by Lee Lamothe
The skipper looked at Ray Tate as he spoke. “Yep. Back in business. The Federale brainiacs have got nowhere on Captain Cook, whoever he is, and his bubbling cauldron of evil, wherever that is. The double Chucks dried up after the two kids went tits up. The task force is hanging around headquarters doing a whole lot of nothing. So they come back to us. After all, we started the fucking thing. So how do you want to do it?”
Djuna Brown looked at Ray Tate and realized he wasn’t going to speak. He looked more likely to start snapping his fingers and reciting free-form poetry. She looked at the skipper and widened her smile. “Ray’s having a moment, skip. Thinking big thoughts. So, what do you want us to do? We’re pretty much fucked from coast to fucking coast on this thing. Every twenty minutes the guys down the hall wander in and say, ‘Hey we got a tip there’s a major stash out in the east end, go get it.’ ‘There’s a guy from Amsterdam coming in at the airport with a ton of blues, round him up.’ So we do. The major stash is three stoner kids sharing a half a brain and two dozen bad-quality ovals. The guy at the airport doesn’t show. The Federales ride their fancy cars around town with the cool radios under the dash and talk like cops. They kick down doors. They torture the speeders. Just like us real cops, except they couldn’t find their dicks with both hands. And when they can’t, now they come back and say, ‘Hey, how about a hand, help us find our dick?’”
The skipper heard the lulling islands in her voice and seemed entranced by her Chinese eyes. He looked over at Ray Tate. “Ray? What do you think?”
Ray Tate’s lips moved but he didn’t say anything. He took a worn Audubon Guide from his pocket and fingered the tattered edges. His fingernails were chewed back and there were flakes of black and purple paint on his cuticles. “I think there is,” he finally said, “a vast array of bird life in this city. You know that, skip? A preponderance of sparrows, a lot of pigeons, and prolific flocks of seagulls. The seagulls come inland for food because the lake is so polluted and there’s nothing down there to eat. So they come up to east Chinatown and go nuts on the garbage, attack picnickers in the parks. Don’t know why there’s so many pigeons. But they shit an awful lot.” He turned his eyes back to the window. “But sometimes you see swallows or robins, even sometimes a falcon or two. But an awful lot of pigeons, no question.”
Djuna Brown gazed at him for a few moments, a fond smile playing on her lips. The skip wondered if Ray Tate was armed.
She nodded, leaned towards Ray Tate, and said brightly: “Yeah, Ray, a lot of pigeon shit, no question. I read that pigeon shit is so toxic that it can dissolve a statue in, like, no time, like ten or fifteen years. I suspect it has something to do with their diet. I also heard that the city spends hundreds of thousands of dollars blasting statues and monuments to get the stuff off. It runs in the drains and pops up in our water. Did you know that, skip? Hundreds of thousands in tax dollars, so we can drink liquid pigeon shit. Believe me, that can’t be good for you.” She stretched again and rotated her neck. She wore one of her endless array of ugly suburban pantsuits. Her bra was black where it peeked through the buttons of her stretched blouse. “Now, crows. Let me tell you about crows. Crows is no joke, don’t get me started on crows —”
“Okay, focus, people.” The skipper sat forward and steepled his hands. “The Federales can’t do the job. The dep thinks we can. Can we?”
Djuna Brown started to speak again but Ray Tate overrode her. “Sure we can. But what’s in it for us? At the end of this thing, they’re going to fuck us all anyway. As soon as we get close, they’re going to race in with the lights flashing and grab up everyfuckingthing we find. You go back to Intelligence Analysis, Djuna goes back sucking a whistle at holiday traffic up the Interstate, and I go back … Well, there’s likely mushrooms involved and it’s going to stink an awful lot like shit.”
The skipper took all this sitting back in his chair, unable to look away from the unblinking eyes staring at Ray Tate in a friendly, expectant manner over the unruly beard. He was right and it wouldn’t matter downtown that the skipper failed because all they’d given him were zombies, a dyke who burned her hair, and a gunman who wanted to play Officer Friendly in the cool uniform and the red lights over his head. “Well, we’re going to do it anyway, right? It’s all pensionable time so we may as well go down in a blaze of glory. Thing is, Ray, can we do it?”
