Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  For this, tonight, there was no excuse. There was no end in it, no payoff. The road of the day to this place in the night had been full of sudden twists and turns. Leaving a bag of double Chucks for the cops to pick up, committing a minor massacre in Chinatown. All to protect the Captain, all to allow himself to find a piece of quiet in a mountain he could only imagine, to sit on his mountain and know that no one was losing a chunk of their life because of him.

  The door of Captain Cook’s house opened. Women stood in the doorway. They sounded drunk. Kisses all around.

  Harv thought about shooting all of them.

  Harv thought about not doing the grab. Just walking away and going up north, bringing Agatha back to the city then making his way west. But the Captain had a hard jones: someone else would be recruited, more Agathas would be made to vanish and deteriorate. The Captain would continue his crazy spiral until he went too far, made too many mistakes. Tonight’s gift for the crazy fucker had to be one that would make him stop.

  Phil Harvey eased back into some bushes between the front of his van and the gates to the Captain’s house.

  He thought of Barry and his crew and their looks. He thought of Barry and the boys having their eye out for the Captain, doing a public service by whacking him.

  Cars started and crept away.

  Harv thought of the three Chinamen he’d just shot. Of blue dust and blood in the air.

  Two women, drunkenly arm in arm, came along the sidewalk. The other cars were gone.

  One woman said, “— up north at some gold mine that needs his money.”

  The other woman laughed. “He’d just waste it on food. Connie’s getting a little … portly?”

  Harvey leaned back quietly, letting the women go by. He smelled booze and perfume. The women stopped and chatted.

  “Don’t worry about Connie,” one woman said. “He’s a pussycat.”

  “Well, he’d better be,” the other woman said. “He’s a really, really, really big pussycat.”

  They laughed. They parted with air kisses and promises to call. One woman passed closely by him, the other dug for her keys in her purse, tilting it to the streetlight.

  In his black leather bat coat Harv felt like a creature of the night, a piece of the night, swooping.

  * * *

  Connie Cook waited in angst by his cellphone. He pulled his Mercedes into a takeout Mickey Dee’s near the Interstate and ordered three family specials. The drone in the window stared at him and shrugged and spoke the order into his headset.

  Connie Cook checked the clock on the Benz. If Harv had made his move when the book club broke up, he should be on the way, if he’d grabbed up the treat. The phone should be ringing and the crazy Captain should be on the road, blistering his way north, to love. But the phone didn’t ring. He took his orders of burgers and fries and drove around the food outlet to the front parking lot. He checked that the cell was charged and operating and began working on the food. In front of the joint a young couple, the girl looking like his lost Agatha and the boy looking like some needy jerk, felt each other and laughed. If Harv didn’t call, Cornelius Cook thought, maybe he could entice the girl into the car, do his own shopping, show Harv how it was done. A snack, to get his juices flowing.

  When the phone buzzed he grabbed it up. It was past midnight.

  “Harv, Harv?”

  “Jesus, Cookie. This one’s a fighter. I got her okay, she’s in the bag, but I’m running way late. I think one of the other broads saw it go down. I got to dump this van and get something else.”

  “But you got her, right? You closed the deal?”

  “Oh, yeah. I had to give her a couple of shots, but she’s in the back.” Harv yelled, Shut the fuck up. “This one, fuck Connie, you got taste. This one is class.”

  “Yep. I got the eye, Harv.” The Captain reached under his stomach into his growing crotch. “So, what now? When can I begin the honeymoon?” He was exuberant. “Fuck, Harv, I fucking love you. You did it. Jesus.”

  “Well, the way it’s going, I’m figuring with changing vehicles and getting back on the road, I won’t get up there much before dawn. You want to get up there any time around then. If I get there first, I’ll have it ready for you.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah yeah. I’m on the way. If I get there first, I’ll get things ready. You did it? Fuck, Harv. You fucking did it.”

  “But this one has to last you, Cookie. I can’t do this every couple of months. The other broad saw what was going down, I think, so I’m gonna be hot.”

