Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 7

Agatha Burns thought the people at Chanel might be a problem. “They already got the interlocked C’s,” she told Cornelius Cook, frowning with officious concern. “You use that stamp, Connie, they’re gonna come after you.”

Cornelius Cook used a flat razor to make a little nick in the flesh on her wrist. The skin was thin and pale. Her blond hair was dying by shades. Not a grey, exactly, but a leaching absence of colour. He licked the droplet of blood and put his finger tightly over the hole, feeling her pulse. It was slowing: she was coming down.

Agatha Burns said, “Six, that’s six, Connie. You filled your daily diet.”

Her wrist was a red blizzard of tiny nicks in various stages of repair. He thought her blood was starting to taste a little different, sour, less sweet. “I think if there’s a knock at the door, Ag, it won’t be the guys from trademark infringement. It’ll be a whole bunch of cops with dogs and shotguns, wearing white bunny suits and gas masks.”

“Still …” Agatha Burns took her wrist back. “Enough, Connie.”

He made his face sad. “I’ll worry about the finer things of commerce, you worry about those chicklets, okay? Harv’s coming by later and I want them bagged and counted. Harv’s making me a snowbank.”

Agatha Burns looked at the hundreds of bottles of cold pills scattered around the living room of her apartment. She hated dumping them out and separating and counting the chicklets. There were bottles of all sizes, all brought to the stairwell at the end of the hall and left by thieves and scammers who scoured the county’s drugstores. After dropping the bottles in the stairwell, the bandits walked down the hallway and tapped three times on Agatha Burns’s door. Agatha Burns hit speed-dial on her cellphone, let it ring once at the other end, then clicked off. A man sitting with a shotgun at the top of the stairwell walked down the stairs and checked the drop. He hit speed-dial on his cellphone and told the guy at the other end, who was sitting on a patio on the ground floor apartment with a big, unleashed Rottweiler, what the drop was. The man on the patio used a clothes peg to attach a couple of bills to the patio rail and waited for the delivery folks to pick it up. Sometimes he was feeling bored and he pegged the money to the Rot’s collar. Agatha Burns, watching the scene from her balcony, went down the hall to the stairwell and retrieved the bottles.

Connie Cook didn’t like being in the apartment. He didn’t like being in the building. He was a ghost, a status he carefully crafted. He saw himself as the elusive Mr. Big, the unseen hand. But he had urges to visit Agatha Burns, to eat a bit of her flesh and bleed her. He’d loved her and he’d hated her and would ultimately consume her for one reason or the other.

Like an artist, he signed his work: each ecstasy pill had two Cs, the first one backwards, interlocking with a C printed correctly. He had pressing machines with other logos. Apples, death’s head, RIP, hearts, stars, tombstones, USA. But he gave his interlocking Cs pride of place, monitoring its chemistry and production closely.

He glanced at his watch. “I gotta go, Aggie. Deal with a problem.” Another bunch of Chinatown cookers, Willy Wong’s boys, were jealous of his success and superb product and had taken to stamping the double C logo on their X. Complaints had been instant: the X pills crumbled and turned to paste the moment they hit saliva. There’d been overdoses, some deaths, because the Chinamen didn’t have his precision. Connie Cook’s henchmen had traced the stream of product back to some high school chemistry whizzes in east Chinatown.

Agatha Burns offered him another hit of her blood. “Stay a while, Connie. I don’t like being here alone all the time. I’m gonna miss you. I got to work late, getting the stuff done. Give me a tap, eh, get me through?”

Naked, she was all long limbs and deteriorating muscle tone. Her habit was voracious. He slid himself around and ran his finger up the tracks behind her knee. “You’re running out of vacancies, here, Ag. You’re getting all full up.” He felt a huge satisfaction but an unaccountable sadness, too. The loss of love.

“C’mon, Connie. I got work to do, I need a boost. Huh, huh?”

He sat up. She put her hand into his scant crotch, disappearing it under his flowing stomach. She didn’t notice any longer that he was a victim of almost morbid obesity — when he lay on her she was drowning in a fleshy sea of grunts and grinds. But he had the product and she had the need.

“You take a pack for it?”

“I don’t like that, Connie. It hurts.” She leaned forward to suck, hoping to allay his desires. He was a thruster and a biter and she feared both.

“I get to pack you or nothing,” he said, pushing her away, the ruthless businessman replacing the sad romantic. “You let me know before I leave.” He ran his hand over her ass, humming. He was just about done with her and, with a little regret he admitted, he started putting her lights out. “You hearing anything? About the Chinaman and the X? Maybe Harv or somebody’s helping them out?”

“I don’t get out. You know I don’t hear nothing about nobody. Will you be careful? If I do? If I let you?”

He stared at her ass. “You think Harv’s got funny?”

She tried to read him. If Harv was on the way out, maybe she could be on the way in. If she could get a job outside the apartment, it would make it more difficult for Captain Cook to pirate her ass. She could avoid him and stay high.

She kind of liked Harv. He was sad and tragic but she had her own need to think about. “Well, I dunno. Maybe. I guess. He’s in the rub and tugs lots. The girls make him put a towel over his face while they do him. Maybe, maybe he’s with the Chinamen. If I take the pack, can I move up? Move out of here, maybe go to the country?”

