Salvation Row

Chapter Twenty-Four

The house was magnificent. It was in the Garden District, the city’s most high-end and exclusive neighbourhood and even among the often stunning houses that surrounded it, it still stood out. It had been built between 1859 and 1865, constructed in Italianate neoclassical style with a host of period features that spoke of class and expense. There was a grand façade with double galleries and elaborate ironwork. Inside, the mouldings were enhanced with gold leaf, the mantels were made of marble, and several of the ceilings were decorated with custom murals. The spacious grounds, spread out across five lots, included a terraced tropical garden and a classically inspired pool. It had been built to be the finest home in New Orleans, and it was a claim that still held true today.

The previous owner had been a novelist, famous for her vampire novels, and the property had sat on the market for a year until Joel Babineaux had decided that he would like to buy it. He had made a competitive offer, reduced it when he decided that he was in an unbeatable bargaining position, and closed the deal for about three-quarters of what he knew the house was worth.

Babineaux was watching from the window of his study as the mayor’s car drew up at the gates. They slid back and the car nosed ahead, parking in the wide gravelled space before the porch. He reached down for his phone. “He’s here,” he said.

Dubois was waiting for the visitor downstairs. “I see him,” he replied. “You want me to bring him up?”

“Yes.”

“Want me to be there, too?”

“I got this. Speak to him once I’m through with him.”

“I will.”

Babineaux prepared himself for the encounter. It wasn’t a question of nervousness — how could that be possible, with an oily little sycophant like Chalcroft? — but more of an assessment of which tactics to adopt. How best to move the conversation in the direction that he wanted. Threats or inducements? Which pressure points did he need to squeeze?

The door opened and Dubois ushered the mayor inside.

“Joel,” Chalcroft said, a bright, toothy smile on his face. He was a career politician, well versed in making an excellent first impression. If Babineaux would have allowed it, he would have clasped his hand in both of his. Then he would have reached up and grasped him around the elbow, clapped him fraternally on the shoulders. They were cheap parlour tricks, useful in currying favour in the credulous, but worthless when used against someone with Babineaux’s experience and almost sociopathic disdain for the norms of good behaviour.

Rather than engage in pointless civility, he gestured at one of the generous armchairs. “Sit down,” he said. It wasn’t a suggestion, and Chalcroft — more used to giving orders than receiving them — frowned a little before he switched his smile back on and settled back into the chair.

“What’s the matter, Joel?” he said. “We’re having dinner on Friday.”

“You don’t get to call me Joel. It’s Mr. Babineaux.”

Chalcroft’s expression switched to one of confusion. “I don’t—”

“We’ve got a problem.”

“And it couldn’t wait?”

“No, Preston. It couldn’t.”

Chalcroft leant forwards a little and spread his arms wide. “What is it? I’m all ears.”

Babineaux pursed his lips. The mayor was a particularly unpleasant individual. He was oleaginous and insincere, untrustworthy and duplicitous. He also had an unfortunate taste for underage girls, an interesting peccadillo that Babineaux held in reserve and was ready to be deployed should the occasion demand it. It hadn’t, yet, because the mayor was motivated by money even more than his dick. But he had seen the pictures of the man, fat and sweaty, sprawled across beds in flophouses across the city, and there was no way that he would be able to forget them. It pained him that it was necessary to fraternise with such a pervert, but business was business, and, whether Babineaux liked it or not, Mayor Chalcroft was an influential man. It was better to have him inside the tent pissing out than to be outside the tent pissing in.

“Those houses down in the Lower Ninth—”

“The charity?”

“Build It Up. Yes. Those houses. They are in the way.”

“Yes, I know, you said. I thought it was in hand?”

“I thought so, too, but apparently not. I’ve tried to buy them out. They rejected the offer. So I tried to explain why it was in their best interests to conclude this amicably, but that hasn’t worked, either.”

“So?”

“So, Preston, I’m going to let you decide how to handle them. Your role in our little partnership was to provide me with the land, unencumbered, and with the permit ready to build.”

“You’ve got the land and the permit.”

“But they’re worthless until those houses have been cleared. I’ve been looking at this, and you’ve only delivered half of your bargain. And that, in my book, is worse than failing to deliver anything at all.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You want me to spell it out? Get rid of them.”

“How?”

“I don’t care how you do it,” he yelled at him. “Just get it done!”

The mayor shifted uncomfortably.

“I needn’t remind you, Preston, that your cut of this project is dependent upon it going ahead.”

“I’m aware of that. I just…” He frowned, then nodded with unconvincing certitude. “Fine. I’ll deal with it.”

“Good. Because every day this is dragging out is costing me $1.2 million in fees and interest. I’m prepared to eat that, for now, but by the time we get to the end of next week, I’m not sure I’ll feel so charitable. I’ll start taking it out of your end. Understand, Preston?”

The mayor looked as if he was about to object, but, then, as he looked up at Babineaux, he realised just in time that that would have been a foolish course of action. “I’ll get rid of them.”

“See that you do.”

Mayor Chalcroft emerged into the bright sunlight and the damp wash of the afternoon heat. He was a corpulent man, his temper was up, and he had to bite his lip as his driver held open the door of his sedan for him. How dare Babineaux speak to him like that? He was the mayor of New Orleans, for Christ’s sake. He had won the election in a landslide, the voters loved him, and his mandate ought to have been enough to garner him a little respect. But no, there was no respect. He was ordered hither and thither like an errand boy. No, he thought, it was worse than that. Babineaux had been eloquent with his implications. He was to “get rid” of the men and women who had made their home on Salvation Row. What a dirty little euphemism that was. He knew precisely what he had meant.

“Chalcroft,” came a voice from behind him.

He turned. It was Jackson Dubois again. There was a snake of a man, he thought, the perfect lieutenant for Joel Babineaux.

“Yes, Mr. Dubois?”

“Mr. Babineaux wanted me to talk to you.”

“About?”

“About what you are going to do. Shall we sit in the car?”

That was rhetorical. Just like his boss, there was no deference about the man, no ‘sir’ or ‘mayor.’ There was no suggestion that this meeting was optional. No suggestion that this would be a conference of equals, an opportunity to exchange ideas. He was about to be told what to do.

“Fine.”

He lowered his bulk into the air-conditioned oasis of the cabin and ran his fingers over the leather upholstery. The car was expensive. This one was provided by the city, but, he reminded himself, he had a similar model parked in his garage back home. His wife had the sporty Audi, too, and both cars had been purchased out of the largesse that Babineaux had diverted in his direction. His new home, too, not that far from this one. It would not have been possible without the money that Babineaux had used to grease his palm.

Their arrangement was simple enough. Preston was an educated man and he knew that their scheme was one that had, in one form or another, been duplicated throughout the ages. He had political power, the ability to grant favours. Babineaux had money. They each had what the other needed. Theirs should have been a relationship of equality, so why did he always feel like Babineaux regarded him as the shit on the bottom of his shoe?

The scheme that he had suggested was simplicity itself: Babineaux wanted to build on the wreckage that Katrina had strewn behind her. He would build his obscene mall right atop the graves of the New Orleanians who Katrina had killed. In return for a very significant backhander, the mayor would support the proposal in the press and usher it through the planning committees. He had stuffed those panels with his lackeys and, for a small slice of the money that was coming his way, he had ensured that approval was granted. He would also be able to claim the political credit for the regeneration of the area, the hurt of the people displaced by the scheme salved a little by the houses that Babineaux would build for them. Everyone would be a winner.

Except for the interference of the Build It Up Foundation, it would have been simplicity itself.

Dubois opened the opposite door and slid inside.

“Mr. Babineaux suggests that you involve our friends in the police.”

“How?” He almost sighed it, resigned, all semblance of choice and control disappearing and floating away.

“He has two suggestions. One that might end things in a neat and tidy way, and one that will be more complicated — messier — but will provide complete finality.”

“You want to give me a little more to go on?”

“I will. But we need to see the police.”

“He doesn’t trust me?”

“Frankly? No, he doesn’t. But he does trust me. If you do what I say, I’ll make sure this gets sorted out so that you don’t have to worry about things.”

“Things?”

Dubois nodded, wearing a guileful smile.

“The money?”

“Yes, that, the funding for your re-election campaign, but, more importantly, the publication of photographs that will make clear your unfortunate”—he paused, making a show of searching for the right word—“your unfortunate predilections for underage girls.”

Chalcroft gaped. The driver chose that moment to lower the dividing partition. “Where to, sir?”

He paused, helplessly, biting his lip, unable to think about what he would have to do next. He turned to Dubois.

“The police,” he said firmly.

He managed to find a way through the panic. Yes, he understood what Babineaux wanted him to do. He considered how that would be achieved for a moment until his thoughts alighted upon just the right man.

“City Hall,” he said. “And call Detective Peacock. Tell him that I want to see him this afternoon.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Milton was back at Salvation Row again at seven. The pickup that collected the crew had just drawn up, and the men were hopping down from the back. Izzy was there, too, and, as she saw him, she came across.

“Did you have a nice evening?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Last night. Dinner, with your parents.”

“Yes,” she said, flustered. “Don’t worry about that. Did they come back?”

“They came back.”

“And?”

“And we had an exchange of views. They told me what they wanted to happen. I told them that they were wasting their time.”

“And that was it?”

He shrugged. “I might have had to underline it a little. But the message was received.”

