Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 13

The basement smelled of fresh burning flesh and old chemicals, and Phil Harvey had wanted to punch out the covered windows to get away from the smell of seared meat that wasn’t so different from his own pork when it sizzled. The stove was rocking, the electric burners glowing red in the corner. The room was sweltering. Cornelius Cook sweated.

The wreckers had found wads of money stashed throughout the first floor of the rooming house. Cornelius Cook told them to take it. The men had been whooping plunderers earning a square day’s pay until the Captain heated up the branding iron on the red coils and went to work on the Chinamen and the girl. One, the gym owner, had turned away and stared at Phil Harvey when the Captain had taken the double C brand to the girl’s breasts.

Phil Harvey said nothing when the Captain told him to round up the bottles of chicklets. He kept his teeth pressed together against the taste of the air. The Captain took baggies of double C tablets, meticulously ground them up, and washed the powder down the sink. Satisfied, he’d then gone to the stove, muttering. The double C branding iron was red. He spit saliva on the Cs and smiled when it danced off, was steam before it could hit the floor. He pretended to putt.

“We’re outta here, Harv,” the gym owner said, taking Harvey aside. “You need something else, just call. But this guy? No.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the Captain who, with a slow, fat dance, made his way to the Chinese guys and the girl. When the brand hit the girl’s breast and she screamed the gym owner had looked at Harv for a few seconds, absolutely neutral, which to Harv was the most diminishing of raw looks. The three men clattered up the stairs and didn’t look back.

Harv went out and sat on the porch, wrapped in his black sunglasses and leather coat. The chicklets were in garbage bags beside him on the top step. For a long time faint screams came from the leaks around the cellar windows. Once, Harv thought he heard laughing and loud conversation.

Harv had found his limit. When Captain Cook had manipulated him into taking Agatha for a ride to the badlands he’d felt his first spark of change. He had somewhere to go now. There was a possibility of change, of a different life. He’d already made a couple of moves in anticipation, but this, in the basement, was an afterburner that torqued him. On every level this, what was going on in the basement, was wrong. Phil Harvey had once had to take a hammer and begin breaking a guy’s bones from the toes up, but that was to find a stash. Once he had the location he stopped swinging the hammer, even bundling the guy into a car and dumping him a block from St. Francis Heart. That was the game. Even when you had to take someone out, you just did it as a piece of business. Spending an hour terrorizing and tuning a guy who was going to be dead before the day was out didn’t make sense in any way to a normal person.

He knew to the nickel how much he had stashed. He knew how much money he had out on the street with degenerate gamblers and inept small businessmen who tried to keep bistros and boutiques afloat in swanky Stonetown. He had almost enough money and he had the vaguest of dreams, of direction. He’d planned to spend another year, max, with the Captain, then strike out. But the keening thin noises from the basement window got him thinking that a year was a long time.

It was that first step that eluded him, he thought, but a shower wouldn’t hurt.

* * *

At Agatha Burns’s apartment building Phil Harvey scouted out the area and spotted the red Intrepid right away. A beatnik looking guy and a black woman with a wild frizz of blond hair that was almost white. He parked the Camaro with a view and waited for the woman’s head to disappear and drop down to the man’s lap. The man would give her money and she’d exit the car and totter away, her job done, instantly looking into passing vehicles. But she didn’t. And she was behind the wheel. No dealer plate. Cops.

Harv laid back and waited for them to leave. He looked around for other cops.

The Captain had been sweating when he’d come out of the rooming house with his suit coat neatly over his arm. There were moons of wet under his armpits and he carried the branding iron on his shoulder like an ax.

“Where’s the guys?”

Harv said they’d taken off, they had other work.

“Cool. I guess they made out okay? They found some money around, right? Good guys, those guys. Didn’t say much but, wow, they could do the job. Place looks like a train wreck.” Cornelius Cook’s face was red and petulant. His translucent hair was damp and his pale flesh was filled with a blush. “Fuck, Harv, I don’t know how you guys do this shit, day after day. Me, I couldn’t. Once a week, maybe, but this? Too much weirdness.” He rubbed his crotch and babbled. “Fuck, I’m hard. I’d really like to go back down there and pack the chick. You sure you don’t know where Ag is? I could sure use her ass right now.”

“She run off on us, Cookie. Joined the circus.”

“I guess. Anyway, you’ll take care of the stuff at her place? Shut it down, clean it out?”

“I’ll head over now.”

The cops in the Intrepid seemed to laugh a lot. When a white girl in tight skirt and leather jacket stumbled from the fire door, the black woman behind the wheel made is if to get out, opening her door before sitting back and easing it shut. The girl in the skirt lit a joint beside the door and leaned back, her face to the sun. The same black player who’d loaded the Camaro hustled slowly up beside her and circled her, a beer bottle in his hand. The two shared a joint and the man ran his hand up the woman’s ass. She shoved him away and scooted back into the building.

Shut down, the black guy looked around to see who’d witnessed his humiliation and he spotted the black Camaro throbbing off the corner of the building.

“Yo, you, Yo fuck.” He grabbed his crotch with his free hand and drained the beer with the other. Winding up, he pitched the bottle at the Camaro. It landed short, but the two cops in the Intrepid looked to see where it went. The beatnik in the passenger seat stared at Harv and he peeled out of there.