by Jeff Gulvin
‘Smelly, huh.’ The guard shook his head. ‘Awful hot for February. I figure he’s been here a coupla days.’
Laforge looked again. He could make out black hair and eye sockets, bloated cups of flesh with the eyeball missing from one. The skull was shattered inwards from one side, and bits of bone, tissue and shrivelled muscle poked at odd angles across what was left of his features. He looked away again. ‘Any ID?’
The guard slapped the floor of the car which stood chest height from the ground. ‘This is as far as I got, brother. I know I don’t look stupid.’ He laughed again, slapped his thigh and took a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket.
Laforge turned to Robbins. ‘Better get on to the sheriff, John. We’re gonna need homicide dicks down here.’
Joe Kinsella, the chief of deputies, phoned the sheriff at home and told him about the body as soon as the road unit called in. Unlike New Orleans, the crime rate in St Charles Parish was low. They had a large jail above the Hahnville courthouse which was rarely full and the sheriff kept fending off those politicians who wanted to build another. No need, he told them. You elected me sheriff to keep the crime rate down and that’s what I’m doing. Half of those who had elected him were developers vying for the contract.
Kinsella was forty-two years old, with short dark hair and a moustache. He was a little chunky round the middle these days. Louisiana born and bred, he had been an FBI agent for five years before coming home to this job when Clements got elected sheriff. Clements was old family Louisiana and Kinsella was old family, but Clements knew next to nothing about law enforcement. He was a damn good lawyer, however, so between them they worked things pretty well. This boxcar thing sounded like a homicide, and Kinsella hadn’t had a homicide since the coke whore murders three years previously. He took his jacket from the back of his chair and popped a fingerful of chew under his lip. The road unit had the evidence technicians en route and the doctor had been summoned, but had not arrived as yet. All Kinsella knew was the obvious death determination: gunshot wounds to the head.
He parked his car next to the cruiser Robbins and Laforge drove. Laforge looked a bit green round the gills. He was a squeamish sonofabitch at the best of times.
Kinsella spat tobacco juice. ‘What we got, Etienne?’
‘Looks like a homicide, boss. Guy with his head blowed off.’
Kinsella glanced round the freight yard. ‘No doc yet, huh?’
Laforge shook his head.
‘Who found him?’
‘Bull over there.’ Laforge pointed with his billy club to where the black guard was sitting smoking on a lump of wood by a blackened open fireplace. Kinsella grunted, nodded and strode over to the crime scene. Robbins had just about finished taping the area off, and Kinsella pushed underneath it and shone his flashlight into the boxcar. Quickly, expertly, he took in the scene. The victim lay on his side, arms smothered beneath him against the back wall of the car. The entry wound was on the right side of his head, a close-quarter shot. Kinsella would put money on the pathologist finding powder burns on the skin. A handgun then. To the side of the head—it was either execution or suicide. He could see no weapon lying around, so that discounted suicide. Carefully, he took an unopened packet of surgical gloves from his pocket and stripped the cellophane off. Laforge was next to him now, shining his torch. The floor area was dusty and Kinsella could make out at least two separate sets of footprints.
‘I don’t figure he shot himself, do you?’ Laforge said in his ear.
‘I don’t figure anything for sure yet, Etienne. You wanna make detective, you got that to learn already. Figure nothing till you have all the evidence in your possession.’ He chewed his lip. ‘Alls I can see so far is a close-quarter bullet wound or wounds to the head. Either he did it or somebody else.’ He pointed to the scuff marks on the floor. ‘Looks like he wasn’t alone; though, and I don’t see a gun. Do you?’
He turned then and strode over to the security guard, who flipped his cigarette butt into the fireplace and sat with his arms folded, his long legs stretched in front of him.
‘Joe Kinsella. Chief of Deputies.’ Kinsella offered his hand. The guard shook it and stood up. ‘Raymond Floyd Patterson.’
Kinsella raised an eyebrow and Patterson shook his head. ‘I know I don’t even look like him and I hate the fight game. Figure my daddy either had a sense of humour or ambition, don’t you?’
Kinsella smiled. ‘You’ve not touched anything back there?’ He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder.
