by Lee Lamothe
On the drive across the highway Ray Tate had flipped through his notebooks until he found the licence number for the black F-250 pickup that had rolled into their surveillance on Phil Harvey’s condo. Using the rover he dialed to the Chem Squad channel and asked Gloria to put the plate through. He asked her to have the city run the owner, as well as Agatha Burns, with various spellings, aged in her twenties.
Djuna Brown swooped around a transit bus. “Housekeeping, Ray?”
“Just stuff we would’ve done a month ago if we’d been left on the case. This black F-250 is everyfuckingplace. It was at Harvey’s place, it went to Burns’s old place in the projects, it might’ve at the Wrong Wong’s warehouse shooting last night. Maybe we can put it under Phil Harvey.”
Djuna Brown wasn’t into talking about work. “Ray, let me ask you one, no prejudice, no nothing. Straight, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Gloria? On the reception?”
Ray Tate dragged it out, “Yeeaaaah?”
“What do you think? You think she’s okay?”
He shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I barely notice her. Why, you and her …?” He laughed. “Another Chicago deep-dish of disappointment for the skipper.”
“No, no. Jeez, Ray.” She smoothly braked at a backlog and put the gumball on the dash and found the siren switch. She swooped onto the shoulder. Ray Tate grabbed the dash with one hand and the overhead grip with the other. “No, she was asking stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah. What’re you like. Are you married? That kind of thing.”
Ray Tate was pleased. Even at speed her fingers curled around the steering wheel. He liked the look of her fingers and noticed the nails weren’t chewed back. “No shit? Fuck. Good-looking woman, that Gloria. If you like non-dyke, white Federale chicks with guns.”
“Not you, though, right?”
“Nope. My heart belongs to my art.”
She gave him a feral smile of pointy teeth. “Beatnik.” She looked happy. “She, Gloria, gave me a business card. For a place I should go to.” She stared through the windshield. The block-up had dissolved but she left the light and siren on and steered over into the hot lane. “You know what she asked me? She asked if I was cutting on myself yet. She said she was born-again. If you can’t find Jesus yet, she said, find a good hairdresser and wait until He comes along. Can we go there, after?”
He looked at the white frizzy hair. It was brushed and had a barrette over the right ear but it was still weird. He wanted to paint her, he decided. “Sure.”
They rode in silence. He warned her that the exit ramp was coming up and she smoothly drifted to the right. On the ramp she shut down the light and noise.
“Djuna, let me ask you one, okay?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“This dyke thing.” He hesitated. “Ah, look, how committed to that are you?”
“Who told you I was a dyke, Ray? Not me, Bongo.”
* * *
They walked around the units and found a vast crime scene taped off. Numbered cones covered shell casing, chalk marked bloodstains on the ground, and bullet holes on the back of the building. The roll-up door was halfway up and it was peppered with rough perforations. A crowd of reporters was grouped outside the yellow tape.
“You’re not? Really?”
“Imagine, huh?” She gave him a mysterious smile and wiggled her eyebrows.
A young charger watched them approach then waved them off. “You’ll have to go around.”
Ray Tate slipped his badge out of his jacket. “Chem Squad. Who’s the duty?”
“Topper.” The young guy went to a cluster of cops near the roll-up doors and spoke to a striper.
The striper looked up and made a big smile. “Ray Tate. Cockfuckingsucker, I thought they’d have you in jail by now.”
Ray Tate shook his hand. “I told you, Topper, they’ll never take me alive.”
“Good man. Fuck them all.”
Tate introduced Djuna Brown. Her name didn’t register with the striper and he stared at her and shook her hand with a laugh. “Jeez, I thought you had to be twelve years old and four feet tall to be a cop.”
She gave him a pretty smile. “An Irish guy, looked a lot like you, did the sign-up physical. I stood on a hundred dollar bill to get the extra four inches.”
