Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 23

The three wreckers were up and bouncing in the afterglow. They were gregarious and there were handshakes and hugs. It was far from the morose finale to the Captain’s crazy branding frenzy in east Chinatown. There’d been no weirdness, just maybe a little chaos that comes with all sudden action. But none of them had been seriously hurt, no one had dropped his fudge. When the Chinamen at Willy Wong’s warehouse had reacted, Harvey and the blond kid and the wreckers had gone to work and finished their mission. One wrecker had taken a metal bar across the shoulders but had shaken it off. Harvey had taken a whack in the upper arm from the same guy before Frankie Chase, the blond kid from up north, pulled his gun and opened up.

Dawn was rimming the sign of the truck stop north of the city, already casting everybody a long shadow. The five men had crammed themselves into the double cab of the F-250. The forty-five gallon drums of precursors were in the back, covered with a tarpaulin chained to the bed.

The wrecker who owned the gym was almost dancing, juggling his paper coffee cup. “Fuck, Harv. Fuck. Just like the old days.” His breath showed in the chill morning air. He wore a thin, unlined leather jacket over a T-shirt but the temperature didn’t seem to have an effect on him. Harvey wondered if the guy’s nose ring ever got cold enough to ache in the winter.

“Nice, nice one, Barry. You fucking guys. Well, that was beautiful.” He screened his body and handed a wad of cash to him. “A little noisy there at the end. You and your guys might want to take a vacation, until it sorts itself out. I think one of those guys was hurt bad.”

“Fucking pussy cocksucker Chinamen.” Barry laughed, threw away his coffee and indifferently ran his thumb over the stack of money. “Ooohh, nice.” He stared into the morning sun. “Like being a kid again, Harv. If I didn’t need the coin, I’d be doing this shit for nothing. How’s your arm?”

“Ah, fuck it. It’ll hurt later. Right now a bit of a throb.”

“Good thing it was your left arm, Harv. Because I know you jerk off with the right.”

The blond kid was with the other two wreckers a few feet away, smoking cigarettes. The kid chain-smoked and sucked nervously at his coffee and periodically glanced over at Harv. The two wreckers were laughing haw-haw-haw biker laughs. They both slapped the kid’s back, calling him Shooter.

A red, chromed Cadillac Escalade crawled into the parking lot, crunching gravel, and stopped twenty yards away. Harvey could hear the radio playing, heavy on bass. A blond woman with long ringlet extensions sat inside, her hand draped over the steering wheel.

“There’s our ride, Harv. You guys good from here? The kid there looks a little shaky, you know? He’s gonna stand up? That guy he shot, he didn’t look good.”

“Yeah, he’s cool.” Harvey shook hands with the wrecker. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

* * *

He had to keep his left arm up on the window ledge of the truck to ease the pain, but Phil Harvey wouldn’t let the jumpy kid drive. As they passed up the highway he kept a tight ear on the kid’s responses, listened for him swallowing too hard, licking his lips. He watched to see if he tapped his feet or drummed his fingers on the dash. He liked the kid and didn’t relish leaving him in a hole in the ground in Indian country. He figured the kid had saved him from a wicked beating by the Chinamen.

They were just pulling into Widow’s Corners when the news of the shooting hit the radio. The kid rushed forward to turn it up. No one was declared dead, although one of the victims, the perky woman’s voice said, was in grave condition with gunshot wounds and a murder team was on standby. Two others were at hospital with minor head lacerations.

“Fuck, that was my guy, Harv. The shot guy. Fuck.”

Phil Harvey knew the kid was about to step over a line. He’d seen the Chinaman get hit and go down, he’d seen the kid lean in like a matador to finish him, he’d seen the Chinaman’s head jerk at the last minute. There were things that happened in the middle of things and people let themselves slip a little. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the end of the world either, usually. Not like Connie Cook, who’d obviously planned his revenge by having a branding iron made, had planned clearly to use it on the guys counterfeiting his product. The Captain had been looking to go crazy long before he got to the rooming house.

For the most part, on the long drive north the kid had been okay. Nervous and excited, but not drawing in on himself, shutting Harv out. He was even laughing and reliving the look on the Chinamen’s faces when they came out of the warehouse.

But the kid had the power to put four other guys in jail, to completely change the path of their lives. It was a knowledge, Harvey knew, not many guys could handle when things got tightened up around their nuts. He wasn’t worried about the wreckers: they were older guys and recognized that doing some time was just an interlude in the lives they’d chosen. Harvey had responsibilities to those guys.