  “No problem. We’ll get this thing straightened out. You cook while I introduce my new pal to the new reality of romance. We’ll move the … groceries, right? The groceries, collect the money and you … Well, a bonus, you keep it all from this cooking. Wherever you want to go, you go. You go on me. A vacation.” He realized he was babbling and simply said, “Fuck, Harv. I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Harv was just a few kilometres from the super lab, keeping the van in the single lane at a steady sixty miles an hour, a good nighttime driving speed, wary of big horned mammals that might jump into the roadway. His gaming with the fat fuck would give him a night of freedom to cook and package. To plan and scheme.

  This was the dangerous part: if you got hooked, how do you explain a sleeping bag in the back seat with a duct-taped woman in it? It was just past midnight and he could cook up a harvest of pills before the fat fucker arrived in the dawn to claim his prize. Harv planned to leave the Captain and his new true love abandoned at the lab after he disabled one of the cars, the Mercedes or the van, and tried for a quick deal with someone, maybe the Greeks that came down from Canada every week, or the Italians at Stateline. If the pills didn’t move right away he’d just dump them someplace for Barry and his crew to pick up, and head for the bumpy mountains of the unimaginable west.

  At the turn into the driveway he didn’t see the cammie clad figure with night scope huddled down off the side of the road, his face smeared with goop to absorb the light of the moon.

  But Harv did see the moon. It rode in the sky as placid as he hoped to become.

  He decided to learn more about the moon, about the doings of the lunar.

  * * *

  Ray Tate knew he’d done something right. The form in the doorway stopped screaming and stopped shooting him, which is all he wanted. He saw a vague lump slouched against the other side of the hall, legs splayed, the soles of hiking boots facing him at opposite forty-five degree angles, blood running away from the body. The face was mostly gone. He couldn’t tell who it was.

  He said to himself, Good shooting, Ray, you still got your chops. But he knew it had been luck: he’d just aimed his gun into the doorway and unleashed some free-form jazz; no aiming, no breath control, no real melody in there. He laughed on his floor and leaked, staring up at the ceiling, amazed he never realized how ugly it was.

  The super, old Mr. Lilly, crept in his slippers to the edge of the doorway and peeked around the jam. He said, Holy fuck, and crossed himself.

  As he started to become very cold, for a scant moment Ray Tate saw Devon Brown and Mkumbi Masa beckoning him like old pals, their lips moving incessantly.

  He saw a freckled uniformed copper wearing men’s underwear and sagging socks, arising, yawning, from his futon, her blond hair a-tangle, opening her mouth to speak and speak and speak at him.

  He saw his daughter whispering at him from behind her camera: “Keep very still, dad.”

  And Djuna Brown singing and a chorus of old, crusty duty sergeants telling endless war stories and wry jokes. He heard the island voice telling him she had no mix. He smelled cinnamon and felt very cold. All the voices, the duty sergeants and the women and dead men, grew in volume until it was a loud racket in his ears and dying became a reasonable warm alternative.

  Chapter 30

  Two hours before dawn the Statie sniper tapped softly on the door of the nightroom and sang, “Wakey wakey. Briefings and worms for the early birds.”


  Djuna Brown opened the door immediately. She wore a pair of fatigue pants rolled up at the cuffs, a sweatshirt that came down almost to her knees, and had bare feet. “I’m up, I’m up.” Her hair was brushed and still wet. The cot behind her had been made up, complete with hospital corners, the way she’d found it when they assigned her the room. She looked at the false smile on his face. “What?”

  He lied and she knew it. “Nothing. Pre-op stress. Sixteen or seventeen more cups of coffee and I’ll be riding up there sitting on top of the helicopter. You don’t get airsick, do you, dearie? Our pilot was out drinking last night and he’s in a foul mood.”

  She gave him a smile but she knew he was talking too much, wasn’t telling her everything. She wondered if the skipper had somehow tracked her down, had put the kibosh on the morning operation. Maybe, she thought, it was some huge Statie joke: the briefing room would be full of Irish fuckheads and knuckle draggers from Widow’s Corners, waiting to maul her. It would be a legendary and complicated scam that would be told for years to come, how the dyke was sucked into thinking she was doing cop work but when she got there found herself being hooted at by old pals.