“Good girl.” The striper looked around. “I can guess why you Chem guys are here. The short version is: four or five guys pull up, they lay a beating on a watchman, a bunch of mutts come out of the place, and it’s Chinese New Year. Year of the Mutt, I guess. I dunno, I’m still writing Year of the Pig on my cheques …” He waited for them to laugh. “So, anyways, we got two with pistol whips at St. Frankie, one with a gunshot at Mercy Med. First two victims are minor; basic attitude adjustment. The third guy’s sniffing the incense. Our bandits roll out in a black pickup with drums of chemicals according to a cabbie who saw them loading up. The victims say nothing was taken, it was an attempted break-in, the cabbie saw the drums go out. Chinamen say black guys, the cabbie says white guys. Chinamen say they didn’t see a vehicle, the cabbie says a black F-250.”
Djuna Brown was writing it down. Ray Tate stood so the media cameras wouldn’t pick up his face. “Anybody see a white guy, big fat fucker?”
“Nope. Just mutts. Steroid guys. And a guy looked like an ugly woman. Coulda been my wife from the sounds of it,” Topper looked at the punctures in the overhead door. “Shot the shit out of the place. Chinamen won’t say what was in the drums. The drums they didn’t take in the truck that wasn’t here, I mean.” He stared at Djuna Brown. “You a city guy, honey? Where you stationed before this mess?”
“I’m Statie.”
Boxcars locked into a train in Topper’s head. “Oh. Oh, yeah. From up north.”
Djuna Brown stared at him. “You got a problem, there, Top?”
“Dearie, take it easy. If you’re with Ray, you’re in the right gang. Me, I got nothin’ against dykes.” He looked around and whispered: “I think my wife? She’s a dyke.” He widened his smile. “She fucks like a dyke, anyway. Meaning: not with me.”
Djuna Brown smiled into his charm. “You ever heard, Top, of a mustache ride?”
He shook his head. “She asked me once. I said: honey, if it ain’t deep fried, I don’t eat it. C’mon in the kitchen. She passed.”
Djuna Brown laughed. Topper turned away and listened to his shoulder microphone.
“Nothing for us here, Djun’,” Ray Tate said. “Let’s see what they’ve got back on the F-250.”
Topper called something out to a group of chargers and they carefully started stepping out of the scene. “Hey, Ray, the guy that got shot? He cracked the blank fortune cookie. Hammers are on the way.”
“Okay, Topper, we’re outta here. We didn’t enter the scene, right? So no need to mention us, that we came around.”
“No problem. Hey, tell your partner here how I got the name.” He started laughing. “Oy vey.”
Chapter 18
The three wreckers were up and bouncing in the afterglow. They were gregarious and there were handshakes and hugs. It was far from the morose finale to the Captain’s crazy branding frenzy in east Chinatown. There’d been no weirdness, just maybe a little chaos that comes with all sudden action. But none of them had been seriously hurt, no one had dropped his fudge. When the Chinamen at Willy Wong’s warehouse had reacted, Harvey and the blond kid and the wreckers had gone to work and finished their mission. One wrecker had taken a metal bar across the shoulders but had shaken it off. Harvey had taken a whack in the upper arm from the same guy before Frankie Chase, the blond kid from up north, pulled his gun and opened up.
Dawn was rimming the sign of the truck stop north of the city, already casting everybody a long shadow. The five men had crammed themselves into the double cab of the F-250. The forty-five gallon drums of precursors were in the back, covered with a tarpaulin chained to the bed.
The wrecker who owned the gym was almo
st dancing, juggling his paper coffee cup. “Fuck, Harv. Fuck. Just like the old days.” His breath showed in the chill morning air. He wore a thin, unlined leather jacket over a T-shirt but the temperature didn’t seem to have an effect on him. Harvey wondered if the guy’s nose ring ever got cold enough to ache in the winter.
“Nice, nice one, Barry. You fucking guys. Well, that was beautiful.” He screened his body and handed a wad of cash to him. “A little noisy there at the end. You and your guys might want to take a vacation, until it sorts itself out. I think one of those guys was hurt bad.”
“Fucking pussy cocksucker Chinamen.” Barry laughed, threw away his coffee and indifferently ran his thumb over the stack of money. “Ooohh, nice.” He stared into the morning sun. “Like being a kid again, Harv. If I didn’t need the coin, I’d be doing this shit for nothing. How’s your arm?”
