by Lee Lamothe
Djuna Brown let her hold her fingers a moment. She had the impression the inspector wanted to talk about anything except something. “Yeah. In the city.” She eased her fingers free. “My guy took me for a treat. He’s a city guy, my guy.”
The inspector laughed very loudly and called to the driver. “Mack? Hey Mack, she thinks I’m gay, hitting on her. Am I gay, Mack?”
The driver laughed. “No question, inspector. Queer as Harry’s hatband. You’ve served more tongue than a deli sandwich maker. Your husband told me, the night you dropped the fourth frog.”
“Four kids,” the inspector said to Djuna Brown. “Four kids, I fucked one guy in fifteen years and I still got this fucking job.”
Mack said, “Heads up, inspector,” and reached to turn up the dash radio. A voice said a vehicle had just turned into the driveway. One white male on board. A Mercedes, dark blue or black.
* * *
The helicopter contained Djuna Brown and six members of a tactical team. The pilot came in low from the east and aimed at a dim crossroads lit by cones of headlights where three marked SUVs were parked on the shoulder. As the helicopter drifted to a stop in the air and slowly kissed down onto the road, Djuna Brown saw familiar faces from her old barracks. In the breaking dawn they looked like refugees with upturned desperate faces, waiting for rescue.
The pilot waited until the prop stopped twirling. Djuna Brown’s Statie sniper said, “Okay, we’re tactical the minute your boots hit the ground. We’re the boys with the toys and you stay by me.” He pulled a vest from the floor near his feet and held it out to her.
She shook her head. “I’ll be okay. I’ll stay behind you.”
He said, “You don’t dress up, you don’t go to the ball.”
He helped her fit herself into its intimate heaviness. “You got some room in there for me, I think. If the shit hits the fan, just pull your head in, pull your arms and legs in, and lay on the ground. The defensive turtle position. Unflattering, but effective. We’ll come get you later, find you a good home.”
The pilot had a handlebar moustache. He waited until the team was off-boarded and called to her, “Hey? You free later? We can get some beers, take ’er up, snap off the lights, goof on the citizenry.”
“Love to,” she said, “but I got to get down to the city, hook up with a partner o’mine. He’s a city guy, but he’s okay.”
He gave her a teasing smile. Then he frowned. “Oh, fuck. I’m sorry, man. How is he?”
She thought he was playing with her. She stumbled. “How he who?”
“Your partner. The city guy, Tate, right? I heard it on the radio.”
She shook her head as her foot hit the ground. “What?”
He said something she couldn’t hear over the backwash of the rotors.
Her Statie had her by the back of the vest. “C’mon, let’s go.”
“What happened to Ray?” It made sense: the quiet looks, the sympathetic turning away, barring her from using her cell to call out, the constant babble and chitchat. “What’s he talking about?”
“Look, we don’t know. A shooting, anyway, down in the city. He was hit, we don’t know how bad. They got him to hospital.”
“Who shot him?”
He shook his head. “We don’t know. He put down the shooter, we know that: no suspects outstanding.” He saw her eyes were huge. “Maybe, you should hang back? We can get the chopper to take you down to headquarters, get you down to the city.”
She looked into his sympathetic eyes. “No. I’m going with you guys.”
The team leader called out and she walked across the road like she was on stilts. The team leader waved the local detachment guys over. They came up the road a ways, then looked at Djuna Brown and unsubtly turned their backs, muttering. The team leader saw their curled lips and looked at Djuna Brown and raised his eyebrows.
She shrugged. “I used to work up here.” She looked around for the Statie sniper. He was off to the side on his cellphone. He looked at her and shrugged and shook his head.
The team leader asked, “You have some chick stuff going with them? I don’t need any surprises up there, friendly fire problems.”
“If there’s gonna be a surprise,” she said, “it won’t be for you.”
He stared at her a moment, weighing, then he walked over to the guys from the Spout and assigned them to guard the trucks and the trees. With a circular hand signal he called his team over. “We’re going in on foot, but they don’t get to play. They’re dudes with ’tudes. Djuna’s going to come up behind.” He nodded to her sniper. “Mark, you hang back with her.”
