Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
too good, I can always use a wheelman, even a drooling old fuck that falls asleep a lot.”
Ray Tate laughed. The desk sergeant told Larry, “Get back out there, you dumb fuck.”
“So, how’s things up there, Ray? Intelligence?”
Ray Tate shook his head in wonder and sipped his coffee. “Fucking paradise, Bob. Overtime out the ass, clerks with big tits. Cappuccino machine in the day room.”
“Ah, fuck off.”
“No shit. Would I stand in front of your table and lie right to your fucking face?”
“Lots of overtime? Like, how much?”
“Well, I got an accountant now, head off any problems later with the IRS.”
“Jesus, Ray. If I had your money, I’d burn mine.”
Ray Tate was safe at home. Drinking coffee and bullshitting over the table, a stream of uniforms hustling handcuffed prisoners behind him, the rumble of voices. He heard a couple of voices murmur his name and some of the chargers found pretext to cross by the table for a look at the double gunner.
Someone said, “That poor fucker. That’s what they do to you, you go the distance for them. You go there twice and then they really fucking hate you.”
Someone else said, “Fuckin’ bum, looking for the guy poisoning dogs in the ravine, that’s all he’s good for.”
Someone else, a woman, said, “Fuck you, Foley, you dumb dildo.”
There was a sudden burst of struggle and Bob the desk sergeant launched himself around the desk. “Shirley. For fuck sakes.”
* * *
Ray Tate showered in the locker room. He waited in the steam until the day crew finished banging their lockers and bullshitting about Shirley taking out Foley with a hoof to the nuts. He loved the echo of the rooms in the stations, the jocking and jilling of the troops as they prepared for work. The thumping boots and songs and whistles. The camaraderie of the ultimate outsiders: not white or black or yellow or brown. Just blue. Not liberal or conservative or unionist. Just blue. That famous blue fog that was really a world of grey.
When the last charger had slammed out of the room Tate turned off the shower and in the steaming silence worked a towel into his hair and beard. Bob, the desk sergeant, came in with a pile of neatly folded clothes: two thick blue union sweatshirts, a worn khaki windbreaker, baggy grey track pants, and a pair of woollen socks.
“Jesus, Ray.” He was looking at the mass of insect bites up and down Tate’s legs, crossed with red gouges where his fingernails had involuntarily ripped at the stinging itch. “Ah, man. Fuck. We got some shit in the kit. Stand by.”
When he came back he had a handful of tubes and sprays and an Iraq vet’s mug with a chipped gold insignia on the side. Tate sipped coffee and worked on his wounds.
“I just got the call. They want you to go to a satellite in midtown, see the skipper over there. I got a car going to take you over. You want to stop first, at home?”
“Naw. What’s the satellite?”
“Task force. Us, the Feds, Staties. They’re after crank shufflers, X-men.” Bob shrugged. “Run by Gordie Weeks. You know Gordie?”
“Nope. Good guy?”
“Well, one time I was shopping down the Tower Mall. Gordie got into the revolving door behind me but he came out ahead of me.” Bob laughed. “Gordie’s very … quick. They say he plays table tennis with himself.”
“Ah,” Ray Tate shook his head. “Ah fuck.”
Chapter 2
The skipper loved the early morning hours. They were productive and he prowled the desks and closets of the midtown satellite office. The long, dim drive in from the northern suburbs helped clear his head on the mornings when he battled a hangover and couldn’t face the sun. There were plenty of strip plazas with doughnut joints studded into them and, if he needed to, on really bad days he could find a washroom to puke in.
But it had been a good week. He’d found a matchbook from an Indian casino and a tube of bright red lipstick under the seat of a car signed out to one of the city slobs. The slob had booked off sick the previous week. The skipper had calculated the mileage to the casino, checked it against the slob’s daily expense sheets and the odometer, and called the security office down there. Now there was an empty desk in the tactical office.
He’d picked the lock on Djuna Brown the Statie’s desk and found it empty except for a stained tampon and note reading, “Fuck You, You Fat Irish Fuck.”
“Nice job, Gordie,” the Big Chan’s new deputy had told him when the city slob had been written out. “This is what we want to see. We call it personnel disenhancement.”
“Yeah, but now I’m short-handed.” The skipper was aware that how high he went depended on how many there were stacked below him. “I’m down a guy.”
The dep laughed. He sounded like he hadn’t laughed in a long time and was out of practice but was getting the hang of it. “Short-handed for what? You guys aren’t actually doing anything, right?”
“Well, the bosses want us to take down this mutt, Captain Cook.”
“Just kidding, Gordo,” the newly minted dep said.
Then he called back: “We got a guy we’re sending you tomorrow, beef up the roster.” He paused. “The guy we’re sending you, he’s your top target. Orders from Beijing.”
The skipper felt a sinking feeling but he kept his voice casual. “What is he? What’s his degeneracy? Booze? Little chickies? Goats?”
“Don’t knock goats, Gordo. Goats is … If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it, right?”
“What is he, then?”
“Well, he’s a gunner.” The dep hung up quickly and the skipper could tell he was smiling.
The next morning the interoffice line buzzed. “Skip? There’s … ah …” the receptionist faltered. “Ah, a party here? To see you?”
“Buzz him through.”
“If you say so.”
Through the glass window of his office the skipper recognized Ray Tate behind the straggly, grey-shot hair and the beard dripping down his face. Even in the lumpy sweatshirts and the windbreaker the skipper could see where stress had burrowed into Tate’s body and chewed its way out. In the media photos he’d looked buff and robust, a perfect poster cop. Now he looked like a fucked-out degenerate in sweatpants and a ratty sweatshirt hanging down under his windbreaker.
Tate stood in the doorway of the satellite office and looked around at the half dozen vacant desks, at the criminal organization charts tacked to the wall, at piles of mug shots and fuzzy surveillance photos of mutts. There were posters of various pills, warning that “Speed Kills,” and observing that “Ecstasy. Isn’t.” A close-up of a woman’s ravaged face was blown up and framed above the base radio: she had no teeth, corroded pits in her face, and straggling hair balding from the front. Block handwriting read: “Don’t Forget Your Mom on Mother’s Day.” There was a blown up photograph of a pile of pink pills with interlocking Cs stamped into them and under the pills a question mark.
Off to the side were photographs with “Captain Cook Crew” printed above them. The top box showed a question mark over a happy face. Beneath it was a surveillance photograph of a long-haired, middle-aged man with a badly burned face. The man, identified as Philip Harvey, wore a long, black leather trench coat and sunglasses hooked into his sweater neck. He glared directly into the camera as he walked out of a strip club. A handwritten note read M/I/XV followed by a series of exclamation marks and the 24/7 phone number for the SWAT teams. The M/I stood for Mentally Incompetent, the XV stood for Extreme Violence. Branched off from the burned man were assorted