“Ah, fuck it. It’ll hurt later. Right now a bit of a throb.”
“Good thing it was your left arm, Harv. Because I know you jerk off with the right.”
The blond kid was with the other two wreckers a few feet away, smoking cigarettes. The kid chain-smoked and sucked nervously at his coffee and periodically glanced over at Harv. The two wreckers were laughing haw-haw-haw biker laughs. They both slapped the kid’s back, calling him Shooter.
A red, chromed Cadillac Escalade crawled into the parking lot, crunching gravel, and stopped twenty yards away. Harvey could hear the radio playing, heavy on bass. A blond woman with long ringlet extensions sat inside, her hand draped over the steering wheel.
“There’s our ride, Harv. You guys good from here? The kid there looks a little shaky, you know? He’s gonna stand up? That guy he shot, he didn’t look good.”
“Yeah, he’s cool.” Harvey shook hands with the wrecker. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
* * *
He had to keep his left arm up on the window ledge of the truck to ease the pain, but Phil Harvey wouldn’t let the jumpy kid drive. As they passed up the highway he kept a tight ear on the kid’s responses, listened for him swallowing too hard, licking his lips. He watched to see if he tapped his feet or drummed his fingers on the dash. He liked the kid and didn’t relish leaving him in a hole in the ground in Indian country. He figured the kid had saved him from a wicked beating by the Chinamen.
They were just pulling into Widow’s Corners when the news of the shooting hit the radio. The kid rushed forward to turn it up. No one was declared dead, although one of the victims, the perky woman’s voice said, was in grave condition with gunshot wounds and a murder team was on standby. Two others were at hospital with minor head lacerations.
“Fuck, that was my guy, Harv. The shot guy. Fuck.”
Phil Harvey knew the kid was about to step over a line. He’d seen the Chinaman get hit and go down, he’d seen the kid lean in like a matador to finish him, he’d seen the Chinaman’s head jerk at the last minute. There were things that happened in the middle of things and people let themselves slip a little. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the end of the world either, usually. Not like Connie Cook, who’d obviously planned his revenge by having a branding iron made, had planned clearly to use it on the guys counterfeiting his product. The Captain had been looking to go crazy long before he got to the rooming house.
For the most part, on the long drive north the kid had been okay. Nervous and excited, but not drawing in on himself, shutting Harv out. He was even laughing and reliving the look on the Chinamen’s faces when they came out of the warehouse.
But the kid had the power to put four other guys in jail, to completely change the path of their lives. It was a knowledge, Harvey knew, not many guys could handle when things got tightened up around their nuts. He wasn’t worried about the wreckers: they were older guys and recognized that doing some time was just an interlude in the lives they’d chosen. Harvey had responsibilities to those guys.
At Widow’s Corners he drove the F-250 into a restaurant lot beside a motel and told the kid they’d have breakfast. That he had to make some calls. They sat at the same seat he’d sat at on his way out after stashing the Camaro at the farm, where he’d waited for the kid to come pick him up. He thought he should have told the old guy up at the lab to turn the engine over on the Camaro and run it every couple of days. He thought briefly about Agatha Burns.
Harvey ordered some eggs and toast. The kid had an appetite and went for the truckers’ all-in special, and that was, Harv thought, good. While they waited for the breakfast, he went to a pay phone and called the Captain.
“Hey, Cookie. How’s it?”
“You been busy, Harv. Wisht I’d’a been there. Was it bad?”
“Naw. One of the … ah … other guys, might, you know … go?”
“I heard. Slow news days I guess. The radio’s all over it. But you’re okay, right? You got what you went shopping for? All the guys are okay? They miss me?”
“Oh, yeah. I took a whack, that’s all. One guy asked about you, said where’s that guy, came out with us last time. We coulda used him. I told him you were fucking up somebody else. Next time, he says.”
“Perfect. Next time for sure. Good guys, those guys. Say hi to them for me.” The Captain sounded pleased. “So, we got, what?”
“Six forty-fives.”
“That’s two hundred and seventy gallons. We can do a lot of good work with that much. What’re you doing now?”
