The Long Count (8 page)

When he left Mrs Perkins house Quarrie told Billings he would be back when the phone records came in and then he made the long drive home.

It took him a little over five hours and he found James watching TV in the cottage with Eunice keeping an eye on him. The house was one of three Pick Feeley had built in whitewashed adobe, set alongside the bunkhouse on a piece of flat land a little way below the remodelled ranch house. Quarrie slipped Eunice an extra ten dollars and asked if her brother was about. Eunice told him that he’d been in Houston with Mrs Feeley but the airplane was back in its hangar and he was probably over at the bunkhouse now.

When his son was tucked up in bed, Quarrie crossed the yard to the low-lying building where he found Pious playing cards with the Uruguayan foreman. At twenty-three years old Nolo Suarez was the single most accomplished horseman Quarrie had ever seen. His father had been a gaucho all his life, working a spread south of Montevideo, and his mother was part Comanche and part Tejano. The bearer of an American passport, Nolo had come north when he hit eighteen and ended up in the panhandle. Pick Feeley was still alive back then and he gave the kid a job. Now Pick was gone Mrs Feeley couldn’t do without Nolo, not unless she decided to turn all the land she owned over to oil and get rid of the stock completely.

Mama Sox had a half dozen bottles of Falstaff sweating in the fridge. Pious’s mother, she ran the bunkhouse along with Eunice, and Quarrie had known them since he was a fourteen-year-old kid. When Pious was locked up in Leavenworth, Quarrie found his mother and sister work at the ranch and they had been there ever
since. Grabbing a long neck he snapped off the top and sat down at the table.

‘You look beat, John Q,’ Nolo said.

‘Do I? Fact is I been on the road so long I could sleep on a chicken’s lip.’

Nolo laughed. He indicated the cards. ‘You want to play? We could deal you in?’

‘No, sir.’ Quarrie shook his head. ‘I’m a worse poker player than Pious even and that’s saying something.’ With a grin he glanced at his old friend. ‘James told me he talked to you about that train wreck up on the Red.’

‘Yes, he did.’ Pious was concentrating on his hand.

‘You never said to him what we found there?’

Pious shook his head. ‘Nope. You told me how you’d tell him when you were ready and I figured you meant what you said. Did you talk to the sheriff yet?’

In his mind’s eye Quarrie could see those bones in the river again. ‘Not so far,’ he said. I was going to but then this business kicked off in Marion County. James told me he’s going to write something up for school though, and I figured I wouldn’t tell him about the skull until I saw what it was he had. Meantime I’ll get a-hold of Sam Dayton and have one of his boys come up here so you can show them where we were fishing at.’

‘You know what?’ Pious said. ‘We could bring those bones up and give them a proper burial, but the way I see it they’re pretty much buried as it is. I guess I told you that wreck happened forty years ago but I was wrong about that. On the way down to Houston Mrs Feeley said to me how that bridge actually came down in nineteen hundred and three. That’s sixty-four years, John Q, and those bones been there ever since. If this was up to me I’d leave them where they’re at rather than go disturbing them over again.’

‘I’d kindly like to oblige you, Pious, but the fact is I’m a cop.’ Taking another swig of beer Quarrie got to his feet. ‘I can’t be
leaving human bones lying around for someone else to come up on. You ain’t the only catfish grabbler knows about that wreck. Sooner or later somebody else will make the same discovery we did. We need to gather those bones up and I should’ve done it right off. I’ll get hold of the sheriff first thing in the morning. And you never know, if James does this project thing properly, maybe he’ll come up with a name for the kid.’ He took another pull at the bottle. ‘He told me you said you might help show him how to look stuff up, and seeing as how I’m on the road right now, I’d be obliged if you did.’

After he dropped James off at the bus stop the following morning, Quarrie drove to Wichita Falls and Sheriff Dayton’s office where he was able to commandeer a desk. He had the sawn-off section of twelve-gauge barrel as well as the slivers of metal he had recovered in two separate evidence envelopes and he sent them to the forensic lab in Austin. He was about to wire the newly formed National Crime Information Center to see if they had anything on the fingerprints, when a call came in.

‘Dispatch here, John Q. We got someone on the line wants to talk to you.’

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

‘He says his name is Bowen and he’s calling from Fannin County.’

Quarrie waited for the operator to put the call through with his knee resting against the lip of the desk.