“I probably shouldn’t ask what that means, right?”

“Don’t worry. It’s all in hand.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because it is.”

She didn’t press. That was good. Milton had a plan, and he knew that she wouldn’t approve of it.

“You and your parents should probably move out for a while.”

“No,” she said. “No way.”

“Just for a few days.”

“They’ll never go for it, John. And I’m not going to start running.”

This isn’t finished. I can’t say that they won’t come back, and I might not be here next time. You know what happened with your father. He can be a hothead.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Just a few days. I think it’s best.”

“Maybe,” she conceded.

“You need money?”

“No,” she said, her eyes flashing. “I got it.”

“Okay.”

She paused for a minute, her mood gradually returning. She looked out at the wild jungle that had invaded the lot and shook her head.

“We’ve been putting this one off. It’s bad.”

“And you’re not joining us?”

“It’s tempting”—she grinned—“but I’ve got preparation to do.”

“For what?”

“Court. I’ve got a hearing tomorrow.”

He fumbled for the explanation that she had given him. “Eminent—?”

“Domain. Trying to clear us off the land. They’ve got to argue against the Fifth Amendment, but they’ve got precedent on their side. It’ll probably come down to a fight about how much compensation we’re due, but I don’t want compensation. None of us want to go. I’m just fighting it off as long as I can. Maybe something will happen in the meantime.”

Milton and the others started to work, trying to get as much done before the brutal sun had risen too far into the sky. They had only been working for fifteen minutes when two police cars turned the corner and rolled up to a halt next to them. There were three officers in one car and two in the other. Milton drove the blade of his shovel into the tilled earth and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He watched as they consulted on the sidewalk. Izzy came out of the office and watched them, too, meeting them halfway as they walked to the lot.

“What’s the matter, officer?”

“Are you in charge here?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Isadora Bartholomew. Who are you?”

“Detective Peacock. NOPD.”

“What do you want?”

“We heard that you’ve got illegal migrants on this project. Know anything about that?”

“No,” Isadora said, but Milton could tell in the stiffening of her shoulders that she was concerned.

“You have a Pedro Mendoza here?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked across at the foreman. Milton did, too. Pedro looked back at the officer defiantly.

“You know that Señor Mendoza has been deported from the United States three times? You know that he has a criminal record? He was convicted in 1999 for possession of cocaine in Harris County, Texas. You know that, Miss Bartholomew?”

“That’s not true!” Pedro said, his spontaneous vehemence enough for Milton to instinctively believe him.

“How about Hector Rivas? He work on your crew?”

“Sure.”

“Señor Rivas has previously served sixteen months for illegal reentry into the United States.”

The other policemen had moved around until they were behind them. Now, two men stepped up to Pedro and another two moved up behind Hector. They took out handcuffs.

“This isn’t necessary,” Izzy protested.

“It’s not true,” Pedro pleaded with her, turning back to the policeman and then back to Izzy again. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Milton could feel the atmosphere changing. There had been confusion, but, now that the police had laid out the reason for their visit, there was an undercurrent of incipient violence. The source of the threat wasn’t the workers, it was the police. Hands had been laid upon the handles of batons and rested against the butts of service pistols. It looked as if they were spoiling for a fight.

The officer turned back to Izzy. “Did you verify their immigration papers, ma’am?”

“Of course.”

“Just not very well.”

“They were checked.”

Milton could see that Izzy’s temper was flaring. He thought that he knew her well enough by now to know that she would have been diligent about things like that. He could see what she was thinking.

She was thinking that this was a fix-up.

He was thinking the same thing.

“I’m afraid that’s something you’re going to have to argue later. You’re under arrest, too, Miss Bartholomew.”

Izzy’s temper boiled over, her eyes flashing with anger. One of the officers grasped her shoulder and she turned in his direction, her hand raised. Milton reached across and caught her by the wrist, holding it gently but firmly enough that she couldn’t strike anyone.

“Take it easy,” he told her quietly.

“They’re setting us up!”

“Then you’ll be out in no time.”

“Take your hands off her, sir,” the cop said.

Milton squeezed her wrist and released it.

Peacock started to read the Miranda warning.

“What if I’m not out?” she said. “I’ve got to get to court.”

The officer behind her pushed her arms down behind her back and fastened a cuff around her right wrist. “Take it easy,” he said.

“Get off me!” she protested, trying to free her left arm.

“Izzy,” Milton said. “Don’t make it worse.”

She looked at him, held his eye, and he watched as she let the fight drain out of her. She was pushed across the sidewalk to the patrol car, the officer pressing down on her head and manoeuvring her into the back.

Milton followed.

“Stay back, sir,” Peacock said.

“I’ll get you out,” he called.

The officer turned to him. “And who are you?”

“John Smith.”

“You want to come downtown, too?”

Milton backed away.

The officer pumped out his chest. “Thought not.”

Milton watched impotently as the doors of the patrol cars were slammed shut. Pedro was glaring straight ahead. Hector looked as if he was fighting tears. Izzy was looking right at him.

“Help,” she mouthed through the glass.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Milton ran to his car and followed the two police cruisers back into town. They headed west, crossed the bridge, and then turned onto St. Claude Avenue and, finally, Burgundy Street. The precinct house was a squat, two-storey building, with cruisers parked outside and a phalanx of security cameras arrayed across the whitewashed walls. The windows were behind bars, and the yard at the side was protected by a fence topped with rolls of razor wire.

He found a space to park a block away and jogged back.

The precinct house had previously been a post office, and it still retained reminders of its previous use. Antique metal letters over the reception window advertised parcel post services and stamps, and post office boxes lined one wall in the lobby. A plaque inside the door commemorated the building’s completion during the term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The waiting room was arranged before a counter that was protected by a screen of Plexiglas. There were rows of chairs bolted to the floor, and the people in the chairs — some lounging, others fidgeting impatiently — gave the place an uncomfortable, antic atmosphere.

Milton went up to the window. There was a uniformed female officer behind the counter. She looked up at him and then looked down again, making no effort to communicate with him. Milton rested his hands on the counter and waited her out. Eventually, she looked back up at him with a lazy annoyance.

“Yes?”

“A friend of mine was brought here.”

“Lot of people get brought here, sir.”

“I want to know what’s happening.”

“Name?”

“Isadora Bartholomew.”

“Your name?”

“John Smith.”

She swivelled to tap the details into her computer.

“Miss?” Milton said when she didn’t turn back.

The woman didn’t look at him. “She’s being booked, Mr. Smith.”

“When will she—”

“Take a seat, Mr. Smith,” she spoke over him. “When I hear what’s happening with her, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“But what does that—”

“Take a seat, please, sir. There’s nothing I can do until I hear from the back.”

It turned out that the first woman was incompetent or lying, or both. Milton waited two hours and, when nothing happened, he went back up to the window. The woman had been replaced by a male officer and, despite being equally unhelpful, when Milton asked what was happening to Izzy, he reported that she was being detained prior to being booked. He protested, was sent back to wait, and then, when he went back for a third time an hour later, he was told by a third officer that Izzy’s arraignment had been set for three days’ time. In the interim, she was being released on her own recognisance. Milton was about to ask what that meant when a door at the far end of the room opened and Izzy appeared through it.

He hurried across.

“Are you all right?”

She glared straight ahead, the muscles in her face rigid. “What time is it?”

“Just past midday.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“Shit, John. I’ve got to be in court in two hours. If I’m not there, they’ll strike out the case. Shit.”

“What do you need?”

“To change clothes, to get my stuff. A shower. Shit, shit, shit. I’m never going to be there in time.”

“Yes, you will,” Milton said. “Come on. I’ll drive you.”

Milton drove quickly, but carefully. It was obvious that the campaign against Izzy and the charity was being ratcheted up: the goons that had been sent to scare them, the baseless arrests.

“I knew the politicians were involved,” Izzy said with a heavy frown. “I guess I can add the police to that, too.”

“Why didn’t they keep you in until after the hearing?”

“Because I called my lawyer and she threatened to bring a writ of habeas corpus.”

“Meaning?”

“They have to take me to a judge and explain why it’s important that I’m detained without being booked. They know the charges are bogus. A judge would’ve seen right through it, provided they don’t have tame judges, too, and, now I come to think about that—”

“What about the others?”

She looked troubled. “I told her that she had to get me out first. I can’t miss this hearing. Hector and Pedro are next. They’ll be out today.”

Milton kept his eye on the mirrors as she spoke. They had been absorbed into a steady flow of traffic on the bridge, but there was nothing about any of the cars behind them that made him unduly concerned that they were being followed. That didn’t mean that they were alone, of course. A good tail would be impossible to spot in heavy traffic, even for him. To be sure, and to speed up the last leg of the journey back to the house, Milton swung off Highway 39 and onto the grid of streets to the north. Nothing turned off with them. Milton pressed down on the gas and accelerated to the east and Salvation Row.

He glanced across at Izzy. Her face was still blackened with anger. “When the two men came to the house, what did they say about going to court?”

“I told you, John.”

“Tell me again.”

“That I shouldn’t go. That it wasn’t safe for me.”

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing specific. You think they were serious?”

“Come on, Izzy. Look at what’s happening. They came around, beat your father, and then they came back just like they said they would. The day after that, you’re arrested on trumped-up charges and put in jail. So, do I think they’re serious? Yes, I do. I’m sure of it. And we have to act accordingly.”