‘No, sir.’
‘Good.’
‘You know who he is yet?’
‘No. Can’t touch him till the doctor certifies him dead.’
‘Oh he dead all right. I told your deputies he was dead when I called you up.’
‘I know it. The law, though, Raymond. Gotta be a doctor who tells us he’s dead.’
The doctor arrived, certified him dead and conducted his preliminary investigation. Then the evidence technicians went to work. They found no ID, driver’s licence or social security card. He had no belongings at all and no wallet or money.
Kinsella stood over him and saw a necklace glint at his throat. He thinned his eyes and squatted, then reached with a gloved hand and fished the chain out from the top of the blood-stained shirt. Medic-Alert. He twisted the flat piece of silver with the snake embossed on it and lifted one eyebrow. Thomas Carey. Diabetic. London and a phone number. ‘Oh shit,’ Kinsella said. ‘We got ourselves a tourist.’
1
June
HARRISON STOOD ON THE sidewalk and tied his hair into a ponytail. Twenty-five years in the FBI and he still looked like a bum. At this time of year in New Orleans, he figured he ought to finally admit defeat and get his hair cut, but he never seemed to get round to it. He wanted to buy food in the French Market, but Decatur Street hummed with tourists who obviously had not heard about the typical summer temperatures here. He sucked humid air, shimmering in a wave from the river, and stepped into Nu Nus Café. Dewey had basketball on the TV.
‘Hey, bro. What’s up?’
‘Just get me a cold one, Dewey. I know what you’re like when you’ve got the game going.’
Dewey Albert Biggs—big, heavyset, with blond hair and beard—flipped the top off a bottle of Miller. ‘Get a little animated, I guess, don’t I.’ He turned to the small, Asian woman seated at the end of the bar. ‘Just excuse me if I make a noise, mam. I won’t mean anything by it.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. Don’t mind me.’
Harrison squinted sideways at her as he raised the bottle to his lips. She had an accent, but he couldn’t quite place it. He thought it might be British, but there was an edge to it. He caught her eye and smiled. She returned the smile and stirred what looked like a tall glass of iced water with a straw. Harrison looked away. Yeah, British, he thought, with a trace of wherever it was she started out still hanging around. He glanced at her again and caught her face in profile. Black hair, a few strands of silver just beginning to lighten it. Crow’s feet at the edge of her eyes. She wore a pair of navy blue shorts and open-toed sandals, and the skin of her legs was rich, dark and smooth. Harrison realised he was staring and looked away suddenly, a glow of perspiration at his neck. He wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans and his habitual, battered cowboy boots. Today had been hot; hotter still cooped up in the police department’s surveillance van deep in St Thomas Project. Four hours he had been stuck in there, him and Dave Cimino from the 6th District, dripping pools of sweat and watching gangbangers out on the street.
Harrison hated surveillance in the projects. No matter what kind of vehicle you put out there, the kids were not stupid. Strange vehicles in black neighbourhoods—watching the ‘bricks’ of one teenage ganglord or another. But surveillance and undercover work was what he did: it had been pretty much the same since he graduated from Quantico. God knows that felt like a long time ago now.
Dewey gave a shout, smashing fist into palm as his team scored again. Harrison g
lanced sideways at the woman once more and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. There was something engaging about her eyes, something behind the fragility of the smile. She looked away again, obviously not in the mood for conversation. Harrison slid the empty bottle across the bar and Dewey cracked open another. Harrison plucked a Marlboro from the crumpled pack in his jeans’ pocket and took a box of matches from the pile on the bar. He popped the match on his thumbnail, a trick he had learned during hours of boredom in Vietnam thirty years ago.
His mind rolled back and age crept up on him. Thirty years and change; Lai Khe base in the Iron Triangle. He scratched the tattoo on his upper arm, a cartoon of a grinning rat standing upright, six-gun in one hand and a whiskey bottle in the other. He remembered lying in a hammock in the hootch, listening to mosquitoes and smoking, just waiting for a bunch of grunts to get pinned down by the VC, who popped up from the tunnels. The call would come and his outfit would saddle up and be choppered in by the Cavalry.
