Jack of Ravens

3

Dallas, 1964

Dallas was like a bad hangover, even weeks after the assassination. In shops and bars and in the streets, people felt guilty, as if they had been personally responsible for the president’s death.

Gabe got nowhere with his investigation, as Church had expected and secretly hoped, but it was clear Gabe wasn’t going to give up easily. Church saw something of himself in the teenager’s innocence and unfocused desire for justice, but they were echoes from long ago, before things had started to go so badly wrong.

On February 9, they stood outside a TV store in downtown Dallas watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on the sets piled high in the window display.

‘I wish I could hear them,’ Gabe said. ‘I reckon they’re really going to shake things up.’

‘You could be right.’ Church smiled wryly to himself.

‘I can’t believe they let them on Ed Sullivan.’

‘You, me and seventy-four million others.’ Church watched Gabe’s face light up with a simple joy and felt like an elder brother. So why the obsession with JFK?’

Gabe fell silent for a moment. ‘My dad died a couple of days after he worked on the film of the assassination. Hit and run. They never caught the driver.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I remember how excited he was when he told me what he’d seen. And how angry when those frames got cut out. It was a big deal to him.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of stuff. These days nothing makes sense at all.’