LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chapter 3

      The cafeteria down the street was close enough to East Chinatown that it was empty except for the two grill men, the cashier, and two idle Mexican-looking bussers who looked for a horizon to jump when Ray Tate and road sergeant 667 walked in. The cashier and the workers wore white gauze masks and tilted away from customers so they wouldn’t have to share breath. Someone had put a sign in the window: NO MASK NO SERVICE. Someone had added, No Chineess Niether. Under that someone wrote Cracker Asshole. And, beneath that in a casual scrawl: Ahhh, Soooo solly, Chollie.

      The cashier silently pointed to a plastic bottle of hand sanitizer mounted near the door and Ray Tate and the Road pumped at it.

      The Road knew the counter crew and he armed two stale breakfasts off the hot table and drew two mugs of coffee. He brought the tray to the window booth. The eggs were poached to rubber; the brittle toast under them was barely tanned; the bacon was pale lank flesh. But the coffee was coffee and it was hot, and, Ray Tate knew, at seven in the morning after a bad night there was no such thing as crappy hot coffee.

      “So, Ray,” the Road said, passing his notebook over for a scribble, “you like that mutt?” He made a toneless voice, “‘You mean, duh, how many times I jerked off, like so far this morning or all day yesterday too?’” He laughed. “Fu-king mutt.”

      Tate signed his name and badge number and wrote the time under the Road’s last notation, then drew a wavy line to the bottom margin, looping to circle the page number.

      “What brings you out to the streets so early, Ray? I thought you were up in Intelligence Zombies?”

      Ray Tate had been out and about because he’d painted through the night until early in the morning and then couldn’t get to sleep with the whirling colours in his head and his ceiling fan indifferently shoving the humidity around his apartment. His morning assignment was to set up at the courthouse and monitor the release of a suspect on a homicide case. He’d gone on a cruise, riding the radio, killing time. When the Road voiced out for a scribbler, he’d snapped up the rover. With the bug gone wild and the chief’s decree that a detective or soft clothes had to attend every crime stage with a wisp of gun smoke, everybody had to lift a little extra weight. There were stages, especially in the Hauser North Projects, that had been frozen for more than twelve hours because no one in a suit or designer windbreaker was inclined to run up there, stick their head in, and scribble in somebody’s notebook.

      “We should’ve probably taken him in, Road. If he goes south, we’re going to wear it like the slippery brown hat.”

      “That guy, Ray, that guy looks after himself. You see his knucks? It looks like he got a few shots in. When we patted him down there was gun oil on his shirt, there, on his waist. He stank of gun smoke. I figure he had a heater of his own tucked away and he dumped it before we got there. Dumped his wallet, too.” The Road picked up a piece of toast and tried to stab the corner through the poached yellow deadeye. The bread snapped like a cracker. “What the fuck we going to do, anyway? Arrest the guy for getting shot?” He gave up on trying to penetrate the deadeye and crunched on the toast. “I asked him. I said, ‘Who shot you?’ Fucking guy’s worse than Bill Clinton. He said, ‘Well, it depends what you mean by shot.’” He started laughing.

      Ray Tate kept his raid jacket on and zipped. The cafeteria was cold with air conditioning; it was believed that the bug multiplied in heat and humidity. The windows looked up the damp street at the broken crime stage. Four bulky men in surgical masks and sports windbreakers, wearing red baseball caps, headed in the direction of East Chinatown, carrying golf clubs. Volunteers. A one-man ghost car trailed them at a walking pace.

      The fella was standing around in the brightening grey dawn, scoping The Road’s flashing cruiser and Ray Tate’s unmarked Taurus. Waiting, Ray Tate thought, to retrieve his gun and wallet from where he’d dumped them when he realized those sirens were singing for him. The fella had a fresh cigarette in his mouth and his right hand was pressing a medi-pak to his left shoulder. One-handed, he dragged on a recycling bin and sat down on it, leaning back against the brown bricks to hang in for the long haul. People shuffled past him, all wearing surgical masks, all moving quickly. They each seemed stiff, holding their breath. No one headed into the plagued precincts of East Chinatown.

      Ray Tate, who fancied himself a bit of an artist, felt like he was sitting in a moody Edward Hopper painting, looking out at an old pearly photograph of hopeful ghetto life. “How many guys you down?”

      “With the bug? Out of my twelve-guy night leg, there’s four left, plus me. I got three guys at Mercy, one of them on a lung. Timmy Harper. You know Timmy?”

      Ray Tate nodded. When he’d come out of the departmental hearing that cleared him after he’d put down the second black guy, a television reporter said Congratulations, Ray, and handed him a lit cigar, trying to get footage of him looking like some arrogant gunner who’d got away with something, celebrating it off a cubano. Timmy Harper had grabbed the stogie and stabbed it at the guy, grinding the hot coal into his hairpiece. Timmy Harper lost a beat and went down to patrolman, getting badly stomped in the Racist Ray Tate riots. “Tell him I’m having a thought, right?”

      “He’ll appreciate it.” The Road looked at the fella up the street, basking in the flashing blue and red lights. “Good that you’re getting out and about, Ray. So, how come, anyway, you’re out so bright and early, on the rover?”

      “This fucking heat. With the bug and the Volunteers, here I be.” He rubbed his face. He had paint crusted on his fingernails. His hair was too long and greasy and he had an unshaped beatnik beard. He was going grey and his eyebrows seemed to be curling into his eyes. There was a benefit to the dripping hair: it obscured his missing earlobe, snicked off by a wild shot when he’d been gunned. His eyes were red from smoking out his apartment. Several gin and tap waters might have something to do with it. Under his raid jacket he wore a black leather biker vest with silver conches over a grey sweatshirt, black jeans, and scuffed short cowboy boots. The handle of his gun, riding in his boot, made a distinct bulge. His badge hung from a breakaway chain around his neck. “Yesterday they had me like this directing traffic down on the Eight while they untangled a wreck. One guy almost clipped me and I caught up to him in the gridlock and tinned him. ‘What the fuck’re you doing, man?’ He said: ‘You? A cop? Fuck, I thought you was gonna wipe my windshield. I lost so many wipers to those guys I got my own parking spot at Walmart.’ Duh.”

      “What you do? You wallpaper him up?”

      “Naw.” Ray Tate shrugged. “If I saw me, badge or no badge, standing the middle of the Eight looking like this, I’d speed-dial my lawyer, lock my elbows and floor it, brace for impact. Anyway, I went down to Stores and checked out the jacket. Enough’s enough.”

      Up the street outside the window, a short blue-and-white van with a caduceus stencilled on the side stopped in front of the shooting victim sitting on his recycling bin. Someone had spray-painted balloons from the forked tongues of the twisted serpents of the caduceus and filled them with FOK YU in stylized Chinese characters. A brisk young black woman wearing a mask and a nurse’s habit climbed from the passenger seat with a handful of surgical masks dangling from her fingers. She stood at a good distance, speaking to the fella, then leaned and at arm’s length held out the masks.

      The fella reluctantly took one and awkwardly tied it to his face. After the woman boarded the van and it slid away, the man stared after it for a moment, then removed the mask and used the point of his cigarette to singe a hole in it. He waved it in the air to stop the burn, then tied it back on and stuck the cigarette through the hole, exhaling jets of smoke through his nose.

      “Road, I’m rolling. Thanks for breakfast.”

      “No problem, Ray. Don’t breathe in.”

      Ray Tate wanted a real breakfast even if he had to pay for it.

      Prowling the streets, it was eerie still, seeing masked pedestrians and motorists making their way through the morning. The four big men in sports windbreakers and red ball caps sat on folding chairs at California Street,

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