by Lee Lamothe
Djuna Brown wrinkled her brow. “That up north thing. It seems a lot of stuff is up north. Harvey gets a speeding ticket, he’s heading up. The F-250 is from up there. The camper fire that we think was Agatha Burns is up there. This super lab’s gotta be out in the boondocks: it stinks and if anyone else was around, there might be complaints.” She nodded to herself. “Indian country or the badlands.”
Ray Tate nodded. “Yeah. This fishing gear Phil was buying, the sleeping bag, points north.”
“Okay, go to it. Keep track of your overtime and I’ll get it for you later, somehow. You need anything else?”
“Just a good fucking leaving alone.”
“Done.”
Djuna Brown looked up from her coffee. “There’s got to be something between Agatha Burns and Phil Harvey. Like, how’d they meet? How’d this fat Captain get his hands on her? How come she stayed in the stash house and when she could get out, she didn’t go home or call the cops?”
“We’re not going to worry about that, Djuna.” The skipper was startled that he’d used her first name. “Don’t even fucking go there. Focus on Phil Harvey, focus on the Captain motherfucker, and my mountain of pills.”
They went to leave. The skipper said, “Ray, stay a minute, okay?”
* * *
Through the glass they could see Djuna Brown working the phones.
“What’s with this makeover madness, Ray? She looks almost fuckable and you look … Well, Gloria better look out. For the both of you.”
“New faces for old places. We’re going to need a new car. The Intrepid’s burned off. And not some fucking Taurus either.”
But the skipper wasn’t listening. “Why’d she do that? When the dep reamed me? She could’ve put me in the deep shit, letting the Burns thing go by. What’s her game?”
Ray Tate shrugged. “We’re just working the case, skip. It’s our case. Right now, we’re all in the same gang. Your problem with her? Her with you? That’s something else.”
“Fucking weird.” The skipper glanced out the window and fished his bottle from the drawer. He topped an inch into his coffee. “Let me talk a minute, okay?” He held up the bottle and raised his eyebrows.
Ray Tate put his palm over his cup and shook his head.
“Back before I got on the rocket I was part of a search party, looking for a missing little girl. She —”
“Sheila Battersby.” Ray Tate shook his head. “Don’t go there, skip. I know the story. Everybody knows the story. Let it go.” He nodded at the skipper’s cup. “You could let that go, too.”
“It’s hard. You know it’s hard. This fucking job.”
“This is the best fucking job in the world, skipper. You know why? Because you’re never alone. You need help you don’t even got to ask.”
The skipper drained his cup anyway. “Yeah.” He looked embarrassed and smiled. “So, the dyke, Ray. How’s that going? You going to spike her in the ground for me?”
“Oh yeah, skip. Head first, so hard you’ll see maybe just the bottom of her tiny little slippers.”
“Good man.”
Chapter 20
Frankie Chase leaned against the door of his F-250 as Phil Harvey headed north. Harvey’s arm was starting to throb and he let his left hand rest on his lap. The radio news went through several half-hour cycles, each leading off with the murder at Willy Wong’s. On the sixth cycle, Willy Wong gave a brief interview, describing himself as shocked at the events. He said it was getting too dangerous to do business in the city. He wanted a meeting with his friend the mayor to get police to root out the bad elements terrorizing Chinatown. A police spokesman came on and gave various descriptions of the bandits. Black or white. A black pickup or a dark car.
Frankie Chase turned off the radio. “Fuck. Black pickup.”
Phil Harvey kept to sixty miles an hour. “Lots of black pickups. We’ll put this one on ice for a while.” He laughed. “You’ll have to get something else. If this shit keeps up my place up north is going to look like a used car lot.”
“Fuckin’ guy died. Unbelievable. That one I gave him in the head? He jerked. I thought his timing was okay and I just took his ear off and was going to give him another one.” He giggled. “I thought he’d cranked you in the fucking head. I thought you were gone, man.”
