Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Lee Lamothe
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gonna stand up? That guy he shot, he didn’t look good.”
“Yeah, he’s cool.” Harvey shook hands with the wrecker. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
* * *
He had to keep his left arm up on the window ledge of the truck to ease the pain, but Phil Harvey wouldn’t let the jumpy kid drive. As they passed up the highway he kept a tight ear on the kid’s responses, listened for him swallowing too hard, licking his lips. He watched to see if he tapped his feet or drummed his fingers on the dash. He liked the kid and didn’t relish leaving him in a hole in the ground in Indian country. He figured the kid had saved him from a wicked beating by the Chinamen.
They were just pulling into Widow’s Corners when the news of the shooting hit the radio. The kid rushed forward to turn it up. No one was declared dead, although one of the victims, the perky woman’s voice said, was in grave condition with gunshot wounds and a murder team was on standby. Two others were at hospital with minor head lacerations.
“Fuck, that was my guy, Harv. The shot guy. Fuck.”
Phil Harvey knew the kid was about to step over a line. He’d seen the Chinaman get hit and go down, he’d seen the kid lean in like a matador to finish him, he’d seen the Chinaman’s head jerk at the last minute. There were things that happened in the middle of things and people let themselves slip a little. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the end of the world either, usually. Not like Connie Cook, who’d obviously planned his revenge by having a branding iron made, had planned clearly to use it on the guys counterfeiting his product. The Captain had been looking to go crazy long before he got to the rooming house.
For the most part, on the long drive north the kid had been okay. Nervous and excited, but not drawing in on himself, shutting Harv out. He was even laughing and reliving the look on the Chinamen’s faces when they came out of the warehouse.
But the kid had the power to put four other guys in jail, to completely change the path of their lives. It was a knowledge, Harvey knew, not many guys could handle when things got tightened up around their nuts. He wasn’t worried about the wreckers: they were older guys and recognized that doing some time was just an interlude in the lives they’d chosen. Harvey had responsibilities to those guys.
At Widow’s Corners he drove the F-250 into a restaurant lot beside a motel and told the kid they’d have breakfast. That he had to make some calls. They sat at the same seat he’d sat at on his way out after stashing the Camaro at the farm, where he’d waited for the kid to come pick him up. He thought he should have told the old guy up at the lab to turn the engine over on the Camaro and run it every couple of days. He thought briefly about Agatha Burns.
Harvey ordered some eggs and toast. The kid had an appetite and went for the truckers’ all-in special, and that was, Harv thought, good. While they waited for the breakfast, he went to a pay phone and called the Captain.
“Hey, Cookie. How’s it?”
“You been busy, Harv. Wisht I’d’a been there. Was it bad?”
“Naw. One of the … ah … other guys, might, you know … go?”
“I heard. Slow news days I guess. The radio’s all over it. But you’re okay, right? You got what you went shopping for? All the guys are okay? They miss me?”
“Oh, yeah. I took a whack, that’s all. One guy asked about you, said where’s that guy, came out with us last time. We coulda used him. I told him you were fucking up somebody else. Next time, he says.”
“Perfect. Next time for sure. Good guys, those guys. Say hi to them for me.” The Captain sounded pleased. “So, we got, what?”
“Six forty-fives.”
“That’s two hundred and seventy gallons. We can do a lot of good work with that much. What’re you doing now?”
“Hang on.” Harvey watched the kid leave the restaurant and go to the F-250. He slid his ass in and left the door open and sat sideways while he turned the key and fiddled with the radio. Harv saw his mouth move. He shook his head and then he got out and looked around, shut the door, and came back inside. He trudged with cement feet and waved c’mere at Harvey. “Ah, I got a couple of things to do up here, Cap, let me get back to you.”
“Okay. Keep me posted.” The Captain paused. In the background a loudspeaker announced a horserace. “Harv? My other thing. What about that? You ready?”
Harv felt heavy dread and couldn’t source it: the kid who’d crossed a line, or the girl the Captain wanted grabbed. “Let’s talk later. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You staying over?”
“Might have a bit of work still to do, I dunno.” The kid sat with his coffee, staring off into space. “Maybe it’ll take a couple of days to get back down. I’ll let you know.”
* * *
Connie Cook watched his horse being rubbed down in the stables. The jockey, a little girl with the face of a man and the ass of a midget, was polite to him but he knew it was because he was buying the oats.
“She’s running well, Mr. Cook,” the jockey said. “She’s got this half-step we can make work for us. It’ll take some time, but she’s a good runner. We can make that half-step work for us.”
“Okay, Mary,” he said, appreciating that her freakishness was as part of her as his was of him, as Harv’s was of Harv. He felt they all shared the kinship of outsiders, of the differences. “I’ll come out one morning and watch her do her thing. You need anything?”
“Naw, no, Mr. Cook. Come out in the morning, sir, see her run. She’s going to need some time, she’s gonna spend some money. I hope you know that, going in.” The jockey studied him looking for confirmation of something. “There’s muscle and there’s speed and feed, you know, but there’s also heart. She’s got the heart.”
Captain Cook liked the jockey. If the horse ran backwards, he thought, he’d still give her a soft landing. She loved the horses like he loved the cheerleaders: with passion, with need. “Mary, go do it. Whatever it is, you go do it, okay?” He gave her a lifting of his jowls. “I’ll talk to that trainer, that Paki. You take her out today and no matter what, I promise you, we’re in business.” He sparkled his eyes. “Unless I come back later tonight and she’s still running to the finish. That’s not good.”
She laughed and for a second there became pretty. “We’re going today in the fourth. If she’s still running it at Christmastime we can come down together and throw oats at her.”
“Atta girl.”
Connie Cook’s wife didn’t like horses, didn’t like their smells, didn’t like their shit, and didn’t like the denizens of the backtrack with their shy shuffles and slang. She liked the Cup races when the Canadian horses came down, when the trailers brought the runners up from Kentucky. She liked the dips and sips in the clubhouse. She liked dressing up and making gentle fun of her husband’s extravagance. Connie Cook’s wife stayed well away from the stables and sat in their box in her pillbox hat and scarf, talking with her cronies.
Connie Cook walked across the front of the stands and looked up at his wife. She was talking across the aisle between the boxes with Gabriella Harris-Hopkins, of the Harris Clothing Company and the Hopkins boutique brokerage. Gabriella Harris-Hopkins was forty-five years younger than her husband, Irving Hopkins, putting her at a tasty twenty-five. Not exactly in the ballpark of Connie Cook’s tastes, but not too far out of it either. Connie Cook thought of her as a crass whore. Irv Hopkins was her third husband and he didn’t blush when she announced she’d had her breasts enhanced as an anniversary present to him. Connie Cook especially hated Irv Hopkins’s granddaughter, Tiffany, who was not much younger than her step-grandmother and still maintained her own boobs. He’d decided to maybe have Harv grab Tiffany, but now he wavered and thought about maybe grabbing them both. It would be a coup but fraught with problems unless he and Harv pulled in someone to help control them. It could be a