Читать книгу Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Lee Lamothe - Страница 9

Phil Harvey wouldn’t go into Agatha Burns’s apartment building. He called her on the cell and told her to come out the back entrance, to bring the stuff down herself, not to use the muscleman in the stairwell or to let him know she was going out. He said he’d keep an eye on the packages as she made as many trips as it took. He told her not to use the phone, not to call out, not to answer it. From here on, he said, her training began.

He waited in his black Camaro, bubbling the engine while he watched traffic move through the winding streets of the South Project. He was parked where he could see the rear entrance but couldn’t be seen by the moneyman on the ground floor patio or be captured by the security cameras in the lobby.

He looked at his hands clutching the steering wheel. Grey, glistening waves of burns disappeared under the sleeves of his beige cotton jacket. He wouldn’t wear nylon: nylon, when it burned, stuck to you like napalm. You couldn’t get it off. If you pulled it off, your flesh came with it, like pulling off a glove inside out. Sometimes the fingernails came off. Phil Harvey had four fingernails left and he kept them immaculate, although nobody noticed.

His face hadn’t suffered as much as his hands, but it was pretty bad on the right side. Tissue had been eaten away. His left ear was a gnarled nub. He wore his grey-streaked, black hair very long, below his shoulders, to hide the angry nub, tying it back in a ponytail when he had to work, loosening it into a curtain he could hide behind when he was in public. Hair burned too but didn’t smell half as bad as the pig roast cloud of fire that rose when your flesh melted in a flash fire. When he’d been a young speeder he never thought he’d be a middle-aged man with an Ozzy Osbourne hairdo. He knew the bikers out in the badlands called him Pork Chop behind his back.

It was about dues. Paying ’em, playing ’em, he believed.

When Agatha Burns appeared at the rear door of the apartment building, dragging a cardboard box, Harv punched in Captain Cook’s number and started laying track. “Hey, so I’m here. Where’s she at?”

“She’ll be there. Probably having a bubble bath. Relax, Harv.”

“I been here a half hour.” He watched her look around, kick at the box, then go back inside, dressed for a party in platform heels, pale, long legs that vanished into a minimal black miniskirt, and a tight, short, red, shiny jacket. A red scarf was looped around her neck a couple of times. “She’s not answering the phone.”

“Just wait. She’s hungry for it. Probably doing herself up, getting ready for her first day of school, impress the teacher.”

Harv clicked off. Over the next twenty minutes Agatha Burns made four trips with cardboard boxes. It took her a long time. After each trip she wobbled on the heels then leaned, exhausted, against the side of the building, looking around. Her muscles had clearly deteriorated from chemical excess and she spent bursts of energy at a rapid rate. At a distance her hair looked grey.

A boneless black guy with a baseball hat sideways over a do-rag, a knee-length basketball tank top, and a heavy gold chain approached her.

“Oh, fuck.” Harv reached under the seat and dragged out a heavy silver revolver.

Agatha Burns shook her head at the black guy and he touched her shoulder. He jittered. Harv wrapped the magnum in a sweater with four inches of wicked ribbed barrel poking out. He shut off the turbo and climbed out. When he was ten feet away he heard the man whispering, “Where yo tote where yo tote?” and trying to look behind her, to see what was in the cartons, to see if she had a purse.

Harv glanced around and held the revolver in his hand with the barrel sticking out, straight down his leg. “Yo. Hey, Yo.”

The black man whirled. “Who the fuck you be fucking yo-ing, Yo?”

Harv felt like laughing. He said, “I be fucking yo-ing you, Yo. Yo?” He’d have to tell Connie about this, later, leaving out the Agatha Burns part. He started laughing and pointed the gun at the black guy. “Don’t yo my ho’.”

The man saw the size of the gun. “Fuuuuuck.” He began backing away, his palms out. “S’cool, s’cool.” He spoke rapid-fire in a childish voice: “I’m a player I’m a player I’m a player.”

