Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
the interlocking Cs. We grabbed up a bunch of them on some dealers, but no one’s copped where they came from.” The skipper pointed to the photograph of the pile of pink pills. “That’s the logo. One of the mutts said it stood for Captain Cook.”
“Could be Cook County, over Chicago way.”
“Naw, the Captain Cook thing has come up a couple of times since we first heard about it.”
“We got any intell on the guy?”
The skipper shook his head. “We don’t got dick. People are talking about him, though. The hydroponics guys took down a farm out in the badlands and somebody said it was Captain Cook’s. A crank lab in the hills, same thing: Captain Cook’s. Could just be a nickname, you know? Like he’s a cooker, so they call him Cook.” The skipper stared at the photograph of the pile of pink pills. “Fuck it, Ray. Take the day. Come in in the morning, at eight or nine, unless we give you a call out.”
“No problem, skip. But sign my notebook out, okay? I know you’re not going to put the hat on me, but if they come looking to rub admin shit on my head, I don’t want you caught in the middle, things go for a shit at the Swamp.”
“Good thinking, I appreciate that. We got to look out for each other,” the skipper said. “Leave your coordinates with Gloria at the desk.”
Chapter 3
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