“I’m not letting them scare me off.”

“And I’m not suggesting that you do. We just need to proceed with caution.”

“So?”

“So I’m going to stay with you today.”

She swivelled in the seat so that she could look across the cabin at him. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

“What’s the matter?”

“How much of what you’ve told me is true?”

“Izzy—”

“You better tell me who you really are.”

“A friend.”

She shook her head. “No. That’s not good enough. I need to know what you do.”

“Izzy—”

“The way you dealt with those two guys. I spoke to Vinnie. He told me what you did. How you took them both out. He said that you’ve got to be police or something like that.”

“I’m not police.”

“Okay, you’re not police. So what are you? You either tell me, or I go to court on my own.”

She was angry from what had happened to her, and he could see that the anger could very quickly be turned onto him if she thought that he was feeding her a line. He gripped the wheel a little tighter, looked dead ahead and clenched his teeth. “All right. I used to be a soldier.”

“What kind of soldier?”

“British Special Forces.”

“What—?”

“Have you heard of the SAS?”

“Like Delta?”

“Sort of like that.”

“You saw action?”

He nodded. “I served for twenty years before I got out.”

“And since then?”

He was convinced that she would see through his act, the lies that he was telling by omission. “I’ve been drifting around. I have money, I don’t need to work. I have no ties, no one to be responsible for. I’ve just been enjoying life. Seeing the world. I saw you on the TV, like I said. I thought you could do with some help.”

He could see her reflection in the windshield, faint in the daylight. And he could see that she was still staring at him, unsatisfied.

“What were you doing in New Orleans before? When we met, during Katrina?”

“Business.”

“Army business?”

“Yes.”

“Your friend? Mr. Penn?”

“He was working with me.”

“Jesus, John. You lied to me.”

“We were on an anti-terrorist operation. He was in pursuit of the targets. They rammed him. It wasn’t an accident.”

There was only so much that he could tell her, of course, and that would have to be enough.

She repeated it, “You lied.”

“How could I tell you? It was all classified. It’s still classified.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, John.”

“That’ll have to do, Izzy. I can’t say any more than that.”

“You lied. To me and my family.”

He didn’t let it pass a third time. “No, I didn’t. I was vague. I said that I was on business, and I was. I just didn’t say what my business was.”

“You know what I mean. It’s the same thing.”

“If you really think that, then I’m very sorry. But I’m here now. And I want to help. I can help.” He turned to glance at her. “You have to trust me, Izzy. I know that you’re not going to back down, and I know that they’re serious. You need someone to make sure they can’t get to you or to your family. And I can do that.”

“Is there anything else? Anything at all?”

He would be truthful, right up to the point where he couldn’t be. “There’s one more thing. My name isn’t Smith. It’s Milton.”

“You’re joking?”

“No.”

“It is John, though? Or isn’t it? Is it something else?”

“It’s John.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess.”

She turned away from him and stared out of the window. He took another quick glance and watched the muscles in her jaw as they clenched and unclenched. She was working out whether she could trust him. Whether she wanted to trust him.

“All right,” she said. “But just so we’re straight from now on, no secrets and no lies. Okay?”

“Okay,” Milton said.

No secrets. No lies. That was a tall order, but, he determined, he would be as true to her as he could.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jackson Dubois would much rather not have been involved, but Melvin and Chad had made a mess of a simple task before, and he didn’t want to take the chance that they would err for a second time. He had received a telephone call from Chalcroft’s man in the NOPD earlier that morning to tell him that Isadora Bartholomew had been released. That was an unfortunate development. Dubois had rather hoped that Isadora would be detained a little longer, preferably long enough for the lawyers to strike out her case against the city’s eminent domain proceedings. That hadn’t happened. Her preparation would have been disrupted, and that was good, but Joel had been very clear that the case could not be allowed to drag out. The odds of ensuring that didn’t happen were much better if she wasn’t there at all.

Getting the mayor to involve the police was supposed to have solved things.

It hadn’t.

Annoying, but not irretrievable.

Dubois liked to be prepared.

There was always a Plan B.

He was going to have to change things a little.

His car was parked alongside the Industrial Canal, the watercourse that marked the western boundary of the Lower Ninth. The canal had been one of the first to be breached during the hurricane, pouring its waters into the streets around and about. The Army Corps of Engineers had restored the levee, but Dubois couldn’t help but think that what they had done could only ever be a Band-Aid. He would not have chosen to build a multimillion-dollar development on land that was forever at risk of flooding, but, he reminded himself, Joel had found his success by taking calculated gambles like this. He knew what he was doing, had demonstrated that over the course of his career a hundred times. Dubois wasn’t going to doubt him.

Dubois looked into the rear-view mirror as Melvin Fryatt’s Lexus pulled up behind him. He pressed his two-hundred-dollar sunglasses onto his face, opened the car, and stepped out into the broiling sun.

Fryatt lowered the window. “Morning, boss.”

“You’re late.”

“Traffic.”

Dubois could smell the crack fumes through the open window. He doubted himself again. There were other men he could have hired for this job. But, he reminded himself, it should have been easy. It should have been child’s play. And these two degenerates, scum that he had scooped out of the septic tank of the city’s underworld, they would not be missed when the time came to finally rid himself of them.

“How do you want us to do this?”

“She’s at her place now. She’ll get changed, grab whatever she needs, and then she’ll head to the courthouse.”

“Alright,” Melvin said. “So we go there now, pull her off the street, put her in the car, and take her out to the bayou. Easy.”

“No,” Dubois said. “You’ve already messed this up once. I’m not going to give you a chance to mess it up again. And that’s too obvious. She’s with the English guy you met the other night. She’s probably going to have him with her all day.”

“So?”

“They’ll take North Claiborne. Even if she’s careful, runs through the streets to the north, she’s got to go over the bridge. You two wait on the other side on Poland Avenue. You wait for her car to come over.”

“And then?”

“Then you take care of her. Both of them.”

Milton parted the curtains a little and looked out of the window. The street outside was clear in both directions.

“John?”

He turned. Izzy was making her way down the stairs. She had showered, and her hair was still damp. She had changed into a simple black dress and shoes with kitten heels. Her skin looked healthy and vibrant, and her eyes beamed with determination. She was not going to be daunted by Babineaux’s threats. That was good. Milton hated bullies, and he especially hated bullies who strong-armed people to do their bidding.

But, he noted, her spunk made things trickier for him, too. She was headstrong and tenacious, and that meant it might be more difficult for him to persuade her to act with the circumspection that would make it more difficult for them to get at her.

“Did you speak to your parents?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And it wasn’t easy. They didn’t want to do it, but I think I persuaded them. I got two rooms at the Comfort Inn. They’re going to go over there this morning.”

“Good. And are you ready?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just need my case.”

She went into her father’s study and returned with a lawyer’s case, the tendons in her arm bulging from its weight.

Milton took it from her. It was heavy. “What’s in here?”

“My files.” She smiled.

Milton unlocked the door and went outside. He looked up and down the street. Still quiet.

“What kind of files?” he said.

“Case law. Precedents. Notes of what I want to say.”

Milton wasn’t really listening. He wanted her to think he was relaxed enough to have a conversation, and he wanted her to talk so that she might forget how much danger she was in. Instead of listening, he was focusing on every little detail. The other houses. The cars parked on the street, simple enough to hide inside. The traffic passing at the junctions to the left and right. Everything looked normal. That didn’t mean Milton was prepared to relax.

“Wait inside until I get the car started,” he said.

“John—”

“Wait.”

He started down the path. He reached his car. He had been watching the street the whole time, but, just to be sure, he dropped down to his knees and craned his neck down, checking the underside, looking for something that shouldn’t be there. He had used magnetic mines himself, many times, and it would only have taken a moment for someone to fix one to the chassis and hurry away down the street. It all looked clear. He opened the door to the back and slid the case onto the seat. He shut the door and walked around the car to the driver’s side, vigilantly scanning up and down.

Still nobody, at least no one that he could see.

He fired up the engine and leaned across to open the passenger door. Izzy came out of the house, locked the door, and hurried down the path. She slid inside next to him and slammed the door. He released the brake and dabbed the accelerator. They started to roll away from the curb, Milton gradually increasing their speed, heading west.

“You have a precedent that says they can’t do what they want to do?”

He swivelled his head left and right.

He checked the mirrors.

Still nothing.

“The law’s different from state to state. Louisiana is pretty good for them, but it’s not a slam dunk. Like I said, I just need to delay things as long as I can. It doesn’t cost me anything but time. Every time they send their team of lawyers down, it’s costing them thousands. It adds up, even for them.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“This morning? I’m going to argue for an adjournment.”

“On what basis?”

She started to talk about unfair process, case law, legal principles that Milton did not understand and had little interest in. She was distracting herself, relaxing, which was exactly what he wanted. He made all the right noises as she spoke, but his attention was focussed outside.

It was four and a half miles from Salvation Row to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal at 410 Royal Street. Milton’s smartphone suggested that they would have to pass to the west through the Lower Ninth Ward, cross the Industrial Canal via the bridge, and then follow the curve of the Mississippi. Google suggested that traffic was reasonable for this time of the day, and that the journey should take twenty minutes from point to point.

