“Absolutely.”
“Well then, nothing for us to worry about.”
* * *
Phil Harvey drove the Camaro close behind Connie Cook’s Mercedes. They wound through the city, the Captain trying to lose him at stale lights. Harv could see the Captain on his phone, hands-free, head bobbing as he yelled at the windshield as though deranged. At one point the Mercedes went into a skid, bumped the curb, and straightened itself out on the roadway.
On the edge of east Chinatown the Captain slowed, lowered his window, and waved Harv up beside his driver’s door. “Turn on the all news, Harv. Strange events up in the badlands.” He laughed and sped away. Harv fiddled his way awkwardly to an AM station and heard a roundup of headlines. One of them was about a truck explosion and fire far northeast of the city. Smoking remains had been found; unknown gender, unknown cause of death.
The Mercedes went through east Chinatown and just over the city line it pulled into a metalwork shop. The Captain waved Harv to wait and held up his hand: five minutes. He disappeared inside in a swaggering waddle and came out two minutes later with a long thin item wrapped in a green garbage bag. He popped his trunk, put the package in, and slammed it.
He waved Harv over. “You hear? That truck fire, there, up north? What’s that all about, I wonder.”
“Fuck if I.” Harv shrugged. “I got a rock solid alibi, anyway.”
“Yeah? You do?”
“Yep, I was with you.” Harv waited a beat. “Back me up or I’ll kill you too.”
The Captain laughed. “Nice one, Harv. Okay, I’ll follow you. You get your thugs over to east Chinatown and we’ll meet them there. They cool, these guys?”
“Princes, these guys are, Connie.” He punched numbers into his cellphone.
They wended their way down through the city. In east Chinatown Harv pulled the Camaro onto a side street. Connie Cook parked on the opposite side of the street, ahead. He popped the trunk, took out the long package, and held it like a golf club, putting aimlessly.
A few minutes later a black Tundra pulled up further down the block and three beefy men got out. They all had pigtails, thick faces, and wore leather jackets. One carried a long sports bag. They bounced on their toes on the sidewalk as they looked around for Harvey.
Harv climbed out and greeted them with handshakes that changed into biker brotherhood hugs. He waved Connie Cook over. The pigtailed men looked at him curiously as he crossed the road, taking in his perfect suit, the puddle of jowls, the short painful steps.
“That the guy we’re doing, Harv? He’s one fat fuck.”
Harv laughed. “No, that’s the guy we’re doing it for. We’re doing a home renovation. He’s okay. He’s weird, but we’re earning.”
One of the men took a coupon from his jacket pocket. “Give him this. He signs up for a year, he gets a lifetime membership at my new gym.”
“Wait,” Harv said. “Hold on to that and if you want him to have it, after, well, you tell him he’s a fat fuck when you give it to him. He likes it when people call him names.”
The Captain came up beside them and Harv introduced him all around. The Captain seemed pleased at meeting some real badlands thugs.
The Chinese chemistry students lived in a tall, narrow rooming house sandwiched between a massage parlour and a beauty salon. There were half a dozen mailboxes studded beside the entry door and a Room for Rent sign in the window.
The gym owner looked the building over. “What’s the plan, Harv? We know what floor they’re on?”
“They got the whole first floor and the basement. First floor is a long hallway, all the rooms on the left. There’s a kitchen at the back with stairs down. They cook in the basement.”
Connie Cook smiled. “Good that you know that, Harv. I didn’t know that.”
Harv smiled back. “Ag told me.”
The three pigtailed men pulled on leather lifting gloves. One zipped open the sports bag and handed around a sawn-off baseball bat, a hammer, and a lug wrench. Harv looked around at the passing traffic. He took off his leather coat, rolled it inside out, and handed it to Connie Cook.
The pigtailed gym owner asked Harv, “What’s the play? We wrecking the place or just doing the people in there?”
“We get them then we take the place apart. There’s any dough, we split it. Powder, we split.”
The gym owner huddled with his companions for a moment then they all trooped up the steps. The biggest of the wreckers examined the lock, then stepped back and bulled his shoulder into it. It gave easily and they ran down the hallway, whooping. A Chinese teenager wearing Snoopy undershorts came out of the kitchen with a steaming bowl in his hands. He went down under the stampede. A pigtailed man swung a hammer. A plump girl, naked, flashed out of a bedroom off to the side. The gym owner whacked her legs out as he passed.
A long-haired Asian wearing a suit and an untucked, white shirt popped out of a doorway. He saw Harv and said his name. Harv was on him with the guy with the lug wrench. Harv took the wrench and began bashing at the man’s long hair. “I told you,” he said, swinging. “I fucking told you, cocksucker.” He stood and began stomping.
Connie Cook stayed in the doorway listening to the place being busted up. When the house was secure he told Harv to get everyone to the basement.
The pigtailed guys threw everyone down the steps. The basement was unfinished and had a strong chemical odour. A blackened stove sat in one corner and buckets, tubing, and bottles of chemicals were littered over a sagging chesterfield. There were cheap Dutch pill-pressing machines with different heads scattered among them. The windows were covered with taped on, ripped up green garbage bags.
There were five prisoners. One of them remained unconscious. The girl was crying and huddling herself off to the side, sobbing and examining her knees.
Harv didn’t like the scene. The chemical smell made his scars ripple and sing, the crying girl reminded him of Agatha. He decided the thing should be over. That’s the way it was done. They’d take the powder and the dough, bust everything in sight, and give everyone a farewell tune-up.
But Cornelius Cook stood at the bottom of the steps looking at his fracas with satisfaction. “Cold in here, Harv. Turn on the stove.” He began stripping the green garbage bag from his package.
Chapter 8
When the skipper arrived at the Chem Squad to do his morning prowl he found Ray Tate behind a desk, most of his hair back in a ponytail. Right away the skipper noticed the Captain Cook chart had been untacked from the corkboard. There was a steaming cup of coffee at Ray Tate’s elbow and across from it, on Djuna Brown’s desk, were a bottle of water and a yogurt container with a plastic spoon sticking out of it.
“The fuck you doing, Ray? It’s the crack of dawn. Where’s the twat?”
Ray Tate glanced around and shook his head, then nodded at the skipper’s glass office. The skipper led the way. They sat opposite each other.
“Okay, spill.”
“I was thinking, last night. I’m not going to get her watching her sit at her desk filing paper, right? So, I figure we’ll get a little project going, get her out where there’s mistakes to be made, and trip her into a hole.”
The skipper nodded. “And? What you come up with?”
“This Captain Cook guy. I figure that’s the way. We start up a little project, start moving around where there’s money and dope, see if she trips. It’s perfect.”
“If there is a Captain Cook.”