by Jeff Gulvin
She smiled, then pinched her lips again. ‘Yes. Thank you. Just shocked, I suppose. Every time I find out a little more, it shocks me over again.’
Harrison picked up the papers Hirstius had left and leafed through them. Swann set the fresh round of drinks on the table and sat down next to Logan.
‘Gary got his information from a cop in Texas,’ Harrison said. ‘If this was just a phone call, the guy owed him one helluva favour. It says here that the real information is with another cop in Spokane, Washington.’
Harrison passed the papers to Jean. ‘You might learn something from this, Miss Lady Mam, but I think Gary’s right. You’re not gonna find who did it.’
Jean’s face suddenly crushed and tears broke from her eyes. She got up, grabbed her cardigan and headed for the main door. Harrison watched her go and sighed.
Logan touched the back of his hand. ‘You can’t let her walk home, JB. This is New Orleans. Remember.’
Harrison went outside and the rain rattled off the pavement. Jean was on the other side of the road, trying to take shelter in the shadows cast by the balconies. He called to her, but she did not look back, and he broke into a run. She was likely to get herself killed. ‘Jean.’ This time she did stop and Harrison caught up with her. ‘You can’t walk these streets on your own, Miss Lady Mam,’ he said gently. ‘Somebody’s gonna rob you or worse.’ He nodded to the shadows. ‘Especially along here. Nobody’s on the street because of the rain. People that are, stick to the sidewalk. So do the bad guys. In New Orleans, if nobody’s on the street, you walk right up the middle.’ He took her arm then, cupped it against his bicep, and together they headed towards the hotel under the cover of the balconies.
Jean walked for a few moments in silence, and then said, ‘Why are we not in the middle of the road?’
Harrison paused, then lifted the leg of his jeans, revealing his ankle holster. ‘Because we don’t need to be,’ he said.
They walked on in silence and Jean listened to the pounding of the rain on the road. It was so heavy and so thick she could barely see the other side. ‘I’ve never seen rain so heavy,’ she said.
‘Does it a lot here.’
They walked again in silence and Harrison could feel the warmth of her body against him. He suggested a drink in Pat O’Brien’s as they came to St Peter Street. They sat inside, and Jean had a brandy and Harrison a beer and a shot of peppermint schnapps. He knocked it back, slammed the shot glass on the table and whacked his chest with the heel of his palm. ‘Now that hit the spot.’ He leaned over the table and looked in her eyes.
‘You OK now?’
‘Yes. Thank you. You’re very kind.’
Harrison pursed his lips. ‘We’re all sorry for your loss, Jean. Not one of us knows what it could possibly feel like.’
‘It hurts like no hurt I could ever imagine, or would want to imagine again,’ she said. ‘That’s what it feels like.’
Harrison nodded and shook a Marlboro from his shirt, saw the expression on her face and shook out another. He lit them both, popping a match on his thumbnail, and handed one to her.
She smoked nervously, looking at the glowing end every time she took it out of her mouth. ‘I gave birth to him. It took me nine hours and ten minutes.’ She drew smoke in through her nose, coughed, and stubbed the cigarette out. ‘He was part of me, John. More than part of me.’ She looked him in the face then. ‘Nothing in my life is ever going to be the same. I left Vietnam when I was eighteen and I have never seen or spoken to my father since. I can remember the last time I saw him, the expression on his face, and I know the North Vietnamese killed him. I got over that. He was the father. I was the child. He was meant to die before I did.’ She shook her head and her lip quivered, eyes misty again. Harrison sat quietly, his fingers steepled before him. ‘I was meant to die before my son,’ she went on. ‘No parent should bury their own child.’
Harrison sipped at his beer and watched her face. She looked beyond him and she was lost in some memory of the past, which was nothing to do with him. She drank some brandy and then asked him for another cigarette, and he lit it for her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jean said. ‘I hardly know you and I’m pouring my heart out here.’ She cupped his hand. ‘You’ve been so very kind. And I know nothing about you.’
‘There’s nothing much to know,’ he said.
‘There must be.’
He sighed. ‘I don’t think this is the time or the place, Jean. Right now, I figure I’m here to listen to you.’
‘Do you?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, mam. I do.’