Milton reached the corner of Caffin Avenue, slowed the car, looked left and right, and then pulled out again. They rolled through the grid of streets in the Lower Ninth, eerie and empty, the buildings flattened, with vegetation running wild. They reached the junction with North Claiborne Avenue. Milton knew that they would have to take the main road eventually, but it was the most obvious route, and he wanted to defer it for as long as he could. Instead of turning onto it, he swung right and followed North Derbigny Street. The street ran alongside the main drag, but was much quieter. They crossed Choctaw, Andry, Lizardi, Forstall, Reynes, and Tennessee. Milton slowed at the junction. Ahead of them were two more blocks, then a margin of waste ground covered with scrub and brush, and then, beyond, the levee that held back the canal. He swung the car to the south and followed Tennessee to the tall struts of the bridge. The on-ramp was located at the end of the street. He merged with the traffic and turned to the west again.

The traffic began to build, slowing at the choke points. Milton began to feel uncomfortable. If the traffic jammed on the bridge, there would be no way for him to get off of it in the event that they were attacked. He glanced back in the mirror at the line of cars, jostling behind them.

If they were being followed, if they stopped, if they became trapped, if, if, if…

He looked ahead. The bridge offered two lanes, going east and west, and one of the lanes ahead was blocked. He could see the stream of traffic in the lane nearest to the edge was stopped, spilling around an obstacle. A breakdown? Something worse? Milton bullied his way into the other lane and, just like that, the traffic suddenly eased. Milton was able to accelerate to twenty. He glanced at a car that had rear-ended the one in front, causing the blockage. They were quickly onto the bridge and then they were across it, the morning sun flashing into the mirror as he looked back again.

Izzy looked at her watch. “We’re going to make it.”

“Of course. You better start thinking about what you’re going to say.”

They came off the bridge, passing over the tangle of railroad lines that carried freight north and south. They moved on, the road fringed now with unkempt grass on the right and irregularly spaced palm trees and iron railings on the left. The junction with Poland Avenue was a wide crossroads, power and telecoms lines strung up overhead, with a broad arm suspending the traffic lights ahead of them. The lights were on red, and Milton slowed to a halt. They were four cars back, easily close enough to the lights to make it through when they next turned to green. Milton had a good view to the left and right. There was a series of one-storey buildings on the far side of the road, facing them. A wide space of open land to the right, an empty warehouse behind that, a realtor’s sign advertising OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE. The traffic on Poland was lighter than on Claiborne. There was still a queue of perhaps thirty vehicles patiently filtering through the lights. There was a bus shelter. A group of people, dressed cheaply, waiting for their bus. Nothing that looked amiss.

Milton started to think about what he was going to have to do next. He would stay with her for the moment, keep her out of harm’s way until he was able to formulate a plan to take the fight to the people who wanted her and the charity out of the Lower Ninth. He had some ideas about how he might do that, but it was going to take time to organise. A few days, maybe a week. He would have to guard her until then. Milton had been trained in bodyguarding during his time in the regiment. There had been assignments during his service in the Group when he had been deployed to protect rather than to kill. He remembered a month that he had spent in Iraq, working under the cover of an oilfield analyst, his purpose there really to guard the chief executive of British Petroleum against threats made on his life. There had been another assignment, nearer to the start of his career, when he had protected an arms dealer in Tokyo against the possibility of assassination by the Triads. You concentrated on the job, you acted proactively, you assumed the worst at all times.

The lights went to green.

The traffic pulled ahead.

Milton allowed a small gap to grow between the second car and his Buick and then pressed down on the gas.

The first and second cars passed by the grass verge that bisected the four lanes of Poland Avenue and continued along North Claiborne Avenue.

Milton had turned his head to the right, looking north, when he heard the roar of an engine revving. He turned his head to the left, too late, and saw the Lexus as it detached from the line of traffic and pelted at them. He punched the gas, just quick enough so that the Encore bolted ahead. The Lexus smashed into the offside rear wing with a grinding metallic screech, spinning the Buick around so that the car was facing south right down Poland Avenue, then north straight up it. The side airbags deployed, a whooshing detonation, the soft pillows expanding in an instant and blocking Milton’s view out of the left-hand side of the car. He saw Izzy thrown against the other side, the impact taken on her shoulder, her head just grazing the glass. The car came to a stop, pointing at the buildings on the side of the road farthest from the bridge and the canal.

He knew at once that he was uninjured. The car had advanced just enough to spare him the impact that would probably have killed him. Izzy was most likely unhurt, too, but he had no time to check. He turned all the way around and looked over his right shoulder. The Lexus had bounced off with the impact and had plowed across the grass, smashing through the realtor’s sign. The front offside wing had taken the brunt of the impact, and was torn and folded inwards. Steam was pouring out of the radiator.

The Buick had stalled in the crash. Milton reached for the ignition, his eyes still on the mirror as both front doors of the Lexus opened and two men got out. One black, one white. It was too far to make out details, and Milton didn’t have time to study them, but he knew who they were.

“Milton!” Izzy gasped.

The engine turned over, but didn’t start.

He looked back in the mirror, saw that both men were jogging over to them.

He saw pistols.

Come on.

“Milton — are you okay?”

He turned the key again.

The engine spluttered.

He turned it again.

Izzy turned, saw the men, and shrieked.

Come on.

The engine turned over, caught, and roared as Milton stood on the gas. The rubber gripped the asphalt, fresh glass spilling out of the smashed windows as it surged ahead and bounced over the curb. The sound of the first shot and the crunch as it bit into the chassis were almost simultaneous. The car changed up to second, the engine whining as it reached thirty. It handled badly, dragging to the left, but the impact seemed to have missed the wheel and, if the axle had been damaged, it wasn’t bad enough to prevent the car from moving.

The second shot shattered the rear window and then the front as it passed through the cabin, bisecting the two front seats.

Milton swung the wheel to the left, bounced across the grassy verge, and put a line of traffic between them and the shooters. He swung the wheel left again, skidding into the junction of Poland and North Roman.

“Are you okay?” he asked her, sweeping glass out of his lap.

“Yes.” She prodded her neck and shoulders with her fingers. “I think so. I feel sick.”

“It’s shock. It’ll pass.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

The airbags on Milton’s side of the car were already deflated, the last remnants of air escaping with a soft, sibilant hiss.

“It was them,” she said. “I saw them.”

He nodded. “The two from before.”

“The ones who came to the house.”

“Yes.”

“They tried to kill us.”

Milton allowed himself a grim little smile. Civilians often had a habit of stating the blindingly obvious after something outrageous. “I’d say so.”

“Are you laughing?”

“No,” he said. “But someone really doesn’t want you to get to court.”

Milton pulled up next to the courthouse. It was a grand building, five storeys tall, built in the 1940s of Georgia marble. The building covered the length of the city block, a dominating structure of towering stone piers and tall leaded windows. Cast-iron grille work covered the lower windows and doors. Above the arched entries were carved stone spandrels depicting eagles and weaponry. There were crenellated battlements high above where overfed pigeons made their roosts, depositing their guano on the pedestrians below. Izzy had explained that the Fourth Circuit of the Louisiana Court of Appeals was the judicial body with appellate jurisdiction over civil matters, matters referred from family and juvenile courts, and the criminal cases that were triable by jury. Izzy’s appeal of the city’s case to take the charity’s land had ended up here.

Milton got out.

“What are you doing?”

He scanned left and right. There were a few pedestrians going about their business. A handful of people were climbing the steps into the building, the door held open for a man and a woman who were coming out. The parked cars looked empty. It looked like a normal afternoon. Nothing unusual. Nothing out of the ordinary. Milton knew that the men that had tried to kill them would try again, but they would need time to plan. They wouldn’t have expected them to have escaped the last attempt. They shouldn’t have escaped. He had been negligent. He had been careful, but not careful enough.

And Izzy could have died because of it.

He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

“Milton?”

“I’m walking you to the door.”

She looked back at the Buick. The wing had been badly damaged and the fender had been halfway torn off, one end of it scraping against the road. “You can’t leave that there.”

“It’s a hire car,” he said. “There was a crash. Not my fault. I’ll get another.”

“But—”

“Don’t argue. Come on.”

He took the heavy case from the back and crossed the sidewalk. She followed and they climbed the steep flight of steps to the main entrance.

“You can’t nanny me all day, John.”

He ignored her. “Which way?”

She frowned at him, but didn’t push it. “Court eighteen.” She pointed along the corridor. “This way.”

Milton went first, pulling the case behind him. The court had the quiet sepulchral air that buildings like this often had, the men and women who circulated around its corridors doing so silently or in hushed, charged semi-whispers. The interior would have been grand, once, with the wide expanse of marble and granite, but now it was dusty and shabby, a reflection on how the very notion of municipality had fallen into disrepair. Katrina had put on a very stark practical demonstration of what local government could and could not achieve, and its abject failure in the face of that test had meant a loss of faith that would never be made right.

They reached court eighteen. There was a man standing there. Milton recognised him. Jackson Dubois. He was dressed in an expensive suit and, as he saw them turn the corner and approach, his face fell. Milton glanced over at Izzy. Her face had hardened with determination.

“Didn’t think we’d be here?” she asked him.

The man extended his arm so that his sleeve rode up, revealing a big expensive Rolex. “Ten minutes late, Miss Bartholomew. The judge is unhappy.”

“We had difficulties getting here. But I expect you know all about that.”

