu is ragging him. Those kids, fried up in Chinatown, they were Willy Wong’s. It’s all about chemicals, so gimme something, anything. The Chan wants this speeder, Captain Corn, behind the pipes.”
“Captain Cook. His name’s Captain Cook.”
The dep began yelling into the telephone. “Captain Corn, Colonel Klink, Corporal Cornhole, or Commander Fucking Cocksucker, I don’t give a fuck. Where we at? Am I going to have to send someone down there, take over the fucking thing?”
“Okay, okay, yeah, we’re on it. We found a stash house, we ID’d one of the Captain’s goons. We’re doing interviews at the stash, we got a silent hit out on the goon and his car. We got a missing person, maybe, probably a witness we can turn around. We’re looking for the super lab.”
“Super lab? What the fuck?”
“Those double C pills, like the ones in east Chinatown and the ones at the lab fire, we have intell they come from a super lab this Captain guy’s running. Churning out, like a million a day or some fucking bullshit.”
There was a pause on the line. “Okay, Gordie. I’m all stupid, okay? First, who found the stash house? Where is it?”
“The Statie dyke and the gunner. I had an idea and I sent them out to the projects and they tracked it like I told them to. Like I thought, it was in the Hauser projects. There was only a couple of pills around, but they had double Chucks pressed in them.”
“Right, okay. The goon, this henchman of Captain whatever. Who be he?”
“Phil Harvey. Speed cooker. The Captain’s number one henchman. We think he was the guy at the branding out east Chinatown. When I sent the guys up to the Hauser they spotted him lurking around. He got free, but they found a witness who saw him with the girl last night.”
“Whoa. Hold it. What girl?”
“The missing witness. Agatha Burnett or Barnett or something. She lived in the stash house, left a note saying if she didn’t come back, Phil Harvey had offed her.”
“Ah fuck. We got maybe a homicide, here?”
“Dunno. I told the guys to debrief the witness, seal off the apartment. And now I need someone to go in there and take some evidence away, if there is any.”
Big Chan’s new dep laughed. “And you don’t want the hammers from the Homicide Squad involved, right?”
“We lose control of this thing, we get nothing, dep. The pills are real. The Captain’s real. Phil Harvey’s real. But a dead body? Based on a note? I don’t know. You want to take this down to the guy next door that runs the Homicide Squad, we’re going to lose it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. Good thinking.” The dep was silent on the line for a few moments. “Yeah, I get it. Okay. Now, the witness, this missing broad. If there’s a strong chance she’s in the ground we gotta slide this under the door down the hall.”
“Slight chance. Real slight. I think Ray Tate’s overreacting.”
“Anything, ah, on that front?”
“Not yet. Tate says he’s gonna be able to put the hat on the dyke. Then we’ll put the hat on him.”
“What did you promise him, if he spikes her down?”
“I hinted at maybe duty sergeant with his own meat puppets to worship him.”
“A duty? Right, Gordo,” the dep laughed. “Fat fucking chance.”
* * *
Djuna Brown contacted the Statie headquarters and was told that the coroner said the smoking remains in the burned-out truck lab up north appeared to be that of a woman. DNA was going to be harvested from the bone marrow but it would take a while, then they’d do some comparisons, if they found anything to compare it to. The Statie major-crime investigator said there were tire tracks near the scene from a Firestone set, the wide kind of rubber GM slapped on several performance cars, including Camaros. Djuna Brown tapped out a memo suggesting the remains might be the missing Agatha Burns and the tires maybe indicated the Camaro driven by Phil Harvey. She printed it, gave Ray Tate a copy, and said he could deliver it to the skipper. She’d had her life’s limit of Irish dickhead bullshit.
In the glass office, Ray Tate handed the skipper the memo. “We should get the hammers in on this, skipper. This is going to be her, I know it.”
“No, no. Ray, slow down. If it’s a homicide then it ain’t our homicide. The case lies where the body lies. If that’s her up in the burned truck then it’s a Statie case. So fuck it for now. We’ll wait for the DNA. The dep’s on it, he’s coordinating with the homicide guys and they’re working with the Staties, they’re on standby. They want something more substantial. The stuff from the apartment, maybe that’ll give them something. Right now, we just concentrate on this super lab and the guys running it, okay? The Chinese Menu is leaning on the mayor and the mayor’s leaning on us. You guys getting anywhere?”