  The Statie waited while she got her things together, then led her down the long quiet hallway to a flight of metal stairs and they rattled down. “We clocked a van going in after midnight. The guy on the night scope said it looked like a guy with very long hair. Couldn’t tell if he was alone or not. Could be a dozen bandits in the back, armed to the teeth.”

  She felt a little sad. She’d hoped Phil Harvey had done whatever he had to do and gone away to get his skin graffs. “We have to talk about that guy, if he’s in play.”

  He nodded. “Do it once, at the briefing, okay? I don’t want our guys going in there if there’s something they should know, and don’t.” He opened a door and led her to a silent cafeteria. A man in tactical garb was loading a coffee filter into a drip machine. His camouflage pants were puttied into his black boots and he wore a T-shirt. He nodded at them sleepily. They grabbed coffees. The Statie sniper said there were buns and other good stuff in the briefing room. He asked how she slept. He asked her if she’d ever gone tactical before.

  She made appropriate responses and wondered what was going on off-stage, what she didn’t know about, what he wasn’t telling her. She said: “You heard from Ray? What’s he up to?”

  “Ah,” he said, pushing open a pneumatic door and ushering her through. “I tried to give him a call a while ago but his phone went to message. You guys are, hmmm, doing stuff?” He walked faster, not waiting for her to respond. He nattered. “That reminds me. I’m gonna have to take your cellphone off you. We’re operational, okay? Loose lips sink ships.”

  “Lemmee give him a quick call.” She took the cell from her jacket.

  He took it from her hand. “You can call after.”

  The briefing room had a weird fluorescent hyperreality: everything was sharp edged and detailed. After the silence of the corridors the lights made an almost invisible hum. Outside the row of windows the world was deeply black with the ending of night. There were two dozen people in clusters in the room, all but one a male, none of them sitting in the arc of chairs in front of a chalkboard. The lone woman was tall and energetic and dressed for office work in a tweedy two-piece suit, medium heels, and nylons.

  Everyone turned to look at Djuna Brown carefully as the Statie sniper led her in. From the corner of her eye she thought she saw her sniper shake his head briefly. The men in the room looked away. Some nodded. The woman continued staring at her, then waved her over and led the way to the chalkboard. Her heels clacked briskly on the tile floor. Passing between the men, most in various stages of camouflage, all of them big and buff, all of them suddenly silent, Djuna Brown felt tiny and was glad she hadn’t worn her lucky slippers. As she passed through, a couple of the men gently touched her shoulder and she became afraid. Standing beside the woman she felt grimy and urchin-like.

  “Okay, grab seats,” the woman said, picking up a piece of yellow chalk and bouncing it on her palm. She looked, Djuna Brown thought, like a strict schoolteacher settling down unruly students. “This is Djuna Brown, she’s one of us. She’s been detached to a task force, chemicals, in the city.” The woman smiled easily. “But she’s come home now. Back to pleasure her own kind.”

  The men laughed. Djuna Brown thought she was going to instruct them to welcome her to a new school. She noticed some of the men still looked at her sadly. Her Statie sniper stood behind the last row of seats, his arms folded, his mouth grim.

  “Okay, kids, here’s the deal,” the woman said. “This morning we’re taking down a drug lab up near Passive. We don’t have a lot of intell. We’ve got people up there, off the property, keeping an eye. A vehicle went in there early this morning, one person aboard, either a woman or a man with long hair. It was a van so we don’t know who might have been in the back. So: we assume the place is populated with heavily armed nogoodniks. There’s a main house and several outbuildings scattered around, if one of the local detachment guys is to believed. There’s been a bush rat working in there. He’s been seen with a varmint gun. The road in is about a half mile long. Again, according to the local guy. In an hour we’re choppering in. The chopper’ll drop us on a concession road about four miles east of the target property entrance. We don’t want to wake anybody up in there, nice to catch ’em napping. The local guys’ll RV with us there and drive us to the site. We walk in.” She looked at the window. “Nice morning for a hike.”