Harv realized the dude was a dummy and hung his arm straight down and wiggled the gun. “Hold on there, player. You want to make ten bucks? Load that shit in the black Camaro over there.” He aimed a device at the car and the trunk lid raised. “Neatness counts, right?”

The black guy looked at the boxes, then at the Camaro, then at the silver barrel. “Yeah, yeah I can do that. Twenty bucks, though.”

“Twenty, sure,” Harv said, still smiling, “if I can shoot you one time, after.”

“Naw. Naw, ten’s cool.” He hoisted the boxes two at a time and fitted them into the trunk. He put some boxes into the back seat. Harv gave him a ten and slammed the trunk shut.

“What happened to you there, mister?” the man said with childish curiosity. “Under your hair. Can I ask?”

“I was going down on your momma and she came in my face. You should fuck off right about now, okay?”

The black man backed away.

Harv held up his hand and Agatha Burns stayed by the rear door. He dialed Cornelius Cook and told him, “Fuck it, she didn’t show and I’m outta here.”

Cornelius Cook said, “Whatever.” Harv heard him stifle a laugh.

He waved Agatha Burns over. He opened the passenger door for her, told her to belt up, and rounded the car. He put the gun, wrapped in the sweater, under the seat. The black guy was standing across the parking lot, watching, shuffling. He had his riff-and-rap persona back. Harv waved and the guy grabbed his baggy crotch and yelled, “Yo this, you bacon faced motherfucker.”

Cruising out of the projects, Harv kept his eyes in the mirrors. “Fucking place. Our people must be the only whites in the whole fucking colony.”

“Connie wants it like that. Connie likes it here. He’s got —” She ran on and Harv didn’t listen. A blue Pontiac was behind him and he watched it until it turned off. Then there was a black van but as it got closer he saw it was two Yos bouncing in their seats. It wheeled off into another housing project. When the mirror was clear he headed for the Interstate. He slipped off and on at random, running neighbourhoods, counting cars behind him.

Agatha Burns was still going a mile a minute about Connie and his wants, his needs, his plans. She spoke to the windshield and didn’t look at Harv’s face. “— so he comes by and says, hey I want you to go to school with Harv. I didn’t wanna but he said I hadda. That okay? With you? Harv? That I hadda? I said, no, Harv is the man, he’s the wizard, but Connie just said if I don’t it’s my ass, you know? I don’t like that but you know how Connie is. So I gotta, right? If I don’t —”

“It’s your ass.”

“Right. Right, Harv. You got it. So I got, like, no choice.” She listened to the silence and didn’t like it. Silence was a no man’s land where anything could be said by anybody and all kinds of evil things could come out of that. “You know you can trust me, if there’s any really secret stuff you teach me. I keep my mouth shut, it’s just between you and me. I told him I’d rather work on the farm hoeing weed or something, bailing or something, but Connie just said, no you go with Harv, keep him away from the Chinamen. He said —”

“What Chinamen?”

“What?” She skidded to a stop. “Chinamen?”

“You said, keep me away from the Chinamen.”

“Chinamen? No, no I didn’t. I don’t even know no Chinamen.”

“Ag, you said, fuck, Chinamen.”

“When?”

“Just fucking now. You said, to keep Harv away from the Chinamen.”

“No. Wasn’t me. You musta heard that on the radio.”

“Ag,” he said, swerving into the hot lane and passing the off-ramps at the city limits, heading for the rising open country north of the city, rounding the lake, “you fucking said it. The radio’s off.”

“I didn’t turn it off. I didn’t even know it was on. You got any CDs?”

Harv shook his head, dazed. He’d love, he thought, to tell Connie about this piece of classic babble. This and the Yo with his yos. But this part of the coming evening wasn’t happening. This part of the evening was a Harv moment.

In one of the soliloquies she asked eagerly if they were going to the super lab. Was she going to see that legendary place?

Harv felt very sad.