“We got an address for Phil Harvey. We’re going to set up on it later. You okaying the overtime?”
“Sure. For now just note it in your book. I’ll try to get you some guys, you give me the location.”
“Okay. Send me the memo, skip, okay? You and me’ve got to protect our asses until we take her out. She’s in with the Gay-Glo and when we put her down they’re going be grabbing up paperwork for her lawsuit. We want to be covered.”
“Good thinking, Ray.”
* * *
The skipper was hovering, bugging, questioning. Ray Tate and Djuna Brown put up with it for a half hour, then grabbed two rovers from the charger, their files and jackets, and headed out while he was on the phone. They took the Intrepid for a spin.
“Interesting things happen when you’re around, Ray. This is turning into, like, work.” She turned out of the driveway and headed north on Huron Street. “You think we can grab this super lab, put the chains on Captain Cook?”
“Connie Cook, maybe Conrad Cook, I think. Maybe Connie the Cooker. She put it in the note on the fridge. Connie wants to kill me. At least we know he exists, right?” He saw the entrance to the cemetery up ahead. “Turn in here, this place is quiet. We can get some work done.”
She shook her head. “No way. You heard of the ju-ju man? Spirits. Mojo. I’ll wind up with steel teeth and your nuts’ll shrivel to raisins. Pass.” She had a wide cat grin on her face but he saw something of hesitation in her eyes.
The rover squawked and Ray Tate grabbed it up.
Gloria, the receptionist, came over. “Skipper says there’s a silent hit on the Camaro you’re looking for. The Staties stopped it for lane change on Interstate northbound, south of Stateline, where it swings west to the badlands. Statie guy said it was a white male, long hair over his face, burns, long leather coat. Solo. An hour ago.”
The Statie doing the traffic stop wouldn’t know about the silent hit. He’d have made a stop, run the driver and plate, laid down his ticket, and taken off, none the wiser. The hit would pop up almost instantly on the main computer and the Chemical Squad notified.
Ray Tate asked Gloria to contact the Staties and have other highway cruisers look out for the Camaro. “Take it off that silent hit shit. We have intell he’s got a gun in the car, the guy doing the stop has to know that. If they see him, grab him for something, call us. They oughta take the Camaro for ident, especially the tires. They should seize the tires off it.” He clicked off. “Phil Harvey’s running around in the woods. We can set up on him later.” He gave her directions to his apartment.
“Your place? What the fuck’s that about? I’m not going there, fuck that.”
“Okay, Djun’, you pick a place. But my place is okay, unless you go all hetero on me.”
She shook her head. “You wish.” But she was smiling. “You just wish them wishes, buddy.”
* * *
The files were scant and while Ray Tate mixed gin and waters Djuna Brown laid them out over the rickety kitchen table that sat in the living room. Feeling home proud for some reason, Ray Tate folded paper towels to use as coasters.
Her nose wrinkled. “Gin and taps? That’s it? Not even fizzy water? No lime?”
“The drink of the people,” he said. “Gin and taps. Lake water and juniper. The beverage of nature.”
She sipped at her drink. “Jeez, I thought I lived like a rat. But you live like a barricaded suspect, Ray.” She looked around, sniffing loudly. “Paint. I thought you said you were painting the place? Why’s it smell like paint? This place is a dump.” She spied, by the sink, a jar with brushes poking up out of it. “Aha. I detect art.” Before he could stop her she went into the kitchen and saw his pallet in the sink. She espied his canvases, face in, under the window. She didn’t turn them. “You really are a beatnik, Ray.” She seemed pleased at this knowledge. “Officer Bongo.” She moved along the wall where he’d hung his daughter’s photographs so they wouldn’t be in the sunlight. She sipped. “You take these?”
“My kid.” He felt a pride. “My daughter’s a photographer.”
“She really likes green, eh? She should come down to my island. The whole thing’s ganja green.” She made a smile. “Except the people of course.” Confidentially she whispered, “They’re black.”
“Well,” he said, feeling his way in the face of this friendliness, “except for that part, it definitely sounds like my kind of place.” He suddenly felt a dread, imagining how the comment would look, typed up on a piece of paper in front of a discipline command.
* * *
There wasn’t much in the files. They were just wasting time until they headed over to Phil Harvey’s place. Mostly they batted ideas back and forth and sipped their gin and taps. Twice she caught him looking at her. The third time she said, “What?”
“I’d like to …” his throat clogged “… ah, paint you.”