by Lee Lamothe
“Open ’er up, Cookie.”
“I don’t want it, I don’t want it. Let’s just get out of here.” But his eyes were glued to the rippling sleeping bag. “C’mon, Harv. Man.”
Agatha Burns said, “I never did anything to you. I was just … there.”
“No, Cookie.” Harv raised the gun and pointed it at the shivering Captain. “There’s guys who want to put you down like a fucking dog, Connie. There’s Chinamen who’ve got a kitchen set up just for you, stew you in a pot. There’s cops who want you in a cage. I told them all: no. I don’t rat. I don’t give up my partners for the bucket or the ground.”
* * *
Djuna Brown didn’t have to touch her Statie sniper to orient herself. The dawn grey had cleared and she could see him and the team members ahead of her. The smell of wood smoke made her think of her early morning patrols in the Spout.
Quietly she slipped her little automatic out of her holster and kept it in her pocket, just like Ray Tate had.
She heard the team leader repeat, “… Guy with the face has his piece on the fat guy … Partial view … No clear view … Tommy, when you get the shot …”
* * *
Connie Cook looked into the deep black hole in the fluted silver barrel.
He bent awkwardly and pulled hesitantly at the zipper on the sleeping bag.
His fat fingers trembled with fear or excitement.
This would be his last packing for love. After this he’d have to deprive himself and dispose of her before the minion Harv sent up arrived. If Harv really did send someone. He’d have to let go of his pursuit of love. Sculpture, maybe, he could take up sculpture and daydream while he did it. Turn something into something else, a chisel and a hammer and whatever implements lent themselves to honest talent that must lurk inside his fat hands.
* * *
Phil Harvey wanted to go to his secret mountain. He’d decided on a wood stove, made of cast iron, identical to the one in the room. The wood smoke was fragrant. The stove, with the iron door shut, contained the heat and there’d be no fear of flash fires. Logs crackled. He said, “Ag? I decided. Cast iron stove. That’s it.” He became impatient and stepped into the Captain to poke him with the gun. “Open her up, Cookie.”
First the blond hair then the eyes. Connie Cook inhaled mightily and pulled the zipper the rest of the way.
His wife looked at him and said: “Connie?”
Connie Cook turned away, losing his balance and falling.
Harv aimed the gun down at his face.
* * *
The team leader listened and said, “Okay, green light, Tommy … You’re green …”
Djuna Brown heard a single cracking shot. Then a scream from inside the house.
A second later the team leader said, “Ten-four … He’s down … The fat guy’s moving … The girl’s moving …Ten-four … Where’s the gun? … Bob tee up, you’re the second man … Everybody, have eyes for the gun …”
* * *
Agatha Burns saw it all backwards. First Harv was on the floor. Then he fell. Then there was a fist-sized piece of skull, the cap, sliding slowly down the wall and a mess behind Harv’s shredded head. Then the window cracked with a ping and then there was a sound outside of a gunshot.
Harv fell straight down. It was magic, as if some conjurer had spirited the bones right up out of his body.
Agatha Burns crouched over Harv, looking for his head with her fingers, as if she was blind or in a dark room and it was a prize.
Connie Cook had no idea what had happened. For some reason he thought of internal combustion — death gathered perhaps from within. That Harv’s wicked life had exploded at the top of his spine and had just had enough.
He felt incredibly sad. He’d lost a pal, lost his best friend who, Connie Cook knew, only had his best interests at heart.
“Harv. Oh, Harv.” The gun was on the floor, there, free, and he picked it up, unknowingly saving himself by moving out of the sniper’s view.
Agatha Burns moved on her knees away from the destroyed Harv. She said, “Harv?”
Cora said, “Connie?”
Captain Cook said, “Cora.” He brought the gun to bear on the sleeping bag. Then on Agatha, then his own head, then back at Cora.
Agatha Burns moved to block his view of Cora, one hand reaching behind her onto her face. “No, Connie.”
* * *
Connie Cook believed death had come from within the room. He had to get outside. His body lumbered to its feet but inside he felt he was moving as if he were two hundred pounds lighter, twenty years younger.