* * *

She was quiet the rest of the way to the farm. She squirmed a little in her seat, the miniskirt hiking up, adjusting her scarf. Harv thought Cornelius Cook had probably got a little out of hand. He had the weak man’s urge to thrust when he could, the weak man’s lack of control. And she didn’t know it but she’d been lucky. The Captain was a biter and he had a position he liked where the face was available.

He reflected on the crazy Captain: money up the ass, private schools, a Mercedes when he was still in high school, big motherfucking cottage up in the Lakes. At first, Harv thought it was just street bullshit but he had a pal troll the Internet and there was the Cook couple. At gallery openings in the state capital, in Chicago, even in New York City at the ballet. Donating to causes. Announcing huge mergers in the business pages. The Captain was in several of the photos looking fat and prosperous, often in company with a slim wife with a brittle smile. What the fuck was he doing in this fucking life?

A fat, kinky item was old Connie, but not without a certain diabolical flair. When Harv first met him, the Captain was just a hugely fat fuck among the fat fucks sitting in the dim stage lights of Jiggles, a mob-run club at Stateline where Harv picked up a hundred bucks a night doing the door. One night the bartender pointed Cook out to Harv, saying the fat guy had been in every night but never hit on the peelers, just sat watching. The fat fuck carried a roll of hundreds and never wanted change for his drinks. Harv, who still had bandages on his face from the lab explosion and was on his ass, keeping the door, waited for the Captain outside, near a sleek Mercedes painted a deep shade of grey he’d never seen before that sparkled under the lights, parked furthest from the side entry to the club. The bartender did his thing and after Cookie came out, weaving and collapsing, Harv was amazed. He’d never kicked anything like it. His motorcycle boot seemed to just disappear into the globe of flesh under the bright arc lights. Harv’s foot seemed to go into the fat fuck’s torso and hit nothing of substance. Like kicking a big pillow. Harv didn’t kick him in the head: he’d seen a guy take a light boot, a kiss to the temple, on the ranges in the state pen and the guy had died. Between Harv’s boot and the stuff the bartender had dropped on him, the Captain wasn’t doing much anyway. Groaning a little. He vomited once, probably more from the fission of the drugs mixed into his cognac than anything Harv was doing.

Two weeks later, Harv was leaning on his door when the fat fuck came in. He nodded pleasantly and Harv nodded back. The fat fuck walked a little off-kilter but he had a big smile for the waitress and dealt out his hundreds.

The Captain waved him over when the peelers changed shifts. “How you doing? You making any money?”

“Fuck off.” Harv thought the fat fuck looked pretty pleased, seeing how he’d been given the special vitamin and stomped up a bit. “You don’t know me.”

“You’re Harv, right? Harv. Phil Harvey. Philip One-L Harvey. November six, nineteen fifty. Been up in Craddock, what? Three times? Now you live upstairs, park your bike out back most of the time because most of the time it doesn’t run. You drive an old rattletrap bubble van the owner of this place lends you, weekends, so you can go and cook up some stuff for some other guys who make all the dough while you make gas mileage and walking around money. Were you born stupid, or was it the fire or what?”

Harv started to reach across the table and the fat fuck skidded his chair back a bit and put his hand under the tabletop.

“The fuck do you want? Get out of here.” Harv had taken twenty-eight hundred dollar bills off the guy, the bartender got five hundred. Harv had seventeen hundred left. He’d take a bullet, if that’s what the fat fuck was doing under the table, before he’d give back a nickel.

“You’re getting on in years, Harv. You’ve got too much hair and not enough face. Soon you’ll be a pensioner.” The Captain saw Harv glancing at the tabletop. “Yeah, I got something down there. But what’s more important, I’ve got three guys with me. Ex-cops, city guys. They’re not ex-cops because they got to retire with the pension, you know? They’re the ones who told me about you. The other day they visited the bartender and he’s been off work, since, right?” Captain Cook closed his eyes. “I’m having a vision, Harv. I predict that the next time you see him he’ll be in a motorized wheelchair. And he said he only got five hundred from you, which means: from me.”

