Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
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to my art.”
She gave him a feral smile of pointy teeth. “Beatnik.” She looked happy. “She, Gloria, gave me a business card. For a place I should go to.” She stared through the windshield. The block-up had dissolved but she left the light and siren on and steered over into the hot lane. “You know what she asked me? She asked if I was cutting on myself yet. She said she was born-again. If you can’t find Jesus yet, she said, find a good hairdresser and wait until He comes along. Can we go there, after?”
He looked at the white frizzy hair. It was brushed and had a barrette over the right ear but it was still weird. He wanted to paint her, he decided. “Sure.”
They rode in silence. He warned her that the exit ramp was coming up and she smoothly drifted to the right. On the ramp she shut down the light and noise.
“Djuna, let me ask you one, okay?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“This dyke thing.” He hesitated. “Ah, look, how committed to that are you?”
“Who told you I was a dyke, Ray? Not me, Bongo.”
* * *
They walked around the units and found a vast crime scene taped off. Numbered cones covered shell casing, chalk marked bloodstains on the ground, and bullet holes on the back of the building. The roll-up door was halfway up and it was peppered with rough perforations. A crowd of reporters was grouped outside the yellow tape.
“You’re not? Really?”
“Imagine, huh?” She gave him a mysterious smile and wiggled her eyebrows.
A young charger watched them approach then waved them off. “You’ll have to go around.”
Ray Tate slipped his badge out of his jacket. “Chem Squad. Who’s the duty?”
“Topper.” The young guy went to a cluster of cops near the roll-up doors and spoke to a striper.
The striper looked up and made a big smile. “Ray Tate. Cockfuckingsucker, I thought they’d have you in jail by now.”
Ray Tate shook his hand. “I told you, Topper, they’ll never take me alive.”
“Good man. Fuck them all.”
Tate introduced Djuna Brown. Her name didn’t register with the striper and he stared at her and shook her hand with a laugh. “Jeez, I thought you had to be twelve years old and four feet tall to be a cop.”
She gave him a pretty smile. “An Irish guy, looked a lot like you, did the sign-up physical. I stood on a hundred dollar bill to get the extra four inches.”
“Good girl.” The striper looked around. “I can guess why you Chem guys are here. The short version is: four or five guys pull up, they lay a beating on a watchman, a bunch of mutts come out of the place, and it’s Chinese New Year. Year of the Mutt, I guess. I dunno, I’m still writing Year of the Pig on my cheques …” He waited for them to laugh. “So, anyways, we got two with pistol whips at St. Frankie, one with a gunshot at Mercy Med. First two victims are minor; basic attitude adjustment. The third guy’s sniffing the incense. Our bandits roll out in a black pickup with drums of chemicals according to a cabbie who saw them loading up. The victims say nothing was taken, it was an attempted break-in, the cabbie saw the drums go out. Chinamen say black guys, the cabbie says white guys. Chinamen say they didn’t see a vehicle, the cabbie says a black F-250.”
Djuna Brown was writing it down. Ray Tate stood so the media cameras wouldn’t pick up his face. “Anybody see a white guy, big fat fucker?”
“Nope. Just mutts. Steroid guys. And a guy looked like an ugly woman. Coulda been my wife from the sounds of it,” Topper looked at the punctures in the overhead door. “Shot the shit out of the place. Chinamen won’t say what was in the drums. The drums they didn’t take in the truck that wasn’t here, I mean.” He stared at Djuna Brown. “You a city guy, honey? Where you stationed before this mess?”
“I’m Statie.”
Boxcars locked into a train in Topper’s head. “Oh. Oh, yeah. From up north.”
Djuna Brown stared at him. “You got a problem, there, Top?”
“Dearie, take it easy. If you’re with Ray, you’re in the right gang. Me, I got nothin’ against dykes.” He looked around and whispered: “I think my wife? She’s a dyke.” He widened his smile. “She fucks like a dyke, anyway. Meaning: not with me.”
Djuna Brown smiled into his charm. “You ever heard, Top, of a mustache ride?”
He shook his head. “She asked me once. I said: honey, if it ain’t deep fried, I don’t eat it. C’mon in the kitchen. She passed.”
Djuna Brown laughed. Topper turned away and listened to his shoulder microphone.
“Nothing for us here, Djun’,” Ray Tate said. “Let’s see what they’ve got back on the F-250.”
Topper called something out to a group of chargers and they carefully started stepping out of the scene. “Hey, Ray, the guy that got shot? He cracked the blank fortune cookie. Hammers are on the way.”
“Okay, Topper, we’re outta here. We didn’t enter the scene, right? So no need to mention us, that we came around.”
“No problem. Hey, tell your partner here how I got the name.” He started laughing. “Oy vey.”
Chapter 18
The three wreckers were up and bouncing in the afterglow. They were gregarious and there were handshakes and hugs. It was far from the morose finale to the Captain’s crazy branding frenzy in east Chinatown. There’d been no weirdness, just maybe a little chaos that comes with all sudden action. But none of them had been seriously hurt, no one had dropped his fudge. When the Chinamen at Willy Wong’s warehouse had reacted, Harvey and the blond kid and the wreckers had gone to work and finished their mission. One wrecker had taken a metal bar across the shoulders but had shaken it off. Harvey had taken a whack in the upper arm from the same guy before Frankie Chase, the blond kid from up north, pulled his gun and opened up.
Dawn was rimming the sign of the truck stop north of the city, already casting everybody a long shadow. The five men had crammed themselves into the double cab of the F-250. The forty-five gallon drums of precursors were in the back, covered with a tarpaulin chained to the bed.
The wrecker who owned the gym was almost dancing, juggling his paper coffee cup. “Fuck, Harv. Fuck. Just like the old days.” His breath showed in the chill morning air. He wore a thin, unlined leather jacket over a T-shirt but the temperature didn’t seem to have an effect on him. Harvey wondered if the guy’s nose ring ever got cold enough to ache in the winter.
“Nice, nice one, Barry. You fucking guys. Well, that was beautiful.” He screened his body and handed a wad of cash to him. “A little noisy there at the end. You and your guys might want to take a vacation, until it sorts itself out. I think one of those guys was hurt bad.”
“Fucking pussy cocksucker Chinamen.” Barry laughed, threw away his coffee and indifferently ran his thumb over the stack of money. “Ooohh, nice.” He stared into the morning sun. “Like being a kid again, Harv. If I didn’t need the coin, I’d be doing this shit for nothing. How’s your arm?”
“Ah, fuck it. It’ll hurt later. Right now a bit of a throb.”
“Good thing it was your left arm, Harv. Because I know you jerk off with the right.”
The blond kid was with the other two wreckers a few feet away, smoking cigarettes. The kid chain-smoked and sucked nervously at his coffee and periodically glanced over at Harv. The two wreckers were laughing haw-haw-haw biker laughs. They both slapped the kid’s back, calling him Shooter.
A red, chromed Cadillac Escalade crawled into the parking lot, crunching gravel, and stopped twenty yards away. Harvey could hear the