Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 14

Djuna Brown sat the car off the fire door of Agatha Burns’s building. “She’s pretty fucked up, old Ginny Wallace or whatever her name is, you can’t miss her. Stringy thing, dresses like a slut in a music video. She comes out the door I’ll take her, chat her up a little, and get her in here. We make her sit here in plain sight until she talks and invites us in, she won’t want to get spotted by the guy. No warrant. We’re guests.”

Ray Tate didn’t care. It was cop work. He didn’t care what the actual work was, it was cop work, even if he had to look like some degenerate with his hair tickling his ears. He had a gun on his ankle, a badge in his pocket, and a partner beside him. The sweet voices of the dispatchers took him back to long, slow nights cruising the streets. Once his daughter, in a rare pique of curiosity, had asked him what his favourite recent memory was and he’d said sitting on the hood of his cruiser the previous night, out on the edge of the river, watching two bums hugging after fighting over a bottle of hooch. Two guys who loved each other, once they got the tough stuff out of the way. They’d cried and consoled each other when the bottle shattered, each of them taking fault: “I’m sorry buddy.” “No, buddy, I’m sorry.”

“People, Ax,” he said. “People will surprise you if you let them. You know what I do, right? I control people.”

“Granddad calls them dogs.”

“Mutts. Yeah, I do, too. Sometimes. But that’s just bad habits you let yourself pick up, make you feel like you’re better than them.” He’d had a moment of insight. “The danger is that you don’t be who you are or who you’re meant to be. Instead, you become part of the people around you, separate from everybody else. For better or worse.”

They’d been sitting on the freshly cut steps of his new deck. He let her sip at one of the beers he’d brought over from Canada. He inhaled the hot new wood smell of the deck.

With daring curiosity, she asked, “Do you ever worry about shooting someone?”

* * *

Djuna Brown started to get out of the car. “That might be her.”

Ray Tate saw a scrawny girl slip out the fire door.

“Nope.” Djuna Brown sat back. “Wrong one.”

“She’s got admirers though. Look at this dude. Mr. Smooth.”

They watched a tall, thin man glide in on the girl, weaving with a beer in his hand. The pair shared a joint. The man put a move on the girl and she shut him down, sliding back through the fire door. The man looked around, his mouth moving, and looked out past the Intrepid. He grabbed his crotch, wound up, and heaved the bottle.

Ray Tate followed the arc of the bottle and beyond it saw Phil Harvey jackrabbiting a black Camaro backwards out of the parking lot, sliding into the street in a Chicago bootleg. He went on the air and voiced out for Chem Squad workers. There was no response. He went over again and the radio burst static.

“Yeah, Chem Six.” The voice yawned. “Whaddayawant? Whofuckzat, anyway?”

“Chem Four. Tate and Brown. What’s your Twenty?”

“Me? What do you want to know that for? Tate? Ray Tate?”

“I be. I got a black Camaro spinning out of the Hauser projects. Male, white, long hair, burned-up face. He’s alone in the vehicle. You nearby?”

“Naw, no. Fuck, Ray Tate. This is Wally Brodski. I knew your father-in-law. How’s he doing?”

“Look, Wally, where you at?”

“Uh, south of you.”

“Can you haul over to River Street, count the traffic in case he comes through?”

“Sure. I guess. I dunno, I got to get gas.”

The skipper came over from the base station. “Brodski, this is Chem One. Get the fuck over there.”

“Fuck.” Ray Tate rolled his eyes at Djuna Brown. “Here we go.”

Brodski came back instantly. “Hey, whoa.” There was a pause. “This is Chem Six, I’m booking out, medical. My ulcer’s flaring. I’ll be off at Mercy, getting checked out.”

The skipper called out for him several times but there was no answer. “Ray, you’re on your own.”

“It was Phil Harvey. He’s gone, skip. We’re going to take the apartment.”

“You got no warrant. Don’t go in there.”

“Djuna’s concerned for Ginny Wallace’s well-being.” He put the microphone back behind the false CD player.

The black guy watched them approach for a moment then began sliding away from the fire door. Djuna Brown put her right hand out, patting the air. “Hey, hold up, brother, c’mon. I don’t shoot too good, but my partner, well, he’s a deadeye. Just hold up a sec.”

Ray Tate saw some little cellophane wraps on the ground near the black guy’s feet. “Hey, you drop something? Those yours?”

“Those what? What those?” The man seemed entranced by Djuna Brown’s hair. “Hey, cool ’do, sister. That’s good. I like that.”

Ray Tate stood a few feet away. Djuna Brown moved up close beside the guy. She was tiny next to him. Ray Tate watched his hands.

“What’s that about?” she asked him. “With the flying bottle? You know him, that guy?”

“What guy?”

“Scarface there, in the Camaro.” She waited. “You want a job? Cleaning up? There’s these baggies on the ground, there. We can call a city crew to sweep them up, or you can be a citizen, do your part and keep the ’hood clean of litter.”

“The guy? Yeah, in the Camaro, I seen him. Riddle me: how’s he get prime stuff like that, all that devil marks burned up on his face?”

“He had a girl in the car?”

“No, not now. The last night. He had a girl and he had a piece. Big silver thing with cuts down the barrel. Was gonna shoot me but I stood him down, ran his old hippy ass right off my place. White, fucked-up-face motherfucker.”

“He took a girl out of here? What she look like? White girl?”

* * *

The lock on the fire door was jammed with a bent Coca Cola can with scorch marks on it. They crept up the stairs to the fourth floor. Far up, a cellphone chirped and a man’s voice rumbled softly. Ray Tate craned his neck to look up the stairwell and saw a bushy head ducking over to look down at him, what looked like a piece of pipe in one hand, the cell in the other.