Harv looked around and instantly spotted the three guys with the fat fuck. They sat like middle-aged bikers, sprawled at a round table between Harv and the side door. One of them, a short-haired guy with a glittering earring and a gold chain around his neck, smiled and nodded encouragingly.

Harv had taken beatings and he’d never run from one in his life. “How you want to do it, you fat cocksucker?”

“Lunch. How’s that, Harv? We have lunch tomorrow and you tell me how you’re going to give me back my twenty-eight hundred. Or we can do something else, and you can make twenty-eight.”

* * *

It was probably, Harv thought, because they were two freaks that they got along.

At the lunch Connie Cook had explained about boredom and the emptiness of his life.

“If I was this fat and broke at the same time,” he said over hamburgers and fries at a Kelso’s in the swanky Stonetown, “I’d ’a killed myself. No shit, Harv. But I’m fat, I know it and there’s nothing I can do about it, but also I’ve got dough. My wife and I go to the art gallery, nobody turns away, nobody goes wow look at that guy, is he one fat number or what. Nope. They all come over. Mr. Cook, you like another canapé? You’re losing weight, Mr. Cook. Mr. Cook, you want to fund an exhibit next season? Hundred and sixty thousand, we’ll put your name in the program. Gee, thanks. Then the fucker signals another sleek fucker and boom, I got a fundraising guy from the museum over in Chicago on me: Gee, Mr. Cook, we could use some dough to bring an exhibit of Inuit art down from Canada. Your dad used to kick some dough our way, how about it, family tradition? Say, two hundred thousand and we’ll put your name in the program.” Connie Cook laughed bitterly. “So, my wife’s on me to pony up all this dough so she can be in the Post on the parties page, looking good with a ballerina or a fucking opera singer. A real good day, she winds up in the Chicago Trib.”

“Huh.” Harv was only mildly interested. “What’s this you said, about making twenty-eight?”

“Those guys, those three ex-cops last night, with me at the club? They’re security guys from one of my companies. They —” Connie Cook stopped for a moment, chewing the last of his burger, staring at Harv’s face. “That hurt? I mean, it probably hurt when it happened, but what about now?”

“No. I know it’s there, sure, it feels tight. But you get used to it.” He shrugged. “Like anything else.”

Connie Cook reached into his suit jacket and put a small tube on the table. “Vitamin E. I told my doctor, I knew a guy with some burns and he said smear this on, twice a day. Tone things down a bit, maybe.”

Harv let the tube sit on the table. “So, these guys, your ex-cops?”

“Right. Sometimes I have to spend some time with them, you know? I do a deal and somebody gets pissed off, they lost their equity or their company’s been taken out from under them. Or union guys who lost their jobs come skulking around my house. So I get security for a while, move into a hotel. Anyway, those ex-cops love to tell stories. Busting this crook, chasing that guy. Being a cop, they say, except for the shitty pay and the rules, best job in the world. Makes my life look more boring than it is.”

Harv casually picked up the tube of vitamin E. “So? You want to be a cop?”

Connie Cook laughed and choked on a fry. “The fuck? Fuck, no. Harv, you’re a funny fucking guy. I want to be a crook.”

* * *

The vitamin E cream didn’t work out well, even though Phil Harvey used it religiously. But fuelled by Harv’s expertise and connections, and suitcases of the fat fuck’s cash, Cornelius Cook’s dark enterprises quickly became multi-faceted. He had water farms all over the state, partnered up with Vietnamese body smugglers who staffed the operations with slave labour smuggled down from Canada, who chopped the weed and baled it. He had the X business, he had the crank labs, he had a network of pan cookers throughout the projects where baby mammas stood over non-stick pans on coil burners, baking rocks of crack. It always surprised Harv that the black folk liked the fat Cornelius, but he figured it was because he was so pasty and translucent that he wasn’t white at all but a whole other non-colour, a whole other species. It didn’t hurt that everybody made out well off the Captain’s operations.

