Ray Tate smiled. “I just said that to a mutt, myself.” He identified himself as Intelligence and said he was heavy at the ankle.
The thick guy sat down and held his hand out. “Brian Comartin. Traffic. You got a better gig than me, the artist thing. They got me running up and down the Riverwalk, pissing in the weeds. Get us a boatload of Chinamen, they say, stop the invasion.”
Shaking his soaking hand, Ray Tate saw his face was flushed. “You okay, man?”
“I haven’t lifted more than a pencil in ten years and they come down to Traffic Flow and say, ‘Hey, you’re a cop again, get your fat ass down to the river, run around, and look for wet Chinamen. You see them, surround them, we’ll get you some backup in, oh, about two weeks when we get somebody off the lung.’” He laughed but he was panting and looked a little frightened for his own well-being. “Jeez fuck. If I wanted to work, I wouldn’a become a cop.”
“How many you guys down here?”
“Me and two others. One from Projections and one from Computer Enhancement. For four miles of Riverwalk, three miles of lakefront, and who knows what the fuck all in between.” He shook his head. “This fucking city. You ask me, every illegal who sneaks over here is a vote for the American way of life. When I first came on, I worked Chinatown, I seen them working the sweatshops, fifteen-hour days, buck an hour, kick back a quarter to the boss, rent a bed for a couple hours sleep. No fucking way do I send workingmen back in the water. I see a bunch of Chinamen coming up out of the river, man, I’ll take ’em home, give ’em a cash job painting my apartment.”
Ray Tate laughed and got up. “I gotta go to court.”
The fat man looked shy. He said, “Let’s see, what you did? You do anything good?” He was embarrassed. He looked at Ray Tate looking back at him with suspicion. “I, ah, I got a thing, too. I’m into, ah, poetry.”
Ray Tate thought for a moment, then flipped open the pad.
The thick man stared at the sketch. “Oh, okay. That’s good, man, that’s like art.” He looked around as though imparting a secret. “You should be in a gallery or something.”
“Yeah,” Ray Tate held out his hand. “I should be in Paris in a beret.”
Chapter 4
The State Police detachment in Indian country was a single-storey cement-block building with chicken wire over the windows and a heavy door with a keypad beside it. The face of the keypad had been ripped out; exposed wiring drooped like bright entrails. Access to the building was done by mobile phone or over the two-way talkies the detachment officers carried around the clock, on duty or off. Shotgun pellets pockmarked the fascia of the building and there was a flaring scorch mark like a triangular shadow where someone had incompetently thrown a Molotov cocktail, short. Concertina wire was looped around the entire roof of the building. Three Ford Expedition four-by-fours with peeling State Police logos were strategically parked around the entrance, backed in on angles to take up as much space as possible. Each truck had suffered damage, ranging from raw punctures from deer-rifle slugs to graffiti that called for Red Rool. All the trucks had the wiring for roof lights but they’d been shot out with such regularity headquarters said Enough and sent lighter-operated dash lights.
Inside the building, Djuna Brown sat behind a desk pirated from the asbestos-laden schoolhouse no one allowed their kids to attend. The desk was deeply grooved with messages: RED ROOL ROOLS, STICK THE MAN, RIP KOPS, SP DOA DJA OK. SP stood for State Police; DJA stood for Djuna. She wore her authority as though it were a secret she only shared with an unlucky few.
“You know,” she said to the man opposite her, back-handcuffed to a heavy oak chair, “you know everyone’s got a … thing. You know? A thing? That sets them off, makes them crazy? Cops are like that. I know a guy just goes nuts at animal abuse, especially dogs. Another guy comes down heavy on people who speed near schools. Another cop goes off on guys that beat their wives. You following? A thing.”
The man in the handcuffs nodded. His head was huge; standing, he was about six-five, just short of a foot taller than Djuna Brown. His torso was thick and his weight was two-fifty, she knew from his file, exactly double hers. Both were dark-skinned: he with Native skin and a lifetime in the sun, trapping, hunting, fishing; she being more an inherited brown Caribbean coffee with a good shot of cream.
She gave him a peek at her authority. “Ronnie, I asked if you’re following me?” Her voice had a bit of lilt, just enough that if they were sitting in the dark, Ronnie would still know she was from a southern island.
His voice was rough and deep, the tone a little petulant. “I follow you, Djuna.”
“Sergeant Brown.”
He brooded, not looking at her face. She saw a moment of shame there. Everyone called her by her first name except her troopers. They had single syllables for her.
She waited for him. Ray Tate had taught her to make time her bubble, create a different kind of life in there, wait things out. Chat endlessly and fill it with verbal free-form jazz.
“I follow, Sergeant Brown.”
She nodded and smiled her tiny pearly teeth, then sat back and put her feet on the desk. She wore red satin slippers decorated with bits of bright metal and beading. He looked at them and smiled sadly. Her uniform pants dragged back, revealing dark blue ankle socks, above them smooth brown hairless skin. Her tunic was opened against the heat in the close room and she wore a pure white T-shirt over a red sports bra.
She wanted to tell him something, but she wanted him to tell her something first. “Well, I’m sure you’ve got a thing, too, right, Ronnie? Something that just takes you out of who you are and you want to go primitive? No rules, no mercy, because of the wrong of it?”
He pondered a while, then nodded slowly. “The hunters in the airplanes. The wolves.”
“Right. The hunters and the wolves. Winter kill.”
“Machineguns.” He wagged his head. “The blood in the snow, they leave them there. Kill them, skin them, leave the carcass.” His face gathered red anger. “I want to —” He looked up beyond the watermarked ceiling and struggled against the cuffs with his shoulder to try to reach up.
She saw he wasn’t dull or stupid and she put her feet down out of respect. She wanted to uncuff him but there was no natural way to do it before she’d finished. She still didn’t know if she was going to have to beat him. “All right, my thing is bleeding children. When I rolled by your place and saw her, I wanted to just beat you with a stick. If I needed ten guys with me, okay, I’d find ten guys, easy. And you know, Ronnie, I’m not like that, right? Since I came back up here from the city with my stripes, things are better. Not great, they’ll never be great up here in our lifetimes, not for you, not for them.” She nodded at the closed office door; from the other side her troopers were banging their boots and bullshitting loudly in the shift room. “But right now, there’s no more Saturday night rodeos. No cops selling hootch to your people, catching the girls drunk, and banging them in the trucks. I catch a dealer from the cities slinging meth or crack, that guy goes for a walk on the traplines for an evening and when he comes back he’s got some serious winter mosquito bites. It hurts me to do that, that’s not who I am, but I try to make a difference.”
He glanced up at her, then away.
She knew she’d lost him, gotten sidetracked, her riff had gone nowhere. She held her palms up at him. Her hands were tiny, her fingers long, her fingertips looking stupid for a cop, a result of the sloppy white French manicure she’d given herself the night before, drunk and talking aloud to the absent Ray Tate. “Start again: I know this isn’t about me, all this. But at your place with Misha? That is what it’s all about. Your twelve-year-old. Beautiful girl. Smart girl. Broken nose, blood everywhere. For me, Ronnie, that’s the blood on the snow, that’s the wolves. That’s