Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 28

They drove north in the morning after a bacon and eggs breakfast at the diner. The same cook was on and he stared at them with deep suspicion. Through the plate glass window onto the parking lot Ray Tate watched drivers unearth themselves from their rigs. They stretched and blew visible clouds of breath. One did some vaguely Asian-looking slow motion movements then lit a cigarette. A middle-aged Native woman slowly climbed down from his rig, straightening her clothing and pulling her inky hair back into a ponytail. The pair talked like pals in the rising sunshine and the trucker gave her a cigarette and lit it. With a curiously tender movement the trucker touched the woman on the arm and she smiled up at him before heading up the edge of the highway, the backwash from southbound traffic whipping at her long baggy coat.

Ray Tate nodded through the window. “Romance.”

Djuna Brown gave him a sweet smile. “Someone for everyone, right, Ray? Even killer beatniks and black dykes.”

They finished their breakfast and while Djuna Brown paid, Tate went to the pay phone on the wall.

“Skip.”

“Ray, where the fuck are you? We’ve been trying to raise you.”

“Up in Indian country. Out of range, I guess. No service. No radio.”

“You got my pills and you’re heading back, right?”

“Soon, skip. We got a lead on Phil Harvey. I think he’s up here, a little ahead of us. He went through here yesterday. We’ve linked him to a bush rat who babysits properties for the bad folks. I think maybe the lab’s up here.”

“Hang on, something else for you.” The skipper rattled papers. “That camper truck fire? With the double Chucks and the dead broad?”

“Yeah, Agatha Burns.”

“Nope. The examination showed a woman a lot older who’s had multiple births. The Federal brainiacs have had the initial post mortem for weeks but it didn’t mean anything to them. Now the hammers down the hall are getting DNA from Burns’s parents for comparison to positively rule her out. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe the truck fire wasn’t related.”

“Except for those double Chucks scattered around the truck.” He watched Djuna Brown standing in the sunshine outside the restaurant. Several truckers making their way in paused to look her over. In her leather jacket, leggings, and khanga hat she looked like a cool chick. Ray Tate had never actually had a cool chick, nor, he thought, had a cool chick ever had him. “Fuck it, skip. It doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s no homicide to put on Harvey, but we need him anyway, to get back to Captain Cook.”

The skipper mulled this. “Okay. Fuck, I dunno. You’re the guy on the scene. Play it the way you want. I can tell the dep you’re on the trail. Did you check-in with the locals? Let them know you’re playing in their pond?”

“We’ll give them a heads-up. This is Djuna’s old turf.”

He hung up and went outside. They climbed aboard the Xterra and she meticulously adjusted the seat and mirrors. She did a fast left out of the parking lot and immediately got bumpered up behind a transport truck heading north to the Canadian border. She drifted in and out peeking for an opportunity to pass. The Native woman from the trucker’s rig sat huddled in her big coat on a lump of rock on the sunny side of the road.

Ray Tate told Djuna Brown what the skipper had said.

“So, she’s alive? Agatha?”

“Dunno that. She could be dead, someplace else. The truck fire might not have anything to do with Phil Harvey or the Captain. It stands the same: she left with Harvey, he had a gun, she left a note that Harvey was going to do her in, she hasn’t been seen since.”

She saw an opportunity and swung out past the transport. The driver sounded a long plaintive horn that faded behind them like a train whistle. “Last night, Ray, that, ah …” She glanced at him. “I’m not like that, all that grim stuff. This place can give you the blues.”

He touched her shoulder. “Indian country. Home of the blues.”

* * *

The Spout was an hour north of the diner. It was a cluster of two gas stations, one opened and doing business with a single pickup truck gassing up, the other closed and abandoned, a variety store set up in a trailer with chicken screen across the windows, a bar that didn’t open until after 8 p.m., a car dealership with four clunkers parked nose out, each with a cracked windshield and no hubcaps, and an Indian souvenir store with carved wooden beavers looking out the window. Two flags sat lank at the end of flagpoles above the Spout office and two four-by-four Ford Explorers were backed in, jammed close to the front door where a piece of plywood covered a busted window that looked like it had been blasted by shotgun fire.

“Nice. This fucking place is an hour away by telephone,” Ray Tate said. “We should check-in with the guys.”

“Fuck the guys,” Djuna Brown said, slowing only momentarily to look at the detachment. “The guys can go roll it. I’ve met the guys, Ray, and I have to tell you: I found the guys wanting.”

“We might need ’em, Djun’, if Harvey’s up there with a battalion of heavily-armed speed freaks. Pull it over. I’ll go in.”

But she didn’t stop. She went past the detachment and rolled into the open gas station almost touching the bumper of the pickup truck. “Let’s look around a little, first,” she said. “We’ll scope it out, see what’s what.”

She tapped at the horn to move the pickup truck forward. A brown Aboriginal face partially obscured by a curtain of black hair came out the driver’s side window and glared. She tapped again and hung the guy the finger. He exploded, burly and pumped, out of the cab with a black tire iron in his fist.

“Djuna, Jesus Christ, we’re working here.”

“Chill, Ray. These guys are pussy. You can kick his red ass.” She leaned out of her window. “My man here will kick your red ass, buddy, you don’t move that fucking beater.”