The man said nothing.

“This is Mr. Dubois, John,” Izzy said, her tone laced with derision. “He works for Mr. Babineaux.”

Dubois looked at Milton with unmasked distaste. “And who are you, John?”

Milton took a step forward. He was the same height as Dubois and of similar build. Milton could see that he was in excellent shape. His jacket draped off wide shoulders, his belt cinched around a narrow waist, and the muscles were obvious through the fabric of his trousers. Dubois looked at him, perhaps preparing to say something, but, if he was, the words died on his lips. Milton knew the effect that he could have on others. His eyes, the coldest blue, nuggets of pure ice, were devoid of emotion and empathy. He had fixed murderers in his gelid stare and watched the arrogance and pep drain from their faces in the moments before he killed them.

But Dubois was made of sterner stuff. He didn’t back down.

“I don’t know you.”

“Lucky for you,” Milton said.

“You’re very full of yourself, aren’t you?”

“A word of advice, Mr. Dubois? Fuck off.”

Dubois paused, weighing Milton up. He looked at Izzy, back at Milton again and, deciding that there was no profit in extending the confrontation, he returned inside.

Milton turned to Izzy. She was looking at him with an expression that he found difficult to read. Amusement, admiration, something else?

“What?” he said with exaggerated innocence.

She laughed. “You’re full of surprises, John.”

“Go and do your thing.”

She collected the case, but paused at the door. “And, what? You’ll stay here?”

“That’s right. As long as it takes.”

He expected her to protest again, but she didn’t. She was independent and proud, but she wasn’t stupid. Perhaps, he wondered, she had grasped now that the threat against her was real. The men at the house, the cops, the crash on the way to court…there was a pattern of escalation that she couldn’t deny, or, if she was wise, ignore. She looked as if she was ready to accept his help.

“It might take a few hours.”

“Not a problem,” he said. “Go on. Give ’em hell.”

She smiled warmly at him, took the case and wheeled it into the courtroom.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Milton sat on the bench outside the courtroom for two hours. He got up after the first hour to stretch his legs and, curious, he opened the outer door and went through into the small lobby that separated the courtroom from the corridor. There was a narrow vertical window in each of the leather-padded double doors, and they offered a view of the interior. The room was large, with a vaulted ceiling and black polished marble wainscoting. There were six rows of wooden pews for members of the public and the lawyers, a passageway cutting through the middle and then, at the front, desks for the judge and the clerk. Old Glory and the Louisiana state flag were hung behind the desk. The carpeting was a distasteful mauve, patterned with fleurs-de-lis, and the walls were in need of a fresh coat of paint. The benches and desks looked old and unloved, too. It was shabby and unimpressive and, in that drab context, Isadora looked dazzling.

She was on her feet, speaking with furious animation, her hands punctuating her points with broad gestures and sudden stabs. Milton couldn’t hear what she was saying, save the occasional word, but her vehemence was as obvious as the anger in her face. He turned to the phalanx of lawyers she was facing. Dubois was behind them, his face clouded with annoyance. Whatever she was saying, Milton thought, it was causing him concern.

Milton was outside again when the proceedings drew to a close. Babineaux’s lawyers emerged first. Two men and a woman, each immaculately dressed. Behind them came a small team of clerks and juniors. Milton counted ten people in total. They were discussing what had just happened as they swept by him, so he couldn’t make out much of the conversation. The tone was self-evident: angry and indignant. Dubois came out after them, a phone pressed to the side of his head. He glanced at Milton, but walked on without stopping.

Isadora emerged into the corridor five minutes later. She immediately set off down the corridor, so wrapped up in whatever had just happened that she walked right by him.

Milton stood and caught up with her. “Hello,” he called out.

She stopped. “Sorry.”

“Well? How did it go?”

“As well as I could’ve hoped.”

“Meaning?”

“I got an adjournment. Three days. The judge wants to see a lot more evidence of why the development is for the good of the public. A full report, plus an environmental survey. They’re both going to be very expensive.”

“But they can get them to say what they need?”

She shrugged. “Of course. If you’ve got money, you can get anything you want.”

“You’re not concerned?”

“It’s three more days, John. A lot can happen in three days.”

Milton drove Izzy to the Comfort Inn. He told her to stay there, get an early dinner in the restaurant maybe, and she said that she would. He waited outside for five minutes, acclimatising himself to the atmosphere, and then, satisfied that there was no immediate threat, he took the damaged Encore back to Hertz. He explained that he had been involved in a fender bender, left them his details so that the case could be investigated, and walked the three blocks south to the branch of Avis. He hired a Toyota Corolla and set off to the northwest, heading out of the city. He stopped at the same Walmart he remembered from before, bought a shovel and a pair of bolt cutters, and continued on his way.

He followed I-10 all the way to Laplace. He recalled the drive from before. The weather had been different then, starkly different, with today’s scorching sunshine replacing the torrential downpour that had heralded Katrina’s arrival. He saw evidence, even this far removed from that day, that bore witness to the terrible damage that the storm had inflicted. Whole groves of trees had been flattened. The occasional building, its roof peeled off, had been left to rot rather than being repaired.

He drove until he reached the beginnings of the Maurepas Swamp, turning off on the I-55 and then finding the right-hand turn into the bayou that he remembered from before. He drove on, passing spreads of bull tongue, cattail, stands of American elm, sugarberry, water and obtusa oak. The road followed the spine of a ridge that rose out of the swamp, and Milton wondered whether the area would have flooded more intensively during the storm. Probably, he thought. That might make his chances of a successful trip less likely. Only one way to find out.

He drove along the road, the surface bone dry and rutted now rather than the hungry quagmire that had sucked at his wheels when he had last been here. He followed until it became a single track, slowing to a halt when he saw the spreading boughs of the big maple with its vivid red foliage. He collected the shovel and set off. He found the cypress grove at the edge of the narrow clearing and the large boulder in the middle, piercing the greensward like a snaggled tooth. He put his back to the rock, measured out three steps back into the clearing, and started to dig.

He had left his rifle in the airport’s luggage storage, but it was registered to him, and that made it useless for what he knew that he might need to do. He didn’t know whether the cache would still be there. The regional quartermasters moved them from time to time, depending upon the security of the locations. There would be no real blowback should a cache be discovered, no obvious way to tie them back to Group Fifteen, but having a trunk full of high-powered weapons go missing had the potential to be damaging if they were required and no longer there. This one could have been discovered, it could have been compromised during the storm, but there was no way of telling without coming out here and digging it up.

Milton had to work harder this time. The ground had been baked for weeks, and the effort of cutting through the hard crust, together with the almost liquid humidity, meant that he was quickly dripping with sweat. Progress was a little easier once he got down into the softer soil and, soon after he did, the tip of his shovel bounced back off of something solid. He drove it down again and heard the metallic ching. He determined the proportions of the item, excavated the earth from atop it, and then dug around it until he could see the handles. He tossed his shovel aside, stepped down into his freshly dug trench, and dragged the trunk out of the ground.

He took the bolt cutters, placed the jaws around the hasp of the padlock, and squeezed the levers together. The hasp was sheared through, and the padlock dropped to the ground. Milton opened the trunk. The contents had been refreshed since his previous visit. The M16 was still there and there was a long rifle and a fresh Sig Sauer P226 to replace the one that he had taken. He hadn’t been able to properly assess the threat that Izzy faced, but the attack on the way to court was ample evidence of her enemies’ determination, so Milton was minded to err on the side of overpreparedness rather than run the risk of being caught outgunned. He took the M16 and laid it on the ground. He collected the P226 and pushed it beneath his belt, the steel sliding down into the small of his back. There was a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol, the abbreviated version, and he took that, too. He added a pair of LUCIE night vision goggles and ammunition for all of the firearms and then, making two trips, ferried everything to the Corolla.

He returned to the trunk and took out one of the waterproof polythene baggies. He opened it, sliding his finger between the seal, and pulled out a block of bank notes. It was twenty thousand dollars. There were fifty bags in total, each containing twenty grand. A million bucks. Milton dropped the cash in the trunk of the Corolla atop the weapons.

He pushed the trunk back into the gash in the earth, shovelled the spoil over the top of it and, covered in dust and dirt, went back to the car. He tossed the shovel and the bolt cutters into the back, started the engine, and turned around to head back for the city.

Milton bought a change of clothes from the same Walmart that he had visited earlier, and then returned to the motel. He parked the Corolla, reversing right up against a wall that was wreathed in bougainvillea so that it was impossible to get to the trunk to open it. He would not be able to transfer the bulky weapons into his room without being noticed, and he wanted to have them close at hand. He locked the car, went to his room, and showered until the grime and muck had been washed from his body and hair. He dressed in his new clothes, stuffing the old ones in the Walmart bag and dumping them in the trash can outside. He field-stripped the P226, checking that it was still in good condition after being in the ground, reassembled it and pushed it into his waistband. Then, feeling fresher and better prepared than he had all day, he took his cellphone and sent an email. Then he called a taxi and asked the driver to take him into the city.