He laid out a point man and the team started in, well-spaced, in their tin hats.
Chapter 31
Connie Cook wasn’t stupid enough to think he was normal. In the middle of his debaucheries he sometimes focused briefly on something, a strand of hair, a rivulet of blood, a sound of despair, and went to himself, Fuck, what am I doing? But the sheer pleasure of abandon and revenge welled up and overcame and he felt a rising in his chest that felt like he imagined love to feel. There were moments in there when he felt his power was the only power that could stop the fear and pain. His mind usually effectively blocked the knowledge that he was the one orchestrating it. The knowledge of some inner goodness was enhanced when he thought of his fondness for Agatha Burns. The strippers, he knew, were disposable people before he ever met them. He was merely a step in the path of their lives, a force of nature. And a final step and a crucial step in the stages of his own metamorphosis. But Agatha. He couldn’t dispose of her himself, it would demean and negate all the love he’d felt for her over the months they’d spent together. My love has grown, he thought. I have grown. Letting Harv end his relationship with Ag had been necessary. But now it was time to move on, don’t dwell.
This, he thought, this’ll be the last one. My life of crime is over. Harv can take over everything, we can just get together once in a while, talk about old times, about my buddy the gym owner and his crew, about the fun in the Chinese basement. We’ll have a history based on the mutual understanding of colleagues, unlike those Chicago Mercantile sharpies, those donation hustlers who peck at my body like wild birds. Me and Harv can talk in a language no one understands. A subtext that’ll make us grin while everyone else goes, What?
Connie Cook slowed to watch for the turnoff into the farm. He didn’t see the cammie guy in the bushes aim his night scope at him. It was clear in the sky with some thick, barely visible clouds that billowed and crisped up with the light of dawn before it made itself known to the earthbound. There was a fortuitous moon riding in them. He thought of an old poem they’d learned at school. “The moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas …”
After this one, after Gabby, I’ll settle it all down a bit. Love will be what comes to me, not what I pursue, capture. I’ll get my good nature back. I must have had one, once, I know I did. Cora loved me and loves me in spite of this globe of flesh I carry around. When I crush an opponent I’ll do it with wit and humour. Hatred will become my enemy. But it’ll be hard. My father was hated and feared. He thought he was respected, but his oppression and ruthlessness made the Cook name a notorious legend. You’ve been Cooked, jocular people told a crushed victim and now you’ll get Eaton, the name of one of old Cook’s business cronies. I’ll get it all out, leak out all the poison from this huge body, then I’ll become a smiling fool, a donating dunce, a benevolent Buddha. I’ll be who I am, what I was meant to be.
He rounded the curve to the farmhouse. The window was a yellow square. He crept the Mercedes into the clearing close to the steps.
A figure moved by the window.
Harvey came out of the barn. He waved and called, Cookie, welcome.
The air smelled of phosphorous and chemicals.
Connie Cook happily hailed, “Harv, hey, Harv.”
He realized if Harv was coming out of the barn, then who was walking past the window in the main house? He climbed from the Benz. �
�What the fuck, Harv? Who’s that up there? In the window? You put her loose? Fuck, man, I wanted to unwrap her, see the look on her face.”
* * *
Agatha Burns heard the Mercedes purr outside. She heard voices, Harv welcoming in his bass voice, the Captain querulous. She looked at the sleeping bag struggling in the corner of the main room.
The woman called out.
Agatha said it would be all right, just relax.
The woman said she was suffocating, bleeding.
Agatha said, Control your breathing.
The woman said, Who are you?
Agatha said, I was beautiful, once.