It was over. He felt exposed and naked. All things were haunting. Dead strippers he’d left with shovels of dirt on their mouths, on their glassy eyes. Agatha’s screams as she disappeared under the power of Connie and his purple oak dick. The breasts of the Chinese girl in the basement. This death of his best friend, Harv. But also of the waitress with the hot red sauce and the smart mouth, of Harv’s face when he gave him the vitamin E cream, of them eating hamburgers and Connie snatching Harv’s fries. His sense of loss was overpowering. How, in such love I have, have I such hatred?
Death had come somehow from within the room, from within Harv. He had to get out. At the door he clutched the knob and turned a moment, entertaining the thought of just killing everyone in the room and himself. If there was no one with a memory of him, none of it had happened.
His wife looked at him around Agatha. She’d seen him fat and naked in their home, at the cottage, at the lake. He’d always looked for the twist of disgust but had never found it no matter how hard he looked and that, he knew, meant she hid it well or he just wasn’t observant. Who could look at this globus thing and not twist their lips, avert their eyes? He was shamed and finally knew that she’d loved him as he could never love himself.
On the porch he suddenly understood the meaning of the crack and penetration of the window, of Harv’s head just going away in a puff of sudden pink, of the crockery clatter of fractured skull bone, of that faint booming that followed.
Looking towards the roadway he saw a tall, athletic man wearing camouflage clothing and a tin pot hat rise from a crouch and start moving towards him with a machine gun up to his shoulder.
The man yelled, “Police.” Then he fell down.
Behind the man was a smudged black face under a watch cap, an impossibly tiny woman, standing straight up. He heard her call, “Hey, asshole.”
* * *
Djuna Brown heard her Statie sniper say, What the fuck? as she shouldered herself into him. He sprawled. She moved around him to get clear in case he tried to grab her legs. She felt herself smiling and thought she might have murmured: That fucker’s gonna wear his ass for a hat.
The team leader shouted: “He’s out he’s out. Police. Don’tfuckingmove, asshole.”
Captain Cook was facing Djuna Brown from thirty feet. He seemed to forget the gun in his hand. Seemingly of its own volition it aimed where his head and body focused.
Djuna Brown took two giant steps, the boots on her feet much heavier than her lucky embroidered slippers, but that was okay because she was, they said, only three feet tall and weighed fifty pounds. She needed the grounding. She set herself, the roots of a tree gnarling in the earth.
She didn’t think so much about Ray Tate. Ray was a big boy. She thought of the Chinese girl at the Emergency with her breasts branded with blistering double Chucks. And either this fat fuck had shot Ray or Harv had, and there was no collecting penance for that pal ’o mine from old Harv.
Connie Cook realized he had the gun in his hand. He had trouble disengaging his fat fingers. He shook it but it wouldn’t leave his fingers. It went off from inadvertent pressure, bucking as the bullet hit the ground between his feet, but it gave Djuna Brown permission.
She thought the six rounds she fired sounded like someone enthusiastically but briefly applauding the final end of something. All the bullets, she believed, went into him, and he sat down and slumped over
himself, his legs doing a jerky dance.
Agatha Burns, with blood and matter up her wrists, and a woman with her hands behind her back staggered out on the porch. Around the porch came a man in fatigues. He secured the women and rolled them from view of the door and off the porch. Both were screaming something but all Djuna Brown could hear was men’s voices. Someone was yelling into a radio. The helicopter appeared in the sky, oscillating like a predatory bird as if to find fine focus. The props put up loose soil and whirling dead leaves. Djuna Brown’s sleeves rippled. With her free hand she pulled off her hat as though welcoming a surprisingly cool breeze into her hot hair. Tac team members called to each other in anxiety. Someone bellowed, Fuck, I don’t know, send all the medics you got, we’ve got people down down here, you dumb cocksucker.
Her Statie sniper was beside her, his hands running over her body, looking for leakage or holes, feeling under her vest, up in her spiky hair. He was saying, You’re all right, you’re all right, and Holy shit. “You had to do it, it was a good one, don’t worry, don’t talk to anybody. Nice, nice. You done good, you done good. Holy fuck. Very, very good.”