But at root, Harv knew, it was the evil that emanated off the porky bastard that curled his toes. Harv himself was a hard man. He’d done hard things and he’d done hard Craddock time. He was getting old and had done almost a quarter of his life in custody. He’d done the hardest thing four times, leaving little trace of the activity, no trace of the victim except once, when a message had to be sent. But he still thought of himself as having a chip left of his soul.

Cornelius Cook, though, was evil because he didn’t need to be. He didn’t need to reach down into the netherworld for profit, didn’t need to do what he did. He could have it by exercising his family’s portfolio, by crushing adversaries with financial clout and then picking up the lucrative pieces, sentencing enemies to the poorhouse gulag. Connie had once bombed out a Stonetown bistro because of rude service when he could have bought the place and fired the staff.

People moved into Connie’s orbit for a while then they were gone suddenly, without rhyme or reason, like shooting stars that burned themselves out and just vanished as if they’d never existed. Some of them were young women, Harv realized, young women who rotated through the clubs, vacant women who he’d brought around for the Captain’s perusal. They came in gorgeous and witty and thought themselves lucky, and wound up hollow and stuttering and chewed and ultimately gone. Not Agatha though. She didn’t come from the ranks of peelers. Agatha had been the test: Captain Cook had given Harv the address where she lived and said go get her for me. Take her on a crank holiday and when you come back make sure she needs us — needs me, anyway.

* * *

Agatha Burns droned. CD prices were supposed to come down after the technology was paid for. But they were higher than they were at the beginning. What was up with that? She could download music off the Internet to save money but the Internet, Connie had told her, was an evil plot by the government. Who knew what subliminal messages were hidden in there, like, flashing into your brain before your eyes even registered it? Hey, look, she said, there’s a sequential licence number on that van. You think the guy asked for it or it was random? Random was weird. There was no … well, random to it. Well, there was, she thought, in a random way, if Harv got her meaning.

She was deathly afraid, Harv suddenly realized. She’d figured it out. He made sure her seatbelt stayed fastened. The chatter was beyond crank patter. She probably hadn’t been out of the apartment in months, waiting for pills to be dropped in the stairwell, waiting for the Captain to come by and pirate her ass, piping himself aboard.

At the hook north of Stateline he stayed on the Interstate, easing into the slow lane to catch the ramp off to the badlands while he thought. He’d done stupid things but he wasn’t stupid. He’d acted without heart, but he had heart. The Captain was a manipulator, but that didn’t matter: Harv had more money than he’d ever earned either legitimately or in the life. That was the name of the game: to make out, to collect your end. But the Captain didn’t seem to care. The family money had been there for generations before he was born, the golden road was paved for him. All he had to do was follow his ancestor’s footprints. It was impossible for the Captain to be so stupid he’d ever be broke. There was just too much money.

“You know,” Agatha Burns said, “when you look at a tree like that tree over there, that there’s actually more of the tree underground, roots and stuff, than we see. Harv, you ever think about that? What we see and what we don’t see. I mean, sure, if we don’t see it, it probably isn’t actually real for us, but there’s a lot more to the tree than the … well, the tree. Weird, eh?”

One night, when Harv and the Captain got drunk and high, the real Cookie got loose. “You should’ve seen her when she was in high school,” he’d said as they sat in their underwear in a hotel room overlooking Michigan, watching Agatha Burns go through jerky cheerleader moves, trying to please them, her eyes on the little baggie of crank on the coffee table. “Perfect. Absolute fucking perfection. Perfect boobs. An ass that was on ball bearings. Legs up to here. She’d have her pals over and they’d go in the backyard of her house and do their routines. Fucking amazing, Harv. I watched from my house, the six of them, little skirts, pretending they didn’t know their boyfriends were watching over the fence. All perfect.” He called over the music. “Right, Ag? You and the team?”

She nodded, breathless, a plastic smile on her face, not missing a beat. “Yes, Connie. We were hot.”

“Did you know I was watching? From my window, Ag?”

She nodded again. “Yes, Connie. It turned us on.”

“Looks don’t mean for shit, though, right, Ag?”

Her breath was short. “Right, Connie. I was superficial then, but I’m okay now.”

