Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
untucked, white shirt popped out of a doorway. He saw Harv and said his name. Harv was on him with the guy with the lug wrench. Harv took the wrench and began bashing at the man’s long hair. “I told you,” he said, swinging. “I fucking told you, cocksucker.” He stood and began stomping.
Connie Cook stayed in the doorway listening to the place being busted up. When the house was secure he told Harv to get everyone to the basement.
The pigtailed guys threw everyone down the steps. The basement was unfinished and had a strong chemical odour. A blackened stove sat in one corner and buckets, tubing, and bottles of chemicals were littered over a sagging chesterfield. There were cheap Dutch pill-pressing machines with different heads scattered among them. The windows were covered with taped on, ripped up green garbage bags.
There were five prisoners. One of them remained unconscious. The girl was crying and huddling herself off to the side, sobbing and examining her knees.
Harv didn’t like the scene. The chemical smell made his scars ripple and sing, the crying girl reminded him of Agatha. He decided the thing should be over. That’s the way it was done. They’d take the powder and the dough, bust everything in sight, and give everyone a farewell tune-up.
But Cornelius Cook stood at the bottom of the steps looking at his fracas with satisfaction. “Cold in here, Harv. Turn on the stove.” He began stripping the green garbage bag from his package.
Chapter 8
When the skipper arrived at the Chem Squad to do his morning prowl he found Ray Tate behind a desk, most of his hair back in a ponytail. Right away the skipper noticed the Captain Cook chart had been untacked from the corkboard. There was a steaming cup of coffee at Ray Tate’s elbow and across from it, on Djuna Brown’s desk, were a bottle of water and a yogurt container with a plastic spoon sticking out of it.
“The fuck you doing, Ray? It’s the crack of dawn. Where’s the twat?”
Ray Tate glanced around and shook his head, then nodded at the skipper’s glass office. The skipper led the way. They sat opposite each other.
“Okay, spill.”
“I was thinking, last night. I’m not going to get her watching her sit at her desk filing paper, right? So, I figure we’ll get a little project going, get her out where there’s mistakes to be made, and trip her into a hole.”
The skipper nodded. “And? What you come up with?”
“This Captain Cook guy. I figure that’s the way. We start up a little project, start moving around where there’s money and dope, see if she trips. It’s perfect.”
“If there is a Captain Cook.”
“Well, even if there isn’t, we get her out there in the land of the bad habits. We’re never going to get her sitting here watching her head glow.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. You got a better plan? She can wait out all of us.”
The skipper stared at the beaming eyes behind the grey beard. Taking down Captain Cook and the dyke and Ray Tate would be a hat trick. While the douchebag was out splashing in shit, Tate would be right there beside her, getting a little on his shoes. A hat trick would get the skipper noticed down at the Swamp where all the goodies were being dealt out in the Big Chan’s fan tan game. Not being noticed was worse than not sticking your head up, even if you were fucking things up. If you fucked up under the Chan regime you hung in there anyway, maybe be a hero in the next dynasty.
“Done. Very nice, Ray. We’re gonna work out just fine. If you get her for me, what do you want?” He looked troubled. “A bump? To duty sergeant, when all this stuff passes? I got to be honest with you: I can try but I can’t promise.”
“Nothing, skip. The blue suit, the round hat, and the red lights over my head. You’ll never fucking see me again.”
“Okay. How you want to do it?”
“Soft. Just memo us both to set up on this Captain guy, give us some room and some time, and we’ll have her zipped in a body bag in no time. Maybe get Captain Cook too, if he’s real.”
“I can’t give you paper on this thing, Ray, what we’re doing to take her down. If it gets to the fags at Gay-Glo we’re all in the shit. I’ll make verbals to the brass about what I’ve got you doing, but that’s it. You okay with that?”
Ray Tate sipped his coffee and stood up. “Hey, skip, fuck, come on. If I can’t trust another copper, who can I trust?”
* * *
They were meticulous in their notebooks. Time in and time out, the memo number when they received the skipper’s memo to set up on Captain Cook, the serial numbers of their cellphones were written in each other’s books, the assignment number of their rovers. They signed out a company car, noting who gave them the keys and at what time. They noted the mileage on the leased Intrepid and that she was driving and he was the shotgun.
The red Intrepid was a Federal lease with a radio hidden in the dash behind a false-front CD player, a red gumball on the dash, and a sign that thanked you for not smoking. Djuna Brown tossed the gumball on the floor and the non-smoking ticket out the window. She lit a cigarette, pulled out onto Huron Street, and headed for the Hauser South Projects. “What’d he say? We’re working, right?”
“We be. I’m supposed to tempt you into malfeasance, make you fall in with evil company.” He dropped the false front of the CD player and dialed in channels to the city divisions. He had dried paint crusted around his fingernails and worked at them with a penknife, glancing up every few seconds to read the street.
“But you won’t, right?”
“Nope. Like I told the skipper, if you can’t trust a copper, who can you trust?”
“What’s with the paint, there, on your hands? You redecorating?”
“Yeah. Change of scene, change of pace.”
She gave him a catlike grin. “Right. Purple. It’s the new black.”
“Tell me about this chick we’re seeing. That knows this Cook guy.”
“She said she works for a guy running some labs. I just started working on her, so when we get up there I’ll go it alone, see how it shakes out. Anyway, it was one of those things. I was getting a prescription filled and the pharmacist caught her down behind the counter, jamming cold pill bottles into her pockets. I pinched her and while we were waiting for prisoner transport I give her a pat-down. She’s got two of these little pills, double Cs on them. She freaks a little and she says she can give me somebody’s stash if I let her go.” She shrugged. “I waved off the pick-up cruiser and spoke to the pharmacist. He was cool, so I took her to a Seattle’s for coffee.”
Unwillingly, Ray Tate took a glance at her.
“Get your mind out of the gutter. We just had coffee and out of the blue I asked her about this Captain Cook guy whose pills she got. She just about shit. How you know about him, she said. She said she didn’t know him and if she had said she did know him, she didn’t really say it. See, she was flying low when she was boosting, forgot what she’d already told me. So I said, Look, you just told me you knew him, he was your pal. She said, I said that? I said, Yup. She said, Okay, so you know. Then she clammed about him but said if I wanted a pinch there was a guy bringing a bag of pills to an apartment building up in Hauser South that evening. So I kick her and went up there and there was a jittery guy with a bag going in the fire door. He comes out later with nothing. He goes to a ground floor patio and a guy sitting there with a big fucking pooch hands him some coin. My guy leaves and I take him out there, lose him in the projects. I go back to sit and bingo, another guy goes in. Same thing. White guy with a bag. A mutt. He’s in and he’s out. Sees the guy with the dog, gets some dough, and he’s away. I’m going, whoa.”
Ray Tate laughed and shook his head. “Holy fuck. I can’t believe you just said all that. There’s a guy and a bag and a guy with a dog and fucked if I know what all else you said.”
She