The Agatha Burns waiting for her future to begin over was glowing. Her hair was shampooed and blond again, and parted on the side, neatly, as it had been when she was kicking up her legs and cheering the team to victory. Her teeth remained greyish but that, she knew, could be fixed, if she wanted to. She had muscle tone. Harv had chained her to the stove for the first month, giving her enough freedom to work out. In the evenings they’d had tea together, pored through the shelves of books about camping and house building and irrigating. At first she’d loved Harv for not killing her then she came to love him for his questions, his observations, his excited alerts of bears outside the window. For the shyly covered lips that moved when he read. His scars disappeared from her vision. She saw him as he’d been as a beaten boy with broken teeth. His hands, neither the scarred messy one nor the other less damaged one, hadn’t touched her except to hold her hair back while she vomited. But she saw in his eyes his own rehabilitation, his determination to undo what had been done to her.
“We’ll get you straight, Ag,” he’d said, that first dawn as her body began a molecular revolt, leaching of the crank, her cells wondering what happened to that good stuff that entered her blood through her veins, off her tongue, up her ass. She heard them demanding: Where’s that good stuff? We’re gonna get noisy, we don’t get it. And for weeks they went crazy under her skin, acrobatic in her brain, fogging her eyes, and forcing her teeth to gnaw at the inside of her mouth.
Harv made endless tea. She screamed. Harv brought cellophane-wrapped cakes full of cloying cream. She moaned and rolled on the board floors of the farmhouse. Harv talked and she puked. Evenings Harv rocked in an old creaky chair and told stories of the brutality of his life. She froze and sweated and squeezed her balled fists between her thighs, under her armpits. No self-pity for old Harv. He laughed with no regrets of the boisterous life in the streets and cages.
When Harv was gone on his trips to the city to, as he put it, wrap up his old life, she was free to roam the length of the chain handcuffed to her ankle. Sometimes when she was loud she heard an old voice singing outside the door, Kick it, you kick it good, girl. Cackles, laughter. She tried to entice the old fool in but he never touched the doorknob. She ate at the food Harv left within reach: cakes and bags of prepared salads and cellophane bags of apples and mixtures of nuts and raisins and dried fruits. She drank water from the sink, became accustomed to the raw lake taste of it. A porcelain bowl was left for her use, rough toilet paper and napkins from roadside diners. She made tea from little bags, she walked and walked her convict circle, and one day she awoke clean. It was like a sudden impossible sunrise, a daybreak.
One night after the frustrated rebellious cells had fled the streams and ponds of her body, her long-absent period returned with a vengeance. She surprised herself when she was too embarrassed to ask Harv to bring up tampons the next time he went to the city. Instead she wrapped used tea bags in wads of toilet paper. This, rather than the absence of chemical and addiction in her body, told her she’d kicked. She’d found her character and identity and experienced shame.
One night, conversationally, she asked Harv, “How’d you let that happen to me? With Connie. The crank?”
And he said, “I forgot. I forgot who I was.”
* * *
In front of the house, Harv calmed the crazy Captain. “Relax, Cookie. C’mon in.” When the fat fucker began hyperventilating and looking for an exit route, Harv took a silver revolver from behind his back. Ambient light from the sky and the window winkled in the flutes of the long barrel. “Inside, Cookie. C’mon.”
“Who is it? Who’s in there? What are you doing, Harv? You setting me up? Cops? Chinamen?”
Harv was disappointed. “Cookie, if you knew what I done the last couple of days for you, you wouldn’t talk this shit. I’d never give you up to cops or Chinamen, you fucking know that.” Harv shook his head. “Fuck, Cookie, fuck.” He indicated the Captain should go up the steps. “No pal of mine dies or does time because of me.”
“What’s going to happen, Harv? Tell me.”
“I’m leaving. You’re staying with your sweetie, here. I’ll send someone up to get you once I get clear.”
“We made a lot of money, Harv. A lot of fucking money. And now what?” He glanced at the barn. “You’re ripping me?”
“I thought it was about the money, Cookie, at first. But it wasn’t.” He wanted to put his hand on the Captain’s shoulder, to commiserate, to explain. “You’re weird, Connie. Fuck, man, I’m weird. But you hurt people when you don’t have to. You’ve got no restraint. You’ve got all the money in the world, and you … Well, you act like an asshole.”
