Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
to come up here …”
Djuna Brown said, “You don’t want Harv making that trip.”
“Hey, no. Frankie left, said he was meeting Harv to do something. He was going to be back today but he’s not back yet.”
“If I have to fucking come in there …”
Djuna Brown told Ray Tate to calm down. “Take it easy, man. She doesn’t know. Guy’s fucked off and left her in his shit.” She asked the girl her name. “We have to find him, Sherry. We have to find him or Harv’s going on the warpath. Did Frankie take off in the truck? That beauty F-250, double cab?”
The girl nodded.
“Did he take his piece?”
She nodded. “I think so. He just said there was something heavy he had to do down in the city for Harv and some guys. That him and Harv would come back and drop Frankie off, then Harv was going to keep the truck to go up north. Harv was gonna return it tonight and me and Frankie were going down to the city to drop Harv off and Harv was going to stand us a night out.”
“North? Where north?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Someplace, I guess.”
“Sherry, if we don’t find him, Harv’s gonna ask you where to find him instead.” Djuna Brown shook her head. “We don’t want that. We can get with Frankie and straighten it out, cool things with Harv. But we gotta find him, find Frankie. Where do you think this place is, north?”
“I dunno.” She thought. “A while ago, like last month, he had to go pick Harv up, up at Widow’s Corners, he said, take him down to the city. Harv needed a ride.”
Ray Tate said, “Widow’s what?”
“I know where it is,” Djuna Brown said. “Indian country.”
* * *
There was a Motel High halfway up to Widow’s Corners. Djuna Brown knew it. “Clean enough. No satellite, though. No pool. They’ll take the government card.”
“Yeah. We should stop and get a couple of rooms.” Ray Tate hoped the innocence on his face didn’t look too phony. “Rest up and poke around tomorrow.”
She smiled. “Sounds okay, Ray. There’s a bar attached to the place. I might go get myself some dinner and company for the night.”
“Yeah. Good idea. Me too.”
She stretched her arms up against the headliner of the four-by-four and groaned. “I need me a good old skinny white boy.” She put her hand on his leg. “I hope they still got the vibrating beds at the High.”
* * *
They put it off until after they’d had hamburgers and beer in the diner attached to the Motel High. She caught him giving her long looks then snickering as he looked away. She felt her own magic and amused herself when he was discussing tracking down Phil Harvey by making little movements of her mouth or lifting her eyebrows and breaking his chain of thought. It had been a long time since she’d played with anyone, since anyone had played with her.
For his part Ray Tate had butterflies. He’d forgotten how to introduce the idea of condoms on the first date but was glad he’d brought them. Like a lot of cops, when he was younger he’d talked a good game. But except for his wife and a couple of young women before her and one freckled policewoman afterwards, he found making a move had become antique to him. There were a few cops he knew who were hard-hearted motherfuckers, but most of them had soul, had a weird kind of romanticism that was always being thwarted.
The diner was ramshackle and neon bright and there was a constant ping of microwave ovens going off through the serving window to the kitchen. The hamburgers were shaped too perfectly to be handmade, the buns were steamed from frozen, the French fries were uniform and limp. Behind the counter a short-order cook knew every driver and customer who came in. He’d stared at Djuna Brown in her khanga hat but before he could say anything, Ray Tate had badged him and taken him aside to show him the photo of Phil Harvey.
“This guy, you seen him?”
“What kind of cops are you guys?”
“Not Staties or Feds, so don’t worry about it.”
The man studied the picture. “Yeah. Scarred up guy, right. It don’t show in this picture as bad as it is, but yeah he’s been in a couple times.”
“You know where he hangs out?”
The cook shook his head. “Nope. Wears a big fucking black leather coat. Came in, I guess, a month or so ago, first time I noticed him. Guy came and got him and they left.”
“The other times?”
“Well, you ain’t far behind him. Him and a blond guy came in today. Had a meal, like at noon, and left.”
“You see what they left in?”
“Nope. They was here, they was gone. Just like all of us, eh?”
“I guess. What about the other time, a month ago. You see what he left in?”
“Don’t recall. Dropped off first by an old geezer in a old, rusted beater. A pickup, I think. Grey?”
“You know the geezer?”
The cook looked around. “Well …”
“Hey, look. I don’t care about you or the geezer, whatever he is to you. I just want to catch up to this guy, see who’s who in the zoo.” He waited. “This is city work not state work, okay?”
“Geezer’s name is Paul. He’s got a problem, you know?” The cook touched the inside of his elbow. “He babysits a place up north a ways. Dunno where. There’s a lot of these old guys, old poachers, dudes from the city give ’em work.” The cook looked around. “Maybe something to do with drugs?”
“You think?” Ray Tate put a business card on the counter. “You see him again you call this number, okay? Maybe, if you get into the shit, you get a pass.”
He sat with Djuna Brown and told her what the cook had said.
A group of Indians came to the door and the short-order cook intercepted them with a baseball bat. He glanced at Ray Tate and Djuna Brown. The Indians looked. They stood outside shouting at the diner but eventually trudged off toward town in their thin denim jackets and construction boots. It was cold with a slow but steady wind down from Canada, feeling towards early winter, and they huddled closely together as they vanished in the darkness. Ray Tate thought they looked like a lost tribe and decided probably they were.
Djuna Brown watched them through the window. “Somebody’s got a lot to answer for in places like this, Ray. From here on up there’s nothing but this shit, these greed-head fucking Christians. Pray on Sunday, sell moonshine to the Indians the rest of the time.” She poured some beer into their glasses from the pitcher. “When I first came up, after training, they thought I’d last a week, maybe a month. Then they’d pour me out of the Spout. But the longer I stayed the more I liked it. I came to love it, like you love your little pieces of the city.”
He didn’t want to wait any longer before heading to their room. He didn’t want her to be in a sad place, a place that might thwart what he had in mind for them. But he realized he didn’t know much about her and hoped there were things he’d come to know, things she’d come to know about him. He realized he was thinking about his future, hers too, and that gave him the weightlessness of a revelation. She was only talking because he hadn’t asked. He’d talk about his dead black men but never if she asked him.
Djuna Brown heard herself, heard the tone of her voice. “Fuck it, Ray. This is our first date, right? You don’t want to know.”
“Sure,” he lied. “Sure I do.”
“Ray, lemme ask you one. All things being equal, which of course they’re not, what would you rather do? Go to the room and jam our