Harvey became concerned. “Frankie. Listen to me, okay?” He took a deep breath. If the kid didn’t absorb this stuff right he was going to have to go. Six weeks ago there’d’ve been no question; the kid would already be in the ground. But things were different now. Phil Harvey had a plan, maybe an actual future. “We’re not going to talk about this again. You aren’t going to reminisce. I’m not going to ask you anything, ever. If you ask me, Hey how’s the arm? I’m gonna say I don’t have any fucking arms, you got me confused with some other Harv. If the guys that were with us call up and even hint at talking about it, you go: What the fuck are you talking about? Never mind not talking on the phone. Don’t talk at all. It didn’t happen. Only five guys know what happened. That’s a lot, but they’re solid guys.” He looked at Frankie Chase. “Four of them, anyway. Even if they all talk to the cops about it and you get hooked, well that’s okay. There’s no evidence. Only your own mouth can put you in for this, that or evidence.” He had a sudden thought. “Frankie, where’s the piece?”
“I got it. I almost forgot it, but I got it.”
“Fuck, that’s what I mean. Jesus, we’re riding heavy already with the drums back there, now there’s a fucking murder weapon in the truck.” Harvey laughed but he made the hard decision. There was just too much to think about, too much to worry about. He had an exit plan from his life and he didn’t want to trip over a murder charge for himself or Barry’s guys on his way out.
He saw an exit ahead and changed to the right hand lane. He rolled off the state highway and drove until he saw a sideroad. He stopped the F-250. “Give me the piece. It’s gotta go.”
Frankie Chase rummaged under his seat. He took out a black automatic and wiped it down with the bottom of his T-shirt.
“Hey, no. Stop.” Harvey stared at the gun. “Listen now, Frankie. There’s things you’ve got to know. You wipe the piece with your shirt, you put your DNA on the piece. So now you’re going to lose the T-shirt and the gun, both.” He laughed. “You keep this up you’ll be walking out of here naked, all the Indians jumping your white ass.” He kept his eyes on the gun but didn’t reach for it. “Okay, okay, let’s just relax. Let’s go slow, here. Pop the clip, clear the chamber.”
Frankie Chase dropped the clip onto his lap. He cleared the sleeve and the round in the chamber bounced up onto the dash. He recovered it. There were four unspent shells in the clip.
“Now take off the shirt and spread it on your lap. Take out the shells from the clip. Wipe each one down and drop ’em on the floor. Wipe the piece down too. And the clip. The shirt’s fucked now.” He watched Frankie Chase closely as he removed his T-shirt. There were spider tattoos on both shoulders, a panther on his bicep. “Now, without touching anything with your fingers, make a little bundle of everything.”
He took the keys from the ignition and got painfully out of the truck. Frankie Chase went to get out.
“You wait here. I’m going to go for a walk and lose this stuff. If we both go, that means two guys know what nobody should know. The gun won’t walk into the bush by itself. So, you go or I go. I think I’d rather be the guy that knows, okay? Nothing personal.”
“Sure, Harv.”
“Put your jacket on, it’s fucking cold. I’ll be a little while. Stay with the truck, don’t look where I go.” He took the bundle carefully.
“Phil, Phil, I never thought of all this stuff. Fuck, I’m stupid.”
“You’re in the bigs now, Frankie,” Phil Harvey said. “You’ll learn. It takes time.”
* * *
He went up the sideroad a ways and picked a tall tree as a landmark. Up at the farm he’d gone for long thinking walks and got slightly lost. It was the
smoke from the farmhouse that saved him. If he hadn’t left a fire going that morning, he’d still be out there walking behind himself. He picked a tall pine, glanced back where the kid was leaning on the F-250 facing the other way, then walked into woods. Two hundred yards in he used a branch to clear some autumn leaves. He scraped a hole in the ground, one handed. He put the T-shirt in, unwrapped the gun, filled the hole over the shirt, and scuffed it down with his boot.
He awkwardly reloaded the four rounds into the clip, tucking the gun under his left armpit, and then he cranked one into the chamber. He put the gun into the top of his boot and settled his pant cuffs. He realized he’d known what he was going to do the moment he didn’t just leave the kid at the restaurant to wait while he took the drums at the farm. But he knew, once Frankie Chase knew where the farm was he was dead. He wondered why he pretended to himself that he had a choice; that the kid might not have to go. No way he’d be able to get the drums off the truck and into the lab by himself anyway.