‘Sir, I’m sorry to bother you.’ The voice sounded a little emotional. ‘My name’s Isaac Bowen. My dad was Icarus Bowen, though everybody called him Ike.’ He broke off for a moment then he said. ‘The deputy from Fannin County told me it was you that found his body.’

‘That’s right,’ Quarrie said. ‘I was passing when your father’s gardener called the sheriff. It’s their deal though; you need to be speaking to them.’

‘Yes sir, I know that and I have done. The thing of it is Deputy
Collins said you told him my daddy was murdered but they think he killed himself.’

Back at the ranch Quarrie found Pious working on one of the trucks. ‘Bud,’ he said, ‘does Mrs Feeley have any plans right now for the plane?’

Standing tall Pious wiped his hands on a rag and glanced from the barn to the hangar up on the plateau where the ranch house was built. ‘Not that she told me.’

‘I need for you to fly me to Fannin County. You figure you could do that? Department’s paying for the gas.’

‘Sure.’ Pious jerked a thumb at the truck. ‘I’d rather be flying that plane than working on this piece of shit. Just give me a minute to make the checks.’

Thirty minutes later they were in the cockpit of a ’63 Piper Cherokee – a model that had been brought out to compete with the Cessna. A two hundred and thirty-five horsepower unit with a pair of tip tanks holding seventeen gallons a piece. Pious said they did that to enhance the load capacity, and along with the existing tanks that made a total of eighty-four gallons. Quarrie wasn’t up on the pay load or any kind of avionics, but when they were kids Pious had been able to fix just about any ailment on any engine that was placed in front of him. A couple of years after he started working the ranch, Pick Feeley had been so impressed he paid for him to get his pilot’s license.

Seated at the controls Pious glanced across the cockpit, a pair of mirror-lens Ray-Bans pressed high on the bridge of his nose.

‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me if I got this right. The sheriff is saying suicide and you reckon homicide. Is that about how it is?’

Quarrie nodded.

‘You sure he’s wrong and you’re right? I mean, I know how you like to think you ain’t ever been wrong, but I’ve known you twenty-two years, John Q, and you been wrong a bunch.’

‘Pious, do I tell you how to fix this plane?’

‘Nope.’

‘Do I tell you how to take off or land?’

‘Wouldn’t pay you any mind if you did.’

‘So, I’ve seen enough gunshot wounds to know when it’s a suicide and when it ain’t, and people don’t shoot themselves with a gun held two inches away from their head.’

Pious eased the sunglasses a little lower. ‘And that’s how it was with this guy?’

‘That’s how it was with this guy.’ Quarrie stared through the spinning prop. ‘Somebody took a twenty-two automatic from his gun cabinet and stood alongside him as he sat at his desk. After he was dead they sat him a little more upright and put the gun in his hand. I know that not just from the powder burns but the way blood settled after he was dead.’

Pious put the plane down a few miles south of the lake. On the phone Isaac had told Quarrie that a farmer named Palmer had an alfalfa field that had been sheared right back to the dirt. Quarrie knew Pious could land on that and he settled the Piper on its wheels before rolling to a stop just ahead of a ragged-looking barn where most of the paint was peeled off.

Quarrie got down and Pious got down and they could see Isaac Bowen in dress uniform leaning on the fence next to an old boy in a pair of denim overalls. Quarrie wore a Carhartt jacket with his twin-rig shoulder holsters underneath, but neither man was looking at him.

‘Something, ain’t it?’ A little sadly Pious wagged his head. ‘How a black man can be flying an airplane. Never would’ve guessed it, a damn-fool thing like that.’

The old man did not say anything, he just looked on with faint hint of color in his cheeks.

Quarrie was studying the man in uniform. ‘You Bowen?’ he said.

Isaac nodded. ‘Yes sir, I am.’ He indicated the older man. ‘This is Mr Palmer.’

They walked across the dust-blown yard to an old Ford pickup, and by the time they got there Palmer was picking Pious’s brains about the plane. Isaac got behind the wheel with Pious next to him and Quarrie on the far side. He drove them north to the woodland and the mailbox with the Bowen name.

Talkative to begin with, Isaac slipped into silence as they closed on the house. By the time they turned into the gravel driveway he was silent and the color had gone from his face.

‘You-all just hit back in the world then, did you?’ Pious asked him.

Pulling up out front of the open garage Isaac killed the engine. ‘Yes, I did.’ He looked sideways. ‘You in the service, were you?’