He dodged back and took his gun from his ankle. He whispered: “Mutt. I think with a gun, a scattergun. Up at about, oh, twelve.”

Djuna Brown took her pistol from the clamshell on her waist. She didn’t know where to point it and clutched it like she’d never held it before. To calm her down, Ray Tate put his into the pocket of his leather jacket. He ducked his head out again but saw nothing. Below them a door creaked open and a dog growled.

“Hey, you fuckers.” A man’s voice echoed up the stairwell. “You don’t want to be here. Get the fuck down here or I’m sending the dog up.”

Ray Tate took his gun out. “We’re the cops. You send that fucking pooch up here, you’ll be wearing its ass for a hat.”

“Fuck that. I saw you guys go in. You’re not cops.” The dog started barking. “Paulie, Paulie, they’re a couple of goofs. Spook chick and a fucked-up looking white dude. You work down, we’ll work up.”

The man, Paulie, called down, his voice booming in echo. “Hey, they might be real cops. Harv just called, said they’re all over out there. In a red car.”

“Oh, fuck.” The man below was quiet for a few seconds. “Okay, you got a badge, right? Hold it out over the edge so I can see it.”

Ray Tate took out his folder and held it out at arm’s length.

The man at the top of the stairwell yelled, “Cops. Scram.”

Downstairs the door slammed. At the top of the stairwell another door slammed. The well was silent.

Djuna Brown was pale. “Fuck, Ray. Fuck.” She still had her gun in her hand.

“We’re okay. They fucked off. Let’s not get tense. We’re okay, Djun’. Put it away.”

She giggled. “Fucker’s going to wear the dog’s ass for a hat.”

The apartment door had bar marks chipped around the edges. Ray Tate leaned heavily on the door and slid a plastic Bank of America card between the frame and the lock and rattled it open. Inside, the room had a thick, chemical smell. There were empty cold-tablet bottles scattered around, an unmade bed, and brown streaks and bloodstains on the sheets. Dirty clothes were stacked in the corners of the room and in the refrigerator freezer were stacks of chocolate bars. Bent and broken syringes were in the trash and Djuna Brown, prowling, found some double C tablets in a dresser.

“This is the place. Double Chucks.”

“Check this.” Ray Tate used the end of a pencil to unfold a square of white paper fastened to the fridge door with a cockroach magnet. “To who it may concern, My name is Agatha Burns. I was beautiful. If I don’t come back soon ask Connie where he told Phil Harvey to take me to. I think Connie wants me to die. Please call my mother …” The rest was a jerky scrawl.

Djuna Brown leaned in and looked at the note. “Who the fuck’s Agatha Burns?”

Ray Tate stepped back. “Djun’, put your hands in your pockets. Walk out the way we came in. Don’t touch the door, don’t touch nothing.”

In the hallway he called the skipper on the cellphone while Djuna Brown wrote into her notebook every item she remembered touching in the apartment.

* * *

Connie Cook lay under his wife and thought about the breasts of the Chinese girl in the basement in east Chinatown. He didn’t wonder what his wife was thinking about. She probably wanted something expensive and was riding her way to it. Her mouth had a barbed wire smile and a couple of times he caught her looking out the window overlooking the lake, at a house identical to the Cook house but with larger grounds. The people living over there had suffered some grief a year or so earlier and were finally selling to a developer. The orange bulldozers were lined up down the block and there was a bigger house going in and she was bugging him about buying up a couple of lots further along the street so she could create a pink ice cream house of her own.

Connie Cook didn’t pack his wife. They had a relationship that extended to cars and furs and vacations and the ballet and the opera, and occasionally this. But packing was out of the question. Packing was of his other world, a free world with no boundaries or restraints. Besides, Connie Cook loved his wife in a strange way. He’d been gross all his life, as had his father and uncles, and all of them found women who saw beyond the blubber and excess. There was something inside him that Cora recognized, and in his late evenings, when he was alone and she was out, he felt grateful.

The Chinese girl, crouched on the floor, staring at the approaching glow of the branding iron. Now there was an image to make him squirt. Her eyes became impossibly large in disbelief that this could be happening to her. Connie Cookie had imagined she’d been staring not at the branding iron but at his hard dick. Her mouth became round and she shrank back from the sheer horror of being viciously penetrated by that purple piece of oak.

To prolong things, he let his mind wander. Harv had changed. He didn’t have the funster thug about him, like he did back at the beginning when he went out and snaffled up the desirable Agatha Burns, brought her up to Indian country so the Captain could lay a bad habit on her. Agatha had clearly been looking for some edge to her life and she took to the crank and Connie Cook’s loving attentions quickly. Harv had been into the game then, but lately he seemed to be a little off. The Captain thought about Harv taking Aggie for a drive in the country. Maybe something happened up there, something so horrific it rattled Harv’s sense of life’s direction. Whatever, that must have been a scary movie, a betrayed Harv and a duplicitous Aggie. Harv wasn’t into packing. His years in the joint had turned him off doing it. But there were a lot of games he could’ve played with Aggie that made that old camper van rock, Harv in his big leather bat coat and insect glasses, before the place turned into a fireball.

The super lab, she’d said. Maybe, he thought, I sent Aggie and Harv off on a picnic just in time.

He’d love to hear the story of that horror, someday. But one participant wasn’t talking and the other was playing coy.

Under his trim wife, her hands vanished in the thick soft flesh of his shoulders and her bored mind computing real estate, Connie Cook bucked.

Connie the colonizer, diluting the yellow horde.