Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
of Frankie Chase’s head.
He felt very sad.
Chapter 21
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown decided to take advantage of the leeway the case had given them. They checked out a black Xterra and headed first to her place so she could pack a bag. He sat outside her leafy duplex and watched her go by the window, the inside lamps making a slim, flitting shadow. He felt like a schoolboy. When she came down she was wearing a bright khanga hat, a short, brown leather jacket, blue jeans, and had dumped her slippers for ankle boots and zany leggings. When she leaned to sling her bag into the back seat he made a show of checking out her butt. He saw the exposed tip of the barrel of her little automatic in its clamshell holster and her handcuff case.
In the four-by-four he drove the few blocks to his place. He told her she was looking like a hot beatnik chick and she gave him a smile.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Ray? I bet you didn’t get laid a lot when you were younger. Right? This is all free-form jazz.”
“Free-form jazz?”
“Yep. You’re just hitting the notes and hoping you find a riff that makes sense. Smokehouse romance.” She put her hand on his leg. “I can tell you this: you maybe got a shot, Bongo, okay? Don’t work so hard.”
He sat back, pleased, and pulled into the driveway of his apartment building. Upstairs he realized all he had was his uniform in plastic and piles of bum clothing. He quickly tried on a pair of blue jeans but it had been months since he’d been exiled into the wilderness and stress and bugs had eroded him; the jeans sagged and gaped and he bound them with the second last hole on his belt. He found the union sweatshirts and windbreaker they’d given him at the sector and a threadbare sweater, and some socks and underwear and stuck them into a gym bag; he added the bottle of gin from under the sink. At the door he looked around at his pathetic pad. Since the second shooting his life, he realized, had been about free-form jazz. Unplanned. Undirected. Without discernable melody.
Before leaving he went into the washroom and found a package of condoms his freckly policewoman had left behind.
When he came out in his sagging Levis, Djuna Brown was behind the wheel, laughing. “Jesus, Ray, you look like a prisoner of war.”
She slid her handcuff case around onto her hip and slipped her clamshell holster off her spine and put it in the console. She belted up and made sure he did too.
Just north of the city she pulled into a huge Wal-Mart and Ray Tate went in to buy some pants and a jacket. She prowled through the glove compartment and when he came out of the Wally’s she held up a plastic card.
“Bingo, Bongo. An all-in credit card. This must be one of the Fed’s vehicles.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “With this, man, we can head all the way west, set up on the coast, and live the beatnik life. By the time the bills come in and they catch on, this fucker’ll be buffed flat.”
“First, Djun’, we have to torture Frankie, then take down Phil Harvey, the Captain, and the lab. Back up a shitload of pills into the skipper’s office. Then we have to make sure we didn’t make any mistakes. Then we either get fired or we get buried.” He stretched and yawned. “Except for all that, we’re on our way.”
She drove back onto the Interstate and made a bubble around herself, flicking her eyes to the rear- and side-view mirrors every minute or so. He dialed in a Chicago radio station and locked it in, then went looking for a Canadian lite-rock program he liked to listen to at night. He went back to the Chi-town station and caught some sweet Butterfield: “Baby I’m just driftin’ and driftin’, like a ship out on the sea …”
She eased over onto an exit ramp and left the Interstate. She seemed to know where she was going. There were little wooden signs pointing ahead, naming half a dozen towns. He saw Porterville had been defaced to read Por Ville.
“This your old turf, Djun’?”
“No. A little further north. Indian country. It gets very weird up there very fast, once you go couple of hours on. Lots of work, especially Saturday nights. But, you know, sometimes …”
“What?”
“Sometimes …” She clamped her mouth and wouldn’t let herself speak. Then she simply said, “Sometimes … not.” She thought of limp bodies hanging from trees like summer pods, of children huffing gasoline and dying with their faces crusted with vomit, of vicious domestic disputes fuelled by alcohol, and dead husbands and wives and lovers gutted like autumn deer.
But there were mornings, too, rumbling out of the mini-barracks in her huge Ford into a new sunrise, of doing walk-arounds and coming back to the truck to discover blanketed elders blowing smoke into the truck’s grill because they knew she was as different as they were from the white cops who patrolled their community like they were troops stationed in a foreign war of pacification. The smoke was for safety, someone said, a blessing. She thought about young men coming into the barracks office after making sure she was alone on shift and bringing haunches of venison and careful instructions for preparing it. Of massive trout wrapped in moss and newspapers, already gutted but with the head still attached. She taught the giggling girls about their periods, the shy boys about condoms. She had her dad put together a shipment of books and paints and sewing supplies and send them up.
She wanted to tell Ray Tate about all that and more. She wanted to tell him about how she got the dyke jacket and why she wore it. She said: “We’re here.”
* * *
Frank Chase lived in a leaning single-storey house just outside Porterville. A cannibalized old Harley was in pieces on the lawn. There were two fridges with the doors removed, laying flat on the patchy grass and a stove by the side of the house, behind them a stack of old wood and curly tails of barbed wire fencing. A sign with the silhouette of a revolver on it warned of dogs but suggested dealing with the dog was preferable to running into the owner. There was a Confederate flag tacked over the living room window.
“No F-250,” Ray Tate said. “Maybe nobody home.”
Djuna Brown rounded the street near the house. Through the rear window they could see a woman in a cloud of steam at a stove, the window cranked open in spite of the cold late afternoon. The woman had long, straight, jet-black hair and looked Native. She wore a plaid shirt and was beautiful, even at twenty yards. She seemed to be singing or speaking with someone. Periodically she reached out of sight and pinched up a thick joint, taking massive inhales.
They drove back around the front. Mindful of the dog warning, Ray Tate took his gun from his boot and put it into his jacket pocket. Djuna Brown removed hers from the console and clipped it behind her back. They weaved their way through the junk on the walk and the lawn onto the porch.
“How we going to do this, Ray? Cops or mutts?”
“Well, Djun’, how about free-form jazz?” He pounded on the door. “We’ll play it off her face.”
She was nervous. “Cool-ee-oh.”
To ease her, he said, “But if the dog answers the door, it’s every dyke for themself.”
She was smiling but stopped when the door opened. She saw the Native woman was a girl, seventeen maybe, and absolutely beautiful. She had bare, bruised legs beneath the plaid shirt that exposed hickies on her neck, and she had high cheekbones and placid features but her eyes were stoned and panicked. “Yes? What?” She looked at each of them. “What do you want?”
She looked like a victim. Ray Tate took his role. “Where’s that motherfucker?”
“Who? Hey, who are you?” She looked over their shoulders to see what they’d come in. “What do you want?”
“Frankie Frankie Frankie. Where the fuck’s Frankie?”
“He’s out someplace. I don’t know.”
“He was supposed to be someplace and he didn’t show up. So, where’s he? He in there?” Ray Tate