Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 16

Connie Cook felt at loose ends. Harv had called and given him a heads-up about the surveillance on Agatha Burns’s stash house. Agatha was gone, someplace, probably not a very nice place, he imagined. He missed yakking with Harv, he missed packing Ag, he missed the slow trails of blood soaking in the fine hairs at the back of her neck.

“There’s heat on Ag’s, Connie,” Harv had said. “Red Intrepid, a black chick with white hair, a white guy with a beard. They might be there for the local spades, but I’m gonna go under for a while. You okay for now?”

Captain Cook went to a gallery opening in the capital with his erect, frozen wife. The artist scented dough on the fat donor with the champagne glass in his hand and made a point of leaning into him as he did the rounds of the walls. She was a tall woman with explosive red hair and a loose-lipped red mouth. “My vision,” she said, “is of angst. But of love, too. That’s why all the red and black.” She read his vibrations and gave him a sad smile. “Love is pain, pain is love. I have to accept that in order to grow. Accept the sacrifices.” She began nattering about the artist’s life, of being born too late, of having missed the golden age of artists and their generous patrons.

The Captain bought three hugely depressing oils. The artist put the red dots under the paintings and stood back pleased. She gave him her card and said she had canvases at her studio on the river, or she would anyway, until the landlord locked her out. She looked mournful at the land sharks who were driving property values through the roof. If ever, she said, the art world needed true patrons, now was it. She actually batted her eyelashes.

Captain Cook felt the hustle and appreciated it. It was his money she was in love with, not somebody else’s. He scoped her ass and looked at the nape of her neck. He felt a rumbling. He was amazed at what people would let him do to them for his money.

When they got off the Interstate, his wife directed him past their house to two adjoining lots. “We can get them both, a million three they’re asking.”

Connie Cook said he’d get his secretary to look into it and she wrote down the developer’s phone number. Connie Cook stopped at the curb in front of his house and walked his wife in, turned on the lights, and said he had to go out for a while.

It was dark. He drove a couple of blocks then rounded on himself and shut off the lights. The lake was off to his right. On his left he could see his own house, the far side overlooking the backyard of the house where Agatha Burns had lived, had done her high kicks, had been a golden girl beyond his reach. The rich young, he thought sadly, didn’t care about money. He wondered if life was satisfying without it. He could have offered her a million dollars to flash him a boob but she’d’ve turned him down and gone to laugh with her little friends. His life had been like that. Cornie the Horny, a girl at school had called him. Fatty Unbuckle. Jabba the Gut. If a man couldn’t get it with money or his looks, then what was left to him? Pillage, that’s what. Pillage was the most successful foreplay.

He watched his house until his wife turned out all the lights upstairs and left the light in the portico lit for him. The door glowed with the hall lamps. To a passerby, he knew, the house was welcoming and homey, clearly a place of expensive textiles and furnishings, fireplaces, chandeliers, staircases. He dreaded going inside. There was nothing for him there.

He didn’t know what to do with himself. Harv was off someplace, gone under. Ag wasn’t around anymore. He thought for a moment that maybe he’d been too quick to sic Harv on her. He should have waited until he had someone else in the bullpen, warming up. The pigpen, Ag had called it, and he recalled with some sadness how that had lifted his heart.

Connie Cook started the Mercedes and rounded the block. He took a long, last look at the old Burns house, almost hidden by new construction hoarding, then continued on and eased through the gates onto his interlocked driveway. He’d been surprised that the Burns couple stayed there so long, after their Agatha had run off or been taken. Old Jerry Burns had been a rich playmaker in the political halls of the state legislature and he’d sat, Connie Cook imagined, for a long time waiting for the call for ransom, waiting to negotiate in his resonant voice, waiting for the call that never came. Or for Agatha to call, regretful, from some roadside phone booth, wanting to come home.

In the foyer of his own house, Connie Cook stood, wondering what to do. Harv was out riding around, doing who knows what, swooping through the underworld in his leather bat coat, pouncing on the weak. Ag wasn’t Ag any more. He headed for the kitchen where the food was but even that didn’t interest him much.

Who’d’ve thought, he thought, crooks ever got bored?

* * *

Phil Harvey left the Camaro under a tarp in the barn. The farm was abandoned. Two outbuildings had been cleaned up a little and both were fully functioning water farms with trays of hydroponic plants set in neat rows under halide fixtures. The keeper, a toothless old farmer with a double-barrelled shotgun and bib overalls, wandered the buildings. The farm was in Indian country and when the Natives came prowling for their burial grounds or whatever, the old toothless guy gave them a blast of the Old West, complete with cackling and whoops. Set in the furthest reach of the property, not quite on it but in a wedge of government land, was the super lab. In the evenings the fumes drifted towards the farm, away from the highway. A backhoe had dug a huge hole in the ground a hundred metres beyond the lab. It was jammed with the leavings of the crank and X trade. When Harv had had the lab up and running, the Captain had come up and was disappointed. He’d expected a gleaming laboratory with white tile walls and floor, fluorescent lighting bathing pristine equipment, little, thoughtful gnome-like technicians in white coats scampering from stainless steel vats, consulting clipboards. He hadn’t been impressed with the reuse electric stoves, the rat’s nest of exposed wiring, the patchy dirt floor, the open rafters with rustling bird life, the white plastic jugs rolling around, and the disarray of tangled tubing heaping on old wooden tables.

