Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
in front of him. As he’d told her on the phone, he wore a striped rugby shirt. The place was packed with groups and couples but he’d saved her a stool by draping a scuffed leather jacket over it. A widescreen showed a satellite soccer game no one was watching. The sound was off and the players seemed to be dancing to the fiddle music blaring from speakers.
People stared at her bleached head and chocolate skin as she moved through the crowd with her hands jammed in the pockets of a blue warm-up jacket with drawstrings and a hood. Under it she wore a dark blue sweatshirt with faded writing on it, shapeless blue jeans, and battered, dirty sneakers.
Ray Tate stood when she reached him and greeted her with a hug. His hands roamed the back of her waistband, up the middle of her back, and he held her close against him.
“Hey, long time,” he said, smiling as though they were old friends. “You made it.” His hands lingered at her hips and fluttered at her shoulders. “You’re losing weight. You look great. You been working out or what?”
He took his jacket from the stool and she sat. The bartender came down the boards. Ray Tate looked at Djuna Brown and raised an eyebrow. She said gin and tonic. He nodded to the bartender. “And another half for me, Jimmy.”
She saw he was younger than he looked with the grey hair on his collar and hanging off his face. Mid-forties, maybe. He looked glad to see her. In spite of having the head of a bum, his body was thin and solid and his eyes were clear. Except for skipping off her face to check out who came in after her, he seemed to sparkle. She was wary. She didn’t like cops. She wished she’d called Gay-Glo and had someone come to monitor the meeting.
Jimmy put down the drinks and Ray Tate made a motion with his hand as though signing something. After the bartender went away he leaned in close and put his face by her ear as though romancing her. “Look, we’re going to sit here and have one. We’re gonna see who comes through the door for the next while, then we’ll go up on the patio for another round, smoke some smokes, and talk, okay? If you want, you can pat me down. That’s fair, because I’m going to have to pat you down again, for real. I want to talk to you. You can talk to me too, if you want. Or you can fuck off at any time. The drinks’re on me. Right now, we’re old pals on a date. Anything you want to talk about? Good movies? New bestsellers?”
In spite of his alley rat appearance, she could smell soap and shampoo off him. His breath was soft against her face, a mixture of toothpaste and stout. There were some fading blemishes on his neck that looked like the after-boil of insect pincers.
“What do you want?”
He shook his head. “Later. You reading the Harry Potter series? Good wizard action. Magic potions, flying stuff. My kid says she seen all the movies and the first one was the best. You think?” His eyes scanned the room behind her. “You got kids?”
She twisted her mouth at him and didn’t say anything.
“Hey, there’s test tubes and stuff. You don’t want to miss out. How’d you feel about stem cell research? Now, there’s an ethical issue. Science bumps up against morality. I’ve listened to Bush and the other guys, but myself, I haven’t sorted out all the —”
“Look, let’s just get this done, okay? I don’t know why you set this up. I don’t know who sent you, or why. I’m not comfortable. I don’t give a fuck about stem cells. I don’t give a fuck about Harry fucking Potter. I don’t like being felt up in a bar and, mostly, I don’t like racists.”
He wasn’t listening to her words. The sound of her voice was lilting, a bit of the Islands in there, perfect pronunciation. He could tell she was apprehensive but curious. “Okay,” he said, shrugging into his jacket, “let’s drain ’em and get ’er done. See where we’re at.”
* * *
They paused on the stairway to the rooftop patio and he gave her a more thorough pat-down. He ran his fingers around the base of her ruined bleached hair. There were loose valiums in her handcuff case and she wore her gun, a nifty little automatic, over her right hip. He offered to let her do him. She poked indifferently and he could tell she didn’t know what she was doing or didn’t care. The patio was vacant except for four smokers huddled at the far end against the cool night breezes. A waitress, hugging herself by a serving station, looked unhappy to see them arrive. Ray Tate ordered another G&T and half a dark.
Djuna Brown sat opposite him at the empty side of the patio. He saw her shiver and took his jacket off. Without consultation he draped it over her shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t know what to say so she gave him a simmering look. The umbrellas shimmered in the breezes. Above them the ambient light of the city sky was silvery. Traffic noises rose from the bum side of Stonetown. The waitress brought their drinks and left and the four smokers clattered down the steps.
He held his hand out. “I’m Ray Tate.”
“The guy that’s gonna spike me, right?” She looked at his hand out over the table and finally took it. “Or shoot me.”
“I’m not going to talk about shooting people. I’m not going to talk about racism. You’re not going to talk about beating cops with sticks. We’re not going to talk about you being a dyke. I don’t care about any of that, and you shouldn’t either. We’re going to talk about being partners.”
“Bonus.” She looked at his bland face. “Not much left, then, to talk about.”
“Well,” he said, “we could talk about fucking up the skipper.”
She was interested but cautious. “And how’d we do that?”
“By doing our job.” He looked at her raised eyebrow and studied her face. She was actually quite attractive under the white frizz. She had long catlike eyes, high cheekbones, and a pointed little chin. Her teeth were small and even. Stress and maybe hatred had worked into her face, giving it a mean repose, making her lips halfway to a twist. Her hand, when it had been in his, was small but strong and firm, and he knew someone had taught her how to shake hands. Her body, when he’d given her the pat-down, had some long muscle.
He got up and went around the table. She shrank back from his hand. “I just want my smokes.” He dug in the jacket, found a pack of Marlboros and a lighter, and went back to his seat. He formally offered her one then lit them both.
She suddenly looked afraid. Politeness was antique to her. “I called Gay-Glo. Just so you know. People know I’m with you right now. If anything happens to me, it’s documented.”
“Gay-Glo.” He shook his head. “Whatever. Relax. I’m going to talk for a while, then if you want to talk you can, okay?”
She stared at him, silent.
“Okay. We’re both fucked. You’re never going to be a working cop again, I’m never going to be a working cop again. Our lives as we know them are over. The skipper wants me to bury your ass. Probably, he’s told you the same thing: bury my ass. I don’t know. If I sink you, he says, I’m on my way back to the streets, riding around, doing the job. I don’t know what, if he promised you anything, and I got to say I doubt it, I don’t know what he promised you.”
“Nothing. I don’t talk to the fucker.”
“Sure. It doesn’t matter, anyway. As long as we’re partners working in the office, there’s no real problem. We can both be careful around each other. That’s cool. But if we go outside and do stuff, well, there’s a lot of things that can happen and the only two people who’ll know what happened is the guy that did it and the guy that saw it. You want to think about that.”
She stared at his friendly, expectant eyes. “You think that’s why he partnered us? One of us is a rat, going to eat up the other?”
“Most people, they look at something and they say to themselves, what would I do in that situation? The skipper, being what he is, assumes he’s normal, so he looks at what he’d do and expects anyone else to do the same normal thing. I’d rat, he figures, so they will too.”
“So,