He found an Internet café, Krewe de Brew, bought an hour’s worth of credit, and took a unit in the middle of the room, not obviously observed by any security cameras. He opened a browser and opened two windows. One for his Gmail account, stuffed full of spam in the months since he had last checked it. The other for a forum dedicated to the music of The Smiths. He concentrated on the latter, logging on with his old account and checking that the account was still linked to his Gmail address. The fansite had been online for nearly twenty years, and he remembered it from the last time he had relied upon it. It had been busier then, but there was still enough traffic for his simple message — a careful, precise extolment of Morrissey — to pass unnoticed amid the usual traffic. In truth, Group Fifteen had appropriated the forum and others like it as modern-day dead drops. It had been monitored by certain operatives in the employ of Group Fifteen, but that was two years ago now, and Milton had no idea whether that was still the case.

He didn’t want the Group.

He wanted someone else.

Five minutes passed, and then ten. Milton was almost ready to conclude that he had struck out when he refreshed his Gmail account for a final time and noticed that he had a new message.

He opened it and saw a single HTML link.

No comment, no explanation, just the link.

He clicked, and a chat window opened.

The cursor blinked, and then scurried across the screen.

— Who is this?

— Number Six.

There was a long pause. Milton watched the cursor blinking.

— Fuck off.

— I’m serious.

— Wait.

Milton did as he was told. He stared at the screen, at the blinking cursor, at the decals that had been stuck to the edges and at the graffiti that had been scratched into the old case.

— Shit. Number Six. I believe you.

— You’re sure about that?

— I can see you. The webcam. You haven’t masked your IP.

Milton gazed at the top of the screen, at the tiny black hole almost invisible against the black bezel. He thought about Ziggy Penn, somewhere in the world, hijacking the webcam and God knew what else besides. He thought of his face, filling Ziggy’s monitor, and he smiled and gave a tiny wave with his fingers.

There was a pause before the characters filled the next line, more quickly now, a rush of them as, somewhere, Ziggy’s fingers flew across a keyboard.

— Ground rules. All non-negotiable. No names, under any circumstances. Nothing that could be used for ID. No chat. This isn’t a secure medium. You read the news, you’ll understand.

— Understood.

— What do you want?

— Help.

— I’m not in that game anymore.

— Neither am I.

— I heard. So?

— You know where I am?

A pause.

— Yes. New Orleans. 1610 St. Charles Avenue. Third row from the back, second unit from the wall.

— And you remember Katrina?

There was another pause. Milton stared at the screen for thirty seconds, still nothing, and he wondered whether Ziggy had signed out.

Three characters appeared, the cursor blinking after the last.

— Yes.

— The people who helped us. Who saved your life. They need us.

— I told you. I’m not in that game anymore.

— For this, you are. You owe them. Don’t make me come and find you.

— Like you could find me.

Milton smiled at the webcam.

— Want to gamble on that?

A pause, and then:

— LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL.

There was another pause, the longest yet, and Milton was convinced that he had gone too far and had scared him off. He stared at the little camera, knowing very well the effect that his eyes had when he fixed them like this, deadened, cold, full of the promise of ice.

— FFS, Six, this is ridiculous.

— It’s easy. And I’ll make it worth your while.

— How much?

Milton tried to find a number that would work. Not so much that he would reduce his capital — he had other uses for that, after all — but not too little that Ziggy would dismiss it.

— 10k.

— 20.

— Okay.

— Plus expenses.

— Reasonable expenses.

— What do you want?

— Where are you now?

— Don’t be silly. Just tell me what you need.

— I need you to get on the next plane to New Orleans.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Jackson Dubois parked his Jaguar on River Road, beneath the Huey P. Long Bridge. The struts of the structure ascended high overhead. To the left was a grassy bank topped by a wire-mesh fence and then, beyond that, the river. To the right was a rough parking lot filled with the vehicles from the construction crews that were tending to the bridge’s feeble structure. There were pickups, several temporary cabins, a row of Port-A-Johns and, stretching above them, a crane.

Dubois got out of the car, collected a flashlight from the glove compartment, and walked into the yard. He felt the comforting bulk of his shoulder-holstered pistol, and he still had the combat shotgun in the car. He didn’t expect trouble, but there was no sense in going into a situation unprepared.

He saw the shape of the man leaning against the side of a Ford. He swung the light up into his face.

“All right, pal,” Detective Peacock said. “Put it down.”

“Dragging me all the way out into the boonies, this better be good.”

“You want us to be seen together? Your boss want that?”

Dubois felt his temper bubbling. He bit his tongue.

“Anyway,” Peacock went on, “you’re gonna want to hear this. Your friend. The English guy. I got something on him.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is John Milton.”

Dubois frowned. “They said his name was Smith.”

“Not true. I’m guessing a lot of the stuff he says isn’t true.”

“All right — go on.”

“I know that there’s more to him than meets the eye.”

“I don’t have time for twenty questions. Specifically?”

“Can’t say for sure, but it looks like he’s worked for the bureau before—”

“The bureau?”

“—I think as a confidential informant.”

“Informing on what?”

“Haven’t been able to find that out.”

“That doesn’t make me very confident.”

“Whatever it is, it’s been sealed pretty tight.”

“So, what? He’s a criminal? Giving evidence for amnesty?”

“Don’t necessarily mean that. A CI could just be someone with information that he’d only give on the condition that he was kept out of whatever it was. Impossible to say. I’m still looking, but don’t hold your breath.”

“That’s useless. What are we supposed to do with that?”

Peacock ignored him. “The other thing I found,” he said instead, “is that he does have a record. Arrested in Texas last year. They think he might have come across the border. Got into a brawl, knocked out a couple of local toughs, one was the sheriff’s son. They were going to throw the book at him until he got pulled out by an FBI agent who — get this — turns out not to be an agent after all.”

“So, he either works for the feds or he doesn’t work for the feds. That makes him… what?”

“Like I said. Until I know better, someone to be careful of.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Got a couple of friends in the bureau. They owe me a few favours, I called them in. Very reliable.”

Dubois straightened his jacket. “It’s more questions than answers,” he said, making no effort to hide his disdain.

“Yeah, well, that’s life. And I don’t answer to you or your boss.”

“Mayor Chalcroft answers to Mr. Babineaux,” Dubois corrected. “And your boss answers to the mayor. That means you answer to us, Detective. Mr. Babineaux has high standards, and, frankly, I’d be embarrassed to bring this to him like this. I want to see better results next time.”

“Yeah,” the detective said, “and I’d like to fuck Scarlett Johansson, except that ain’t gonna happen.”

Dubois already had his cellphone out of his pocket by the time he was in his car again. He thumbed through the contacts until he found the number for Melvin Fryatt. He pressed call and put the phone to his ear.

Jackson Dubois arranged to meet Fryatt and Crossland in the Lower Ninth. They were waiting for him on Surekote Road. The road had been abandoned, with vegetation reaching up high into the air. The tumbledown houses that were still standing had been claimed by nature, and the empty lots where shacks had been washed away thronged with substantial growth. Dubois rolled up behind their car and killed the engine. He could see them both inside. He wound down the window and sampled the atmosphere. He could hear the bass of a distant boom box, the buzz of the city, the chirping of the nocturnal wildlife that had claimed the street for its own. There was no one else around.

That was good.

The two of them got out of their car. Melvin came up to him. The white guy, Chad, pimp rolled behind him.

Dubois stayed in his car. The two of them came up to the open window.

“Just you,” Dubois said, pointing to Melvin.

“Say what?” Chad protested.

“Say get the fuck back into the car, you fucking junkie.”

Chad looked as if he was going to protest, but Melvin turned back to him and said something that Dubois couldn’t hear. He shrugged, his expression morose, and did as he was told.

“Get in, Melvin.”

He came around the car and got into the passenger seat.

“What happened?”

“She got away.”

“I know that, Melvin. I saw that. What I want to know is how it happened.”

“I don’t know, man. We hit the car, but I guess we didn’t get it good enough. We came out to finish her off, but the car drove off. I put a couple of rounds into it, but, well, you know…”

“It was a simple thing to do, Melvin. Very simple.”

“We tried, man. I don’t know what else I can say.”

“You know what? It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re not mad about it?”

“I’m not happy, but mistakes happen. This time, I’ll let it ride. There won’t be a next time, though. You hear me?”

“Sure, boss. Thanks. No more fuck-ups, I got it.”

“There’s something else you can help me with, and then we’re done.”

Dubois took out the printout of the photograph that Travis Peacock had given him and laid it on the dash.

“The man who attacked you. Is this him?”

Melvin squinted at it, his brow clenching into an angry frown. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him. That’s the motherfucker. Dude was driving the car today, too. Who is he?”

“Do you think he’d recognise you if he saw you again?”

“Probably,” Melvin said. “Dude was talking to us, like you and me are talking, right before he hit me upside of my head.”

Dubois took the photograph. “Thank you, Melvin.”

“That it?”

“That’s all I needed to know. We’re done here. I’ll be in touch.”

Melvin shrugged, knowing better than to outstay his welcome, pushed the door all the way open, and stepped out. He closed the door, rapped his knuckles against the roof, and slouched back to his car.

Dubois corkscrewed in his seat and reached down into the footwell between the back and front seats. He picked up the shotgun that he had laid down carefully before setting off that evening, opened the door and, the gun held loosely before him, walked briskly to the other car. It was gloomy, the street lit by the glimmer of the moon overhead, and it was only when Melvin started his engine and flicked on his headlamps that he and Chad could see that they had just a few seconds left to live.

