Pious Chan nodded at the mayor’s asparagus and raised his eyebrows. The mayor nodded and Chan started spearing with gusto. “Only white guys I can think of are Mr. Price and his guys down the hall at Planning. Don’t think we want that. Not yet anyway. There’s some Chinese guys gambling in the caverns under east Chinatown.”
The mayor knew what was going on. Pious Chan had already revealed his oriental hand at the Swamp: cops who’d pissed him off over the past twenty years were riding marked scout cars in the dark, piloting the prisoner wagons, adding up paper clips in obscure offices. The mayor had ten years of superior private schooling in Boston and Paris. Chan had two patient decades of accumulated personal slights and centuries of bloody revenge. A hundred generations of time were to the Chinamen as they were to a rock: imperceptible.
“I can’t see a chain gang of young black kids and old Chinese gamblers doing it for us, Pious.”
“Well, sir, we can go back after the cookers. The Feds haven’t got this Captain Cook guy, whose pills killed the kids. Or the cowboy who went nuts with the branding iron last month, on the exchange students. Or the super lab everybody’s talking about. Our special unit is still up, although it isn’t running too well.”
“That where Ray Tate is still? The Chemical Squad? What’s going on with him? I’m still paying his salary?”
Pious Chan nodded. “The gunner’s still with Gordie Weeks’s bunch. They’re doing nothing, sir. Some raids, little stuff. Nothing heavy that Tate can trip over, lose his way. At least he hasn’t killed anyone of the black persuasion. We’ve given the new Fed task force some space and some manpower, but if they ever somehow take down this Cook guy and get his lab the headlines are going to be Federal, out of Washington, how they saved the children because we couldn’t.”
The mayor shook his head, frustrated. “Take it back, Pious. Can you find a way to work around the Feds? Nail this Captain cocksucker, make him ours?”
“No problem, sir. Just send me the paper and I’ll kick Gordie and his gang into gear.” Chan was sick of the buttery asparagus but he asked, “You going to finish that, sir?” He wanted to eat the mayor’s lunch for him, literally and figuratively.
* * *
Gordie Weeks spent the month trying to figure out what was going on with Ray Tate’s scheme to spike Djuna Brown. The pair showed up separately each morning, drudged their way through paperwork, and seemed to get along all right. When the brainiacs down the hall had a fix on a lab they called the skipper and he put together a raiding party. The most likely time for reactive violence on lab raid was the go-in. The skipper mandated that Wally Brodski and the dyed dyke hit the door first, followed by whatever slobs were working. Ray Tate was the keeper of the keys, a fancy clerk who took down the names and numbers of the detectives, technicians, State Haz-Mat, and fire officials who went through the place. Ray Tate was swimming in boredom and seemed to be going downhill quickly under his matted hair and behind his thickening beard. He smelled sharply of paint and linseed oil, his fingertips were crusted with shades from the unhappy end of the rainbow. The raids yielded little mom-and-poppers, chemistry sets in basements, bathrooms, attics. None of the bust-ins had yielded a single double Charlie.
The dep had stopped calling. Gordie Weeks’s calls to Intelligence for intell coming out of the raids were unreturned.
Almost daily, the skipper cornered Ray Tate. “Hey, Ray, what’s going on with the dyke? She dropping today?”
“My partner, skip. She’s my partner.”
The skipper wasn’t sure if Ray Tate was being devious and arch. “You’re not gonna get her for me, are you, Ray? You were fucking me all along.”
Ray Tate just smiled at him and shrugged. “She’s clever, skip. She’s one diabolical dyke, that one.”
The skipper wasn’t sure but he was hopeful. “But, maybe? Maybe soon?”
Ray Tate had enshrouded himself in the safe cloud of non sequitur and had taken to talking about birds. “You ever notice, skip, that there’s a lot of fucking Canada geese in town? All those homeless people starving and there’s a fucking shitload of geese, waiting to be cooked up? How come nobody ever put the equation together? We got skinny folks starving in the streets and we got, like, a million fat fucking geese strutting around like they pay taxes.”
“Ray, Ray.”
* * *
When the call came from Pious Chan, via the dep, the skipper was in his office with his feet up, thinking idly about Gloria the receptionist and the .45s. He’d seen Djuna Brown and Gloria in deep chitchat a couple of times and wondered if the dyke had lured her over to the other team. The concept destroyed his dozing dreams. Something was different with the dyke. She made effort to keep her unruly white hair in some kind of shaped ’do. The exhaustion that had slumped her bones inside her body had evaporated, as though she’d had some kind of marrow work done on her skeleton. Djuna Brown still looked at him with her bitter eyes spitting hate, but when he wasn’t noticeably around she seemed to bustle with efficiency. She and Ray Tate laughed a lot.
The dep called, his voice jocular, “Gordo, you douchebag. Where you been? I call and I call and you’re never home. Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Hey, hey, dep.” The skipper knew he’d been swinging on a hook in the wind since the Feds had set up their own task force with the Staties. He played it low. “I been busy. Sorry I haven’t got back to you.”
“No matter. I know you guys been busy.” The dep said it without laughing. “What’d you get last night? Thousand pills?”
“Well, eight hundred.” The skipper had been disappointed. The tip from the local sector had suggested hundreds of thousands, based on the anxious rap of a strung out speeder.
“Wow, great. A little here and a little there, eh, Gordo? Chip away at the criminal infrastructure, it’ll collapse.”
“How’s the Fed task force working out, dep?” The skipper didn’t laugh but he took his shot. “They knocking down the double Chucks yet, got Captain Cook in the chain gang?”
“Well, Gordo, my boy, that’s why I’m calling you.”
* * *
The month for Ray Tate and Djuna Brown had been a cycle of rote. Raids on cookers had been amusing for a while but the media lost interest in minor takedowns and didn’t show up for the photo op. Ray Tate noticed that Wally the boozer and Djuna Brown were first through the doors. There were some scuffles but none of the speeders or cookers had much muscle tone or firepower. Wally Brodski took an elbow in the face while subduing an inside keeper and got two weeks off. Djuna Brown got into a tussle with a landlord who thought it was a home invasion and Wally stood watching her get her shit handed to her until Ray Tate climbed over him and put the chains on the guy. Djuna restrained him from going after Wally.
Afterwards, alone at the satellite, Ray Tate took Wally aside. “Don’t let them do this to you, Wally. We go into a place, we’re all one gang. You fucking know that.”
“She’s a fucking dyke, Ray. C’mon.”
“Right now she’s my partner. My dyke partner, sure, but she’s got the yellow letters on her back same as you, same as me, and the rest of us. What happens in here, that’s one thing. Out there, that’s another.” Ray Tate laid on some bullshit. “My father-in-law told me you were a good cop, you’d never watch another cop get his shit shuffled. Don’t you fucking do this, man.”
“Ah, fuck you, Ray.” But he had to listen: Ray Tate had the authority of dead bodies. Wally took the next door ahead of Djuna Brown and got his nose broken.
Djuna Brown somehow heard about it. “Don’t do that to me, Ray, okay?”
“It isn’t about you, Djun’,” he told her. “Wally forgot something, that’s all. I reminded him. I don’t