At Widow’s Corners he drove the F-250 into a restaurant lot beside a motel and told the kid they’d have breakfast. That he had to make some calls. They sat at the same seat he’d sat at on his way out after stashing the Camaro at the farm, where he’d waited for the kid to come pick him up. He thought he should have told the old guy up at the lab to turn the engine over on the Camaro and run it every couple of days. He thought briefly about Agatha Burns.

Harvey ordered some eggs and toast. The kid had an appetite and went for the truckers’ all-in special, and that was, Harv thought, good. While they waited for the breakfast, he went to a pay phone and called the Captain.

“Hey, Cookie. How’s it?”

“You been busy, Harv. Wisht I’d’a been there. Was it bad?”

“Naw. One of the … ah … other guys, might, you know … go?”

“I heard. Slow news days I guess. The radio’s all over it. But you’re okay, right? You got what you went shopping for? All the guys are okay? They miss me?”

“Oh, yeah. I took a whack, that’s all. One guy asked about you, said where’s that guy, came out with us last time. We coulda used him. I told him you were fucking up somebody else. Next time, he says.”

“Perfect. Next time for sure. Good guys, those guys. Say hi to them for me.” The Captain sounded pleased. “So, we got, what?”

“Six forty-fives.”

“That’s two hundred and seventy gallons. We can do a lot of good work with that much. What’re you doing now?”

“Hang on.” Harvey watched the kid leave the restaurant and go to the F-250. He slid his ass in and left the door open and sat sideways while he turned the key and fiddled with the radio. Harv saw his mouth move. He shook his head and then he got out and looked around, shut the door, and came back inside. He trudged with cement feet and waved c’mere at Harvey. “Ah, I got a couple of things to do up here, Cap, let me get back to you.”

“Okay. Keep me posted.” The Captain paused. In the background a loudspeaker announced a horserace. “Harv? My other thing. What about that? You ready?”

Harv felt heavy dread and couldn’t source it: the kid who’d crossed a line, or the girl the Captain wanted grabbed. “Let’s talk later. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You staying over?”

“Might have a bit of work still to do, I dunno.” The kid sat with his coffee, staring off into space. “Maybe it’ll take a couple of days to get back down. I’ll let you know.”

* * *

Connie Cook watched his horse being rubbed down in the stables. The jockey, a little girl with the face of a man and the ass of a midget, was polite to him but he knew it was because he was buying the oats.

“She’s running well, Mr. Cook,” the jockey said. “She’s got this half-step we can make work for us. It’ll take some time, but she’s a good runner. We can make that half-step work for us.”

“Okay, Mary,” he said, appreciating that her freakishness was as part of her as his was of him, as Harv’s was of Harv. He felt they all shared the kinship of outsiders, of the differences. “I’ll come out one morning and watch her do her thing. You need anything?”

“Naw, no, Mr. Cook. Come out in the morning, sir, see her run. She’s going to need some time, she’s gonna spend some money. I hope you know that, going in.” The jockey studied him looking for confirmation of something. “There’s muscle and there’s speed and feed, you know, but there’s also heart. She’s got the heart.”

Captain Cook liked the jockey. If the horse ran backwards, he thought, he’d still give her a soft landing. She loved the horses like he loved the cheerleaders: with passion, with need. “Mary, go do it. Whatever it is, you go do it, okay?” He gave her a lifting of his jowls. “I’ll talk to that trainer, that Paki. You take her out today and no matter what, I promise you, we’re in business.” He sparkled his eyes. “Unless I come back later tonight and she’s still running to the finish. That’s not good.”

She laughed and for a second there became pretty. “We’re going today in the fourth. If she’s still running it at Christmastime we can come down together and throw oats at her.”

“Atta girl.”

Connie Cook’s wife didn’t like horses, didn’t like their smells, didn’t like their shit, and didn’t like the denizens of the backtrack with their shy shuffles and slang. She liked the Cup races when the Canadian horses came down, when the trailers brought the runners up from Kentucky. She liked the dips and sips in the clubhouse. She liked dressing up and making gentle fun of her husband’s extravagance. Connie Cook’s wife stayed well away from the stables and sat in their box in her pillbox hat and scarf, talking with her cronies.