‘Triple volunteer like you.’ Quarrie indicated the insignia on Isaac’s sleeve. ‘Old Pious might fly an airplane these days but there was a time we were jumping out.’

Standing on the gravel driveway he could feel the heat of the breeze coming up from the south. Above them no clouds billowed, there was only the sun; a yellowed ball, it seemed to echo the yellow brick of the house.

Isaac led the way into the kitchen where he had coffee going in a new pot. He poured three cups and passed them round. Pious wandered through to the living room where he noticed the green felt table. ‘Texas Hold’em, or five-card stud?’

‘Blackjack is what it was.’ Isaac followed his gaze. ‘My dad used to play blackjack when he was first married. I guess that table is just a reminder though, because I never once saw him deal a hand. There’s an alcove underneath with chips and all, got a deck back there that’s still wrapped up.’ He looked at Quarrie. ‘Somebody shot him, that’s what you said?’

‘That’s what I figured when I saw him.’

‘So why is it the sheriff’s telling me he took the gun to himself?’

Quarrie thought about that. ‘Beats me,’ he said. Looking beyond Isaac he considered the family photograph. ‘I found marks where
blood settled in his neck. That indicates post-mortem movement and he couldn’t do that by himself. Hasn’t the coroner seen the body?’

‘I don’t know,’ Isaac shrugged. ‘Nobody said.’

‘OK, I’ll check that out when we’re done.’ Quarrie considered his uniform again. ‘So how much time did you get in?’

‘In Nam you mean? Three tours.’

‘You weren’t drafted then? You volunteered? Where was it you were fighting at?’

‘No, I wasn’t drafted,’ Isaac told him. ‘I was regular Army and it was the Fishhook I was based at. Fought in the Crow’s Foot valley, places like that. Long-range recon – they liked to have me walk the point.’ Loosely he gestured. ‘Last detail ended up as a firefight sixty miles north of Saigon.’

Quarrie was still looking at the photograph.

‘Ambush from the sawgrass, had us pinned down up there with thirty-one dead and a hundred and twenty-three wounded.’

‘Your last detail huh?’ Quarrie studied him again. ‘After that you were on your way back?’

Wiping a line of perspiration from his brow, Isaac nodded. ‘Last detail of my last tour. Took the boat home to surprise my dad only, it was me got the surprise of my life instead.’

Quarrie glanced briefly at Pious. Then he looked back to where Isaac was trembling ever so slightly. ‘You OK there, Isaac?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’

‘You staying here at the house?’

Isaac nodded.

‘Kept it spotless, didn’t he? Your dad, I mean: stickler for that kind of thing.’

With a half-smile, Isaac nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose he was. Learned how to be like it in the army – his whole life the army; Africa then Korea, fighting in the jungles, he was always saying how easy it was for infection to set in. Kept everything clean on account of it, and
he was so obsessive I guess that was one of the reasons Mom left.’

Crossing to the fireplace Pious took a long look at the photograph. ‘That your mother there?’

Isaac nodded.

‘How long ago did she leave?’

‘I guess not long after that picture was taken. Maybe a year or so – I can’t recall exactly.’

‘That your brother there with you?’ Quarrie said. ‘Where he’s at?’

At that Isaac faltered. His lips seemed to form words but none came out, as if he was just about keeping his emotions in check.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s something else I’ve got to deal with. I can’t find him. I can’t find Ish.’ He pressed the air from his cheeks. ‘He was at Trinity, the hospital. There was a fire and …’ His voice seemed to break all over again. ‘The whole place went up and they told me a few of the patients still aren’t accounted for.’

Sinking into an armchair he looked helpless. ‘That’s why this whole thing is as bad as it is. I mean coming home from all that shit over there to find your family …’ He lifted his palms once again. ‘All anybody wants over there is family. But I come home to find I don’t seem to have one, not anymore, not unless I can find Ish.’ Tears built. He seemed to be fighting them where he sat. ‘I get off the boat after six weeks at sea and fly to Houston to go to the hospital because it’s a year since I saw Ish. I wanted to do that before I came here. I wanted to check on my brother. I wanted to see how he is. But when I get there, when I get to the hospital, I see the whole place is burned and I have to go up to a place called Bellevue. That’s Shreveport, Louisiana; and when I get there they tell me that Ish is either dead or missing. I get home here and my dad … Him and me, Dad and me …’ Eyes closed now he shook his head. ‘Well, anyway, the fact is my dad is dead and they’re telling me he killed himself.’