‘What did you call me earlier?’ she asked. ‘“Miss Lady Mam”?’
Harrison laughed.
‘Where did you come up with that?’
‘Oh, just some place, I guess. It’s just a figure of speech. I call most people something other than their name. Swann is duchess, because he’s a limey, I guess.’ He shrugged his shoulders, then said: ‘Gary is right you know.’
She looked at the tabletop. ‘I know.’ She was quiet for a moment or two, then added, ‘But what do I do if I give up here?’
Harrison had no answer for that. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There may be something I can do. That bandana thing’s a helluva coincidence.’ He touched her on the shoulder. ‘Let me talk to some people on Monday.’
She nodded and smiled, and sucked on her cigarette. Harrison sank the rest of his beer.
‘I’ll walk you back to the hotel.’
‘Would you mind?’
‘You think I’d let you go by yourself?’ He stood up. ‘Besides, it’s my pleasure.’ He took her in via Nu Nus Café, as Dewey was thinking about closing up. Harrison stood at the connecting hotel door with Jean.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I really appreciate it.’
‘What’re you doing for the rest of the weekend?’ he asked her.
She shifted her shoulders. ‘Nothing.’
‘You fancy going on a swamp tour?’
‘With you? I’d love to.’
‘You got it, then.’ He tapped the watch on her wrist. ‘I’ll come get you about ten and take you down to the bayous.’
Tom Kovalski was still at his desk in the Washington field office. Everyone else had gone home long ago, and twice his wife had called and asked him what he was up to. He was working, he told her, and he would be home just as soon as he could. He had been due to leave at 7 p.m., when reception had taken delivery of a small package addressed to the assistant special agent in charge. It did not name Kovalski, but he was the ASAC. The parcel had been screened and found to contain an audiotape. They had checked it for booby traps, but found none. Kovalski had played it, rewound it and played it over again. He sat alone in his office, with only the desk lamp burning, and rewound the tape for the umpteenth time. He sat back in his chair, loosened his tie, and listened all over again. The voice was Asian, clipped concise tones:
My name is Fachida Harada. Before me was my father Noruki and his father Akira. Our home was in Kobe and our business was herbal pharmacy. You are my enemy, the enemy of my father before me and my grandfather before him. I, Fachida Harada, will make war on you. I will honour you in battle until one of us is dead.’
6
LOGAN CALLED DETECTIVE CAMERON in Hope Heights, Oregon, and asked him how his investigation was going. ‘Badly,’ he told her. ‘We’ve completed all the interviews and come up with pretty much nothing.’ He paused for a moment. ‘We’d really like to talk to three Asian gentlemen, though, who were seen in the area a couple of days before the killing.’
‘Number one suspects, huh?’
‘Them and their black Chevy Suburban.’ Cameron laughed. ‘If it wasn’t so serious, it’d be funny. Certain people’s worst nightmares are coming true, Logan. I don’t know if you monitor the websites. I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to constitutionally, but maybe you’ve seen them in your spare time.’
‘Maybe,’ she said.
‘Well, you might want to ch
eck out one I’ve come across. It’s aimed at teenagers, called “Midnight Hour”. The Hong Kong troops are here, sent in by the New World Order to take away our guns.’
‘Thanks, Detective.’ Logan hung up and sat with her hands in her lap. Hope Heights, Oregon, just a tiny west coast town, and yet she felt the cloud that had descended on that community was already spreading east.
Kovalski came in then. He had been attending a meeting with the Washington D.C. joint terrorism task force. His face was grave and he crooked a finger at Logan. ‘Cheyenne, I’ve got something I want you to hear,’ he told her.
Logan listened to the tape and stared across the desk at him. ‘Fruitcake?’ she said.
‘They’re all crazy, Chey. The question is—do we take him seriously?’
She turned her mouth down at the corners. ‘Fachida Harada. I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Neither have I.’
‘It’s probably not even his real name.’
‘Then why give it to us?’
‘Vanity.’
Kovalski looked unsure. ‘The tape came in late Friday, which was a little ironic given that I had a meeting with the JTTF this morning.’
‘Did you mention it?’
He shook his head. ‘I thought about it, but I wanted your opinion first. We have no idea who or what he is, even if he’s for real. You know how many crank calls we get, Chey.’