Dubois raised the combat shotgun. It was a semi-automatic, tubular magazine-fed weapon chambered for twelve-gauge cartridges, and allowed the shooter to apply a rapid rate of fire over a large area. It was also very accurate for a weapon with a reputation for being indiscriminate. The choke barrel was about the same diameter as a dime and, up to ten feet away, the pattern of the buckshot wouldn’t stray outside the edges of a six-inch circle. Dubois fired it from the waist. The first shot shattered the windshield, hitting Melvin. The second spread drilled Chad. The third and fourth shots were, in all likelihood, superfluous. But since Dubois had not gotten to be as successful as he was by being lackadaisical, he fired them both anyway.

When he had finished, the windshield was completely gone and the two men had been blown to pieces.

He stepped up to the car to make doubly sure, returned to his vehicle, put the shotgun in the trunk, and took out a five-gallon gas can that he had filled at the Shell station he had passed earlier. He went back to the car, unscrewed the cap and upended the can, sloshing the pungent liquid over the upholstery and both bodies. He emptied it completely, took a packet of matches from his pocket and, tearing one off, lit it and flicked it into the interior. The flames took hold immediately, curling up to the roof and spewing thick black smoke out of the open windshield.

Dubois waited for a moment to make sure that the fire had taken hold and then went back to his Jaguar. He started the engine, put the car into drive, and drove away.

Chapter Thirty

Ziggy Penn’s apartment block was in the heart of Tokyo’s exclusive Yoyogi district. The enormous city was not a particularly green place and, because Yoyogi was near to one of the largest municipal parks, it had become one of the more expensive places to live. It was sandwiched between the busy Shinjuku and Shibuya neighbourhoods, but the price of living there meant that it was quieter than both.

Ziggy limped back from the convenience store, two polythene shopping bags clasped in each hand. One bag held two litre bottles of diet Coke, practically the only thing that Ziggy drank. The other had four tubes of Pringles. It was six in the morning, and Ziggy had been up all night. That was the way that he usually worked, starting his daily endeavours when other people were going home for the day. He looked around as he approached the entrance to the block and watched the suited salarymen emerge from the lobbies of blocks similar to his own, slouching to the subway and the commute into their dreary, uniform offices. He didn’t envy them. Ziggy had worked a regular job, once, and it hadn’t suited his temperament. Working for himself like this, being his own boss, earning when he needed to earn and relaxing when he didn’t…that was the way to live.

Ziggy would normally have been finishing for the day, white noise spilling out of the high-end Bose stereo in an attempt to shut down his questing, sprawling intelligence so that he could have his regular ten hours of sleep. Today was going to be a little different. Ziggy was going to work, too. There were things that he needed to do before he set off for the airport and the flight to New Orleans that he was already second-guessing. It was a fourteen-hour trip, with a short stopover in Dallas. He needed to get a ticket. He would sleep when he was in the air.

The block was twenty storeys high, a grid of identical windows reaching up to the top floor. There was a communal area on the roof that offered a decent view of the city, and you could see for miles when the smog allowed. The apartment was fine for his purposes. The leases were short, six months or a year, and there were enough well-heeled international students so that his Western appearance did not mark him out as particularly unusual.

Anonymity was important for Ziggy. There were international agencies that would have been very interested to find his location. Six months earlier, a consortium of multinational law enforcement experts had conducted dawn raids on the properties of a number of Ziggy’s online acquaintances. The forums that he had frequented, previously hidden on the dark web, had been smashed. That sent those who had escaped the round-up into chat rooms and fora that were insecure, riddled with grasses and snitches and undercover police waiting to entrap the unwary.

Ziggy was careful. He was not driven by the same anti-establishment zeal as some of the others, and he was too lazy to organise himself to profit from the crimes to the extent that some of the others had managed. Some of them had earned millions of dollars, transferring their ill-gotten gains into Bitcoin wallets that the authorities would never be able to recover. Ziggy was happy to skim just enough to live. Many of his comrades had gloried in the notoriety with which they had clothed their avatars. Ziggy just wanted to stay out of the way. It was that, he knew, that had meant he had escaped the dragnet.

He took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, hobbling past the door to his apartment and then turning back at the end of the corridor, making sure that he had not been followed. He stopped at the door and listened, decided that he couldn’t hear anything, slid the key into the lock, opened the door, and went inside. It was a one-bedroom place, not too big. There was a kitchen-diner, a small bathroom and a balcony that looked down onto Yoyogi Park. The apartment was stiflingly hot, thanks to the heat that was pumped out by the servers and laptops that were crowded into the small space. Ziggy had initially run the air-conditioning on a constant basis, but the electricity bill had been so high that he had worried that it would bring him unwanted attention. Now, he tended to work in his underwear, with the windows open and a couple of oscillating fans switched on. It was still hot, but it was bearable.

He took off his shirt and trousers. He glanced down at the lattice of scars on his leg and thought, again, of what had happened in New Orleans. He didn’t remember all of it. There was the operation, the pursuit into the Lower Ninth and then nothing. He had woken up days later, in a hospital bed, his leg in bits and waiting to be reconstructed. The blanks had been filled in later. Control had said nothing, and so he had waited for Milton to file his report and then hacked the server to take a copy for himself. It didn’t help him to remember, but it made it very plain to whom he owed his life.

He stepped over the nest of cables and wires to his main computer. He took out one of the bottles of Coke, unscrewed it and slugged down a quarter in a thirsty series of gulps. He dropped down onto the floor, leant his back against the wall, put the Macbook on his lap and woke up the screen. There was a large parabolic antenna on the balcony, aimed out at the neighbouring block. Ziggy had taken the apartment on the highest floor possible. Wireless security was getting better all the time, but it was still child’s play for him to crack. He ran a homebrew application that found all the wireless routers using the older 802.11b standard, sifted those for routers that still had their encryption switched off thanks to the factory default, and then jumped onto the one that had the strongest signal and the fastest connection.

Ziggy was careful. If his hacking was discovered, the police would only be able to trace it back to the patsy whose connection he had just hijacked. He jumped across to the server in the convenience store that he had just visited. He had realised that the PC was acting as the back-end system for the point-of-sale terminal. It collected the day’s credit card transactions and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit card processor. Ziggy quickly isolated the day’s batch, stored as a plaintext file, with the full magstripe of every card that had been swiped. He skimmed through the dump, found the first Western name — Anthony Shakespeare — and then jumped across to the website for Delta.

In five minutes, he had purchased a ticket to New Orleans. In another five, he had ordered a false British passport in the name of Mr. Shakespeare, hacked into the Uber website and summoned a taxi to come and pick him up.

He shut down the computers, turned off the fans, went into his bedroom and packed his case.

Ziggy wheeled his suitcase to the desk and waited for the attendant to finish serving the customer before him. The woman ahead of him was cavilling at the cost of a flight to New York and trying to persuade the girl to upgrade her to business. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

He stepped up to the desk. “Can you get a move on?”

The woman turned her head and glanced at him. Her first reaction, indignation, was quickly replaced with a combination of fright and odium. Ziggy knew why. He was dressed without any real concern about how he looked, he was unshaven, his face covered in a patchy ginger beard, and the word FUCK was displayed prominently across his T-shirt.

“Be patient. I was here first. Wait your turn.”

Ziggy thought about John Milton. It had been a shock to be contacted by him. He had only been seconded to Group Fifteen for a short while, but it had been obvious even then that Number Six was becoming something of a legend. The Group was organised so that personal connections were kept to an absolute minimum, and it wasn’t a place where institutional gossip was possible. But even with that in mind, Milton’s reputation was something that everyone was aware of. Ziggy had been excited to have been paired with him on the Irish assignment, and it had been that excitement and his stupid desire to impress him that had led him to set off in pursuit of Maguire.

A second attendant slid into the chair at the desk next to the occupied one, and she beckoned Ziggy over to her. She looked pristine in her British Airways uniform, trim and petite and pretty, and Ziggy gave her his best smile. The one she returned was perfunctory. “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

“I do.”

He read out the booking reference and waited as she typed it into her computer. If she was surprised at the booking that was displayed, she mastered it quickly.

“Mr. Shakespeare,” she said, reading off the screen. “Good morning, sir. One first-class ticket to New Orleans.”

The woman at the desk alongside must have overheard the attendant. When she turned to look at him, her expression of opprobrium had changed to one of incredulity.

The check-in attendant printed off his flight voucher and gave him directions to the first-class lounge.

The woman was still gawping at him as he picked up the carry-on bag with his laptop and other kit inside and left the desk.

Chapter Thirty-One

The original Café du Monde had been a New Orleans landmark for one hundred and fifty years. It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, only closing on Christmas Day and whenever the occasional hurricane drifted too close to the city. It was a coffee shop that specialised in dark roasted coffee and chicory, beignets, and fresh-squeezed OJ.

Milton walked up and down the street, surveilling the area, until he was satisfied that there was nothing amiss. There was no reason to think that he was observed, but certainty — or as near to it as he could manage — had always been well worth the effort in his business.

Ziggy Penn looked different from the last time that Milton had seen him. He was skinnier, his skin was even more pallid, and there were dark circles around his eyes that suggested a lack of sleep. He was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt that revealed sleeves of tattoos that Milton did not remember. There were patchy ginger whiskers on his cheeks, chin and throat, and his little nose and asymmetrical eyes gave his face a striking, misshapen quality.

Milton sat down opposite him.

