by Lee Lamothe
The cops, who had to work in all kinds of medical weather, were hit hard. The few remaining moustachioed gunslingers from the robbery squad were twitchy. They cruised the downtown financial sector in heavily weaponed bank cars. Folks wearing masks on the streets triggered inside the gunslingers a genetic urge that they struggled to master. Except for Halloween, and that was iffy in some neighbourhoods, running the streets in a mask made you a magnet for a hollow-point. The gunslingers fought to control their tingling fingertips. Their frontier moustaches twitched in frustration.
The hammers of the Homicide Squad were almost wiped out; the bug had hit them hard in their dog-eyed wanders through the homes of murder victims and their constant presence in the dank halls of the stone courthouse. The hammers were reduced to chalking-and-walking or bagging-and-tagging, escorting corpses to the morgue where they told the fluorescent bleached clerks: You better stack ’em way back on the meat rack, Jack, ’cause I might come back in the black sack.
There was mindless violence. An unmasked Chinaman coughed in an elevator; he was stomped by fellow passengers. City buses became segregated: there were routes where all the passengers were Asian. Before boarding, non-Asian riders peered through windows to make sure they weren’t embarking on the Fuzhou Express. There were luggar bandits at work: crews of Asian kids who slipped out of East Chinatown and shook down the city, threatening to spit toxic phlegm onto pedestrians if they didn’t drop their wallets. Dim sum restaurants were bereft of clientele; the cart ladies had gone back to hoeing vegetables for street stands that nobody visited. In the subterranean massage parlours of Chinatown, the ladies danced naked except for their masks. Dreamy hand jobs came back into vogue for the lovelorn.
It was a humid dog day of summer and the bug breathed out a sigh, and a man in a black Chevy Blazer, his feet jammed into the detritus of around-the-clock surveillance, breathed it in.
Their skinner lived in a small brown post-war bungalow with an unhealthy undulating lawn and a sprinkler system that had gone on automatically an hour earlier. The house had grimy-looking beige curtains. A bouquet of flyers and envelopes poked up out of the black tin mailbox.
The spin team hadn’t seen their skinner all day. He was clearly inside: early lights had gone on; a shadow moved from room to room. When children passed by the house on their way to school, a curtain cracked at the corner of the bay window. After the children had passed and the school bell a block away rang, the curtain twitched shut and the house went still. At four o’clock when the last knapsack-laden little potential victim had trudged past the house safely, the spin team would move on to their next spot-hit assignment.
“Maybe he snucked out,” the wheelman said for the fourth time. “He gave himself his morning rub-and-tug at the window. It didn’t satisfy, and he went out the back, around the block, and grabbed one of the kiddies up.”
For the fourth time, the shotgun said, “Do I look like I give a fuck?” He rubbed his lower abdomen. “He could be ramping up his hard-on in the gym locker room, all we know, showing the kiddies what it looks like when it gets happy and spitting.” He made a belch, forcing it. “Ah, fuck.” He belched again. “Two guys doing a spin? What kind of fucking detail is this?” He shifted in his seat and pressed his hand to his diaphragm. “Geez, my guts.” He moaned. “Ahhh, fuck.” His stomach rumbled audibly. The air in the car took on a brown aura. “Donnie, I just shit my pants …” He wobbled as if he’d lost his gravity, looking like he wanted to cry from humiliation but instead suddenly convulsed, jackknifing his face hard into the dashboard. His nose spouted blood. His knees jerked up into the racked shotgun under the dash. “Ahhhh fuck, yack.” He began vomiting spasmodically and continuously onto the jumbled mess of camera equipment, clipboards, crushed tin cans, and coffee cups at his feet.
The wheelman, without pause, locked his breath and stumbled from the vehicle. He said: “Fuck, Stanley, fuck.” He pulled a white surgical mask from the back pocket of his blue jeans and clamped it to his lower face with one hand while with his other he groped at his belt for his rover and yelled, “Ten Thirty-Fucking-Three.”
Just before close of business on the day after Stanley the spinner blew his stomach all over the Chevy Blazer, the skipper of the Zombies received a rare telephone call at the Intelligence Bureau from a deputy chief at the Jank Center of Public Safety: “Cops are puking in Technicolor all over town,” a clipped voice twisted at him. “The State’s sending some troops. Meanwhile, dig up your bodies, we’re letting those sad-sack motherfuckers walk the earth.”