She smiled then. ‘So why does this one bother you so much?’
He scratched his head. ‘It shows, huh. I don’t know. I just get a feeling.’ He stood up. ‘Call me an old fool, Cheyenne. Maybe it’s just the timing that bothers me, what with this and the situation in Oregon.’
‘It’s 1999, Tom. The year of the millennium psycho.’
‘Then roll on 2000.’ He looked at her for a long moment. ‘It might be totally unconnected, but somebody gave me a whisper the other day, somebody who has proved reliable in the past. The words “cherry blossom” were mentioned.’
‘In what context?’
‘In the context of us having a hometown problem.’
‘The festival of the cherry blossom,’ she said. ‘That’s Japanese.’
‘Yes. And so is Fachida Harada.’
Back at her desk, Logan phoned Swann in New Orleans. She knew he had dealt in some detail with yakuza gangsters in the UK. New Orleans was an hour behind Washington and she got him just as he was about to leave for his class at the field office. She asked him if they had had anything to do with cherry blossom.
‘Not as far as I know,’ he told her. ‘Cherry blossom was the ancient symbol of the samurai. Arguably, and I mean arguably, the yakuza are the nearest thing to samurai, at least symbolically, these days—finger-cutting, dishonour, that kind of thing. Why?’
‘I’m not sure yet. I’m just trying to piece something together for Kovalski.’
She put down the phone and went back to Kovalski’s office. ‘I just spoke to Jack Swann,’ she told him. ‘Down in New Orleans. He had an organised crime attachment back in England. Yakuza.’
Kovalski sat back in his chair. ‘Yakuza? I never thought of the yakuza.’
‘And, apparently, cherry blossom was a samurai symbol.’
Kovalski made a face. ‘I’ll talk to someone in organised crime, see if they can enlighten me.’
Harrison sat in the office of gang squad supervisor Mike Hammond, along with Swartz and Penny, the two case agents working on the Little Nate wire tap. ‘We followed the guy out to the swamp in St Charles Parish,’ Harrison was saying: ‘Me and Andy.’ He glanced sideways at Swartz. ‘The only thing in that woodland, besides ’gators and mud, is the Kansas City Southern railroad.’ He sat forward. ‘Six months ago, that English kid, Tom Carey, was murdered on a freight train coming in from Texas. Body was found by a security guard out near Hahnville.’
Hammond nodded. ‘I remember.’
‘Well, his mom’s in town. She’s been doing some digging and found out that a whole buncha hobos have been killed all over the country.’ Harrison paused and looked at the others. ‘There’s a cop in Spokane, Washington, that reckons a gang is behind it. A couple of the victims have been found gunshot like the Carey kid, with their pants pulled down to their ankles, shirts up over their heads, that kinda thing. There’s been something like five hundred killings over the last three years, but nobody seems to have done anything about it.’ He lifted his shoulders. ‘The victims have been homeless, mostly, with nobody to care about them. But there have been one or two straights, such as Tom Carey.’ He picked up the coffee cup that sat on the edge of Hammond’s desk. ‘The gang calls itself the FTRA—that’s Freight Train Riders of America. They’re allegedly split into three groups, who wear different-coloured bandanas to designate the crew they run with.’ He looked at Swartz then. ‘The guy we tailed, after he had the face to face with Little Nate, was wearing a black bandana. Right?’
Swartz nodded.
‘That’s the mark of the FTRA, right here, in the South.’
For a few moments nobody spoke.
‘The cop in Spokane has done more work on the outfit than anyone,’ Harrison went on. ‘But there’s been no investigation per se. As far as I know, he’s just monitored the murders. My question is, why go around the country murdering a bunch of hobos?’
Penny cracked a smile. ‘Why not, JB. Since when did the bad guys need a logical reason?’
Harrison nodded. ‘You’re right.’ He looked again at Hammond. ‘But maybe there’s more to it than that. If a guy with a black bandana’s been supplying dope to Little Nate, who else is he supplying? And is it just him, or is it his buddies too?’ He paused again. ‘How many cops do you know would stop and search a hobo smelling of piss?’
