Her knees knocked and when the old speeder lady with the shotgun peered in through the window and cackled a smile, Harv felt he was in someone else’s strange landscape.
Agatha Burns told him of her shame.
She touched his scars.
She apologized.
The gap-toothed, balding old speeder lady was in her fifties or sixties. Agatha Burns was twenty. How did one get such a long life of misery, and the other a short life that had been mostly okay?
The pickup truck with the camper van in the back had squeaked on rusted springs as he helped her into it, telling her, Don’t worry, Ag, you just took too much stuff.
She turned and looked at him and her eyes were clear.
She’d said, “I know, Harv. It’s okay, okay?” Her mouth trembled a little when she said, “Can you let my mom and dad know? Somehow? Where to find me? Harv?”
* * *
Harv’s minion lived halfway between Widow’s Corners and the city. He arrived almost two hours after Harv summoned him. He came into the diner, spotted Harv and nodded, got a coffee to go, and went out to a black chromed F-250 pickup. Harv paid his tab and went into the washroom to retrieve his gun. Boiling down the Interstate in the F-250, the minion talked about what happened to the Chinamen in the city who’d fucked with the brand. He rattled about the cooker who went up in the truck explosion. “They say it was a broad, maybe.”
Harv told the driver to slow down. “We’re heavy.”
“Oh, fuck, okay.” The driver changed to the centre lane and kept inside a handful of traffic. “That fat guy we’re working for. What’s he about?”
Harv liked the minion, a failed striker for the Riders. The kid had done some time but he’d done no heavy lifting. Things like that put you in your position on the scale of things. Going the hard distance wasn’t something just anyone could do, although everybody thought they could until they were face to face with it. You had to be a certain way. Harv had known he was that way since he was a teenager. It wasn’t until he met the Captain and his weird ways that he thought maybe there was nothing lower than himself in the cold swamp.
“The Captain’s cool. The Captain’s okay. Just a little different.”
The driver laughed. “You got that right.”
They rode in silence for a while. Harv saw trees and thought of Agatha Burns and her riff about more tree being underground than above it. Not something he would have thought of, taking a ride you didn’t expect to come back from. He thought about the conversation about the Chinamen she said she didn’t know, and the radio that had been off and she swore she hadn’t turned it off and how about those fucking CD prices. He chuckled.
The driver said, “What?”
“Nothing.” Harv looked at him. “Let me ask you one. If I asked you to do something, could you do it?”
The driver knew right away. “You need something, Harv? Fuckin’ A.”
“No question, no problem? You’re that way?”
“Gotta be.” The driver nodded at his windshield. He had long, feminine blond hair held back by his ears. “You gotta be, in this life. You do or you’re done. You’re dog or you’re dog food.”
They passed an open pickup with a half-dozen Indians sprawled in the back. Ahead of it was a sway-backed, rusted, bone white Reliant station wagon in the slow lane with a long-haired guy driving. Harv could see a woman’s legs in a long skirt and a kid in the back seat sleeping against a window smeared with drool. “That guy. Him, in the Reliant.”
The driver was puzzled and craned to look. “Sure. Who is he, what’d he do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. I don’t care. I ask you and you say … what?”
The driver squirmed a little. “I guess, yeah. But it ain’t right. You don’t just … No, that’s fucked. You’d have to be nuts.” He passed the Reliant and kept an eye on it in the side mirror. “You okay?” He laughed nervously. “You’re a funny fucker, Harv.”
Harv, his face hidden in the cheesy curtain of rock star hair, was thinking about monsters.
PART TWO
Chapter 13
Nothing happened at Harv’s condominium. They chatted and played the tag game. Ray Tate had evens and Djuna Brown had odds. Personalized licence plates didn’t count, neither did taxis or commercial vehicles. Of the first twelve cars to roll through the parking lot eight had even numbers at the end and Djuna Brown was going to buy the drinks after.
They took turns dozing and doing feel-outs.
She started speaking in soft patois. “Hey, Ray, mon, what’s wit’ de painting? Be you some kind of closet artist?”
“Naw,” he said, a little embarrassed. “No. Just fooling around.”
“You like the dark colours, eh?”
He didn’t answer that. “You always lived alone, Djun’?”
“I lived with someone, for a while, before I got recruited.”
“How’d that go?”
“Well, I’m sitting in a shitty car with a beatnik. You tell me.”
After a while he asked, “Why’d you sign up?”
“My dad wanted me to be a nurse, like my mom. When I got accepted at the Staties he was pretty mad. He said I was too small.” She glanced at him. “He was mad as a Chinaman with no thumbs.”
“Chinaman. What the fuck? Why not, say, a Macedonian with no thumbs. Or, say, a pygmy?”
“Ray, Ray, get a grip, mon. What’s a Macedonian or a pygmy want thumbs for?”
He smiled. “Nice one, Djun’.”
She looked pleased with herself. “What about you, Ray? You a single dude on the make?”
“Well, I’m married, I guess. We’re not together right now.”
“How old’s your kid? The photographer?”
“Seventeen.”
“You a cool dad, Ray?”
“Not lately.”
At nine o’clock Ray Tate tried to raise the skipper on the rover. Walter Brodski came back. There were party noises in the background and someone yelled, “Seven, you cocksucker.”
“He’s gone hours, Ray. Where you at?”
“We’re sitting on a place in the Beach. We’re looking for the guy that boiled out of the projects this afternoon. Anybody on the air, can spell us off?”
The radio was silent. Brodski came back. “I would, Ray, but my ulcer’s acting up again.” The background noise was gone.
A black F-250 pickup dripping with chrome rolled in off the street and did a turn through the parking lot. It slowed passing in front of the Intrepid. Ray Tate saw a young guy with blond hair behind the wheel, scooping them. It rolled off, cut a wide U, and dribbled out of the parking lot. When it was out of sight there was a peel of rubber.
“A mutt.” Ray Tate noted down the plate. “I think this is a wash, Djun’. We should pack it in. Even if Harvey and the Captain came and went, we’ve only got this one vehicle and that got burned off this afternoon. We’re going to need more bodies, more cars.”
She started the engine. “Who gets this one for the night? Let’s go