“I only got six guys on,” the Skipper said. He paused carefully. “Ah, one of them is, ah, Ray, uh, Ray Tate? The gunner?”
“Fuck. Hang on.” The voice from the Jank went away for a few minutes. “Okay. Dust him off, Harold. All hands on deck. Send him out. Better snap his trigger finger first, though.”
Chapter 2
The fella was leaning against an ambulance, smoking a cigarette and dreamily examining the thin milky pre-birth of morning out over the lake. He ignored the indifferent enticement of the paramedics. The blood on his shirt was pretty much tacky three inches above the left pocket, where Ray Tate could see the outline of a cigarette lighter through the corduroy fabric. An angry scorch mark and flecks of burnt black gunpowder embedded in the fella’s left neck and chin told the tale: up close and personal. In his right hand the fella held a package of Kool menthols; his left hand held the quarter-smoked cigarette elegantly near his face, straight up with an inch of ash on the end, leaning but solid. The knuckles of the hand holding the cigarette package were scraped raw. The fella was clearly a scrapper and he might have picked the wrong bar to carry a full bag of asshole into.
No nerves, no shakes, Ray Tate decided. There were guys like that. Take a small-calibre hornet a couple of inches above the red pump and yawn, go, Bummer, this is my favourite shirt. And he weighs the price of a new shirt against the expense of the lost art of invisible mending.
The road sergeant had a white gauze mask pulled down from his face while he mangled a stogie. He rolled his eyes and stepped away when Ray Tate nodded at him. The Road looked at Ray Tate’s beard and biker garb and muttered to the ambulance crew and they all laughed.
To the fella, Ray Tate said, “Going to be a nice day. Hot one.” He shrugged himself into a yellow vinyl raid jacket with POLICE printed in black block-letters across the back and vertically down the right chest.
The fella nodded and inhaled with confidence. “They said no rain, but I smell it. Maybe there’s something over the water, there, coming down from Canada. Dunno.” He took a careful drag on his cigarette and lifted his left arm a bit, testing. “How you think they get that job? Calling the weather?”
Rate Tate took a notebook from his back pocket. “Good guessers, I guess. They test you. You come down to the station every day for two weeks and wing it. If you’re right enough of the time, you get a hairpiece, they bleach your teeth, and give you a suit from Bummy’s.”
“You think the weather guy gets to fuck the lady that calls the news?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Ray Tate wrote the time and date. He glanced at the squat old row houses, looking for an address. The buildings’ windows were about half lit up; it was a working neighbourhood where folks crawled out at dawn to factories and work sites to bust themselves a living. There were neat bags and recycling bins lined up in front of each stoop. No discarded furniture. It was the kind of no-bullshit neighbourhood where you threw nothing away until it had absolutely no function any longer and you could at least afford to make a down payment on a replacement. Some windows had bright flowers in bottles or vases. The sidewalk and stoops in front of the buildings were wet from a hosing down. A neighbourhood of prideful people working their way up, not falling their way down. If you attracted trouble here, Ray Tate knew, you must’ve been really looking for it. He doubted the fella had been shot where he was found.
A garbage crew paused their rumbling truck at the edge of the crime stage
and the female driver was arguing through her mask with a blasé charger who wore his union baseball cap backwards, his uniform shirt limp and half-untucked.
Ray Tate wrote down the state of the weather. He always did, since a defence lawyer had questioned his memory in court. “You remember all those details about my client, Officer, but you can’t recall if it was raining on your head that day?” So he led each incident note with the weather.
He looked around to see the numbers of the marked cars blocking off the stage. He wrote down the name of the road sergeant who’d voiced out on the rover without much hope for a response. The Road’s badge number was 667. Everybody knew the road sergeant who said he was right behind the devil, Chief Pious Man Chan, when he signed up. The beast: 666.
“They say,” the fella said, “that those people behind the big desk look like they’re wearing suits or good outfits, but down below, out of camera range, they either got old blue jeans on, or they’re naked. For laughs.”