She thought he looked suddenly young and confused and maybe afraid. He was looking at her differently, as though she’d just returned from a voyage to somewhere he’d never been. She wanted to ask him if he’d crossed over yet, if he was on her and Ray’s side of the job. He was, she saw, a tough but pretty white boy with pinches of pale around his mouth. What are you doing in a place like this? You should be mowing a lawn, drinking a beer, and windsurfing. You should grow a daring moustache. I’m a hundred years older than you and I’m not of you anymore. I’m only meant for the killer beatniks. She went to tell him that, get a smile, but she felt like she was gargling.
He pried the gun from her hands. His subconscious had counted the rounds fired and knew the gun was still live and he was gentle and firm peeling off her fingers.
Djuna Brown looked at him, her eyes vacant, then looked at her hand as he held it. “I think,” she said, her fingers maintaining the shape of the butt and the trigger, “I think I need a new manicure.”
She looked at him as though she’d never seen him before.
“You know, my guy in the city, Ray? He took me out, got me a makeover. He’s a cool one, my guy.”
She laughed. “He’s a beatnik, you know.”
She sank her little white teeth into her lower lip. “We’re moving to Paris.”
She was crying. “That’s in France.”
Epilogue
The skipper was driving to work when he saw Ray Tate dodging and limping through traffic, north of the cemetery. Tate held his hand to his side and seemed deranged, shouting curses at the speeding motorists. He had a bundle of white gauze on his ear. The skipper pulled his company car to the curb, got half out, and called, “Ray, hey, Ray?”
Ray Tate stopped on the sidewalk by the tall picket fence. His hair was long and he had a full grey-streaked beard. He wore a hydro parka, blue jeans, and hiking boots. There was paint on his cheek. He favoured his left arm.
“C’mon, Ray. I’m headed downtown. Let’s get a fix.”
The skipper’s car was warm and the radio played softly. There was no smell of booze or puke. The skipper’s eyes were clear and his hands steady. Ray Tate carefully buckled himself in and looked askance at the skipper, unbelted, but he didn’t say anything. They approached the midtown office building where the satellite office had been. A Space for Lease sign was erected on two-by-twos near the entrance. The skipper swung into the parking lot anyway and together they crossed to the coffee shop. The skipper held up two fingers to the cook and led the way to the booth at the back.
“You didn’t put your papers in yet, Ray. What’s that all about?”
“I’m thinking on it. Going to see how it works out, with the shooting.”
“Nice piece of work, that. She nailed you pretty good, but you put her down.”
Ray Tate waited until the cook put the coffees down. The skipper tore open a bag of sweetener. Ray Tate drank his black and said, “When they told me who she was, I went What the fuck? Who? Never fucking saw her before in my life. Still, right now, I couldn’t pick her picture out of a photo array.”
The skipper shrugged. “It was a dyke thing. She had a hard-on, or whatever, for your partner there. I heard when they searched her files at the Gay-Glo office there were surveillance pictures of you and Djuna, a clock on your movements, a copy of your personnel file.” The skipper looked out the window. “Who’d’a figured that? A cop trying to do in another cop for doing a cop? Weird stuff. But you’ll come out of it clean. She was a fucking loon.”
“I guess. So, where’d you end up?”
“Headquarters. We’re doing city corruption. The planners and the builders on the lake. Special task force.” The skipper drank at his coffee. “You, if you hang around, I hear you’re going to the Marine Unit. If you don’t put in your papers, I mean. The slobs, Bernie and Wally, are down in Florida pissing off the marlins until they come back and open their fucking bait shop or whatever up in Canada. Your partner, there, she just jumped herself straight into the same shit she came out of.”
“Hey, she’s happy.”
“Let me ask you one, Ray, okay? What’s with her? I mean, you guys fucked me good but you fucked the fucking mayor better, with giving the case to the Staties. The fat fucker at City Hall went nuts. No way he gets elected dogcatcher after this. With what they were doing to the planning department, he’ll be lucky if he doesn’t end up pulling a pound in Craddock. The black community went nuts when we took down the Bik-Bigs. And that photo of the mayor hugging old psycho Captain Cook there, at the track? The Mayor and the Serial Killer. Fuck. But her? I know I was shit-faced through most of that stuff, but there, at the end, she coulda put me in the smelly brown stuff. But she didn’t. What’s that all about?”
