by Jeff Gulvin
The Cub got up and switched off the TV. He yawned, stretched and looked out of the window. The two spotters were still there, parked in their cab at the bottom of the road. He shook his head at them and smiled, then he flicked open his cloned mobile phone and dialled.
Kovalski was back in the field office, having been grilled like a trout by his superiors. The pressure was bearing down like a ton of bricks now: the city in a panic, and business and government departments alike, all wanting a result and wanting it yesterday. Swann and Logan were in his office, taking calls like everyone else about sightings of Harada, particularly around the phone booth in 4th Street. They had issued a picture to the television stations, which Swann had acquired from the National Police Agency in Japan. It was three years old and showed a slightly built Japanese man, with short-cropped hair and square, indistinctive features. ‘Could be anybody.’ Logan looked at Kovalski’s ravaged face. ‘You did a good job, boss,’ she said. ‘Mind you, we’ve had thirty-three separate calls since you went on TV, claiming that you’re a liar and Harada is one of the Hong Kong troops whose “programming” has destabilised. They reckon the microchip the CIA inserted in his brain must be malfunctioning. He’s gonna be something of a hero amongst the militia because of it.’
McKensie came through then and her face was very grey. ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘We just had the Denver field office on the line. The central post office in Colorado Springs has been blown up. No warning. Nobody claiming it.’ She paused. ‘The ERTs are on-scene now.’
Logan looked at Swann and bit her lip. ‘Copycat,’ she said. ‘There’ll be more.’
‘There is.’ McKensie sifted paper in her hands. ‘A state trooper in Michigan was gunned down an hour ago. He stopped a speeding pick-up truck and they shot him dead as he approached the vehicle.’
Kovalski got up and paced the office floor. He thought for a minute, then sat down again and picked up the confidential telephone. Logan looked at him.
‘D’you want us to leave, Tom?’
‘Hell, no. Stay right where you are.’ Kovalski sat back and swivelled in the chair.
‘Cyrus Birch, please,’ he said. Swann watched him, and Kovalski’s eyes were dark and thoughtful in his head. ‘Cyrus,’ he said, suddenly sitting forward. ‘Why don’t you guys know anything about Fachida fucking Harada?’
Birch put down the phone and sat in silence for a moment. He thought about Kovalski’s words and he pondered. Then he pressed the buzzer on the phone and got his secretary. ‘Get me the Tokyo station chief,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the time is over there.’ He sat back again and thought about calling the deputy director of operations just in case, but decided against it.
The station chief came on the line from Tokyo. ‘Hello, Maybelline,’ Birch said. ‘This is Ivy House. I want to see your entire file on Tokyo Joe.’ He put the phone down once more and then buzzed through to his secretary again. ‘Get me The Talent, will you?’
Harrison rode the boxcar with Southern Sidetrack and Limpet. The Texas plains rolled out on both sides of the train and the breeze did nothing for the heat that scalded the walls. Harrison had survived that first night in the Oklahoma freight yard and nobody had tried anything since. He had woken in the morning to find himself alone, but, with Limpet’s pack lying by the embers of the fire, he knew he was being tested. That had been a difficult moment. The temptation to search the pack for drugs was strong, but they had left it deliberately, and Harrison knew from one of the hobos he had met up in Spokane that this was the FTRA’s first initiation test. The situation both puzzled and intrigued him. He had known these people a matter of days, had done nothing but get in their faces, and yet they were already testing him for recruitment. Either that, or they figured he might be some kind of undercover agent and were trying to catch him out. He had left the pack alone and Limpet had come back with Sidetrack and the others. They jumped a train heading west on the Southern Pacific line. That had been three days ago now and two more Southern Blacks had got aboard, but they had jumped off north of Wichita Falls, carrying a spare backpack. Now they were heading south for Abilene and had been joined by Hooch and Carlsbad the Bad, who appeared to have three rucksacks between them. Limpet, Hooch and Carlsbad sat playing five-card draw in a little circle on the floor of the boxcar. Sidetrack sat on his own, sipping from a bottle of mescal. Harrison was standing by the door in his singlet and he could feel Sidetrack’s gaze on his arm. It was the tattoo that intrigued them and the tattoo that, for some reason, had kept him alive. He had no idea why. Maybe they just respected Vietnam Vets or maybe there was something else. He ran through the intel he had stored up in his head. So far, he had identified Limpet, who he already knew from the surveillance in New Orleans, as well as Hooch and Carlsbad, and, most importantly, Southern Sidetrack himself. He considered the rest of the information Spinelli had furnished them with: the Blues or Highrollers up north, led by the Canadian Voyageur; and the Red Heads out west, led by Nixon Bodie, known as Ghost Town.