The man had a big stomach but was massive through the chest and he held the tire iron loose at his side and seemed to be timing his steps into a windup. He bobbed his head sideways around the driver’s window at the driver. “Da June Ah, my girl.”

“Buck, I told you, move it, right?”

He grabbed his crotch. “Move this world, girl, cause it’s moving for you.” He was laughing and came up on the driver’s side. He looked insanely happy. “You back? You going to bring law and order to Dodge? Run the bad guys out of town?”

“Absolutely, Buck.”

He shook her hand through the window and seemed reluctant to let go of it. “You back, really, you going to come back?”

Djuna Brown was radiant. She introduced Ray Tate to Buck, calling him the last honest man. “Just here on a job, Buck. Looking around a little. We’re looking for some guy. Anything going on?”

Buck shook his head. “Nope. Been pretty quiet. Some city folk in their fancy cars, that’s all. Some of them go in the woods for a while, then come out and head home.”

Djuna Brown nodded. “Nature lovers.”

“Maybe some of them. The others?” He gave Ray Tate an empty face. “Heap bad medicine.”

“You see a big black double-cab Ford? Lots of chrome?”

Buck shook his head.

She asked, “A guy, face all burned up with scars?”

“I didn’t see nothing, Da June.” He studied the sky for a few seconds then looked at her. “Didn’t hear nothing.” He seemed to be waiting for something. He said, again, with emphasis, “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing.” He looked at her expectantly and rubbed his nose.

She listened twice to what he was saying. “Smell, Buck. You smell anything?”

“Well, the smell. Maybe up by Passive there’s a smell. Like old eggs. Used to be we’d go in there and hunt and fish, but now there’s signs and an old white devil with a gun. Some fences.” He gave Ray Tate a gapped smile and spoke sonorously, “The ancestors moan. The earth mother, she weeps. You shouldn’t fence in your mother.” He winked.

Ray Tate met his eyes. “I’m hip.”

Djuna Brown nodded. “Passive. Up past or down before?”

“Up past. The smell is bad especially when the grandfather wind blows from the west.”

Ray Tate asked if he knew a bush rat named Paul. “Drives an old pickup.”

“You already been up there, seen that old devil with his gun? So you know.” He turned to Djuna Brown. “You should come back up here, Da June, you’re closer to us than to them white devils down there.” He smiled again at Ray Tate. “No offence to your man, there.”

“He’s a beatnik, Buck.” She gave him a business card. “My man’s a man of peace to all people.”

With a solemn nod, Buck said to Ray Tate, “Good luck to you with that, sir.”

“Call, Buck, if you need me.” She put her hand on his on the doorframe. “I miss the mornings.”

“The morning says she misses you.” He stepped back, got into his truck, and left the gas station in a rush of engine. Djuna Brown put the Xterra into gear, waved a complex finger sign at Buck’s departing truck, and rolled forward. She gassed it up herself, went inside with the credit card, and came out with an armload of treats.

* * *

She seemed in deep thought as she drove and Ray Tate watched their passage through the cut rock on both sides of the road. There were small stacks of stones on top of the rock cuts, Indian-looking designs. He saw a small shrine at a crossroads with trinkets and some cracked pots arranged in a design around them. There was an abandoned trailer that had undergone scorching fire. Four children, two of them dark brown with black hair and the other two dark but blond, ran down a hillside chasing wobbly tires.

As though talking to herself, Djuna Brown said, “They didn’t care that I was a dyke, even if I wasn’t. They said the mother was a woman, so how bad could it be, to love the mother of the earth? When I did the dawn patrols, after I took the teeth out of my partner, they’d come out in front of their trailers and wave me down, blow smoke onto the truck for my safety. Very mystical stuff, very loving. They’d invite me out on Fridays and Saturdays so the guys from the detachment wouldn’t go too far. All the bad stuff, all the dead children, the dead old folks, the head-ons on the blind curves, none of that moved me like how they accepted me. When I left here, I cried. It was the worst thing they could do to me, transferring me out of the worst place.”

Ray Tate watched the sadness on her face. He felt a thumping in his chest, out of all proportion to any investment he had in her, in her life. He realized he loved everything: her voice, her skin, her cinnamon, her wit. Her sadness and her heart.

She handled the increasingly sharp turns in the road with the four fingers of each hand on each side of the steering wheel, sliding close to the rock face when she went in blind, coming out a little wide, the Xterra holding the road like glue.

“When this thing’s down, Ray, we should take a holiday, see what’s what with us.”

“Well, Djun’, all I can offer you is gin and taps and mad Parisian beatnik love.”

“Cool-ee-oh, Bongo. Tonight let’s —” Her head whipped. “What did the cook tell you? About that old bush rat’s vehicle?”

“Rusted out old pickup. Grey.”

“Just went southbound, looked like a woman or a guy with long, black hair behind the wheel.” She spun into a U-turn.

* * *

Through the window of the diner they saw Phil Harvey on the phone. He looked exhausted, his forehead leaning against the wall as he spoke, his hair hanging loose. Inside his black leather bat coat he sagged. The short-order cook watched him. When Harvey hung up, the short-order cook waved him over and they started talking. Harvey took some money from his pocket and gave it to the cook. Outside he looked at each vehicle in the parking lot, missing the Xterra backed in among a half dozen rigs. Harvey went inside and came out with a coffee. Favouring his left arm, he boarded the pickup and headed south.