by Jeff Gulvin
Harrison went back to the quarter and phoned Jean’s room from the hotel lobby. They sat and talked over a cup of coffee in the open quadrangle behind reception. Harrison could smell the flowers and their conversation was punctuated by the sound of hosepipes keeping them fresh. He told Jean what had happened, and her eyes lit up when he explained that he was going up to Spokane and that they ought to travel together.
‘I’m delighted, John,’ she said. ‘But why’re you doing this?’
Harrison shrugged. ‘It’s my job.’
She nodded, but the expression in her eyes told him she thought there was more to it than that. All at once, Harrison was embarrassed and got up. ‘The plane leaves at ten-thirty tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll swing by and get you at nine.’
Jean stayed in the quadrangle after he had gone, just sitting quietly and thinking. There was more to it than just his job. She thought about him then, the way he had treated her since that first night in the bar. He had been concerned about her ever since. Yes, it was his job, but there was a kindness about him that was hidden behind his appearance and his awkwardness. She wondered if kindness was all that it was.
Harrison packed a bag at his apartment. He was not going back to the office today, and he had arranged for Matt Penny to give them a ride to the airport in the morning. He had got the Spokane police officer’s name and number from Jean: a Detective Spinelli. He called him.
‘FBI?’ Spinelli said. ‘You guys finally interested in this, huh? I’ve been trying to get some kinda federal co-ordination for years. Does this mean that Mrs Carey won’t be coming now?’
‘No, she’s coming along. I’m just accompanying her.’
‘Good.’
Harrison frowned. ‘Why is it good?’
‘Because from the tone of her voice on the phone, I figured she was looking for the kinda answers I sure as hell can’t give her. I can tell her a few facts about some of the murders, perhaps point out a few similarities which might identify this crew as the perps, but that’s not gonna convict anybody, and it sure as hell won’t bring her son back to life.’
‘Don’t worry, she’s a tough lady, Detective. And she’s intelligent. She can handle it.’
Harrison put down the phone, lit a cigarette and stared out of the window at the balcony across the street. The Sun and Moon hotel and boarding house. He could see Kathleen changing the beds. She waved to him, but his thoughts were all at once in Vietnam. Maybe it was Jean’s connection, but his mind was in Cu-Chi and the past. Eli Footer being blown up and him finding a disembodied hand with Eli’s watch strapped to it. He sat down on the bed and wondered at himself. Was this just because of Jean Carey, or was it age catching up with him? Never before in his life had he thought so much about the past.
They flew to Spokane via Denver and Salt Lake City. Jean sat in the seat alongside him and looked out of the window as they climbed above Lake Ponchartrain. Harrison watched the muscles in her neck; her head was twisted to get the best view of the glistening mantle of water. Her black hair was loose, but she had pushed it back so one ear was exposed, small, neat and nut brown, and Harrison found himself taking in every contour. She looked round once more as the plane levelled off and then she sat back, eyes closed, with both her hands on the armrests. Harrison rested his hands in his lap, looking at how small hers were and how beautifully she kept her nails.
Jean opened her eyes and smiled at him. ‘Thank you for coming with me.’ She touched his hand where it lay in his lap and Harrison squeezed her fingers briefly. ‘It’s my job, Miss Lady Mam.’
‘I know. But thank you anyway.’
All at once he felt colour in his cheeks, as if she knew this was much more than just his job. ‘What made you want to be a doctor?’ he said quickly.
She thought about that and was not wholly sure of the answer. ‘I think it was because I helped nurse a lot of people during the war. Would that make sense to you?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘When I got to England, I knew it was going to be for keeps, and I wanted to forget all about the war and the past and the terrible suffering everyone had been through. But I had been good at the science subjects at school, and I think I have an analytical mind, so medicine seemed the natural thing to do.’
