Harv let the tube sit on the table. “So, these guys, your ex-cops?”
“Right. Sometimes I have to spend some time with them, you know? I do a deal and somebody gets pissed off, they lost their equity or their company’s been taken out from under them. Or union guys who lost their jobs come skulking around my house. So I get security for a while, move into a hotel. Anyway, those ex-cops love to tell stories. Busting this crook, chasing that guy. Being a cop, they say, except for the shitty pay and the rules, best job in the world. Makes my life look more boring than it is.”
Harv casually picked up the tube of vitamin E. “So? You want to be a cop?”
Connie Cook laughed and choked on a fry. “The fuck? Fuck, no. Harv, you’re a funny fucking guy. I want to be a crook.”
* * *
The vitamin E cream didn’t work out well, even though Phil Harvey used it religiously. But fuelled by Harv’s expertise and connections, and suitcases of the fat fuck’s cash, Cornelius Cook’s dark enterprises quickly became multi-faceted. He had water farms all over the state, partnered up with Vietnamese body smugglers who staffed the operations with slave labour smuggled down from Canada, who chopped the weed and baled it. He had the X business, he had the crank labs, he had a network of pan cookers throughout the projects where baby mammas stood over non-stick pans on coil burners, baking rocks of crack. It always surprised Harv that the black folk liked the fat Cornelius, but he figured it was because he was so pasty and translucent that he wasn’t white at all but a whole other non-colour, a whole other species. It didn’t hurt that everybody made out well off the Captain’s operations.
But at root, Harv knew, it was the evil that emanated off the porky bastard that curled his toes. Harv himself was a hard man. He’d done hard things and he’d done hard Craddock time. He was getting old and had done almost a quarter of his life in custody. He’d done the hardest thing four times, leaving little trace of the activity, no trace of the victim except once, when a message had to be sent. But he still thought of himself as having a chip left of his soul.
Cornelius Cook, though, was evil because he didn’t need to be. He didn’t need to reach down into the netherworld for profit, didn’t need to do what he did. He could have it by exercising his family’s portfolio, by crushing adversaries with financial clout and then picking up the lucrative pieces, sentencing enemies to the poorhouse gulag. Connie had once bombed out a Stonetown bistro because of rude service when he could have bought the place and fired the staff.
People moved into Connie’s orbit for a while then they were gone suddenly, without rhyme or reason, like shooting stars that burned themselves out and just vanished as if they’d never existed. Some of them were young women, Harv realized, young women who rotated through the clubs, vacant women who he’d brought around for the Captain’s perusal. They came in gorgeous and witty and thought themselves lucky, and wound up hollow and stuttering and chewed and ultimately gone. Not Agatha though. She didn’t come from the ranks of peelers. Agatha had been the test: Captain Cook had given Harv the address where she lived and said go get her for me. Take her on a crank holiday and when you come back make sure she needs us — needs me, anyway.
* * *
Agatha Burns droned. CD prices were supposed to come down after the technology was paid for. But they were higher than they were at the beginning. What was up with that? She could download music off the Internet to save money but the Internet, Connie had told her, was an evil plot by the government. Who knew what subliminal messages were hidden in there, like, flashing into your brain before your eyes even registered it? Hey, look, she said, there’s a sequential licence number on that van. You think the guy asked for it or it was random? Random was weird. There was no … well, random to it. Well, there was, she thought, in a random way, if Harv got her meaning.
She was deathly afraid, Harv suddenly realized. She’d figured it out. He made sure her seatbelt stayed fastened. The chatter was beyond crank patter. She probably hadn’t been out of the apartment in months, waiting for pills to be dropped in the stairwell, waiting for the Captain to come by and pirate her ass, piping himself aboard.
At the hook north of Stateline he stayed on the Interstate, easing into the slow lane to catch the ramp off to the badlands while he thought. He’d done stupid things but he wasn’t stupid. He’d acted without heart, but he had heart. The Captain was a manipulator, but that didn’t matter: Harv had more money than he’d ever earned either legitimately or in the life. That was the name of the game: to make out, to collect your end. But the Captain didn’t seem to care. The family money had been there for generations before he was born, the golden road was paved for him. All he had to do was follow his ancestor’s footprints. It was impossible for the Captain to be so stupid he’d ever be broke. There was just too much money.
“You know,” Agatha Burns said, “when you look at a tree like that tree over there, that there’s actually more of the tree underground, roots and stuff, than we see. Harv, you ever think about that? What we see and what we don’t see. I mean, sure, if we don’t see it, it probably isn’t actually real for us, but there’s a lot more to the tree than the … well, the tree. Weird, eh?”
One night, when Harv and the Captain got drunk and high, the real Cookie got loose. “You should’ve seen her when she was in high school,” he’d said as they sat in their underwear in a hotel room overlooking Michigan, watching Agatha Burns go through jerky cheerleader moves, trying to please them, her eyes on the little baggie of crank on the coffee table. “Perfect. Absolute fucking perfection. Perfect boobs. An ass that was on ball bearings. Legs up to here. She’d have her pals over and they’d go in the backyard of her house and do their routines. Fucking amazing, Harv. I watched from my house, the six of them, little skirts, pretending they didn’t know their boyfriends were watching over the fence. All perfect.” He called over the music. “Right, Ag? You and the team?”
She nodded, breathless, a plastic smile on her face, not missing a beat. “Yes, Connie. We were hot.”
“Did you know I was watching? From my window, Ag?”
She nodded again. “Yes, Connie. It turned us on.”
“Looks don’t mean for shit, though, right, Ag?”
Her breath was short. “Right, Connie. I was superficial then, but I’m okay now.”
“Take off the top, show Harv how they bounce.” He’d turned to Harv. “Watch this. Elastic.”
Harv had been uncomfortable. There was a sick aspect to the Captain’s jowly, pinched face, a hatred he couldn’t imagine, even on his own face when he had to do the hard things. He felt a stirring of feeling for her, for her open face and her fading beauty. “It’s okay, Cookie. I seen boobs before.”
“Yeah, but not like this. C’mon, Ag, give us the old one-two-three-four. Swing ’em.”
The night had ground on. At one point Agatha Burns blew them both, but Harv had been too far gone to remember it afterwards, if it was good or not.
He did remember the Captain, twirling a little baggie of crank, had enticed her to lick away at the scar tissue on the side of Harv’s face and suck at his destroyed fingers, tell him she loved him, his scars were beautiful.
Harv did remember that.
And he remembered walking into the bedroom of the suite at dawn, looking for his jacket, and she was almost invisible under the pounding blubber of the howling Captain, her face stuffed into a pillow, her screams muffled, the Captain looking up with blood running down his chin under his huge wreath of smiling jowls.
* * *
Phil Harvey checked the odometer and slowed, looking for the sideroad that would take him away from the feeder highway to one of the mom-and-pop labs scattered in the area. Beside him, Agatha Burns’s knees were white and knocking.