Vietnam: his past, 1st Engineer Battalion Tunnel Rat. He had volunteered to go back for a second tour of duty, after he could not transfer to the Rats the first time. Eli Footer’s fault, God rest his beautiful soul. If Eli hadn’t got himself all blowed to hell, then Harrison wouldn’t have got so pissed off he had to join the most dangerous outfit there was. He thought about it now, crawling underground—just you, your flashlight and your pistol. One on one; warfare pure and simple. He remembered some of the guys: ‘Batman’ and Rejo and Ray ‘the Probe’ Martinez. Martinez had been the one who pulled him out after he screwed up the last time he went underground.
Harrison sucked on the cigarette, letting smoke dribble from his nostrils, and glanced at the woman again. She looked Vietnamese; he could tell after having spent so much time out there. She was the reason his mind was running off at all kinds of tangents, after a day frying in the van.
His beeper vibrated against his midriff and he plucked it from his belt. Penny calling from the office. Harrison asked Dewey for the phone and walked to the door that led up to the hotel, so he could use the one on the wall. Now the woman sat face on to him, but her stare was through him, eyes like onyx glass in her head.
‘Hey, Matthew. What’s up?’ he said when Penny answered the phone.
‘Just checking with you, buddy. Making sure you didn’t cook out there.’
‘All but, bro.’ Harrison crushed his cigarette in the ashtray.
‘Where are you?’
‘Decatur. Nu Nus Café. Dewey’s watching basketball.’
‘Who’s Dewey?’
‘Bartender.’
‘Listen.’ Penny’s voice grew more serious. ‘I just got back from the range. The team leader asked me if I knew where you were.’
‘Mackon, why?’
‘I don’t know. I told him you were on surveillance for us. I figure he wants to talk to you about something.’
Harrison shrugged. ‘Well, I guess he can page me if he wants me bad enough. I’m through for the day, bubba.’
‘Yeah. Me too. Time I was outta here.’
‘How’s that little rug-rat of yours?’
‘Keeping us awake at night. Think yourself lucky you live on your own.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Harrison put down the phone.
Penny was a good agent and they formed one of the sniper observer units for the SWAT team. He was ex-Marine Corps and had done some special forces stuff in his time. He could separate a target’s brain stem at two hundred yards with a rifle. Not that he had had to do it. As far as Harrison knew, Penny had never shot anyone, which was probably a good thing. He was just a kid really. His wife had only recently given birth, so the Penny household out in Slidell was turned just about upside down. Slidell. Harrison lit another cigarette and flapped out the match. All the guys from the field office lived out that way, except Cochrane who was St Charles Parish born and raised. Harrison was the only one who lived in New Orleans itself: all but fifty years old and two crummy rooms on Burgundy and Toulouse in the French Quarter. The part that tourists were told to avoid after dark. The ankle holster sweated against the inside of his boot. He finished his beer and ordered a third, and Dewey leaned on his elbows.
‘Summer in New Orleans, Johnny Buck,’ he said. Then he smiled at the Asian lady. ‘We don’t get but two temperatures here in the summer, mam. Stop and mildew.’
She laughed then and Dewey poured her some more water. ‘About the best thing you can drink in this weather.’
‘You don’t mind?’ Her voice was soft and easy on the ear, the words perfectly formed in her mouth. Harrison looked at her again. She was tiny, even on the stool he would put her at no more than five foot two. She was small-boned and delicate, which belied the strength he could see in her eyes.
‘You on vacation, mam?’ Harrison asked her.
She sipped iced water through a straw, pursing her lips so the colour faded only to return again when she smiled. ‘Not really.’ She looked beyond him once more, as if not quite sure of herself, as if not sure she wanted to speak.
She could feel this man’s eyes on her, but she looked through him now to the wall, something that she did a lot these days. Everything would crowd in on her and grow tall, even the tiniest, most simple of things would take great shape and weight and stop her right in her tracks. As a doctor she had told herself to expect it—mind wandering, things not making sense. It had been going on for four months now. She looked back at the man and he was still looking at her. Blue-grey eyes set in wrinkled cups of flesh; a lined and seamy face, tanned dark by the sun. Long, gunmetal-coloured hair tied at his collar in a ponytail that hung down his back. He wore no hat and she could see the hair was fuzzing and just beginning to thin at the crown. Normally, she did not like long hair on men, but somehow it seemed to sit well on him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at length. ‘That wasn’t much of an answer.’