  “Us?” one of the guys said. “You coming in, inspector?”

  Another laughed. “Yeah, it’s about those shoes. Manolos?”

  “Ferragamos.” She smiled gently. “Now, about the guys running this. What should we know?” She stepped back. “Djuna?”

  Djuna Brown didn’t feel so little. She sipped her coffee. She felt like she was in a room full of Ray Tates, of cops. “The guy with the long hair, going in, is, I think, a city thug named Phil Harvey. He’s got a sheet longer than his hair. He’s done a lot of time. We got a witness in the city says he goes armed. Intell says he’s put at least two people down. Then there’s the bush rat. An old snaggle-toothed guy we’re told has a gun of some kind, something, roaming the place. The other guy that’s come up is this great fat fellow we haven’t seen yet, but we’re told he’s the guy behind the lab. He’s psycho: he used a branding iron on some ecstasy cookers down in the city. There’s a blond guy that’s been around. Biker wannabe. He might be in there. Who else? Don’t know. Vehicles? Harvey’s been seen driving rentals, he’s got a black Camaro under him but we haven’t seen it in a while. The blond guy drives a buff black F-250 pickup, double cab. The old guy had a busted-back old grey pickup, he might still have it. Phil Harvey was driving it in the back roads, last time I saw him.”

  A radio squawked and the inspector stepped away from the group to respond. She listened, the unit held quiet and close to her ear, and said, Ten-four, and came back.

  Djuna Brown continued: “By background: there was a chemical task force set up with the city and the Feds and us. Everybody sent down their best ace investigators.” She waited for the laugh and when it came she smiled prettily. “We were getting whipped by these guys turning out pills with double C markings. Some kids died on them. There was torture and mayhem. We tracked the lab to up here and here we are.”

  One man said, “And the city guys? And the Feds? What time to do they arrive?”

  Djuna Brown shrugged her shoulders and glanced at the windows. “I think they’re gonna miss it. They’ll be pretty pissed off. Mad as Chinamen with no thumbs.”

  They all laughed but nobody asked.

  “We doing a warrant?” a tactical guy asked. “We all have to read the warrant before we go in. Have we got a warrant?”

  “Let me just,” the inspector said to Djuna Brown, stepping up. “The wind’s changed up there. One of the scouts said there’s a strong smell of chemicals coming from the west. I’ll call a p
rosecutor, but I think he’s going to say there’s a public hazard, we have to act.”

  A tac guy said, “Terrorism, maybe?”

  “Yeah, good thinking,” the inspector said. “Maybe Osama bin Cookin’.”

  They all laughed. A little too hard, Djuna Brown thought, noting their careful looks at her.

  * * *

  Djuna Brown wore a set of cammies and a woollen watch cap. The inspector wore a dashing looking trench coat belted over her suit and a blue silk scarf tucked in around her throat. They were in the middle of a convoy of three four-bys, racing from headquarters to a nearby airfield. Djuna Brown thought the inspector smelled gorgeous and glamorous. She was lightly perfumed, her hair was scented with shampoo, and dry cleaning chemicals were noticeable on her clothing. She held a rover on her lap. A dash radio muttered. The driver leaned to adjust it. The inspector made small talk. “So, how was it, down in the city? On the task force?”

  “It was okay.” She felt guarded for no reason she could imagine. If this was a Spout trick, it was elaborate. But, she thought, something else seemed to be going on.

  When she didn’t say more, the inspector laughed softly. “But you missed us up here, right? Widow’s Corners. Those fuckers.” She turned her head and looked at Djuna Brown. “I know all that. Everybody knows all that. But the guys up there, they weren’t assigned up there because of their charm and tact. Those guys in the briefing room? My guys. If I was up there and what happened to you happened to me, they’d jump in their jackboots into the place and lay fucking waste.” She turned on an interior sidelight and picked up Djuna Brown’s hand, tilting her nails to the light. “This is nice. You get these done down there?”