“I don’t know about that.” Ray Tate wrote down a thumbnail: white, mid-thirties, heavy-set, muscular, six-two, two-twenty-five or -thirty, blond and blue, soul patch, gold stud in his left ear, black corduroy shirt with blood and scorch visible on upper left quadrant, blue jeans, scuff boots, laces unfastened. Calm and relaxed, smoking. Swollen right-hand knucks. He didn’t write Moron. “You been searched yet?”
The fella nodded.
Tate called to the sergeant. “Road, you India Delta off him?”
The Road shrugged. “No ID, he says. Smith, John.”
“No doubt.” To the fella, Tate said, “You want to break out something for me, John?”
“Not so much. I already know who I am.” The fella knew his game and was pleasant with genial menace. “But thanks for asking.” He seemed to be weighing a big thought. “They’ve all got big heads, you know? I saw that little Chink chick from Weather One down Stonetown last week. Nice hot little package, she’s got it all going on. But she’s got this big fucking plate-face. Guy she was with, I seen him on CX doing sports and he’s got a big head too. What’s with that? Big fucking heads?”
“The camera loves them, I guess.” Ray Tate tried to think of something to ask that might wing the boomerang back to the shooting. Without taking his cellphone from his pocket, he fingered the camera function. “You got work, John? You a working man?”
The fella shrugged his right shoulder carefully. “You know. A little here, a little there.”
“Where and what?” Ray Tate slipped the cellphone out of his pocket and snapped the fella’s face.
The fella ducked too late, then faintly smiled. “Ah, you know, hog and pig man, that’s me. Off-season, plumbing, mostly. Tuck and point. Shingle your roof.” He leaned toward Ray Tate. “You get a good one?”
Rate Tate pressed a button, showed the screen to the fella. “Just in case the next guy shoots you shoots better. Souvenir.” He put the phone away. “You pull any time, John? Craddock, out of state? Joliet?”
The fella seemed to ponder that. “Well, I got caught banging a hog one time, but they dropped the charges. The hog wouldn’t testify. It was consensual, anyway.” He stared at Ray Tate with a glitter. “You like pork chops?”
Ray Tate nodded pleasantly. He began steering the boat without much hope. He wanted the bullet. “Look, let’s get down to Mercy, dig that bad boy out, okay? Fix you up. Just take a sec.”
The fella said, “Huhn?” He turned around, careful with his vertical cigarette ash and showed Ray Tate a blot of blood on his upper left shoulder. “Come and gone.” He looked closely at Ray Tate. “You think I could get a job like that?”
“What?”
“Calling the weather. Except that I don’t got a big head.”
“A good thing, maybe,” Ray Tate studied his skull as if he cared and tried with no real hope to get off the skull-enhanced weather team and onto the shooting. “If you had the big head thing going on, they might’ve shot at that.” He looked at the bloodstain on the shirt, remembering the pain and confusion when he himself had been shot the previous year. “That’s gotta hurt, that, huh?”
“This?” The fella glanced at the blood. “This is nothing. Last time, they got me in the gut. That hurt. Hadda go to Saint Frankie’s, that time. They took a mile of sausage casing out of me. I shit by gravity for a month.”
“You been shot before? Like, how many times?”
“This year?” The ash fell from his Kool and he looked disappointed. “Or all together?”
“Oh-kay.” Defeated, Ray Tate closed his notebook. “Have yourself a nice day.”
Chapter 3
The cafeteria down the street was close enough to East Chinatown that it was empty except for the two grill men, the cashier, and two idle Mexican-looking bussers who looked for a horizon to jump when Ray Tate and road sergeant 667 walked in. The cashier and the workers wore white gauze masks and tilted away from customers so they wouldn’t have to share breath. Someone had put a sign in the window: NO MASK NO SERVICE. Someone had added, No Chineess Niether. Under that someone wrote Cracker Asshole. And, beneath that in a casual scrawl: Ahhh, Soooo solly, Chollie.
The cashier silently pointed to a plastic bottle of hand sanitizer mounted near the door and Ray Tate and the Road pumped at it.
