Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
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,