“Take off the top, show Harv how they bounce.” He’d turned to Harv. “Watch this. Elastic.”

Harv had been uncomfortable. There was a sick aspect to the Captain’s jowly, pinched face, a hatred he couldn’t imagine, even on his own face when he had to do the hard things. He felt a stirring of feeling for her, for her open face and her fading beauty. “It’s okay, Cookie. I seen boobs before.”

“Yeah, but not like this. C’mon, Ag, give us the old one-two-three-four. Swing ’em.”

The night had ground on. At one point Agatha Burns blew them both, but Harv had been too far gone to remember it afterwards, if it was good or not.

He did remember the Captain, twirling a little baggie of crank, had enticed her to lick away at the scar tissue on the side of Harv’s face and suck at his destroyed fingers, tell him she loved him, his scars were beautiful.

Harv did remember that.

And he remembered walking into the bedroom of the suite at dawn, looking for his jacket, and she was almost invisible under the pounding blubber of the howling Captain, her face stuffed into a pillow, her screams muffled, the Captain looking up with blood running down his chin under his huge wreath of smiling jowls.

* * *

Phil Harvey checked the odometer and slowed, looking for the sideroad that would take him away from the feeder highway to one of the mom-and-pop labs scattered in the area. Beside him, Agatha Burns’s knees were white and knocking. She was talking to the passenger window. The scarf had looped away and he glanced at her, could see she was still leaking blood from the punctures at the nape of her neck. She was essaying a soliloquy on alternative cultures, telling how she’d got an A-plus in high school for paralleling 1960s America with 1930s Berlin.

He found the sideroad and sped the Camaro absolutely straight for several miles, into the heart of the badlands, passing only scattered farms, a few shacks, and remote houses with yellow geometric windows lit in the distance. A cloud of Riders on noisy bikes flashed past him. In his rear-view he could see on their backs the smudged oval colours of the club. He slowed until they’d vanished, then turned onto a rough track, mindful of the washboards and dips, worrying for the undercarriage of the car.

In the middle of a speed revelation about the temperature at the core of the Earth, she turned to him. “Harv? Harv?”

“Nearly there, Ag. Relax.”

“You know, I was beautiful, once. I was perfect. It wasn’t my fault, how I was. Tell Connie, okay? It wasn’t my fault.”

“Just a little further.” He didn’t look at her. “Few minutes.”

He felt sad that she knew. Unless someone had fucked you up wickedly, this wasn’t the way to do it. If they were wicked rats you had to make them go hard. But if it was just housekeeping, you were jocular and a pal, lolling them off to sleep until you dropped them as though you flicked off a light switch. There was enough old pain in life without making new stuff.

Her knees were knocking audibly, a mile a minute. Her fingers twisted into one tight fist between the tops of her thighs. “Is it gonna hurt, Harv? Can you do it, fast, without hurting me?”

“Don’t get paranoid, Ag. It’s just the stuff making you think crazy.”

He flashed his headlights three times, then once, eased off the rough track and stopped. A rangy woman in an oilskin with a shotgun under her arm appeared in front of the Camaro, squinting through the windshield. The woman was in her sixties, her dead hair balding back from the front. She flashed a half-a-smile of broken, gapped teeth. She had angry sores around her mouth. Behind her was the lab, a sagging pickup truck with a weathered, peeling camper mounted in the back, the windows cranked open.

From the corner of his eye he saw Agatha Burns’s hands unlock from each other. Ghostly, one of her palms moved in the air between them. He glanced. Her knees had stopped jittering. She was looking directly at him. He felt his curtain of hair being gently moved back from his face, then the freezing of the palm of her flesh against his face, against his scars, stroking.

“I’m sorry, Harv. What he made me do, here —” her fingers traced the mass of ridges and angry boiled skin, “— that night at the hotel was the worst thing I ever did. To anybody. I’m sorry.” She inhaled with a sob, then calmed down and composed herself. “I don’t want to die without you knowing I’m ashamed.”