The Road knew the counter crew and he armed two stale breakfasts off the hot table and drew two mugs of coffee. He brought the tray to the window booth. The eggs were poached to rubber; the brittle toast under them was barely tanned; the bacon was pale lank flesh. But the coffee was coffee and it was hot, and, Ray Tate knew, at seven in the morning after a bad night there was no such thing as crappy hot coffee.
“So, Ray,” the Road said, passing his notebook over for a scribble, “you like that mutt?” He made a toneless voice, “‘You mean, duh, how many times I jerked off, like so far this morning or all day yesterday too?’” He laughed. “Fu-king mutt.”
Tate signed his name and badge number and wrote the time under the Road’s last notation, then drew a wavy line to the bottom margin, looping to circle the page number.
“What brings you out to the streets so early, Ray? I thought you were up in Intelligence Zombies?”
Ray Tate had been out and about because he’d painted through the night until early in the morning and then couldn’t get to sleep with the whirling colours in his head and his ceiling fan indifferently shoving the humidity around his apartment. His morning assignment was to set up at the courthouse and monitor the release of a suspect on a homicide case. He’d gone on a cruise, riding the radio, killing time. When the Road voiced out for a scribbler, he’d snapped up the rover. With the bug gone wild and the chief’s decree that a detective or soft clothes had to attend every crime stage with a wisp of gun smoke, everybody had to lift a little extra weight. There were stages, especially in the Hauser North Projects, that had been frozen for more than twelve hours because no one in a suit or designer windbreaker was inclined to run up there, stick their head in, and scribble in somebody’s notebook.
“We should’ve probably taken him in, Road. If he goes south, we’re going to wear it like the slippery brown hat.”
“That guy, Ray, that guy looks after himself. You see his knucks? It looks like he got a few shots in. When we patted him down there was gun oil on his shirt, there, on his waist. He stank of gun smoke. I figure he had a heater of his own tucked away and he dumped it before we got there. Dumped his wallet, too.” The Road picked up a piece of toast and tried to stab the corner through the poached yellow deadeye. The bread snapped like a cracker. “What the fuck we going to do, anyway? Arrest the guy for getting shot?” He gave up on trying to penetrate the deadeye and crunched on the toast. “I asked him. I said, ‘Who shot you?’ Fucking guy’s worse than Bill Clinton. He said, ‘Well, it depends what you mean by shot.’” He started laughing.
Ray Tate kept his raid jacket on and zipped. The cafeteria was cold with air conditioning; it was believed that the bug multiplied in heat and humidity. The wind
ows looked up the damp street at the broken crime stage. Four bulky men in surgical masks and sports windbreakers, wearing red baseball caps, headed in the direction of East Chinatown, carrying golf clubs. Volunteers. A one-man ghost car trailed them at a walking pace.
The fella was standing around in the brightening grey dawn, scoping The Road’s flashing cruiser and Ray Tate’s unmarked Taurus. Waiting, Ray Tate thought, to retrieve his gun and wallet from where he’d dumped them when he realized those sirens were singing for him. The fella had a fresh cigarette in his mouth and his right hand was pressing a medi-pak to his left shoulder. One-handed, he dragged on a recycling bin and sat down on it, leaning back against the brown bricks to hang in for the long haul. People shuffled past him, all wearing surgical masks, all moving quickly. They each seemed stiff, holding their breath. No one headed into the plagued precincts of East Chinatown.
Ray Tate, who fancied himself a bit of an artist, felt like he was sitting in a moody Edward Hopper painting, looking out at an old pearly photograph of hopeful ghetto life. “How many guys you down?”
“With the bug? Out of my twelve-guy night leg, there’s four left, plus me. I got three guys at Mercy, one of them on a lung. Timmy Harper. You know Timmy?”
Ray Tate nodded. When he’d come out of the departmental hearing that cleared him after he’d put down the second black guy, a television reporter said Congratulations, Ray, and handed him a lit cigar, trying to get footage of him looking like some arrogant gunner who’d got away with something, celebrating it off a cubano. Timmy Harper had grabbed the stogie and stabbed it at the guy, grinding the hot coal into his hairpiece. Timmy Harper lost a beat and went down to patrolman, getting badly stomped in the Racist Ray Tate riots. “Tell him I’m having a thought, right?”