Harrison looked at Sidetrack again and found him still staring at his arm. ‘You keep staring and I’m gonna get nervous. I do strange things when I’m nervous.’
Sidetrack looked at him and shook his head. ‘You’re one fucked-up sonofabitch. You gotta mouth on you like the Hudson River Tunnel. You know, we could kill you as easy as swatting a fly.’
‘I know you all think you could.’ Harrison squatted in front of him. ‘But I think you’d die trying.’
Sidetrack stared bug-eyed at him and his face flushed red at the jawline. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I figure we’ll do it, just to show you we can.’
‘Your call, big guy.’
Suddenly Sidetrack laughed. The others looked up, and he shouted to them over the rattle of wheels and the sudden, long whistle blast from the locomotive, a quarter of a mile ahead of them. ‘Can you believe this guy?’ he yelled. ‘He’s calling the four of us out.’
Harrison looked him in the eye. ‘I’m calling nobody out, Sidetrack. Alls I’m saying is, you better get the drop on me real good, ’cause if you don’t, I’ll kill you.’
Sidetrack looked at his arm again. ‘How many gooks you kill underground?’
‘Enough.’
‘On your own?’
‘Sometimes.’ Harrison took out tobacco and papers. He looked down at his arm. ‘You got a real thing about this, don’t ya?’ He looked at the other three. ‘You all do.’
Sidetrack shook his head. ‘Distinctive tattoo, is all.’ He was quiet for a moment, then he said, ‘You got brains, Four-String. And for a man your age, you got balls.’
‘That’s a compliment, is it?’ Harrison licked down the paper on his cigarette.
‘I like you.’ Sidetrack looked at the others. ‘Carlsbad over there told me how you was when you ran into the two of them. Takes balls to do that to an FTRA member.’ He looked him right in the eye. ‘We kill people just because we don’t like them.’
Harrison sucked smoke soundlessly. ‘I’m fifty years old, Sidetrack. There ain’t a whole lot I haven’t seen in this world. And nothing that really scares me.’ He pointed to the men playing cards. ‘When I met up with those two, the odds were two to one. I figure I can adapt to those odds.’ He looked back in his eyes. ‘Right now, those odds are way out there.’ He smiled coldly. ‘You’d kill me, all right. But some of you’d die trying.’
Sidetrack sipped mescal. ‘We ain’t gonna kill you, Four-String. You’re free to ride the skids in this part of the country.’
‘That’s your say-so, is it?’
‘You better believe it.’ Sidetrack tipped the neck of the bottle again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I get to say who lives and who dies in the South. Up north or out west, it’s a different story. You travel out there without one of these’—he touched the bandana that pressed his hair to his scalp—‘you’re gonna end up in the slicer.’
‘You mean there’s more of you?’ Harrison said.
‘Oh yeah. There’s more.’
‘I’ll try to remember, if ever I head out west.’ Harrison leaned and spat into the wind.
They rode without conversation for an hour. The game was still going on and Carlsbad called Hooch out as a cheat. They were almost fighting when Sidetrack whacked the floor with the heel of his bottle and told them to quit it. He looked across at Harrison, who sat against the far wall now, with his hat half over his eyes. Harrison could see him squinting again at the tattoo.
They hit the first of the Abilene yards, with dusk falling like rain clouds across the breadth of the sky. The train slowed and slowed, and they assembled at the door and one by one dropped into the dirt at the trackside. They stood there, Harrison a little apart from the others, watching as the train rumbled on, and then Sidetrack led the way into the yard. There were no guards anywhere that Harrison could see, just the shadowy shapes of the boxcars, some still in use, others clearly broken and beyond commercial value. A small fire burned in a trash can in one corner and three old men sat huddled round it. The Southern Blacks materialised out of the darkness and the old men gathered up their belongings and shuffled into the shadows. Sidetrack bent to the fire and warmed his hands. The temperature was dropping rapidly now, and Harrison threw a blanket round his shoulders and cut some beef jerky from his pack. Carlsbad and Hooch were laughing about the rapid exit of the old hobos and bemoaning the fun they had been denied. Sidetrack was on his second bottle of mescal and Harrison was watching him closely. During the daytime, Sidetrack was rational, even thoughtful. His eyes darted like tiny burning coals and he weighed up each situation. At night, though, he liked to sit round the fire and drink till he passed out, and his words became slurred and evil.