“What the fuck, Harv? This place is a fucking … barn. I expected something a little more, I dunno, German? Like the place where the Nazis did their experiments. This place is a pigsty.” His pride of ownership had evaporated.

“It’ll do the job, Connie. Check this.” Harv felt sorry for him and took him over to a pill-pressing machine with Chinese characters stamped into it. “This is the best. Taiwanese. This’ll turn out more pills than we can handle. We can use a hundred imprints. Peace doves, number ones, death’s heads, you name it.”

“You can make anything? Any symbol?”

“Yep.”

Captain Cook had stared at the machine. It was impressive. It looked industrial and solid. “You ever see that symbol for women’s stuff? Chanel?”

* * *

Harv put the speeding ticket he’d attracted on the way north into his jeans pocket and wrapped the fluted revolver in a sweater he found in the main house.

Snapping his stringy saliva like it was bubble gum, the grumpy old keeper drove him in a busted-up pickup truck down the long rutted laneway to the sideroad and out to the highway. They went south to Widow’s Corners where Harv got out at an all-night diner on the edge of town. The old man spat out the side window as he drove off but the window was cranked up and Harv had a bit of a laugh as he crossed the parking lot to a pay phone booth and called one of his guys to come up and get him.

Harv went into the diner, ordered a meal, and went into the washroom. He stashed the bundled pistol behind the toilet cistern then sat in a booth with a view of the washroom doors and the entrance. Wrapped in his black leather coat he ate a jailhouse meal: meat loaf with instant mashed potatoes and limp vegetables, and several cups of coffee. Truckers came into the place with regularity and barely glanced at him. Long-distance truckers with patches of the flag on their jackets and the words, These Colors Don’t Run, hunched over plates, eyes down, yawning. Those guys, Harv knew, had seen shit and he wasn’t much different from the rest of it, a white man swathed in leather, wearing sunglasses at night, in a town notorious for Indian ribaldry and criminal doings in the bush.

* * *

Waiting, Harv reflected on a life away from the city, a life with a woman and maybe a kid, although that was a long shot, in a place where he could finally stop. He hadn’t worked a day in his life, except in custody when he did some cooking and scrubbing in the industrial prison kitchens, or shovelling coal in powerhouses, or hoeing on work farms. On the streets he’d never been more than a couple of thousand bucks from being broke, always with an eye for a decent score. Hooking up with the fat fucker had taken care of that problem: Harv had enough money to last for years. He wouldn’t have to work in a chemical fog, wouldn’t have to daydream while watching a Brinks truck rolling up to a bank. Life should’ve been golden, but associating with Connie Cook had, he believed, diminished him, made him as much a lunatic as a crook. Harv knew he could steal or deal all the livelong day. He could collect loans, hustle huge quantities of dope, even do the odd armed robbery to keep the wolf from the door. That all made sense: no one could fault a man for what he did to keep food on the table, especially if he was willing to pay the grim bill when the cops came knocking. But since he’d been with the Captain he found himself thinking of himself as … something other. Depraved came to mind. Psycho, maybe. Snaffling up a girl and locking her down until she had a bad habit was strange. Turning her over to a gross pervert for months of playtime, that was degenerate. There was no end in it for anyone. Harv made a good end with the Captain’s criminal schemes but the weird perversion bothered him. Agatha Burns had cried for him, apologized for sucking and licking his scars. No sorrow for maybe being a rat, no whining about having maybe betrayed him, no remorse for facilitating the drug trade. She just wanted forgiveness for what she did to him. As if that was her biggest crime, the headliner in a theatre of confession.

* * *

The Captain had wanted to become a kingpin.

“Where’s the money, Harv, where can we make out best?”

Dope, Harv had advised. Water farms, labs.

“Yeah, Harv? How about broads. Any dough in running hookers?”

“Naw, chicks are trouble, they’re work, they shoot their mouths off. I don’t feature myself as a pimp.”

“Oh, okay, Harv. Tell you what: you figure out what you need to get a business going, tell me how much, and we go partners. If you think dope’s the way to go then we go that way. I’m just a tourist here. Hey, what’d’you think’s a better car, the Camaro or the Corvette?”

“Camaro. Corvette’s for homos.”

“Homos. Got it. And, hey, Harv, there’s something I want you to get for me. This young broad up on the lake, I want her, I want you to get her for me. Can you do that?”

Harv thought the Captain was doing a kidnapping, maybe something to do with one of his Chicago business deals, muscling a commodities broker. He clocked Agatha Burns, snaffled her up, and a few months later Harv had a black Camaro with the rims.

They were in a restaurant one night and the waiter made a comment about desserts and calories. The Captain took umbrage.