A new future didn’t just drop out of the sky, he thought. You didn’t wake up one day and go, Oh okay, a new life for me, and just walk away whistling. You had to clean up after yourself. There was housekeeping to do: money to collect, debts to settle, plans to make, tracks to cover. Another few days, Phil Harvey thought, a couple of hard things to do, and … Well, who knew? A haircut, that was for sure. And he’d looked into skin grafts, slowly reading his way through a book at the library. It was painful, taking skin from other parts of his body, but what wasn’t painful?
The pine was off to his left and he headed diagonally so he’d pop out on the road from the other side of the F-250. He wished he’d brought the fishing gear up, that he could try to figure out how to put on a hook or a lure, how to fix a weight, how to cast his offering out into the lake. The library had had instructional books but he wasn’t sure; he’d also read how to clean a fish and cook it and how to tell them apart from each other.
There were mountains out west, another book had told him, places where you could reinvent yourself and never see anybody if you didn’t want to.
The rivers were silver and clean and land was cheap if you didn’t mind hauling water, living by lamplight.
Back at the truck he told Frankie to forget everything about the gun, about the shooting. “After right now, before I get in the truck, you want to say anything? Because once I’m in there, if you ever mention it again you’re going into a hole in the ground in the woods, right, Frankie?”
“Never happened, Harv. I’m okay, I’m cool.”
* * *
A few miles before the turnoff to the dirt road that led to the farm, Phil Harvey told him to put his head on the dash, to put his coat over his head. “This is a place I don’t want anyone to know about, Frankie. We leave here, same thing. You cover up.”
“If we’re leaving my truck, how are we getting out?” He struggled out of his coat.
“There’s a crazy old guy up here, he’ll drive us down to Widow’s after we off-load the barrels and stash the truck. We’ll get someone to pick us up, drop you at home and me in the city.”
The kid nodded. “What a fucking day.” He turned in the seat. “Look, I appreciate this. I just want you to know. You ever, I mean ever, need anything, Harv, you call me. I’ll be there.”
Harvey was wavering. He liked the kid. The kid had done the shooting, but no one would ever find the gun if Harv hid it. Without the gun, the T-shirt was just a T-shirt. Maybe some of Frankie Chase’s DNA on it, a hair or two, and some burnt gunpowder. But without the actual gun that did the Chinaman, it was just a rag.
“No problem, Frankie. You go out on a thing, who the fuck knows how it’s gonna turn out?” He shrugged. “That’s the life, that’s the game.”
The kid hid his head under the jacket and Harv turned onto the sideroad. It was a huge responsibility, not just for himself but for Barry and the boys, but he decided to re-evaluate the kid’s future, to keep an eye on him for a while, see what was what. If you killed every guy on his way up who’d done some heavy lifting, no one would get into the game. There’d be no one to do the work except morons.
A couple of hundred yards up he saw the main farmhouse and far beyond that, the old reprobate’s pickup truck parked beside a tumbledown shack. The day had stayed as cold as the morning and a flag of smoke rose from the chimney of the farmhouse.
Harvey told the kid he could uncover his head. The kid did and looked around.
The door of the house opened and a face leaned out.
“Who the fuck is that?” Frankie Chase leaned forward to peer through the windshield.
Phil Harvey realized he was going to have trouble getting the drums off the truck after all. He had the black automatic out of his boot and very quickly he fired the remaining four bullets into the left side of Frankie Chase’s head.
He felt very sad.
Chapter 21
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown decided to take advantage of the leeway the case had given them. They checked out a black Xterra and headed first to her place so she could pack a bag. He sat outside her leafy duplex and watched her go by the window, the inside lamps making a slim, flitting shadow. He felt like a schoolboy. When she came down she was wearing a bright khanga hat, a short, brown leather jacket, blue jeans, and had dumped her slippers for ankle boots and zany leggings. When she leaned to sling her bag into the back seat he made a show of checking out her butt. He saw the exposed tip of the barrel of her little automatic in its clamshell holster and her handcuff case.