“Dunno, skip.”
Outside the window the snow began, running steady and heavy. Cars slowed down, pedestrians moved with caution. Winter coming down from Canada had been born late, coming at Christmas, but with the new year came snow that blew sideways. It was grey and banked and iced over. Ax had left for a trip to Asia and he regularly received handmade postcards of photographs of water buffalo, oxen, smiling Asian faces. He’d bought a home computer and learned to email, tapping messages with the fingers of his right hand. Only when she was overseas did Ax write to him about Djuna Brown setting up outside the family home, waiting for her to come out then taking her for coffee. Ax didn’t say what they talked about but she said Djuna Brown wept that she wasn’t there for her partner. She said, Ax wrote, you had to be who you are.
The skipper was still fascinated by Djuna Brown. “How come, Ray, she wore that dyke jacket when she didn’t have to? I mean, you guys were jamming, right? That’s what sparked off the Gay-Glo chick. How come she didn’t just say, Hey, I’m no lesbo, so fuck off? She’d’ve had an easier ride, all things in.”
“Dunno, skip. Chicks, what you gonna do?”
The skipper smelled turpentine from Ray Tate’s hair. There was paint on his fingernails and on his shirt cuffs. His eyes were hollow black holes and he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “I’m dry, Ray. Six weeks dry. Fucking hard go of it, I’ll tell you. How about you? You sipping a little?”
“Nope. Just waiting for the shit to settle, then I guess I’ll go down to the Marine Unit and laugh at the fucking snowmobilers after spring thaw.”
They sat with little to say.
The skipper finished his coffee and put some singles on the table. “Sparrows, Ray. Outside my window in the morning, driving me nuts. How come so many sparrows?”
Ray Tate looked at him and made a small smile. “Sparrows. Fuck sparrows, skip. Should be a bounty on the downy little bastards.”
“That’s my boy,” the skipper said with relief.
* * *
Bundled in his hydro parka, Ray Tate walked back north, up the slippery hill, and past the white cem
etery. He veered off and walked past the local station but there were no freckled blond policewomen with men’s underwear and sagging socks.
He thought of the last time he saw Djuna Brown, the new white slicks on her arm, the round Trooper hat held in both hands.
“You could have anything, Djun’, you could get down here, if you want.”
She’d sat on the edge of his futon. The hospital had given him a sack full of painkillers, bandages, and a colostomy bag until his innards were healed, but he was on his ass. A nurse came by every few days to bitch him out for standing at his easel. The futon was as lumpy as it had ever been. A crew led by his daughter while he was in hospital had painted the walls and ceiling.
“You looked good on TV,” he said. She had. She was a poster girl. She was black and a little Chinese and a chick and, most believed, a dyke. The State Police commissioner had made a point of touching her often as he detailed her daring exploits: a serial killer caught and put down in a wild gunfight, a meth lab seized, a notorious bandit killed, a kidnapped girl returned to her family after more than a year, the wife of a prominent but insane businessman rescued. Four bodies and three muddy skulls had been found on the property. A sky-scan was ordered, looking for the glowing heat of decomposition.
She’d smiled and leaned to kiss him, careful of his bag. “I be the hero, Bongo. I be the chick o’ the day.”
The press had loved her, had loved her sly eyes and little rows of sadly smiling teeth, her modesty. There was talk of a book, a movie. No one put the dead Gay-Glo chick downtown together with Djuna Brown the northern hero. “You had the place done over, Ray. New paint and I spy a new set of bedding there. I bet if I look in the fridge I’ll find mix, right?”
“Ax did it.”
She saw a canvas, face in, and crossed to it in her sleek, black highway boots. She gently turned it. It was a slash of greys and blacks and the darkest blues: a smudge of a tiny woman in the corner of a box. An elevator, she realized. There was a slumping loss to her posture. She wore embroidered slippers. She had the wide hollow eyes of the saddest trapped creature in the saddest world.