‘And your job’s still open for you?’ he asked her. ‘Back in London?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled then, thinking of the wards and the faces of the children and the tremendous amount of laughter there was in the place. For the first time since coming here, she missed the work. But then she felt inexplicably guilty, as if in considering such thoughts she betrayed the memory of her son; and the need to understand, to do something about his murder was redoubled. She dismissed London from her mind.
‘I’m not thinking about going back, John. I have too much to finish here first.’
Harrison looked sideways at her then and wanted to tell her not to get her hopes too high, and that all they could really expect was general information. But her eyes were fired with renewed strength and there was no way he wanted to dampen that spirit.
The flight attendant came by with her trolley and poured them both some coffee. Harrison sipped his black and thought about placing a surreptitious plug of chew under his lip. But the no-smoking policy extended to all tobacco products and he would have to wait. He took an elastic tie from his pocket and twisted his hair into a ponytail. ‘Time I got this cut,’ he muttered. ‘I’m too old for it now.’
Jean smiled. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Almost fifty.’
‘Have you always been an FBI agent?’
‘No, mam. I was INS before the Bureau. Border patrol agent on the New Mexico line.’ He smiled. ‘Trying to stop wetbacks crossing the river.’
‘Wetbacks?’
He nodded. ‘It’s not a real nice term, but it’s only because of the river.’ He made a face. ‘American-born Mexicans are called Chicanos. I lived with a whole bunch of them in a trailer park in Idaho.’
‘Undercover?’
He nodded.
‘Have you done a lot of that?’
‘Too much.’
‘Would you do it again?’
‘No, mam. I wouldn’t.’
They sat in silence for a while, Harrison half listening to the murmur of other people’s conversation, half to the drone of the engines, and then Jean touched his hand again.
‘Did you go to fight in my country?’ she said.
He pushed out his lips and nodded. ‘I did two years. Like the dumb sonofagun I am, I volunteered to go back.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I had unfinished business.’ He squinted at her. ‘A friend of mine, who should never have been out there in the first place, got blown up on my first tour. I had promised his mother I would look out for him, because he was about as streetwise as Mr Magoo.’ He stopped then, and Eli’s face was as clear in his mind as that day in 1968 when they had shared a last cigarette, while holed up in a firefight. Eli was a nervous individual and did not make a good soldier. But he had balls and refused to duck service for his country by going to college like he should have. ‘I fought the VC underground, in the tunnels of Cu-Chi,’ he said.
They looked at one another for a long moment and it was as if each could discern the level of pain in the other. Harrison finally smiled and patted her hand. ‘It was thirty years ago,’ he said. ‘I was a punk kid with a hair stuck up my ass. It was real dumb, Jean, and I know better now. But right then, I just wanted to kill the sonofabitch who blew up my buddy. I think I got by on adrenaline alone.’
‘Do you regret it?’ she asked him.
‘No, I don’t regret it. I was true to my feelings at the time. I think as long as you do that in life, you don’t regret much.’
They changed planes in Denver with a half-hour in between, and then an hour in Salt Lake City, before finally they flew into Spokane. It was raining and the wind was howling in from the Rockies. Harrison stepped out of the airpor
t on to the pavement. ‘And I want to move north?’ he muttered.
Spinelli had told them to check into the Holiday Inn downtown, which was only a short cab ride from police headquarters, where he was stationed with the homicide squad. Harrison hailed a taxi and helped the driver load their bags into the trunk, then he settled against the back seat with Jean.
They took a room each on the second floor, and agreed to meet for dinner in the bar. Harrison showered, smoked a cigarette and thought once more about his motives in coming here. He was first down and had a beer going when Jean came in. She had changed into a sleeveless, light cotton dress. She wore no stockings and the skin of her legs was smooth, brown and rich. Her hair was piled on her head and looked very black against the artificial light. Harrison pulled out the stool next to him. When she sat down, the hemline of her dress rode just above her knee and it was all he could do to keep his eyes averted.
‘You look beautiful,’ he told her, and nodded to the barman.
