Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
his silver fluted revolver. Any bent Chinaman in the east Chinatown would pay a buck each, easy. That was half the going rate for bulk but for Harvey it was all profit. Another mad bout of chemistry and magic and he could get to a hundred thousand. They all had lightning bolts on them. They were all a bright pink. He’d have to be careful the Chinamen didn’t rip him but there were fallbacks and ways to prevent any Chinatown gambit.
He’d do the grab for Connie Cook Thursday night, move the victim up to the farmhouse to await Connie’s arrival. The transit would be done in a rental van. While he was waiting for Connie he’d be the crazy cartoon chemist. When Connie arrived to claim his prize, Harv would give him the bad news: goodbye. He’d disable whatever vehicle Connie came up in and would leave in the van. He’d become really fond of the fat pervert and planned to send someone up to the farm to rescue him.
An old farm wagon pulled by a tractor came rattling down the road. Harv had a minor thunderbolt: what if I was him and he was me?
For a moment there was a cloud of snow across the fields then it was gone. It meant something and he reached for it but it eluded him. Maybe we’re all snowflakes and life is when a wind blows us alive, briefly, until our season ends? Far off clouds edged down over the lake from Canada.
Christ, he thought, I’m tired. The click and hum of the tablet-pressing machine was still in his body rhythm. His shoulder ached.
An Xterra came down the road and passed, a clean-cut guy in the passenger seat consulting a map. Harv couldn’t see who was driving. But it passed and didn’t pause.
Agatha Burns had been mortified that she’d sucked his burned fingers, licked his glistening cheek. He’d never met a real victim before in his life. Everyone asked for it in some way. Being too young and born beautiful, where was the crime in that?
I’m sorry, Harv, for what he made me do. I just want you to know that.
He closed his eyes for a minute and recalled the exact moment, the exact sound of her voice.
He opened his eyes, smiling.
The Xterra was full across the front of the pickup. A black woman in a stupid hat was leaning on the passenger side door, smiling tensely back at him with her hand under her leather jacket and a pistol half-drawn. A clean-cut guy with a gun in his hand, pointing it at Harv’s windshield, stood a couple of feet off his front fender.
The woman called, “Don’t move.”
At the same time the man called, “Put your hands on the wheel.”
Harvey didn’t know what to do.
He heard the man call, “Oh, fuck. Hang on, Harv. Djuna, you do it.”
“Okay.” She called, “Hands on the wheel, Harv.”
Harvey heard them laugh.
The clean-cut guy said, “Well, that was professional.”
The woman laughed and said something that sounded like, “Rongobongo.”
Harvey tentatively put his hands at the top of the steering wheel, expecting to absorb a bullet.
The black woman with her gun fully out came up alongside the passenger side, not crossing the white guy’s field of fire. She jerked the passenger door open. “Sorry about that, Harv. We don’t arrest a lot of people. Conflicting directions can lead to tragedy. They taught us that. Is that right, Ray? Clarity is your friend?”
The white guy had come up the driver’s side while she was talking. He was smiling. “Yep, otherwise: heap bad medicine.” He had the driver’s door open and Harvey by the back of the collar of his leather coat and on the ground even as Harvey mentally put bleached blond hair on her head and a dripping beard down the white guy’s face.
“Lawyer.” His shoulder ached from the impact and as he waited for the handcuffs he flexed his wrists so there’d be some slack when they were secured, even if they were tightened up. The man patted him down and Harv heard the depressing clank of cuffs. The woman said something and after a moment the guy didn’t handcuff him.
“Fucking lawyer.”
The woman rounded the front of the pickup. “Harv, Harv. Don’t be like that. You can trust us, man, we’re not like all the others.” She seemed positively gay to meet him.
“Lawyer.”
The white guy said, “Maybe later. Right now I could really use a coffee. It’s been a long day. You up for a coffee, Harv?”
“Law-fucking-yer.”
“Okay, if you’re sure. But we haven’t arrested you or anything. We’re just saying: let’s get a coffee. You don’t have to talk. You haven’t done anything wrong, right? We’ll talk, you just listen.”
“If I’m not busted, then I’m walking.”
The white cop shrugged. “Then we’ll arrest you and that means no coffee for you. Whatever.”
Harvey climbed to his feet. “I’m not talking.”
The black woman said, “Cool-ee-oh. Most people in your position, in my experience, they just fucking talk themselves into trouble. Right, Ray? Blah blah blah and the next thing you know they’re behind the pipes, going, Fuuuuck, how stupid am I?” She ran her hand lightly over his pockets. “You ever notice, Harv, how there’s not many mute people doing time? Think about that, buddy.”
The white cop nodded. “Tell you what, Harv, let’s go for a cup of coffee. We’ll leave the pickup here. When we’re done, we’ll fuck off and go about our business, you can go about yours.”
Harvey looked from one to the other. “What’s this about?”
“Well,” Ray Tate said, “at first we thought it was about murder. But it turns out maybe you didn’t put Agatha Burns in the ground after all. Maybe. Now it’s about a great fat fucking master criminal and pills with double Cs on them.”
“You talk, I walk? That’s it?”
“Unless you confess to something outrageous and we have to arrest you for it.”
Djuna Brown said, “My advice, Harv? Listen first and then if you really want to, maybe you can say something. Maybe. But I have to tell you, I’d be really fucking careful.” She leaned towards him and whispered: “This guy? This partner o’mine? I think he’s a rope smoker, high all the time, looking to just get laid and watch a parade.” She snickered. “I think we both better be careful of this guy, you and me, pal.”
* * *
Ray Tate kept his gun in his jacket pocket and his hand on the gun. He didn’t belt himself into the Xterra and sat slightly sideways, facing Djuna Brown as she drove, but keeping an eye on Harv sitting in the middle of the back seat. The intelligence file on Phil Harvey put him as a suspect in at least two homicides. The cop in him wished he’d chained Harvey up but he recognized Djuna Brown was developing a nice style of her own and she’d at least made Harv smile.
They found a coffee shop in a little hamlet where the state road ran under the Interstate. There were baskets of new potatoes, autumn melon, and herbs near the cash register. A man reading a Minneapolis newspaper looked surprised to see them. He stared at Phil Harvey in his bat coat. The place was empty and he told them to sit anywhere. They sat at the farthest table from the entrance and said nothing until after they’d been served mugs of coffee. Harvey sat with his back to the door, Djuna Brown and Ray Tate facing him.
Djuna Brown took off her khanga hat and ran her fingers through her spiky hair. She stirred her coffee. “I gotta ask you one, Harv, nothing to do with why we’re following you around the countryside. That, there, on your face. That’s gotta hurt, right?”
Phil Harvey looked at her closely and raised his eyebrows slightly but said nothing.
“No, Harv. That came out wrong. What I mean is, I mean, I knew it hadda hurt when it happened, but now? Do you ever forget it’s