Hammond steepled his fingers. ‘This Carey woman,’ he said. ‘Is she still in town?’
Harrison nodded. ‘Right now, she is. But she’s gonna fly up to Spokane.’
‘She’s really going for it, huh?’
‘Mike, some sonofabitch murdered her only son. Nobody can tell her who it was or why. She’s looking for any clue she can get.’
Hammond nodded. ‘So, what’re you proposing, JB? Our remit is gangs in New Orleans, not hobos on trains.’
‘Yeah, but hobos travel interstate, Mike. What if Little Nate’s gang is just one of a whole bunch that’s being supplied. Vagrants shipping dope in the boxcars of freight trains. That is our business.’
‘What d’you wanna do?’
‘I wanna fly up and see this cop in Spokane. Find out what’s going down. If I can get a handle on it, maybe we can pull down more man just the sonofabitch from St Thomas.’
Harrison stood in the parking lot, smoked a cigarette and considered his motives. He had been going to quit. That marine in D.C. had all but convinced him it was time. He had something of a past and perhaps he needed to sift through it a little bit, before settling his mind elsewhere. He could retire early, and with his service, still take a livable pension with him. He had a mind to get that old Chevy tuned up properly and cruise the blue highways for a while. Maybe track down some people he had not seen in a long time.
‘I thought I’d find you out here.’
Harrison turned to find Swann standing behind him.
‘Never creep up on an old soldier, duchess. You’re liable to get yourself killed.’ He plucked a fresh cigarette from his shirt pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth.
‘You seem preoccupied,’ Swann told him, ‘this time around. Like you’ve got things on your mind.’
Harrison blew out his cheeks. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, duchess. I do.’ He leaned back against the concrete parapet, with his arms folded across his chest and the heel of one boot resting against the toe of the other. ‘I got dropped from the SWAT team, Jack.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘No real problem in that. We got a guy down here who used to be in the Hostage Rescue Team up at Quantico. The team leader probably figured he could teach us a thing or two, so it made sense. I’m the oldest by about ten y
ears. Hell, I’m fifty next birthday. It’s time I quit the SWAT team.’ He broke off. ‘But it made me think all the same.’ He looked Swann in the eye. ‘You remember when I first met you, how I figured it was you that got me burned up in Idaho?’
Swann rolled his eyes. ‘How could I ever forget?’
‘Well, I told you then, that once that deal was done, I was getting outta here.’
Swann flipped away his cigarette. ‘And now is the time?’
Harrison pursed his lips. ‘I think it might be, bubba.’ He looked beyond Swann then. ‘But first I’m gonna fly up to Washington State with Jean Carey and help her find out a bit more about these freight train riders. If she can figure that maybe they were responsible for her boy getting killed, then maybe she can go home with something.’
‘She’s got no chance of a conviction.’
Harrison sighed. ‘I know it. But that’s not the point. The lady’s got guts and she needs something. Maybe I can persuade her to quit and go back to her life in England.’ He stepped away from the wall. ‘Then I think I’m gonna quit. I could walk away right now, but I wanna do this for Jean first.’
‘You like her, don’t you?’
Harrison leaned and spat. ‘Yeah, I guess I do.’
They walked downstairs together. ‘When’re you and Logan tying the knot?’ Harrison asked him.
‘As soon as she gets that London posting.’ Swann smiled at the thought of it. ‘My two daughters are going to be bridesmaids.’
‘They don’t mind their daddy getting hitched again, then?’
‘They did at first. I think they liked having me to themselves, but they’re up for the idea now.’
‘Good.’ Harrison laid a friendly hand on his arm. ‘That Logan’s a sweet lady, duchess, and a hell of an FBI agent. You treat her nice, y’hear?’
Hammond called Harrison into his office when he got back down to the gang squad. ‘Johnny Buck,’ he said. ‘I think you got a point about this train business. Go up to Spokane and see what you can dig up. I’ve spoken to the boss and he wants the full story when you get back. Apparently, we’re not the first field office to show interest. Swartz checked with a couple of buddies in Chicago and they told him that a blue bandana-wearing hobo got busted supplying heroin to a Gangsta Disciple.’ He made a face. ‘You just might have something here, and if we can coordinate a response, we might get both ends at the same time.’