She ordered a Long Island iced tea and Harrison sipped another beer, and they chatted with the bartender for a while, getting the lowdown on Spokane. It was an industrial city and all Harrison knew about it was that the FBI had arrested three members of the Phineas Priesthood there. But he had learned a long time ago that the best way to find out about a place was to ask the local bartenders.
In the morning, they got up early and went down to the station house only to find that Spinelli had been called out on a homicide. So Harrison and Jean took in what sights of the city there were, until one of the homicide dicks paged them.
Spinelli was a big man with a handshake that crushed bones. He was in his mid-thirties, with blond hair, sharp blue eyes and a bushy blond moustache. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, revealing heavily muscled arms, and had a .357 Magnum in his shoulder holster.
‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs Carey,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid your son just got on the wrong train.’ He stood up and reached for his jacket. ‘Most of the investigation time I’ve put in on this has been my own.’ He looked at Harrison and smiled. ‘The FBI wasn’t the only organisation to show no interest. The Spokane PD wasn’t too hot on the idea of the legwork either.’ He opened the little gate that separated the squad area from the corridor and turned down the collar on his jacket.
‘I’ve done it all in my own time and keep the files at home.’
He drove them to a suburb on the southern city limits, a small development of single-storey houses in a four-block grid. Harrison rode up front and they talked about police work.
Spinelli’s house was set to the back of his lot, which was unfenced, and a newspaper still lay on the lawn where the paperboy had tossed it.
‘My wife’s at work and the kids will be at school,’ he said, and led the way inside.
The front door opened into an open-plan living room and kitchen. Spinelli put some coffee on to boil, then he opened a door off the hall, and a desk and two metal filing cabinets seemed to bulge at them. ‘Not a whole lotta space, but there you go.’ He whipped his jacket off, spread it over the back of the chair and settled himself down at the desk. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you know so far.’
Jean told him what Gary Hirstius had found out, and then Harrison put in his piece about the bandana-wearing heroin-dealer. Spinelli drew in his lips. ‘Now that is interesting,’ he said. ‘I’ve come across that one other time, but it kinda bears out a theory I’ve had for a while now. Chicago. One of the Highrollers got popped up there. The Highrollers are the northern crew by the way.’
‘Supplying dope to a gangbanger,’ Harrison said. ‘I’m wondering if we’re looking at some kinda supply network.’
Spinelli pulled a number of files from the cabinets and gave them the picture he had built up over the past five years. He told them that the FTRA had upwards of two thousand members, split into the three groups that Hirstius had identified. The Blues, or Highrollers, rode the northern lines, from the North-West to Minnesota. ‘As far as I can gather, their leader is a Canadian guy they call The Voyageur,’ he said. ‘I guess after the trappers that used to canoe Lake Superior in the old days. I’ve never got a picture of him and, like most of them, he’s real secretive. But I know he’s French Canadian and hails originally from Montreal.’ He went on to explain that the Red Heads occupied the Midwestern railroads and were led by a man called Ghost Town. ‘His real name is Nixon Bodie,’ he said. ‘From the Yosemite area of California. They named him after the town of Bodie, which is a sorta living museum now, up in the Sierras.’ He looked at Jean then. ‘The black bandanas roam the South, mam. Southern Colorado’s as far north as they get, and they ride all the way to Florida, Georgia, and maybe even the Carolinas. All I know about them is that they call themselves the Southern Blacks, which is a play on words, because the whole outfit is racist through and through.’ He paused for a moment. ‘You said you were Vietnamese.’
She nodded.
‘Forgive me. I haven’t seen a picture of your son. Was he Asian to look at too?’
‘Partially.’
Spinelli sucked a breath. ‘They coulda killed him just because of that.’
The colour drained visibly from Jean’s face and she bunched her lips together hard to stop them trembling.
‘It may’ve been something else, but I can’t pretend to you that it was.’ Spinelli tried to smile.