Harrison sat cross-legged, the blanket over his shoulders, and cut himself some more jerky. Limpet squatted next to him and looked at it enviously. ‘That the kind with pepper in it?’
Harrison nodded.
‘You gonna share?’
Harrison looked at him, sighed and cut a chunk, which he stuffed greedily into his mouth. Hooch produced some tortillas and some steak meat, which he dropped into the blackened cooking pot he carried. He had some carrots, which he chopped up, and then Harrison took some potatoes he had bought and cut them into slices with his bowie knife. He added them to the pot and Hooch nodded to him.
They ate out of the one pot with spoons. The stew did not taste of much, but it was hot and kept the cold from their bones. Afterwards, Hooch broke open a bottle of Kessler. Carlsbad rolled a joint and passed it round, and Harrison sucked the pot deep into his lungs. He lay on one side and watched Sidetrack watching him. ‘You gonna play that thing some?’ Sidetrack asked him.
Harrison looked at his banjo. ‘Only if somebody gets me that missing string.’
Hooch laughed. ‘Then we gotta change your name, bro.’
‘So buy me the string and keep the fucking name.’ Harrison sat up and played them a bad version of ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. He watched Sidetrack watching him, as he sang softly and picked away at the strings. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no more till I get me that fifth string.’
There was silence round the fire, just the wind plucking at their clothing through the gaps between the boxcars. Sidetrack looked across the flames into Harrison’s eyes. ‘You did well the other morning.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘We left you with Limpet’s pack, and when we came back it was still there and so was you, and from the look of things you hadn’t touched it.’
Harrison smiled thinly. ‘Touch a man’s stuff in the hole and you’re pushing up dirt.’
Sidetrack nodded. ‘You betcha.’ He paused, made a face and looked at the others. They were all silent and Sidetrack looked back at Harrison again. ‘You wanna run with us for a while?’ he asked.
Harrison did not reply. He looked into the fire. ‘Figured I might head north,’ he said eventually. ‘Who do I need to look out for, if I do?’
Limpet flicked a cigarette stub into the fire. ‘Highrollers, man. Blue bandanas. Got some mean motherfuckers up there.’ He glanced self-consciously at Sidetrack then, as if he had said the wrong thing, but Sidetrack was still looking at Harrison.
‘Why go north? It’s cold up north.’
‘Not at this time of year, it ain’t.’
‘You got something up north?’
Harrison looked into the fire. ‘I guess once upon a time I did.’
‘Stick around. Run with us for a while. Nobody’s gonna give you no shit.’
Harrison squinted at him. ‘You mean you guys or other people?’
‘Either.’
‘And do what, exactly?’
Sidetrack smiled. ‘Who knows? Stick around, Four-String, and you might get a little something for yourself.’
Harrison did not say anything for a moment, then: ‘Where you all headed, anyways?’
‘All over. We got stuff we gotta do.’
‘So this ain’t just wandering for the sake of it, then. You got purpose to your travels.’
Sidetrack smiled. ‘Four-String, do biker gangs just ride motorcycles?’
‘I don’t know, man. I never was one for motorcycles.’
‘Man.’ Sidetrack was beginning to slur. ‘We’re more powerful than any biker gang you could name. We got connections, brother. And we got a country fulla railroad tracks to ride on.’ He broke off and drank. ‘And you know what the best thing about it is—no cop, no Fed, nobody knows we’re out here.’ He tipped his head back and laughed.
In the morning, they moved south again, walking from the freight yard and hooking up with the train as it pulled away from the driver swap. Sidetrack was quiet, evidently suffering from his two bottles of mescal, and Harrison kept his distance and his mouth shut. They jumped an open-topped car, which worsened Sidetrack’s mood still further and he cursed the thought of spending the day under the heat of the sun. Harrison sat down in one corner and rested his hat on his knee. This was the fifth day since he had had any contact with Jean and that meant his case agents had no clue where he was. It was not a problem, although they normally liked contact every second or third day when someone was undercover. In the past, he had gone as long as two weeks without surfacing and nobody worried overmuch. He was as experienced at living the lie as just about anybody, but he missed Jean, and images of the one night he had slept in the motel room with her burned with the sun in his head.