Connie Cook dreaded going up the steps. “What’s in there, Harv?” He stared at Harv and Harv thought he looked like a big, disappointed baby. “My guys, my security guys’ll find you, Harv. They’ll get you.”
“Go on in, Connie. You get a last treat, you do what you want with her, but you better have your shit straight when the guy I send up here to get you gets here.”
“You’re gonna kill me. I know it, Harv. Harv?” He stared at the house.
“I could’ve done you by now, I was going to. Right, Cookie? I could’ve done you in the city, anytime.”
“Do it, Harv. If you’re going to fucking do it, fucking do it. I’m not going in there.” He turned and tried to shuffle away. “It’s the Chinamen.”
Harv took him by the collar of his jacket. “No, Cookie. Never. I fucking love you, man.” He pulled him towards the steps. At the top the door opened.
Connie Cook saw a backlit figure he couldn’t make out but he heard Agatha Burns’s voice, strong and friendly, “Connie, welcome.”
* * *
The gun team moved quickly but slowed as the smell of chemicals and wood smoke became sharper. There were dark shadows off to the side of the track. Inside them, Djuna Brown stretched her hand out and put it lightly on the utility belt of her Statie sniper. She kept pace, keeping her eye on his right hand. When it went up from the elbow, she stopped. When the fingers snapped forward, she moved.
The air was grey light when they reached the clearing. The team leader muttered into his mouthpiece. Two of the team members slipped away, one to the left and one to the right. The team leader tilted his head, listening to his headset.
“There’s several buildings, there’s lights in a farmhouse. There’s people moving past the windows. The Mercedes and the van are parked to the left-hand side, empty.”
Djuna Brown watched a shadow imperceptibly ease up the side of the house, stopping under a window. Another shadow went the other way, around back and out of her view.
The team leader listened and repeated in a whisper: “Long-haired male inside with a gun to the left of the entrance … He’s got a fucked-up face … Silver revolver … Fat male standing over a sleeping bag, far wall … Female standing by the stove to the right of the fat guy …” He stopped repeating what he was hearing, then picked his litany again. “Ten-four … Barn clear … Shack down the road, clear …” He spoke, “Four and five, secure the vehicles … Two, get some high ground and set up on that window…”
Djuna Brown took her nifty little pistol from the clamshell holster.
Her Statie sniper put his hand on her shoulder. “No, dearie. When we go to work we’re the only fools with tools.” He watched her holster
it.
She thought about Ray Tate. The only case he was involved in was this one. It could have been Harv for some twisted reason. It could have been Captain Cook, whoever he was. It could have been any number of speeders or cookers in that milieu. Chinamen, bikers. A lot of people could know they were close to breaking things up.
* * *
Agatha Burns didn’t think the crazy Captain looked like much anymore. Just the sad, fat, old pervert who’d watched the cheerleader routines from his window, doing who knows what with himself. She’d thought throughout her kicking, chained to the stove, of torturous things to do to him. Give him a habit, the fat bastard, she thought. Stick things way up his ass, drink his blood, chew his copious flesh, watch him die by the mouthful.
Harv had asked if she wanted him offed. She surprised them both and shook her head. He’d looked relieved as though she’d confirmed some deep belief he harboured.
But watching Connie Cook standing over the moving sleeping bag she feared for the woman inside. She looked at Harv. He was smiling. She decided that, no matter what, even if she had to find a way to kill both Connie and Harv, there was no way she was leaving the woman behind.
“Who is it? What’s happening? Is the lady there?” The woman’s voice was muffled and high-pitched. “Hey, hello? Miss?”
“That’s her, Cookie, your new sweetie,” Harv said. “Knock yourself out.”
“Don’t do this, Harv, c’mon, man.” But the crazy fat fuck couldn’t keep his eyes off the struggling sleeping bag. “Let’s all just walk away. You need dough?”
“How could you do that to me, Connie?” Agatha Burns said.