Harrison touched Jean’s arm and she took his hand in hers and squeezed really hard. He looked back at Spinelli. ‘I’ve got a picture of the guy we tailed,’ he said. ‘You wanna take a look?’
‘Sure.’
Harrison let go Jean’s hand and she sat down while he fished out the surveillance photograph from his bag. Spinelli frowned, chewed at his lip, and then went back to his filing cabinet.
‘I thought I recognised him,’ he said, taking out a file. ‘There you go. Harold Douglas. Goes by the nickname Limpet.’ He passed Harrison a picture. ‘I got that from a hobo who sorta went UC of his own accord.’ His eyes narrowed then. ‘Good old boy, he was. Musta been all of seventy, had been riding the skids since the forties. He got a whole bunch of information for me before he disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’ Jean said.
‘Yes, mam.’ He took off south one day, two years ago, and I’ve never seen him since.’ He made a face. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling he became one of the statistics.’
‘Why’d he do that for you?’ Harrison asked. ‘Go undercover.’
‘I figure he was just sick of it all. Quite a lot of his friends had disappeared over the years, people he’d known for thirty years in some cases. He figured riding the rails was the last bastion of what used to be the spirit of America. The whole hobo thing started up after the Civil War. Lots of farmers went home to nothing after the fighting was over and some of them started laying track for the big railroad operators. They called them “hoe boys” because of their farming background, and that eventually shortened into hobos, and then they started taking to the rails instead of building them.’
He led the way back through to the kitchen and poured them each some coffee. ‘I’ve spent quite a bit of time at freight yards up here in Spokane and Seattle, and down at Pendleton in Oregon. Some of the regular guys have started to trust me. The freedom of always being able to move on gets in their blood, like the early pioneers. All they need is a little shelter, a fire and some food. Only now they can’t do it any more, because somebody formed a gang.’
Harrison nodded grimly. ‘If they are freighting dope, then that’s the other spirit of America kicking in, right there.’ He looked at the file on Limpet. ‘Got quite a rap sheet, this dude,’ he said. ‘Three-time loser.’
Spinelli nodded. ‘He’s been with the outfit about two years, I figure,’ he said. ‘Right after he got out of the can the last time.’
‘The three groups,’ Jean said. ‘Are they completely separate?’
‘I don’t know for sure,’ Spinelli said. ‘It’s shadowy, mam. The Southern Blacks are a really nast
y bunch. They’ve got discipline squads who mete out punishment to members who step out of line. They might even be assassination squads, I couldn’t tell you for certain. They’re led by a really nasty guy called Southern Sidetrack. He’s never been arrested and I’ve got no file on him.’
‘And he runs the whole crew?’ Harrison asked him.
Spinelli shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve heard other rumours, stuff about an ex-Hell’s Angel who came back from ’Nam with more than one grudge. He went by the name of Whiskey Six and he’s still wanted in Arkansas and Tennessee for the murder of two guards during two separate bank robberies in 1981.’ He pulled a face. ‘Trouble is, there’s no picture of him anywhere and nobody knows his real name. Like I said just now, most of this is sketched together from bits and pieces I’ve picked up at the freight yards. The way the hobos tell it is, he quit the Angels in the mid-eighties, because he was pissed off about an FBI agent infiltrating the Alaska chapter.’
‘Anthony Tait,’ Harrison said. ‘I know him. His evidence put a helluva lot of them away for a helluva long time. He did real well, worked his way up to sergeant in arms. Nobody had a clue he was an undercover agent.’
‘Well, anyways,’ Spinelli went on. ‘Apparently, Whiskey Six quit the brotherhood and took to the tracks. Over time, he established a brand new gang of his own. That gang now runs the railroad from here to the Florida Keys and has over two thousand members. He lets the three wings run their own deal pretty much, and they say he sticks mostly to the northern routes, but he’s liable to turn up any place, at any time.’ He looked at Jean then. ‘Forgive my language, mam. But he is one evil bastard.’