‘Mam,’ Harrison said. ‘If that’s the only one you got, it’ll do just fine.’ He smiled again. ‘Are you from England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘London.’
‘Really?’ Harrison swivelled round on his stool. ‘I know a guy in London.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. He’s coming out here, in fact. Next few weeks, I think it’s gonna be.’
‘What’s his name?’
Harrison laughed then. ‘Mam, from what I hear London’s a big place. I don’t figure you’re gonna know him.’
They both laughed then and Harrison asked her if she wanted anything else to drink. She ordered a glass of white wine.
‘And another beer,’ Harrison said to Dewey. ‘All this heat makes me thirsty.’
‘Does it ever cool down?’ the woman asked him.
‘Only when it rains.’
The woman asked to see a menu and Harrison got one too, and they both ordered the house po-boys. There was something about her, something behind the broken smile. Old instincts pricked at Harrison and he wondered. ‘As we’re both about to eat,’ he said, ‘would you like to join me at a table?’
‘Thank you. That would be very nice.’
They moved beyond the mirrored partition, leaving Dewey to the third quarter of the game. One of the regulars, a reporter for the Times Picayune, came in, saw the basketball and satisfied himself with a beer and a silent stool at the bar.
‘My name’s Dollar,’ Harrison introduced himself. ‘John Dollar. But everyone calls me Harrison.’
‘Why Harrison?’ she asked him.
He thought about that. Harrison had been the name he had picked when he first went undercover for the FBI and somehow it had stuck. He had been deep three times since then and always the same name.
‘Just a kinda nickname,’ he said.
‘John Dollar and they nicknamed you Harrison?’ Her eyebrows stalked.
Harrison looked a little awkward. ‘Well, that and Johnny Buck. You know—buck—dollar.’
She nodded her head and smiled. ‘My name�
�s Jean Carey.’
‘From England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Originally?’
She leaned on a palm, long nails cupping the delicate lines of her face. ‘No. I arrived in England as a refugee from Vietnam when I was eighteen.’
‘When was that?’
‘A long time ago. More years than I care to remember.’
The name Carey rang a bell somewhere in Harrison’s head, but he could not remember why. He looked at her again. She wore a wedding ring on her finger.
‘So Carey’s your married name?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Jean?’
She smiled. ‘Now we’re on to nicknames again, I suppose. My real name’s Jung Sook, but being a student in England and a Vietnamese boat person to boot, it was easier to pick something the locals would be able to remember.’
‘So you chose Jean.’
‘The first thing that came into my head.’ She laughed again, but he could sense little merriment in her.
‘Is this your first time in New Orleans?’
Her face darkened all at once and she laid down her fork on the salad dish. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not.’
Four months ago now and it felt as if it were yesterday. She knew that would never change. It would always feel like that. Nothing would get any better. The pain, she hoped, might ease: other people she had spoken to, who had been through similar experiences, told her the pain did ease. But the memory never faded. It remained as fresh as that first night when the telephone had woken her.
It had not actually woken her. That was the following night or the night after perhaps, she could not quite recall the details now. But she remembered waking up at three minutes past two, one night back in February. The curtains were open and the Fulham street outside was quiet and still. The moon was large and full and she could see it above the lights of the city. There was frost on the windows, patterns gathering on the inside even. She was suddenly wide awake, taking in minute details as if she had never been to sleep. Something was wrong. She could feel it. A tremor, the smallest of sensations somewhere deep inside her and all she could see was her mother’s aged face. She could hear her mother’s voice and, in the distance, gunfire. There was nothing new in gunfire. She had grown up with the rattle of gunfire. Ml6, AK47: she knew the sounds they made by heart. But this was new gunfire, different gunfire, and she knew that what they had feared had happened, and now it was time to go.