Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
stick. He quits and she hangs in for a month or so but the farm boys and their wives complain. She’s down to the Capitol, shuffling paperwork. Then the Feds start up Gordo’s task force and next thing, she’s seconded down here, driving him nuts.”
Ray Tate thought a moment. “I’m partnering with her. They want me to put her down. Could be that she’s out to get me? Get out from under her own stuff?”
The inspector hummed. “The word down here, Ray, is that the mayor wants you out. You and all the other city guys working chemicals. You want to be careful, in word and deed. You know? There’s a lot of opportunity to fuck up, a lot of loose cash floating around you can stub your toe on.”
“Thanks.”
“Ah, Ray? Is it interesting that they’re partnering you up with a black without breaking your trigger finger first?”
Ray Tate called a half dozen sergeants and duty sergeants. The Chemical Squad, they all agreed, was a shooting gallery where cracked city guys were always in season and you could take your limit. There were warnings about Gordo the skipper and commiseration about being partnered with a psycho Statie dyke.
He called a sniper on the Statie tactical shooters he’d done some training with and listened to a lot of funny stories about Indian country.
* * *
Djuna Brown took a photocopy of the skipper’s memo home with her. She filed it in a folder stuffed with other sheets of paper. A dated and signed trail of slights, of conflicting orders, of her mileage and hours worked down to the minute. There were the scrawled notes she’d found on her desk, many of them calling her a dyke, a rug muncher, and an all around generic bitch. There were racist cartoons. There were flyers advertising gay revues in the Rainbow Valley. There was a computer-enhanced picture of her face printed over a girl going down on a grossly fat black woman, her tongue a foot long. There were digital pictures she’d taken of used condoms left on her office chair, glued to her desk drawer. There were licence numbers of cars she’d found suspiciously parked near her apartment.
Another folder, much slimmer, contained commendations, atta boy memos, and newspaper clippings: high profile arrests up in Indian country, saving a Native baby from a burning trailer, running a self-defence class for at-risk children, a sex-ed class for teenage girls.
Her duplex was within walking distance of the satellite. She kept her head down as her slippers trudged the same hills Ray Tate had gone up and down a few hours earlier, past the same cemetery. She didn’t stop for a cup of leisurely coffee, she didn’t look at the streets as though she were meeting old friends. She bought some yogurt at a convenience store, allowed herself to buy a pack of Marlies.
In her living room she ate the yogurt without interest and waited until six o’clock to pour a gin and tonic. By seven o’clock she was smoking continuously and weaving a little through the duplex, straightening up, avoiding looking at herself in the mirror.
The Gay-Glo association after-hours hotline was picked up on the first ring. “Dee-joon,” the woman, a perpetually bitter former patroller, sang, “you gonna join up with the folks who love you? Make your voice heard?”
“Soon, I think, Haze. I’m okay,” she said softly, making her voice wistful. “So far.”
The Glo wanted Djuna Brown with a vengeance. She hit all the right notes: female, dyke, black, some Chinese, and a Statie. It was widely known that she’d been harassed, both physically and sexually, and had fought back. There were no Staties in the Glo, they were barracked across the rural portions of the state.
“So, what can I do for you, sister?”
“You know this city guy, Ray Tate?”
“The gunner? Sure, he shot a black guy back, oh, before you came down here. He got away with it. So then he shot another one about a year ago. Got away with that one, too. They’re protecting him, keeping him out of sight until they can bring him back.” Hazel was tapping into her computer. The Gay-Glo had its own little intelligence network. It collected slights and troop movements, helped its members avoid traps, to step around the machinations of the homophobic thugs at the Swamp. “What’s up with Ray Tate? You hear something on him?”
“They put me with him today. Any chance he’s a rat? Or should I just be worried that he’ll put one in my queer black ass?”
“Whew. That guy, anything’s possible. You want to write everything down, like you write the other stuff. Tape what you can. It would be nice to be the ones that put the hat on him, drag him before the governor’s review board. But be careful, okay?” She paused, revealing the tap of typing. “Look, I’m going to put this stuff into a file, okay? If something happens to you, we want it documented that they put you with a racist killer, in an at-risk situation.”
“Sure.”
“Perfect. You, ah, seeing anybody? We’re having a meeting tomorrow night, why don’t we have dinner first? Go out after, have a drink. Strategize. Girl talk.”
“Let me see how tomorrow goes, Haze. I might just take you up on it.” Djuna Brown hung up and shuddered. Before she could take her hand off the receiver the phone rang.
A man’s voice asked if she was Trooper Brown.
She said she was and reached to flick on the tape recorder.
“Did you ever, like, want to be a cop?”
She didn’t ask who it was. “I am a cop.”
“You’re a problem. You’re a target. If you want out, just get them to cut you a deal, take the package and move to San Francisco or something. Open a rainbow bookstore. Quit fucking around.”
She didn’t recognize the voice. There was no attempt to deepen it or disguise it. She played light. “I don’t run.”
“Do you drink?”
“Who is this? What do you want?”
“Well,” the voice said, “I’m Ray Tate. I’m the guy hired to spike you into the ground.”
Chapter 5
Phil Harvey wouldn’t go into Agatha Burns’s apartment building. He called her on the cell and told her to come out the back entrance, to bring the stuff down herself, not to use the muscleman in the stairwell or to let him know she was going out. He said he’d keep an eye on the packages as she made as many trips as it took. He told her not to use the phone, not to call out, not to answer it. From here on, he said, her training began.
He waited in his black Camaro, bubbling the engine while he watched traffic move through the winding streets of the South Project. He was parked where he could see the rear entrance but couldn’t be seen by the moneyman on the ground floor patio or be captured by the security cameras in the lobby.
He looked at his hands clutching the steering wheel. Grey, glistening waves of burns disappeared under the sleeves of his beige cotton jacket. He wouldn’t wear nylon: nylon, when it burned, stuck to you like napalm. You couldn’t get it off. If you pulled it off, your flesh came with it, like pulling off a glove inside out. Sometimes the fingernails came off. Phil Harvey had four fingernails left and he kept them immaculate, although nobody noticed.
His face hadn’t suffered as much as his hands, but it was pretty bad on the right side. Tissue had been eaten away. His left ear was a gnarled nub. He wore his grey-streaked, black hair very long, below his shoulders, to hide the angry nub, tying it back in a ponytail when he had to work, loosening it into a curtain he could hide behind when he was in public. Hair burned too but didn’t smell half as bad as the pig roast cloud of fire that rose when your flesh melted in a flash fire. When he’d been a young speeder he never thought he’d be a middle-aged man with an Ozzy Osbourne hairdo. He knew the bikers out in the badlands called him Pork Chop behind his back.
It was about dues. Paying ’em, playing ’em, he believed.
When Agatha Burns appeared at the rear door of the apartment building, dragging