“Sure, skip. No question. We can put the hat on these fuckers in, oh, I bet two weeks. Maybe ten days.”
“Bullshit, Ray. The Federales have had a month and unlimited resources. They don’t got dick.”
“Yeah, skip, but they aren’t ace investigators.”
Djuna Brown smiled at Ray Tate. “And they maybe don’t have everything there is to have, eh, Ray? Maybe they don’t have …” She cut her eyes towards the door as though imparting a secret. “Maybe they don’t have … the mystery clue.”
The skipper couldn’t avoid speaking to her directly. “What mystery clue?”
She ignored him
Ray Tate continued, “The question is: do we want to do it? Are we going to get the tools? We’re going to need bodies, we’re gonna need cars.” Tate stretched and his joints cracked audibly. “Phil Harvey is our way in. He’s the only one we’ve got a hook on, him and Agatha Burns.” The skipper looked confused. “Agatha Burns, skip, the girl who went for a drive with Harvey and never returned?”
“Oh, her. She left the note on the fridge, right?”
“This case isn’t wires and tires. We’ve got no phones to wire and we’ve got no one to drive behind. We need two approaches: one to set up some teams around town and put a fix on Harv. The other to backtrack Burns, try to figure who she is and where she hooked up with these mutts.”
“Give me an action plan, Ray. How do you want to do it?”
“Someone on Phil Harvey’s place in the Beach. Someone else on Agatha Burns’s old place. Couple of guys out there, cruising mutts’ hangouts, ready to move if something breaks out. We’ve got to freshen up the statewide hit on Harv. Me and Djuna are going to shape out Agatha.”
“Two weeks?”
“Yep. Two weeks we’ll back up a shitload of pills to your door, bring in Captain Cook in chains.”
Wally Brodski stuck his head in the door and looked at each of them as though he suspected he was the target of a conspiracy. He had brightly coloured feathered fishing flies hooked into his shirtfront. His tie was a long silkscreened trout. “Skip? I’m taking a medical off. My ulcer’s on fire. I can’t do the night trick.”
* * *
Djuna Brown took some hours to rest up for her sudden night shift. Ray Tate asked Gloria to scan the photo of Phil Harvey into her computer and make a half-dozen prints. When they were ready he checked out a Taurus and ran through the spots, his rover dialed to the local police grids, hoping for a call he could legitimately respond to. He got a quick crush on a dispatcher, loved her cool litany. She made gunshot sound like a sex act.
He drove with his elbow out. The autumn air had a sharp wintry chill and the brief snow had stopped. On the edge of Stonetown he came across two chargers tussling with a large Native panhandler on the sidewalk. He jammed the Taurus and got half out, but the chargers had the guy under control. The both looked about fifteen years old and he’d bet they didn’t have five years on the job between them. But they were out and about and learning their trade. One of them looked up and somehow recognized the drab Taurus and a cop through the facial hair. He gave Tate a thumbs-up then ran his hand horizontally as though smoothing water: Hey, everything’s okay. Ray Tate continued to cruise, taking the long way around up to his first stop, Phil Harvey’s condo.
Bernie Gross sat in a pickup truck behind the building, sprawled across the seat, his rover off and his head crammed at an awkward angle against the passenger door. His feet stuck out the window and the floor was covered with food wrappings, beer cans, and fishing magazines. There was a mom-and-pop shop around the corner and Ray Tate went on foot and brought back two coffees.
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“Bernie, Bernie. Wake-up time. C’mon, man. Fuck, look at this mess.”
Bernie came around slowly. “Ray. Ray Tate, the last policeman. How we doing? We arresting anybody yet?” He straightened up and reached for the coffee.
Ray Tate stepped back with the cups. “Come out, Bernie. You come out to drink it. Stand up, man.” He felt a huge sadness. There was almost nothing left on the job between the fifteen-year-old uniformed kids wrestling bums and this great fat slob, once a good cop, counting the minutes until he hit the big pension. There was stuff in Bernie’s head and his heart that could fashion great cops of green kids, could create a lineage for generations to come. But Bernie had made a wrong move someplace and he gave up. His career was now a cycle of the brown jobs: court wagons, couriering, counting paper clips.
