Читать книгу Picasso Blues - Lee Lamothe - Страница 7

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.”