Connie Cook walked across the front of the stands and looked up at his wife. She was talking across the aisle between the boxes with Gabriella Harris-Hopkins, of the Harris Clothing Company and the Hopkins boutique brokerage. Gabriella Harris-Hopkins was forty-five years younger than her husband, Irving Hopkins, putting her at a tasty twenty-five. Not exactly in the ballpark of Connie Cook’s tastes, but not too far out of it either. Connie Cook thought of her as a crass whore. Irv Hopkins was her third husband and he didn’t blush when she announced she’d had her breasts enhanced as an anniversary present to him. Connie Cook especially hated Irv Hopkins’s granddaughter, Tiffany, who was not much younger than her step-grandmother and still maintained her own boobs. He’d decided to maybe have Harv grab Tiffany, but now he wavered and thought about maybe grabbing them both. It would be a coup but fraught with problems unless he and Harv pulled in someone to help control them. It could be a disaster instead of true love. In any event, he decided, the lucky girl would be kept up at the farm for keeps and wouldn’t make it back to the city. This meant a lot of driving. Connie Cook was looking into a sedan that would be comfortable on long rides. He didn’t mind the long rides with the mounting anticipation, the teasing of himself when he stopped for coffee or gas. But he liked a lot of leg room; the new Beemer 7, maybe.

Idly he thought of having Harv get some disposable workers up there to build an underground bridal suite for his future loves, something with running water, lights, some furnishings, and maybe a video hookup. It wouldn’t be necessary to saddle them with bad habits at all. He could just grind away on them, leave them healthy on the outside, keep them until they naturally advanced to their expiry date.

The mayor and an aide, followed by some news teams, came along the rail, the mayor stepping carefully in his suede Hush Puppies. He wore a blue tie decorated with horses, and waved up into the stands although nobody waved back. Someone booed, calling him a Commie cocksucker. People laughed but no one threw anything. The aide posed the mayor and several luminaries with the state flag and the Stars and Bars in the background. The mayor spoke about the city as a growing international sporting centre. He said the racetrack was a perfect example of equestrian sport, a pastime available to all the citizens of the city.

The aide spotted Connie Cook and waved him over.

“Mr. Mayor, you know Cornelius Cook? He was a great supporter in the campaign and is a patron of the arts community in the city.”

The Mayor shook hands with Connie Cook. The aide nudged them together until the photographers got their shot. The aide spelled Connie Cook’s name out for them.

Connie Cook heard the aide say, “Cook, he gives the limit.”

He heard the mayor say something that sounded like, “That whale should get to vote twice.”

The Captain’s wife beckoned him. He laboriously climbed the stairs to the box.

“Connie, Gabby is involved in the most delightful project. She wants to build a gallery for homeless art. I said we’d be glad to support it.”

“If art doesn’t have a home, it should go to a free gallery.”

Cora Cook told him to shush and affectionately pushed his arm. “Art by homeless people, Connie. Don’t be such a wiseacre. Some of those people have talents they’ll never get to develop.”

“Connie,” Gabriella Harris-Hopkins said, moving to interact her breast and his bicep, “I think if four of us start with a modest amount of seed money we’ll be able to find donors without too much difficulty. Then we’ll go to the city for matching funds. What do you think?” She was in the garb of racetrack patron: stylish tailored jodhpurs, sleek boots, and short, brown leather jacket over a knit sweater. Opera glasses hung from a beaded chain around her neck.

“Gabby,” Cora Cook said, “your breasts may be perfect but don’t flirt with my man.”

He noted the effect jodhpurs and boots had on Gabriella’s ass and then and there he decided a strong maybe. “Define: modest, Gab. Define: amount.”

“Connie …” His wife looked horrified. “Don’t be in a mood, Connie.”

Gabriella Harris-Hopkins shook her head. “You’re such a kidder, Connie.” She gave him the smile she’d hooked her old husband with.

“I’ll need a pack.”

“What, sorry? Connie?”

“I’ll need a plan, I said. Something that I can work from to determine my involvement. Just something for the bean-counters.”

“Oh, a plan. Well, let me have something put together for you. I knew you’d be onside.” She gave him an arch look. “If this gets going, we’re going to have to spend some … quality time together.”

“Soon, though, with something written down, okay, Gabby? How’s your week looking? My year-end, you know?”

“Well, Irv’s off to the Bahamas tonight. I’m staying at the apartment in Stonetown while we have the alterations on the house done. Let me work on it, all right? I’ll put something together and call you.”

“Perfect.” He made his decision and made a wide smile. “Perfect. We can do great things for those with great needs.”

“Oh, Connie,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re such a kidder.”

“That’s what they say, Gabby.”