Bernie got his huge body out of the pickup. His upper face sat on an inverted pyramid of jowl. His eyes were shot red with dull, general hatred. “Okay, gimme.”
“Any action?”
“There’s no fucking target. They told me to sit on this place, so I’m sitting. Dunno who to watch for. What the fuck is this? If this is the new American policing, I missed the memo.” The coffee cup lid wasn’t secure and Bernie spilled coffee down the front of his fat shirt. He ignored it. “Wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know? This job used to be a religion for the guys, most of them anyway. Now, well, look at you. Two good shoots, two mutts go toes up — two less to bust later. And instead of giving you a medal they’re out to hack your ass with that dyke twat. Why you hanging in? Fuck them and their community outreach. You got the twenty-five in. Come fishing with me and Wally. We got a guy buying us a fishing camp up in Canada.”
Ray Tate took an envelope of prints from the Taurus and handed Bernie the photograph of Phil Harvey. “Black Camaro. This guy with the burns on his face. Or a big fat guy with a branding iron, going ‘Giddy-up.’”
Bernie took the photo without looking at it and sailed it into the pickup. “This is fucked, you know, Ray? They’re just lining us up and the skip is gonna knock us down. But,” Bernie made a wise face, “but two more weeks, Ray, and I got my time in. I’m fucking gone so fucking fast my fucking shadow’ll still be on the fucking wall for a fucking week and those cocksuckers can kiss my ass. You like bass fishing? This place we’re buying in Ontario, oh you gotta see this place.”
“You’ll make it, Bernie. No problem.” He took his coffee and left Bernie leaning against his pickup, slurping and thinking about angling some bass.
Bernie terrified him.
He wondered if that’s how it happened: you pretend to not give a shit and go on long bird rambles and nobody notices. Before you know it you’re sleeping in a pickup truck covered in candy wrappers, counting the days to a very long fishing season and not giving the shit you used to pretend not to give.
* * *
At Agatha Burns’s stash apartment in the Hauser South projects, Tate could find no signs of surveillance set up. He voiced out on the air and got nothing back. He went to the ground floor patio where the money man worked. The glass doors showed the place had been cleaned out but the former resident had left several lumps of dog shit scattered around and a bag of clothes pegs. The lock on the side fire door was still jammed and he stood in the stairwell and listened, sipping his coffee. No sounds. Climbing the stairways he kept his gun in his hand, craning out to look up where the keeper with the scattergun had been. At Agatha Burns’s apartment the signs of the forensic collection were long gone. The door was locked and no one answered when he thumped. He trudged down the stairs.
Outside, the boneless black guy was sniffing around the Taurus. He recognized Tate’s hair and beard with the wave of a can of beer. His gold chain hung down to his waist. Plastic bags appeared from the bottom of his baggy pant cuffs and slipped onto the pavement.
Ray Tate nodded in a friendly manner. “Hey, player, who’s around?”
“They all gone. Just us folks here, now. Took that ugly ass fucking dog with them. Where your ho go?”
“Where’d they go? They set up someplace else around here?” Ray Tate waited. “You dropped something.”
“Me? No, not me. I’ll clean ’em up for you, you want.”
“Do that, would you? I’d hate for some kid to find them, get curious. Where’d they go? The guys from here?”
The man put his big running shoe over the plastic bags. He shrugged. “Big pickup truck took ’em away a couple of weeks ago. After you was here. Where that ho? She got a man? She need a player?”
“Tell me about the pickup.” Ray Tate realized the guy was mentally ill, that his cool jerks were the result of medication fouled by alcohol, not some inner hip hop. A puppet for the local traffickers, a feeble goof they stood up to attract the heat. Ray Tate doubted the plastic bags contained anything but talc. The clunky gold chain was chipping, he could see, showing dull lead underneath. “What did it look like? Who was driving it?”
“Black thing. Lots of silver. White guy with blond girlie hair came.”
