Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
old place. Couple of guys out there, cruising mutts’ hangouts, ready to move if something breaks out. We’ve got to freshen up the statewide hit on Harv. Me and Djuna are going to shape out Agatha.”
“Two weeks?”
“Yep. Two weeks we’ll back up a shitload of pills to your door, bring in Captain Cook in chains.”
Wally Brodski stuck his head in the door and looked at each of them as though he suspected he was the target of a conspiracy. He had brightly coloured feathered fishing flies hooked into his shirtfront. His tie was a long silkscreened trout. “Skip? I’m taking a medical off. My ulcer’s on fire. I can’t do the night trick.”
* * *
Djuna Brown took some hours to rest up for her sudden night shift. Ray Tate asked Gloria to scan the photo of Phil Harvey into her computer and make a half-dozen prints. When they were ready he checked out a Taurus and ran through the spots, his rover dialed to the local police grids, hoping for a call he could legitimately respond to. He got a quick crush on a dispatcher, loved her cool litany. She made gunshot sound like a sex act.
He drove with his elbow out. The autumn air had a sharp wintry chill and the brief snow had stopped. On the edge of Stonetown he came across two chargers tussling with a large Native panhandler on the sidewalk. He jammed the Taurus and got half out, but the chargers had the guy under control. The both looked about fifteen years old and he’d bet they didn’t have five years on the job between them. But they were out and about and learning their trade. One of them looked up and somehow recognized the drab Taurus and a cop through the facial hair. He gave Tate a thumbs-up then ran his hand horizontally as though smoothing water: Hey, everything’s okay. Ray Tate continued to cruise, taking the long way around up to his first stop, Phil Harvey’s condo.
Bernie Gross sat in a pickup truck behind the building, sprawled across the seat, his rover off and his head crammed at an awkward angle against the passenger door. His feet stuck out the window and the floor was covered with food wrappings, beer cans, and fishing magazines. There was a mom-and-pop shop around the corner and Ray Tate went on foot and brought back two coffees.
“Bernie, Bernie. Wake-up time. C’mon, man. Fuck, look at this mess.”
Bernie came around slowly. “Ray. Ray Tate, the last policeman. How we doing? We arresting anybody yet?” He straightened up and reached for the coffee.
Ray Tate stepped back with the cups. “Come out, Bernie. You come out to drink it. Stand up, man.” He felt a huge sadness. There was almost nothing left on the job between the fifteen-year-old uniformed kids wrestling bums and this great fat slob, once a good cop, counting the minutes until he hit the big pension. There was stuff in Bernie’s head and his heart that could fashion great cops of green kids, could create a lineage for generations to come. But Bernie had made a wrong move someplace and he gave up. His career was now a cycle of the brown jobs: court wagons, couriering, counting paper clips.
Bernie got his huge body out of the pickup. His upper face sat on an inverted pyramid of jowl. His eyes were shot red with dull, general hatred. “Okay, gimme.”
“Any action?”
“There’s no fucking target. They told me to sit on this place, so I’m sitting. Dunno who to watch for. What the fuck is this? If this is the new American policing, I missed the memo.” The coffee cup lid wasn’t secure and Bernie spilled coffee down the front of his fat shirt. He ignored it. “Wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know? This job used to be a religion for the guys, most of them anyway. Now, well, look at you. Two good shoots, two mutts go toes up — two less to bust later. And instead of giving you a medal they’re out to hack your ass with that dyke twat. Why you hanging in? Fuck them and their community outreach. You got the twenty-five in. Come fishing with me and Wally. We got a guy buying us a fishing camp up in Canada.”
Ray Tate took an envelope of prints from the Taurus and handed Bernie the photograph of Phil Harvey. “Black Camaro. This guy with the burns on his face. Or a big fat guy with a branding iron, going ‘Giddy-up.’”
Bernie took the photo without looking at it and sailed it into the pickup. “This is fucked, you know, Ray? They’re just lining us up and the skip is gonna knock us down. But,” Bernie made a wise face, “but two more weeks, Ray, and I got my time in. I’m fucking gone so fucking fast my fucking shadow’ll still be on the fucking wall for a fucking week and those cocksuckers can kiss my ass. You like bass fishing? This place we’re buying in Ontario, oh you gotta see this place.”
“You’ll make it, Bernie. No problem.” He took his coffee and left Bernie leaning against his pickup, slurping and thinking about angling some bass.
Bernie terrified him.
He wondered if that’s how it happened: you pretend to not give a shit and go on long bird rambles and nobody notices. Before you know it you’re sleeping in a pickup truck covered in candy wrappers, counting the days to a very long fishing season and not giving the shit you used to pretend not to give.
* * *
At Agatha Burns’s stash apartment in the Hauser South projects, Tate could find no signs of surveillance set up. He voiced out on the air and got nothing back. He went to the ground floor patio where the money man worked. The glass doors showed the place had been cleaned out but the former resident had left several lumps of dog shit scattered around and a bag of clothes pegs. The lock on the side fire door was still jammed and he stood in the stairwell and listened, sipping his coffee. No sounds. Climbing the stairways he kept his gun in his hand, craning out to look up where the keeper with the scattergun had been. At Agatha Burns’s apartment the signs of the forensic collection were long gone. The door was locked and no one answered when he thumped. He trudged down the stairs.
Outside, the boneless black guy was sniffing around the Taurus. He recognized Tate’s hair and beard with the wave of a can of beer. His gold chain hung down to his waist. Plastic bags appeared from the bottom of his baggy pant cuffs and slipped onto the pavement.
Ray Tate nodded in a friendly manner. “Hey, player, who’s around?”
“They all gone. Just us folks here, now. Took that ugly ass fucking dog with them. Where your ho go?”
“Where’d they go? They set up someplace else around here?” Ray Tate waited. “You dropped something.”
“Me? No, not me. I’ll clean ’em up for you, you want.”
“Do that, would you? I’d hate for some kid to find them, get curious. Where’d they go? The guys from here?”
The man put his big running shoe over the plastic bags. He shrugged. “Big pickup truck took ’em away a couple of weeks ago. After you was here. Where that ho? She got a man? She need a player?”
“Tell me about the pickup.” Ray Tate realized the guy was mentally ill, that his cool jerks were the result of medication fouled by alcohol, not some inner hip hop. A puppet for the local traffickers, a feeble goof they stood up to attract the heat. Ray Tate doubted the plastic bags contained anything but talc. The clunky gold chain was chipping, he could see, showing dull lead underneath. “What did it look like? Who was driving it?”
“Black thing. Lots of silver. White guy with blond girlie hair came.”
“Not the guy with the bacon face?”
“Him, no. He come here, he stay here, you know? You be taking his fried chicken ass out of this project with a spoon.” The man started to get angry. “I’d shove that silver bad boy right up his skinny hippie ass, he bring that cooked mutton motherfucker face in front of this player.” He calmed himself with a swallow of beer and nodded. “They took the ugly dog in the back of the truck, the ugly motorcycle motherfucker with the scatter.”
“You see the scatter?”
“He had it under his coat. Cut down the pipes real short so the shells stick out. Whoo, tough white boy. Fuck. You ho, where’s that girl of yours at with that old lady hair on her pretty head?”
Ray