“Hang on.” Harvey watched the kid leave the restaurant and go to the F-250. He slid his ass in and left the door open and sat sideways while he turned the key and fiddled with the radio. Harv saw his mouth move. He shook his head and then he got out and looked around, shut the door, and came back inside. He trudged with cement feet and waved c’mere at Harvey. “Ah, I got a couple of things to do up here, Cap, let me get back to you.”
“Okay. Keep me posted.” The Captain paused. In the background a loudspeaker announced a horserace. “Harv? My other thing. What about that? You ready?”
Harv felt heavy dread and couldn’t source it: the kid who’d crossed a line, or the girl the Captain wanted grabbed. “Let’s talk later. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You staying over?”
“Might have a bit of work still to do, I dunno.” The kid sat with his coffee, staring off into space. “Maybe it’ll take a couple of days to get back down. I’ll let you know.”
* * *
Connie Cook watched his horse being rubbed down in the stables. The jockey, a little girl with the face of a man and the ass of a midget, was polite to him but he knew it was because he was buying the oats.
“She’s running well, Mr. Cook,” the jockey said. “She’s got this half-step we can make work for us. It’ll take some time, but she’s a good runner. We can make that half-step work for us.”
“Okay, Mary,” he said, appreciating that her freakishness was as part of her as his was of him, as Harv’s was of Harv. He felt they all shared the kinship of outsiders, of the differences. “I’ll come out one morning and watch her do her thing. You need anything?”
“Naw, no, Mr. Cook. Come out in the morning, sir, see her run. She’s going to need some time, she’s gonna spend some money. I hope you know that, going in.” The jockey studied him looking for confirmation of something. “There’s muscle and there’s speed and feed, you know, but there’s also heart. She’s got the heart.”
Captain Cook liked the jockey. If the horse ran backwards, he thought, he’d still give her a soft landing. She loved the horses like he loved the cheerleaders: with passion, with need. “Mary, go do it. Whatever it is, you go do it, okay?” He gave her a lifting of his jowls. “I’ll talk to that trainer, that Paki. You take her out today and no matter what, I promise you, we’re in business.” He sparkled his eyes. “Unless I come back later tonight and she’s still running to the finish. That’s not good.”
She laughed and for a second there became pretty. “We’re going today in the fourth. If she’s still running it at Christmastime we can come down toget
her and throw oats at her.”
“Atta girl.”
Connie Cook’s wife didn’t like horses, didn’t like their smells, didn’t like their shit, and didn’t like the denizens of the backtrack with their shy shuffles and slang. She liked the Cup races when the Canadian horses came down, when the trailers brought the runners up from Kentucky. She liked the dips and sips in the clubhouse. She liked dressing up and making gentle fun of her husband’s extravagance. Connie Cook’s wife stayed well away from the stables and sat in their box in her pillbox hat and scarf, talking with her cronies.
Connie Cook walked across the front of the stands and looked up at his wife. She was talking across the aisle between the boxes with Gabriella Harris-Hopkins, of the Harris Clothing Company and the Hopkins boutique brokerage. Gabriella Harris-Hopkins was forty-five years younger than her husband, Irving Hopkins, putting her at a tasty twenty-five. Not exactly in the ballpark of Connie Cook’s tastes, but not too far out of it either. Connie Cook thought of her as a crass whore. Irv Hopkins was her third husband and he didn’t blush when she announced she’d had her breasts enhanced as an anniversary present to him. Connie Cook especially hated Irv Hopkins’s granddaughter, Tiffany, who was not much younger than her step-grandmother and still maintained her own boobs. He’d decided to maybe have Harv grab Tiffany, but now he wavered and thought about maybe grabbing them both. It would be a coup but fraught with problems unless he and Harv pulled in someone to help control them. It could be a disaster instead of true love. In any event, he decided, the lucky girl would be kept up at the farm for keeps and wouldn’t make it back to the city. This meant a lot of driving. Connie Cook was looking into a sedan that would be comfortable on long rides. He didn’t mind the long rides with the mounting anticipation, the teasing of himself when he stopped for coffee or gas. But he liked a lot of leg room; the new Beemer 7, maybe.