“I need this, Harv.” The Captain looked out the window. “Unless my Ag comes back. You think she’s going to come back to me?”
“I don’t think so, Cookie.” Harv looked sad. “Really, I really don’t.”
Harv saw that the Captain had made a sad face but he couldn’t help licking his smiling lips. “Cool, Harv. Get some gear together for my thing, and in the meantime we’ll get up and at it on our thing. Use those wreckers from before, the day of the Chinese roundup. Those were good guys. Did they like me, Harv?”
* * *
Ray Tate and Djuna Brown were in the skipper’s glassed office. Ray Tate was staring out the window as if studying the air currents, divining the invisible paths of birds. Djuna Brown affected boredom. She’d fluffed out her bleached hair into a wild ’do. The skipper wondered if Ray Tate was winding up for an avian lecture. This bird facet was new and the skipper had calls in to see how much documentation was needed for a psych write-out.
“Okay. Okay, you guys. We’re back in business. Orders from headquarters. We’re taking out this Captain Cook guy. We’re taking down the super lab.”
Djuna Brown said, “Cool.”
Ray Tate said, “Wow.”
The skipper glanced at Ray Tate, who now seemed to be documenting how many species of birds flew past the window. Djuna Brown had her eyes on his, a cat smile waiting to pounce. He thought he could smell peroxide in the air and suddenly wanted her out of his office. He was amazed at his enduring hatred of everything about her. He’d heard stories that she’d been a good cop, even though she’d been working up the woods amongst the bears and the wolves, that she’d made some good pinches. But there were other stories and it was those stories that scared him and his fear made his hatred deeper.
The skipper looked at Ray Tate as he spoke. “Yep. Back in business. The Federale brainiacs have got nowhere on Captain Cook, whoever he is, and his bubbling cauldron of evil, wherever that is. The double Chucks dried up after the two kids went tits up. The task force is hanging around headquarters doing a whole lot of nothing. So they come back to us. After all, we started the fucking thing. So how do you want to do it?”
Djuna Brown looked at Ray Tate and realized he wasn’t going to speak. He looked more likely to start snapping his fingers and reciting free-form poetry. She looked at the skipper and widened her smile. “Ray’s having a moment, skip. Thinking big thoughts. So, what do you want us to do? We’re pretty much fucked from coast to fucking coast on this thing. Every twenty minutes the guys down the hall wander in and say, ‘Hey we got a tip there’s a major stash out in the east end, go get it.’ ‘There’s a guy from Amsterdam coming in at the airport with a ton of blues, round him up.’ So we do. The major stash is three stoner kids sharing a half a brain and two dozen bad-quality ovals. The guy at the airport doesn’t show. The Federales ride their fancy cars around town with the cool radios under the dash and talk like cops. They kick down doors. They torture the speeders. Just like us real cops, except they couldn’t find their dicks with both hands. And when they can’t, now they come back and say, ‘Hey, how about a hand, help us find our dick?’”
The skipper heard the lulling islands in her voice and seemed entranced by her Chinese eyes. He looked over at Ray Tate. “Ray? What do you think?”
Ray Tate’s lips moved but he didn’t say anything. He took a worn Audubon Guide from his pocket and fingered the tattered edges. His fingernails were chewed back and there were flakes of black and purple paint on his cuticles. “I think there is,” he finally said, “a vast array of bird life in this city. You know that, skip? A preponderance of sparrows, a lot of pigeons, and prolific flocks of seagulls. The seagulls come inland for food because the lake is so polluted and there’s nothing down there to eat. So they come up to east Chinatown and go nuts on the garbage, attack picnickers in the parks. Don’t know why there’s so many pigeons. But they shit an awful lot.” He turned his eyes back to the window. “But sometimes you see swallows or robins, even sometimes a falcon or two. But an awful lot of pigeons, no question.”
Djuna Brown gazed at him for a few moments, a fond smile playing on her lips. The skip wondered if Ray Tate was armed.
She nodded, leaned towards Ray Tate, and said brightly: “Yeah, Ray, a lot of pigeon shit, no question. I read that pigeon shit is so toxic that it can dissolve a statue in, like, no time, like ten or fifteen years. I suspect it has something to do with their diet. I also heard that the city spends hundreds of thousands of dollars blasting statues and monuments to get the stuff off. It runs in the drains and pops up in our water. Did you know that, skip? Hundreds of thousands in tax dollars, so we can drink liquid pigeon shit. Believe me, that can’t be good for you.” She stretched again and rotated her neck. She wore one of her endless array of ugly suburban pantsuits. Her bra was black where it peeked through the buttons of her stretched blouse. “Now, crows. Let me tell you about crows. Crows is no joke, don’t get me started on crows —”
“Okay, focus, people.” The skipper sat forward and steepled his hands. “The Federales can’t do the job. The dep thinks we can. Can we?”
Djuna Brown started to speak again but Ray Tate overrode her. “Sure we can. But what’s in it for us? At the end of this thing, they’re going to fuck us all anyway. As soon as we get close, they’re going to race in with the lights flashing and grab up everyfuckingthing we find. You go back to Intelligence Analysis, Djuna goes back sucking a whistle at holiday traffic up the Interstate, and I go back … Well, there’s likely mushrooms involved and it’s going to stink an awful lot like shit.”
The skipper took all this sitting back in his chair, unable to look away from the unblinking eyes staring at Ray Tate in a friendly, expectant manner over the unruly beard. He was right and it wouldn’t matter downtown that the skipper failed because all they’d given him were zombies, a dyke who burned her hair, and a gunman who wanted to play Officer Friendly in the cool uniform and the red lights over his head. “Well, we’re going to do it anyway, right? It’s all pensionable time so we may as well go down in a blaze of glory. Thing is, Ray, can we do it?”
“Sure, skip. No question. We can put the hat on these fuckers in, oh, I bet two weeks. Maybe ten days.”
“Bullshit, Ray. The Federales have had a month and unlimited resources. They don’t got dick.”
“Yeah, skip, but they aren’t ace investigators.”
Djuna Brown smiled at Ray Tate. “And they maybe don’t have everything there is to have, eh, Ray? Maybe they don’t have …” She cut her eyes towards the door as though imparting a secret. “Maybe they don’t have … the mystery clue.”
The skipper couldn’t avoid speaking to her directly. “What mystery clue?”
She ignored him
Ray Tate continued, “The question is: do we want to do it? Are we going to get the tools? We’re going to need bodies, we’re gonna need cars.” Tate stretched and his joints cracked audibly. “Phil Harvey is our way in. He’s the only one we’ve got a hook on, him and Agatha Burns.” The skipper looked confused. “Agatha Burns, skip, the girl who went for a drive with Harvey and never returned?”
“Oh, her. She left the note on the fridge, right?”
“This case isn’t wires and tires. We’ve got no phones to wire and we’ve got no one to drive behind. We need two approaches: one to set up some teams around town and put a fix on Harv. The other to backtrack Burns, try to figure who she is and where she hooked up with these mutts.”
“Give