“Hey, Harv, you know any construction guys? That can get dynamite or something?”

“Sure, Connie. How much, what for?”

“That place we had dinner at, with the lippy waiter? You think two sticks’ll do it?”

Two sticks did it. Two sticks did the restaurant, took the arms off the cook who’d stayed back to braise lamb shanks for the next day’s special, and shut down Stonetown for a week.

* * *

The windows of the diner vibrated from the heavy trucks left rumbling in the parking lot. Harv thought of Agatha Burns and her knocking knees. She’d been a perfect little thing, the kind of unattainable item Harv instinctively hated, the kind of thing that had the perfect life in the perfect neighbourhood with the perfect mum and dad. It took him weeks of keeping a clock on her movements. One night she came out of her boyfriend’s house and Harv was waiting with a panel van and a sleeping bag and she was in the back and on the way to a drop house in the badlands. The waiting, impatient Captain took over from there, squiring her up to the farm in Indian country.

Hey Harv, how much of this stuff do you have to take, like, how long, before you’re a zombie, a scuzzy little slave who’ll do anything to anybody for more?

Harv had seen insanity in the streets and in the joints. He always backed away from it silently, never judged. Judgment was a smirk in those places and there were guys who would just slice the smirk right off your lips. You nodded and slowly backed away from them, but you never backed down.

But what the Captain did to Agatha Burns in that farmhouse put him into the mood of watching gang pile-ons in the joint: Whoa, that’s weird. Not for me, but you pull your time however you have to. No judgment.

Her knees knocked and when the old speeder lady with the shotgun peered in through the window and cackled a smile, Harv felt he was in someone else’s strange landscape.

Agatha Burns told him of her shame.

She touched his scars.

She apologized.

The gap-toothed, balding old speeder lady was in her fifties or sixties. Agatha Burns was twenty. How did one get such a long life of misery, and the other a short life that had been mostly okay?

The pickup truck with the camper van in the back had squeaked on rusted springs as he helped her into it, telling her, Don’t worry, Ag, you just took too much stuff.

She turned and looked at him and her eyes were clear.

She’d said, “I know, Harv. It’s okay, okay?” Her mouth trembled a little when she said, “Can you let my mom and dad know? Somehow? Where to find me? Harv?”

* * *

Harv’s minion lived halfway between Widow’s Corners and the city. He arrived almost two hours after Harv summoned him. He came into the diner, spotted Harv and nodded, got a coffee to go, and went out to a black chromed F-250 pickup. Harv paid his tab and went into the washroom to retrieve his gun. Boiling down the Interstate in the F-250, the minion talked about what happened to the Chinamen in the city who’d fucked with the brand. He rattled about the cooker who went up in the truck explosion. “They say it was a broad, maybe.”

Harv told the driver to slow down. “We’re heavy.”

“Oh, fuck, okay.” The driver changed to the centre lane and kept inside a handful of traffic. “That fat guy we’re working for. What’s he about?”

Harv liked the minion, a failed striker for the Riders. The kid had done some time but he’d done no heavy lifting. Things like that put you in your position on the scale of things. Going the hard distance wasn’t something just anyone could do, although everybody thought they could until they were face to face with it. You had to be a certain way. Harv had known he was that way since he was a teenager. It wasn’t until he met the Captain and his weird ways that he thought maybe there was nothing lower than himself in the cold swamp.

“The Captain’s cool. The Captain’s okay. Just a little different.”

The driver laughed. “You got that right.”

They rode in silence for a while. Harv saw trees and thought of Agatha Burns and her riff about more tree being underground than above it. Not something he would have thought of, taking a ride you didn’t expect to come back from. He thought about the conversation about the Chinamen she said she didn’t know, and the radio that had been off and she swore she hadn’t turned it off and how about those fucking CD prices. He chuckled.

The driver said, “What?”

“Nothing.” Harv looked at him. “Let me ask you one. If I asked you to do something, could you do it?”

The driver knew right away. “You need something, Harv? Fuckin’ A.”

“No question, no problem? You’re that way?”

“Gotta be.” The driver nodded at his windshield. He had long, feminine blond hair held back by his ears. “You gotta be, in this life. You do or you’re done. You’re dog or you’re dog food.”

They passed an open pickup with a half-dozen Indians sprawled in the back. Ahead of it was a sway-backed, rusted, bone white Reliant station wagon in the slow lane with a long-haired guy driving. Harv could see a woman’s legs in a long skirt and a kid in the back seat sleeping against a window smeared with drool. “That guy. Him, in the Reliant.”

The driver was puzzled and craned to look. “Sure. Who is he, what’d he do?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t care. I ask you and you say … what?”

The driver squirmed a little. “I guess, yeah. But it ain’t right. You don’t just … No, that’s fucked. You’d have to be nuts.” He passed the Reliant and kept an eye on it in the side mirror. “You okay?” He laughed nervously. “You’re a funny fucker, Harv.”

Harv, his face hidden in the cheesy curtain of rock star hair, was thinking about monsters.