Who’d’ve thought, he thought, crooks ever got bored?
* * *
Phil Harvey left the Camaro under a tarp in the barn. The farm was abandoned. Two outbuildings had been cleaned up a little and both were fully functioning water farms with trays of hydroponic plants set in neat rows under halide fixtures. The keeper, a toothless old farmer with a double-barrelled shotgun and bib overalls, wandered the buildings. The farm was in Indian country and when the Natives came prowling for their burial grounds or whatever, the old toothless guy gave them a blast of the Old West, complete with cackling and whoops. Set in the furthest reach of the property, not quite on it but in a wedge of government land, was the super lab. In the evenings the fumes drifted towards the farm, away from the highway. A backhoe had dug a huge hole in the ground a hundred metres beyond the lab. It was jammed with the leavings of the crank and X trade. When Harv had had the lab up and running, the Captain had come up and was disappointed. He’d expected a gleaming laboratory with white tile walls and floor, fluorescent lighting bathing pristine equipment, little, thoughtful gnome-like technicians in white coats scampering from stainless steel vats, consulting clipboards. He hadn’t been impressed with the reuse electric stoves, the rat’s nest of exposed wiring, the patchy dirt floor, the open rafters with rustling bird life, the white plastic jugs rolling around, and the disarray of tangled tubing heaping on old wooden tables.
“What the fuck, Harv? This place is a fucking … barn. I expected something a little more, I dunno, German? Like the place where the Nazis did their experiments. This place is a pigsty.” His pride of ownership had evaporated.
“It’ll do the job, Connie. Check this.” Harv felt sorry for him and took him over to a pill-pressing machine with Chinese characters stamped into it. “This is the best. Taiwanese. This’ll turn out more pills than we can handle. We can use a hundred imprints. Peace doves, number ones, death’s heads, you name it.”
“You can make anything? Any symbol?”
“Yep.”
Captain Cook had stared at the machine. It was impressive. It looked industrial and solid. “You ever see that symbol for women’s stuff? Chanel?”
* * *
Harv put the speeding ticket he’d attracted on the way north into his jeans pocket and wrapped the fluted revolver in a sweater he found in the main house.
Snapping his stringy saliva like it was bubble gum, the grumpy old keeper drove him in a busted-up pickup truck down the long rutted laneway to the sideroad and out to the highway. They went south to Widow’s Corners where Harv got out at an all-night diner on the edge of town. The old man spat out the side window as he drove off but the window was cranked up and Harv had a bit of a laugh as he crossed the parking lot to a pay phone booth and called one of his guys to come up and get him.
Harv went into the diner, ordered a meal, and went into the washroom. He stashed the bundled pistol behind the toilet cistern then sat in a booth with a view of the washroom doors and the entrance. Wrapped in his black leather coat he ate a jailhouse meal: meat loaf with instant mashed potatoes and limp vegetables, and several cups of coffee. Truckers came into the place with regularity and barely glanced at him. Long-distance truckers with patches of the flag on their jackets and the words, These Colors Don’t Run, hunched over plates, eyes down, yawning. Those guys, Harv knew, had seen shit and he wasn’t much different from the rest of it, a white man swathed in leather, wearing sunglasses at night, in a town notorious for Indian ribaldry and criminal doings in the bush.
* * *
Waiting, Harv reflected on a life away from the city, a life with a woman and maybe a kid, although that was a long shot, in a place where he could finally stop. He hadn’t worked a day in his life, except in custody when he did some cooking and scrubbing in the industrial prison kitchens, or shovelling coal in powerhouses, or hoeing on work farms. On the streets he’d never been more than a couple of thousand bucks from being broke, always with an eye for a decent score. Hooking up with the fat fucker had taken care of that problem: Harv had enough money to last for years. He wouldn’t have to work in a chemical fog, wouldn’t have to daydream while watching a Brinks truck rolling up to a bank. Life should’ve been golden, but associating with Connie Cook had, he believed, diminished him, made him as much a lunatic as a crook. Harv knew he could steal or deal all the livelong day. He could collect loans, hustle huge quantities of dope, even do the odd armed robbery to keep the wolf from the door. That all made sense: no one could fault a man for what he did to keep food on the table, especially if he was willing to pay the grim bill when the cops came knocking. But since he’d been with the Captain he found himself thinking of himself as … something other. Depraved came to mind. Psycho, maybe. Snaffling up a girl and locking her down until she had a bad habit was strange. Turning her over to a gross pervert for months of playtime, that was degenerate. There was no end in it for anyone. Harv made a good end with the Captain’s criminal schemes but the weird perversion bothered him. Agatha Burns had cried for him, apologized for sucking and licking his scars. No sorrow for maybe being a rat, no whining about having maybe betrayed him, no remorse for facilitating the drug trade. She just wanted forgiveness for what she did to him. As if that was her biggest crime, the headliner in a theatre of confession.
* * *
The Captain had wanted to become a kingpin.
“Where’s the money, Harv, where can we make out best?”
Dope, Harv had advised. Water farms, labs.
“Yeah, Harv? How about broads. Any dough in running hookers?”
“Naw, chicks are trouble, they’re work, they shoot their mouths off. I don’t feature myself as a pimp.”
“Oh, okay, Harv. Tell you what: you figure out what you need to get a business going, tell me how much, and we go partners. If you think dope’s the way to go then we go that way. I’m just a tourist here. Hey, what’d’you think’s a better car, the Camaro or the Corvette?”
“Camaro. Corvette’s for homos.”
“Homos. Got it. And, hey, Harv, there’s something I want you to get for me. This young broad up on the lake, I want her, I want you to get her for me. Can you do that?”
Harv thought the Captain was doing a kidnapping, maybe something to do with one of his Chicago business deals, muscling a commodities broker. He clocked Agatha Burns, snaffled her up, and a few months later Harv had a black Camaro with the rims.
They were in a restaurant one night and the waiter made a comment about desserts and calories. The Captain took umbrage.
“Hey, Harv, you know any construction guys? That can get dynamite or something?”
“Sure, Connie. How much, what for?”
“That place we had dinner at, with the lippy waiter? You think two sticks’ll do it?”
Two sticks did it. Two sticks did the restaurant, took the arms off the cook who’d stayed back to braise lamb shanks for the next day’s special, and shut down Stonetown for a week.
* * *
The windows of the diner vibrated from the heavy trucks left rumbling in the parking lot. Harv thought of Agatha Burns and her knocking knees. She’d been a perfect little thing, the kind of unattainable item Harv instinctively hated, the kind of thing that had the perfect life in the perfect neighbourhood with the perfect mum and dad. It took him weeks of keeping a clock on her movements. One night she came out of her boyfriend’s house and Harv was waiting with a panel van and a sleeping bag and she was in the back and on the way to a drop house in the badlands. The waiting, impatient Captain took over from there, squiring her up to the farm in Indian country.
Hey Harv, how much of this stuff do you have to take, like, how long, before you’re a zombie, a scuzzy little slave who’ll do anything to anybody for more?
Harv had seen insanity in the