“Not the guy with the bacon face?”
“Him, no. He come here, he stay here, you know? You be taking his fried chicken ass out of this project with a spoon.” The man started to get angry. “I’d shove that silver bad boy right up his skinny hippie ass, he bring that cooked mutton motherfucker face in front of this player.” He calmed himself with a swallow of beer and nodded. “They took the ugly dog in the back of the truck, the ugly motorcycle motherfucker with the scatter.”
“You see the scatter?”
“He had it under his coat. Cut down the pipes real short so the shells stick out. Whoo, tough white boy. Fuck. You ho, where’s that girl of yours at with that old lady hair on her pretty head?”
Ray Tate unlocked the Taurus. “You want to pick that stuff up, okay?” He saw the man was getting jittery, moving the beer from hand to hand. “You throw that at me when I drive away, next time I see you I’m going to run the car over you.”
“I hear. I hear.” His head bobbed, the whites of his eyes were orbed out, and when he smiled the long thin cords of his neck stretched painfully. “Peace out, peace out.”
As Ray Tate left the parking lot he heard a yell and the beer can cracked off his back window. He laughed. “Oh, you fucking douchebag.”
* * *
He headed out to the west end and cruised his wife’s house. It wasn’t quite dark outside but there were upstairs lights that he recognized as lamps he’d strategically positioned to make the place look occupied. The garage door was closed and he couldn’t tell if his wife’s Neon was inside. Someone had left a package of cigarettes in the Taurus and he fumbled at the lighter. Before things had turned he hadn’t smoked more than two dozen cigarettes in two years, and most of those were while he and his lawyer were pacing out the results of the shooting team.
The house looked like somewhere he’d lived once, maybe, when he was another person. With some chargers from the Accident Reconstruction Unit he’d re-shingled the roof, with some firefighters he’d put in a new front porch and a deck in the back. The brother-in-law of a duty sergeant had sodded the lawn with something he said was Kentucky Blue. Twenty years in the house and Tate knew every piece of trim and moldings, every hidden flaw he’d covered with careful manipulation of plaster and paint, where every seam in the drywall was poorly sanded, where every edge of tile didn’t quite fit and was disguised under baseboards. It was a trade you learned by doing, just like policing. You were as careful as your experience let you be and you had to make mistakes. You covered them up as best you could and swore to never make them again. And you made less and less as time went on. Just like being a cop. The house was a place of hidden but educational flaws and he’d been proud of all of them. He’d been a doorstep baby of the State and had lived in many houses, but never as more than a guest, cheap labour, or a sufferance.
It was good work, being a cop. At first it was just a job. But then it became something else, something that overtook him, somet
hing that he was good at, could be perfect at. In a drunken evening at the kitchen table once, after he’d been punched out in a bar fight and was recuperating, one of the visiting old-timers had called it a religion and used the words Faith and Duty.
“If you weren’t a copper, young Ray,” the old-timer had said, “what would you have been?”
Drunken Ray Tate had fallen for the sympathetic eyes of the old interrogator and said, “A painter.”
But the oldster misunderstood. He’d nodded and said, “A good living. People always need their houses painted, you can make a good dough if you hustle, build up a client base.”
He watched, smoking, as a firefighter two houses down carried an old armchair to the curb then went back and brought out a set of end tables and a box with magazines poking out the top. The firefighter put out a cardboard sign: Free. He’d been among the neighbours questioned by Internal Affairs after the second shooting. The buff firefighter had told the shoo fly to get off his property. You fat fucking slob, he’d said, you should be ashamed of yourself, going out in public like that, on the taxpayers’ dime.
The whole enclave was men in uniforms: city cops, firefighters, emergency crews, a few Staties, two Federales who did consular security over in Chicago and commuted home for three-day weekends.
Ray Tate went to get out of the Taurus to say hello to the firefighter when the dash radio went off.
“Any Chem Squad bodies out there?” Djuna Brown waited out a few seconds of silence. Her voice was of islands and sand and she put even the honeyed dispatcher to shame. “Anybody? We got a good live sighting for Phil Harvey downtown.”