“C’mon, Ag. A little fun. You gonna be okay to work? Do some stuff with Harv later, become a journeyman cooker?” He stepped in and twitched back the shower curtain. “I decided to move you up. Harv’s okay on the X but he needs an apprentice for the crank.”
Agatha Burns was crouched on the floor under the hard, hot water, holding a soapy face cloth to the back of her neck. The face cloth was stained pink with watery blood. “Really?” For a second her face had a residual cheerleader’s glow that hadn’t quite been burned away by chemistry.
“Yep. The Harv’s a master maker. Don’t mention to him that I know about the Chinamen, though, okay? That you told me. I want to move you up quick. I don’t think Harv’s gonna make it and I want you to have all his secrets.”
“Okay, wow.” She stood up, beaming. Of all of her, only her eyes remained gorgeous. “Okay.”
He could count her ribs. There were bruises on her hips and knees where she’d fallen while high. She suddenly had sagging breasts and he regretted that. She smiled and her teeth looked wobbly and grey, off-kilter. He again felt a bit of sadness. “Finish up the chicklets, and when Harv comes to pick them up he’ll take you with him, get you started.”
“We going to the super lab?” She laughed gaily, his excesses forgotten, forgiven. “Okay, okay, Connie, I’ll do good.”
He felt a chill at the echo of her words. The super lab. What was that all about?
He left the building whistling, knowing he’d never need to come back again, and he was sad he’d never see her again. Harv was primed and would make his move, giving Agatha Burns a lesson in crank combustion. Harv, he knew, didn’t fuck around.
Chapter 4
When his wife threw him out after he’d shot the second black guy, Ray Tate had poked at the rental section of the newspaper, then went to the nearest police station and leaned on the duty sergeant’s table. The duty sergeant, an old Irish squarehead with rockers on his stripes, knew everything about his kingdom: the smokehouses, the homes with domestic violence, what was a rental and what was owned. He knew every neighbour dispute, every squat, every house infested with mental patients who only came out after dark, shy of the light, fearful of eyes.
The duty sergeant shook Tate’s hand across the table. “Fuck ’em, Ray. You go forth and smite thine enemies and, well, fuck what they’re trying to do to you.” He took the slip with the apartment building’s address, turned to a civilian operator, and said with polite command, “Run it.” To Ray Tate he said: “I know it. Old man Lilly’s place. It’s okay. Parking kinda sucks. Where they got you working? You got a company car?”
Ray Tate had told the squarehead he was relaxing on paid leave until they sorted out the latest shooting. No gun, no badge, no car.
“No problem, then.” The CO handed the duty a printout. “Okay. We got a domestic, we got a domestic, we got a B&E, we got another domestic, another B&E, noise, noise, noise. A suicide by blade. What the fuck?” He read through the page. “Oh, hang on. Okay. You’re going into three-o-five, right? That’s the domestics and the noise complaints, and the suicide. That’s why it went vacant, the guy killed himself. Cutting. A mess.” He’d dropped the sheet on the desk. “Make sure old man Lilly gives you a new carpet.”
The apartment was one big room with a partial partitioned-off kitchenette with a fragrant gas stove, a half-fridge, and a table that snapped down off the wall, landing on a folding leg. The bathroom was compact but had a tub. Ray Tate had spent many after-shifts sitting on the edge of a bathtub, soaking his feet in salts and soaps after walking his many posts. Calluses on his feet were buttery and rife and as familiar as his thumbs. There was no furniture and no carpet. The floor was scuffed but solid and an attempt had been made to sand it. There was no seepage onto the wood from the suicide. Ray Tate wasn’t worried about being haunted by a suicide: he had two black guys who sometimes came around late at night and stirred up his sleep.
The windows faced glorious, indirect north and Ray Tate had instinctively thought about painting. He’d used a butter knife to chip the encrusted paint on the windowsills until he was able to force the windows open all the way.
Old man Lilly liked having a cop in the building and gave Ray Tate a key to the storage area in the basement. “Go on down, take what you like. When you move out, just leave it.”
There was no bed in the basement but a serviceable wooden table and chair were stacked in a corner, upside down on a sprung-out couch. There were two mismatched lamps, a set of cups, saucers, dishes, and some odd pots. He’d never lived alone in his life. Every place he’d ever lived was already someone else’s home: first the State homes, then the foster homes, the rooming house with two other recruits near the academy, and finally with his wife. He went to an art store and bought bags of paints and brushes and an easel and set it up at a forty-five degree angle to the window.
While he was on paid off he’d stood at his easel and looked at the canvas. He squeezed paint and stared at it, his thumb poked through the hole in the pallet. His paycheques were automatically deposited and he had little reason to go outside. Until his beard and hair grew out, and he became unrecognizable from the media photos, he crept to the supermarket in a baseball hat and sunglasses. He started smoking again. He drank, each day starting in earlier until he found himself leaning asleep on his easel in the middle of the day. When he awoke his hands shook as he poured his breakfast.
One night he’d borrowed Mr. Lilly’s old Chevrolet and drove out to the western suburbs to see his ex and his daughter. His wife had been perfunctory and went to the basement to do laundry and watch television. His daughter, graduating high school, sat with him on the deck he’d built with the firefighter next door, and they talked about her photography and her plan to spend a year in Asia. She looked at him funny and then went inside, returning with a handful of photographs and a sleek Nikon. She stuttered it at him a few times and previewed the pictures on the LCD screen.
“Look, Dad,” she’d said. She handed him a photo taken of him before the first of the shootings. The difference was stunning: his face had become lined, his eyes were sunken into his head, his mouth was grim and clamped as though protecting himself from a confession.
“You look afraid,” his daughter said with alarm. “Are you afraid, Dad?”
He’d gone home and poured the half bottles of alcohol into the sink. He took to four sugars in his coffee to keep his blood in balance. The squareheaded duty sergeant from the local station came by one after-shift, looked around and said, “Jesus fuck, Ray. C’mon, man.”
The following day, three off-dutys and a uniformed female officer appeared carrying a folded futon, pillows, some banal framed pictures of Japanese mountaintops, a set of silverware, a television set, and a stack of bedding meant for a queen-sized bed. Each left a police business card with their cell numbers scrawled on the back. The last one, preparing to leave, a trim blond policewoman with a hurricane of freckles and a wide sad smile, said: “You need, you call, sergeant. You got it?”
Ray Tate nodded.
“You want, I’ll stay, sergeant.”
Numbly, he’d nodded and she helped him assemble and make up the futon. She stripped off her uniform. She wore men’s underwear and socks that sagged to her ankles.
Afterwards, as she slept, he turned on a lamp and tilted the shade away from her. He mixed blues and purples and blacks and painted her sleeping, her muscular arm hanging off the side of the futon, her gun belt curled on the floor, her boots neatly aligned beside the futon. He looked at the long tubes of yellows and oranges and bright reds and could think of nothing to do with them.
Then the sun was coming up and spilling thin, perfect north light into the apartment. He lay down beside her. He felt loved for what seemed the first time in his life, although he couldn’t recall her name.
* * *
After leaving the satellite