Sidetrack watched him even more carefully today, or so it seemed to Harrison. He thought about calling him on it, keeping up with the lippy bravado, but his instincts told him today was the day when Sidetrack might have him killed. So he kept his lip buttoned, held Sidetrack’s gaze if he stared, but did nothing else to provoke him.
Sidetrack slept till noon and, when he woke, Harrison shoved a water bottle under his nose. He said nothing, but took the bottle, swallowed noisily and complained about it being overwarm.
‘I’ll pack an ice box the next time,’ Harrison said.
Sidetrack laughed suddenly and stood up. He sucked air into his lungs, shaded his eyes from the sun and looked out at the mesquite plains. ‘Where are we?’ he said to Hooch.
‘I figure we’re heading towards Brownwood.’
‘Where we picked up that gook that time? Was that south of here?’
‘What gook?’
Sidetrack frowned at him. ‘Naw,’ he said, ‘that wasn’t you. It was me and Limpet. Hey, Limpet, we pick up that gook about here?’
‘The young one?’
Sidetrack nodded.
‘Aways south of here, Sidetrack. That was Kinney County.’
Sidetrack leaned and spat into the wind. Harrison stared at his back and pretended not to listen. Limpet got up and unzipped, then stood by the door and urinated, being careful not to let it blow back on his pants. Sidetrack stood at the other end of the doorway and scanned the horizon with one hand shading his eyes. He said something to Hooch, which the wind took and Harrison did not pick up on, but then the train began to slo
w and Harrison got to his feet.
The four of them were crowding the doorway now, so he could not see out, and then to his surprise, Sidetrack ducked back in the car and took a cellphone from his pack. Harrison stalked one eyebrow, and Sidetrack winked at him and punched in a. number, then half turned away and lifted the phone to his ear. ‘Hey,’ he said, finger in his other ear to block out the clatter of wheels. ‘We’re just south of the lake, coming into Coleman.’ He paused and listened. ‘OK.’
He switched off the phone and stowed it back in his pack. Harrison leaned against the wall of the boxcar and Sidetrack leered at him: ‘Not just riding motorcycles,’ he said and turned to the door again.
The train slowed as they approached the town of Coleman and, as it did so, Harrison saw a pick-up truck kicking up dust on the dirt road. The truck was moving fast, converging on the train at an angle of thirty degrees, bouncing its way through the scrub. The four Southern Blacks watched as it got closer, and then Harrison noticed that Hooch and Carlsbad had the spare pack between them. Carlsbad picked it up by both straps and seemed to strain a little under the weight. Harrison thinned his eyes, and, as their boxcar rounded the bend in the tracks, Carlsbad hefted the pack into the sagebrush. They watched it land as if to make sure it did not break open, and then the train gathered pace again and Carlsbad ducked inside. Harrison took his place and looked back. He could no longer see the pack, but the dust trail rose from the pick-up.
That night, they camped well away from any freight yard and were joined by two other Southern Blacks, at the edge of a group of caves once used by the Comanche. Sidetrack was in good spirits and was especially pleased when the newcomers showed up with beer, steaks and two bottles of mescal. Hooch had built up a big fire, using dried brushwood, mesquite stalks and tumbleweeds broken down for kindling. Harrison laid out his bedroll on the desert floor and lay with his hands behind his head, looking up at the night sky. He picked out the names of stars he knew and listened to the conversation. Neither of the two newcomers had spoken to him and he had said nothing to them. Hooch was busy cooking steaks in their own fat on a skillet and Limpet squatted by the fire. Southern Sidetrack sat on a rock, with the cap off a bottle of mescal, and was chewing delightedly on the worm. Carlsbad hefted a can of beer at Harrison, who caught it one-handed and snapped off the ring pull. He took a long draught and raised the can to Carlsbad, who raised his in return. One of the newcomers, a short, thickset man, with cropped hair and lots of earrings, stared through the flames at him. He wore his bandana cowboy-style round his neck and smoked tailor-made cigarettes one after the other. He looked at Harrison, but spoke to Sidetrack.