In the four-by-four he drove the few blocks to his place. He told her she was looking like a hot beatnik chick and she gave him a smile.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Ray? I bet you didn’t get laid a lot when you were younger. Right? This is all free-form jazz.”
“Free-form jazz?”
“Yep. You’re just hitting the notes and hoping you find a riff that makes sense. Smokehouse romance.” She put her hand on his leg. “I can tell you this: you maybe got a shot, Bongo, okay? Don’t work so hard.”
He sat back, pleased, and pulled into the driveway of his apartment building. Upstairs he realized all he had was his uniform in plastic and piles of bum clothing. He quickly tried on a pair of blue jeans but it had been months since he’d been exiled into the wilderness and stress and bugs had eroded him; the jeans sagged and gaped and he bound them with the second last hole on his belt. He found the union sweatshirts and windbreaker they’d given him at the sector and a threadbare sweater, and some socks and underwear and stuck them into a gym bag; he added the bottle of gin from under the sink. At the door he looked around at his pathetic pad. Since the second shooting his life, he realized, had been about free-form jazz. Unplanned. Undirected. Without discernable melody.
Before leaving he went into the washroom and found a package of condoms his freckly policewoman had left behind.
When he came out in his sagging Levis, Djuna Brown was behind the wheel, laughing. “Jesus, Ray, you look like a prisoner of war.”
She slid her handcuff case around onto her hip and slipped her clamshell holster off her spine and put it in the console. She belted up and made sure he did too.
Just north of the city she pulled into a huge Wal-Mart and Ray Tate went in to buy some pants and a jacket. She prowled through the glove compartment and when he came out of the Wally’s she held up a plastic card.
“Bingo, Bongo. An all-in credit card. This must be one of the Fed’s vehicles.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “With this, man, we can head all the way west, set up on the coast, and live the beatnik life. By the time the bills come in and they catch on, this fucker’ll be buffed flat.”
“First, Djun’, we have to torture Frankie, then take down Phil Harvey, the Captain, and the lab. Back up a shitload of pills into the skipper’s office. Then we have to make sure we didn’t make any mistakes. Then we either get fired or we get buried.” He stretched and yawned. “Except for all that, we’re on our way.”
She drove back onto the Interstate and made a bubble around herself, flicking her eyes to the rear- and side-view mirrors every minute or so. He dialed in a Chicago radio station and locked it in, then went looking for a Canadian lite-rock program he liked to listen to at night. He went back to the Chi-town station and caught some sweet Butterfield: “Baby I’m just driftin’ and driftin’, like a ship out on the sea …”
She eased over onto an exit ramp and left the Interstate. She seemed to know where she was going. There were little wooden signs pointing ahead, naming half a dozen towns. He saw Porterville had been defaced to read Por Ville.
“This your old turf, Djun’?”
“No. A little further north. Indian country. It gets very weird up there very fast, once you go couple of hours on. Lots of work, especially Saturday nights. But, you know, sometimes …”
“What?”
“Sometimes …” She clamped her mouth and wouldn’t let herself speak. Then she simply said, “Sometimes … not.” She thought of limp bodies hanging from trees like summer pods, of children huffing gasoline and dying with their faces crusted with vomit, of vicious domestic disputes fuelled by alcohol, and dead husbands and wives and lovers gutted like autumn deer.
But there were mornings, too, rumbling out of the mini-barracks in her huge Ford into a new sunrise, of doing walk-arounds and coming back to the truck to discover blanketed elders blowing smoke into the truck’s grill because they knew she was as different as they were from the white cops who patrolled their community like they were troops stationed in a foreign war of pacification. The smoke was for safety, someone said, a blessing. She thought about young men coming into the barracks office after making sure she was alone on shift and bringing haunches of venison and careful instructions for preparing it. Of massive trout wrapped in moss and newspapers, already gutted but with the head still attached. She taught the giggling girls about their periods, the shy boys about condoms. She had her dad put together a shipment of books and paints and sewing supplies and send them up.