Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
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all of us.”
The skipper stared at the beaming eyes behind the grey beard. Taking down Captain Cook and the dyke and Ray Tate would be a hat trick. While the douchebag was out splashing in shit, Tate would be right there beside her, getting a little on his shoes. A hat trick would get the skipper noticed down at the Swamp where all the goodies were being dealt out in the Big Chan’s fan tan game. Not being noticed was worse than not sticking your head up, even if you were fucking things up. If you fucked up under the Chan regime you hung in there anyway, maybe be a hero in the next dynasty.
“Done. Very nice, Ray. We’re gonna work out just fine. If you get her for me, what do you want?” He looked troubled. “A bump? To duty sergeant, when all this stuff passes? I got to be honest with you: I can try but I can’t promise.”
“Nothing, skip. The blue suit, the round hat, and the red lights over my head. You’ll never fucking see me again.”
“Okay. How you want to do it?”
“Soft. Just memo us both to set up on this Captain guy, give us some room and some time, and we’ll have her zipped in a body bag in no time. Maybe get Captain Cook too, if he’s real.”
“I can’t give you paper on this thing, Ray, what we’re doing to take her down. If it gets to the fags at Gay-Glo we’re all in the shit. I’ll make verbals to the brass about what I’ve got you doing, but that’s it. You okay with that?”
Ray Tate sipped his coffee and stood up. “Hey, skip, fuck, come on. If I can’t trust another copper, who can I trust?”
* * *
They were meticulous in their notebooks. Time in and time out, the memo number when they received the skipper’s memo to set up on Captain Cook, the serial numbers of their cellphones were written in each other’s books, the assignment number of their rovers. They signed out a company car, noting who gave them the keys and at what time. They noted the mileage on the leased Intrepid and that she was driving and he was the shotgun.
The red Intrepid was a Federal lease with a radio hidden in the dash behind a false-front CD player, a red gumball on the dash, and a sign that thanked you for not smoking. Djuna Brown tossed the gumball on the floor and the non-smoking ticket out the window. She lit a cigarette, pulled out onto Huron Street, and headed for the Hauser South Projects. “What’d he say? We’re working, right?”
“We be. I’m supposed to tempt you into malfeasance, make you fall in with evil company.” He dropped the false front of the CD player and dialed in channels to the city divisions. He had dried paint crusted around his fingernails and worked at them with a penknife, glancing up every few seconds to read the street.
“But you won’t, right?”
“Nope. Like I told the skipper, if you can’t trust a copper, who can you trust?”
“What’s with the paint, there, on your hands? You redecorating?”
“Yeah. Change of scene, change of pace.”
She gave him a catlike grin. “Right. Purple. It’s the new black.”
“Tell me about this chick we’re seeing. That knows this Cook guy.”
“She said she works for a guy running some labs. I just started working on her, so when we get up there I’ll go it alone, see how it shakes out. Anyway, it was one of those things. I was getting a prescription filled and the pharmacist caught her down behind the counter, jamming cold pill bottles into her pockets. I pinched her and while we were waiting for prisoner transport I give her a pat-down. She’s got two of these little pills, double Cs on them. She freaks a little and she says she can give me somebody’s stash if I let her go.” She shrugged. “I waved off the pick-up cruiser and spoke to the pharmacist. He was cool, so I took her to a Seattle’s for coffee.”
Unwillingly, Ray Tate took a glance at her.
“Get your mind out of the gutter. We just had coffee and out of the blue I asked her about this Captain Cook guy whose pills she got. She just about shit. How you know about him, she said. She said she didn’t know him and if she had said she did know him, she didn’t really say it. See, she was flying low when she was boosting, forgot what she’d already told me. So I said, Look, you just told me you knew him, he was your pal. She said, I said that? I said, Yup. She said, Okay, so you know. Then she clammed about him but said if I wanted a pinch there was a guy bringing a bag of pills to an apartment building up in Hauser South that evening. So I kick her and went up there and there was a jittery guy with a bag going in the fire door. He comes out later with nothing. He goes to a ground floor patio and a guy sitting there with a big fucking pooch hands him some coin. My guy leaves and I take him out there, lose him in the projects. I go back to sit and bingo, another guy goes in. Same thing. White guy with a bag. A mutt. He’s in and he’s out. Sees the guy with the dog, gets some dough, and he’s away. I’m going, whoa.”
Ray Tate laughed and shook his head. “Holy fuck. I can’t believe you just said all that. There’s a guy and a bag and a guy with a dog and fucked if I know what all else you said.”
She smiled. “I know. They had me at the capital listening to wiretaps before they kicked me down here. I picked up the rhythm.” She made an Italian accent softened by Caribbean breezes. “Hey, you know that fuh-kin guy, hangs around with the guy with the red fuh-kin hair, you fuh-kin know, with the guy that’s always fuh-kin moochin’? Well, go see that guy, not the redhead guy or the mooch, but the other fuck, the first fuck, you know?” She steered the Intrepid into an illegal left under the Interstate, ignoring a cloud of horns. “It’s a wonder how those mutts get anything done, how they understand each other.”
“So,” Ray Tate was laughing, “this chick.”
“Right. I’m back at the Hauser South building a couple days later and she comes creeping out the fire door. I bag her. She’s really afraid, Ray, she pissed herself. Turns out the guy she works for won’t let her go outside, keeps her in a stash house on the fifth floor. That’s why she rolled so quick for me when I grabbed her up at the pharmacy. She doesn’t mind going in the bucket for a few nights, waiting for a bail hearing, but if the guy she works for finds out she went out, well, not pretty, she said.”
“You think she’s up there, now?”
“Dunno. Anyways, we’re talking and I see she’s jittering, so I say, out of the blue, So where’s this super lab you were talking about the other day, that punches out of the double Cs? Fuck, she said, I told you about that? He’s gonna kill me. She started crying and shaking. Oh, God, he’s gonna pack me to death.”
“Pack?”
“She didn’t want to talk about it. This is three days ago. I tell her that each day, right about now, she should come down to the fire door, we’ll talk if I can make it, if she can make it. I missed the past couple of days, but I think now’s the time.”
Ray Tate was impressed. “So she copped to Captain Cook and she copped to a super lab.” When she drove behind a grimy high-rise building he asked, “So, why’d you do it at all? We’re both walking dead, anyway. You could bring in the Big Chan with his moon face glued to a Boy Scout’s ass cheeks and it wouldn’t make any difference.”
“I told you, I’m a cop. I didn’t need you to come along and rag me out.” But she had a slightly wider feline curve to her lips. She expertly parked the Intrepid with a view to the fire door. “But the gin and tonics were nice.”
A happy man, Ray Tate eased back his seat, electronically adjusted his side mirror, and listened to a litany of calls streaming over the city frequency.
* * *
The Big Chan’s new dep called the skipper.
“Hey, Gordo, you awake over there? I catch you snoozing? You drop my body for me, yet?”
“Naw. But I got something going. I partnered Ray Tate up with that Statie dyke, turned ’em loose in the land of temptation. Just a matter of time now.”