He fiddled with his class ring, rotating it around his fat pinky finger. “You want to do that? Play with the chemistry set? Become a professional woman?”

“Well,” she purred and ran her hand down his distended, pure white belly until it was nestled back at his crotch. “I should get a shot. I got good hands. I did good in chemistry at school. If Harv’s got funny and goes over to them, who’ll you get? I can be like one of those guys at baseball, in the pig pen.”

“The bullpen.” He felt a sudden brief fondness for her. “It’s the bullpen.”

“Right, that.”

“You want a shot. I want to give you the packer. How you with that? Quid pro quo.”

“C’mon, Connie. I don’t like that.” She looked at him staring at her. “Look, okay, but take it easy, okay? Last time I had to wear a scarf and a turtleneck. It hurt.”

“You look good in a turtleneck. But no problem, Ag. I’ll be good.”

When she went to the washroom for lotion and preparation he stretched his jaws and jowls wide and cracked the joints. He’d always hated being fat but found it was delicious to see her slim figure vanish under him.

She came out with a bath towel, a box of condoms, and a tube of gel. He watched her hands quickly make him hard and skin the rubber on. She stayed down there massaging the gel onto the condom and stared at him. He made her wait a few moments then took a tube of crank from beside the bed. He positioned her, then tapped a mound onto the sticky tip of the condom. Her ass was his favourite delivery system.

* * *

While Agatha Burns was in the washroom, cleaning up and crying, Connie Cook called Harvey on a cellphone. “Hey, where you?”

“Cookie? What’s up, man?”

“Well, I was, a few minutes ago.” He laughed.

“You at Ag’s? She got the stuff ready to go?”

“Yeah, soon. Give her a couple of hours. She’s got to work standing up for a while.”

“Hoo.”

“You been dealing with those Chinese guys, Willy Wong’s kids, out in the east end? Aggie says you got yellow fever, trolling the massage parlours. Meeting bad people and pressing and cooking for strangers. Anything to that, Harv?”

“Fuck, no. C’mon, Cookie. She said that, eh? She wouldn’t say that.”

“Yup. And she wants to cook. I said you’d give her a tryout.”

“Ah, well, okay, I guess,” Harv said. He waited a few seconds. “But it isn’t the kind of thing you can just teach someone, like baking brownies, you know. You make a little mistake they turn out, taste a little bitter, sprinkle on some sugar and eat ’em anyway. This is different. There are tricks. You know I got tricks and you can’t ask me to just give ’em to some scrag you’re banging. That ain’t right, Cookie.”

“Harv, don’t worry about it. She’s just trying to get ahead. When you come by to pick up the chicklets for your snowbank, you arrange to take her out for a drive. See if she’s got the chops.”

“Well, if you’re sure, Cookie. I got lots of people want me to give ’em night school lessons in avoiding crank combustion.”

“Well, look, Harv, I’m not asking you to make her a wizard like you. Just take her to the first step, okay? Let her make suds. She’ll feel useful, like she’s going ahead. You do the real work.”

“Yeah, okay.” Harv clicked his teeth. “She said that, eh? That I’m with the Chinamen?”

“Don’t worry about it, Harv. She probably meant some fucking fucker.”

Agatha Burns stayed in the washroom while he dressed. It took a long time and he was breathing heavily when he finished. He slipped his feet into loafers: it was impossible for him to contort himself to secure shoelaces. He could hear the shower blasting. He cracked the door called into the steam, “Hey, you okay, Ag?”

She sobbed. “Go away. You said you wouldn’t bite.”

“C’mon, Ag. A little fun. You gonna be okay to work? Do some stuff with Harv later, become a journeyman cooker?” He stepped in and twitched back the shower curtain. “I decided to move you up. Harv’s okay on the X but he needs an apprentice for the crank.”

Agatha Burns was crouched on the floor under the hard, hot water, holding a soapy face cloth to the back of her neck. The face cloth was stained pink with watery blood. “Really?” For a second her face had a residual cheerleader’s glow that hadn’t quite been burned away by chemistry.

“Yep. The Harv’s a master maker. Don’t mention to him that I know about the Chinamen, though, okay? That you told me. I want to move you up quick. I don’t think Harv’s gonna make it and I want you to have all his secrets.”

“Okay, wow.” She stood up, beaming. Of all of her, only her eyes remained gorgeous. “Okay.”

He could count her ribs. There were bruises on her hips and knees where she’d fallen while high. She suddenly had sagging breasts and he regretted that. She smiled and her teeth looked wobbly and grey, off-kilter. He again felt a bit of sadness. “Finish up the chicklets, and when Harv comes to pick them up he’ll take you with him, get you started.”

“We going to the super lab?” She laughed gaily, his excesses forgotten, forgiven. “Okay, okay, Connie, I’ll do good.”

He felt a chill at the echo of her words. The super lab. What was that all about?

He left the building whistling, knowing he’d never need to come back again, and he was sad he’d never see her again. Harv was primed and would make his move, giving Agatha Burns a lesson in crank combustion. Harv, he knew, didn’t fuck around.