“Hello, Ziggy.”

He was trying hard to look cool, but he couldn’t hide the same approbation that Milton remembered from before. Ziggy was going to try to impress him again. Milton had thought it stupid then, and he thought it doubly stupid now. Ziggy was not the first analyst Milton had worked with who had considered his grubby profession something to aspire to, as if the glamorous books of Fleming were a reality rather than naïve and childish make-believe.

Milton knew the truth. He was a killer. He didn’t deserve acclaim. He deserved disgust.

“Number Six.”

“Not any more. Just Milton now.”

“Never thought I’d see you again.”

“Well, there you go. You never know what’s around the corner, do you?”

“You were careful? Not followed?”

“Please, Ziggy. What do you think?”

“I have to be careful. There are people who would love to know where I am.”

“Why? What have you done?”

“You first, Milton. What have you done? I heard you got out.”

Milton had no idea what Ziggy did or did not know about what had happened to him, but he had little wish to rehash it beyond what was necessary. In order to ensure that the subject was adequately dealt with so that there was no need to revisit it later, he provided a brief account. He told him about his flight from the UK after his attempt to leave Group Fifteen and described his journey through South America and the southwest of the United States. He skipped over his sojourns in Ciudad Juárez and San Francisco and then, since it would be of more relevance to Ziggy, he went into a little more depth about what had happened during his mission to Russia to rescue Pope and what had subsequently happened with Beatrix Rose and Control. Ziggy listened, agog, and by the time that Milton had finished, they had both finished their coffees and ordered refills.

“I heard you tried to leave,” Ziggy said. “That couldn’t have gone well.”

“Not particularly,” Milton said with dour understatement. “Control tried to have me killed.”

“And?”

“He’s dead now. I don’t have to be quite so careful.”

The waiter came to their table. The coffee was served black or au lait, mixed half and half with hot milk. Milton ordered his black, Ziggy went for milk, and they ordered beignets, the square French-style doughnuts that were lavishly covered with powdered sugar.

“So that’s me,” Milton said. “What about you?”

“How much do you know?”

Milton didn’t know much. He hadn’t seen Ziggy since the Jayhawk had winched him off the roof of the Bartholomews’ flooded house. He knew that Ziggy had been airlifted straight to the airport, his condition stabilised, and then transferred on board a private jet back to London. But that was it. None of that was unusual. Operatives and analysts had nothing to do with one another outside the parameters of a mission. Milton had not even thought to ask about Ziggy, especially once Control had confirmed that he had survived his injuries. Milton remembered that debrief better than many of the others: the tense atmosphere in his office, the barely suppressed anger, the irritation after Milton had enquired about Ziggy, as if the fact of his survival was an annoyance, as if it would have been better if he had died, punishment for making an already aborted mission even worse than it already was.

“I know Control was unhappy with you,” he said.

Ziggy snorted. “You could say that. I guess it’s easier to leave the Group when they don’t want you anymore. He sent me back to GCHQ, and they demoted me. Cryptography. I was there for six months. I still managed to get into a spot of bother, though.” He smiled.

“Bother?”

“It’s big news now, the stuff Snowden’s putting out, but I was ahead of him. Years ahead. He hadn’t even joined Booz Allen when I found out what the NSA and GCHQ were doing with surveillance. But I like my life too much to do something as masochistic as blowing the whistle on people like that — not stupid enough, not brave enough, whatever — but they noticed I was snooping around in areas I wasn’t supposed to be. Jesus, Milton, the things I saw…”

Ziggy let the sentence dangle, inviting Milton to ask for more, but he nodded and waved it off. He remembered Ziggy better now, remembered that he was bumptious and liked to show off with the things that he said that he knew. Always trying to impress. Insecure. Milton’s complete lack of interest inured him to the barrage of teased hints and allusions, and he recalled how that had always baffled and frustrated Ziggy.

“Anyway,” he said, pretending to ignore Milton’s brush-off, “they sort of suggested that it would be better for me to leave, so I did. Two years ago.”

“And since then?”

“A bit of this, a bit of that.”

“Legal?”

“Not entirely.”

Milton cocked an eyebrow. He made no attempt to mask his disdain, hoping that Ziggy might register it and temper his bluster. But self-awareness was not one of Ziggy’s strengths — just working with him for the short time they had been together was enough for Milton to suspect that he had all the basic elements of an autistic personality — and he went on for another minute, crowing about his brilliance, until Milton raised his hand and cut him short. “Ziggy, enough.”

Ziggy grinned at him and put a hand to the thinning ginger thatch on his scalp, scrubbing at it. “All right, dude. You’re not interested, fine, I get it. Here I am. At your service. You’re lucky I still check that board, by the way. They’ve moved on since then.”

“What do they do now?”

“It’s Lana Del Rey, Calvin Harris, Miley Cyrus now. The Smiths are so 1980s.” He took a half-empty pack of duty-free cigarettes from his pocket, slid one out and offered the rest to Milton. He took one and lit it with Ziggy’s lighter. “So, Milton, you want to tell me why you wanted to see me so bad?”

“It’ll be easier if I show you.”

Milton drove the Corolla back to the Lower Ninth.

Ziggy looked out, agog. “Jesus,” he said. “Look at this place. I saw it on the TV, but I had no idea it was like this. It’s like a fucking jungle on the surface of the moon.”

“Not all of it,” Milton said. He navigated the car through the grid of streets he was starting to know very well. Salvation Row came into view behind the stands of saplings, shrubs and undergrowth.

“Whoah,” Ziggy said. “Look at that.”

Milton turned the wheel and cruised slowly down the road. He looked left and right, aware that the place could very easily be under surveillance, but everything was in order. The lights were off in the Bartholomews’ bright-sided house, and he thought of them in the Comfort Inn, forced out by the threat that he still hadn’t really got to grips with.

“That junction back there, that’s where the Irish took you out. The house we sheltered in is gone. The whole street is gone. It was condemned, so they tore it down. These houses have been built to bring the displaced families back. There’s a foundation behind it — Build It Up. There’s no reason why you would’ve heard about it—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I have. I read a report on it, must’ve been last year. I just didn’t recognise the street.”

“This is all they’ve done so far, but they’ve got big plans. You remember the family who took us in?”

“No.”

“No,” Milton said, correcting himself. “Of course not. There was a girl. Her name is Isadora. She set the foundation up. She runs it.”

“That’s impressive.”

Milton nodded. “It was going well for them until a development was approved here. A mall. Big. The city is trying to take the land. Compulsory purchase. All of this could get bulldozed. Izzy’s fighting it and doing a good job. Too good, probably. Someone has been threatening her and then, yesterday, they tried to take her and me out.”

“Take you out?”

“Drove a car into us and then took a couple of shots.” He waved it off. “I can handle them, but I’m just reacting at the moment. I need to go on the attack. I need you to help me find out who’s behind it, and anything else you can get on them.”

“What do you have?”

“There’s plenty you can start with. The police are involved now, so I need you to look into them. If they are involved, it’s possible that it goes deeper. Politicians, maybe. Probably.”

“Anything more tangible?”

“I’ve got the name and address of someone who I think is involved.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You had me fly here for that? I could’ve done all that from my apartment.”

“I prefer to be hands on,” Milton said. “And I think there might be more for you to do once we start to make progress.”

Ziggy leaned back. There was a tracing of sugar on his top lip. He wiped it off. “Twenty grand?”

“Yes,” Milton said. “But I’d like to think that you’ll do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

He grinned. “Sure. But a little money doesn’t hurt, either.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Jackson Dubois met Peacock in the same place, under the bridge. A ship slid ponderously down the canal, lit up like a Christmas tree, its horn sounding two booming ululations as it approached its berth. The traffic swooshed overhead. The only people down here were junkies, pimps, hookers, and johns. The tires of his car scrunched through the loose aggregate. Peacock appeared out of the shadows, jogging over to him. Dubois let his hand drift down to the space at the side of the car where he had his shotgun. Peacock went around, opened the passenger door and slid inside.

“Well?”

“Our friend. The English guy. You know, before, there was only so much I could get? Well, I’ve got more on him now. You really need to hear it. He’s trouble.”

“Go on.”

“You know that problem they had up in Michigan, couple months ago? The militia?”

Dubois said that he did. It had been a big story: an eighteen-wheeler filled with enough fertiliser to make Oklahoma City look like a sneeze. “He was involved with that?”

“Yeah, he was. The FBI said they got to the bottom of it, right, they said they used CIs? Turns out that he was one of the CIs. I don’t know exactly how he was involved, but he was. The rumours I’m hearing, it wasn’t in no small capacity, either. I’ll never get it confirmed. But I’m hearing he didn’t just snitch on them, he brought them down himself.”

“What do you mean?”

Peacock shrugged. “Just that.”

Dubois remembered. There had been killings in the woods, multiple members of a fundamentalist Christian militia found dead. One guy did that? He started to feel uncomfortable.

“What else?”

“His name is John Milton, not John Smith. Used to be British Special Forces. SAS. I know that because the Brits got involved after the militia went down and Milton was brought in by the feds. My guess, they got onto them and told them to seal up what happened, keep their boy out of it in exchange for his confidential testimony.”

“So what’s he doing here?”

“That much I can’t say.”

“Keep looking.”

“I am.” He shuffled a little. “What about those two goons you had working for you?”

“Not a problem.”

“One thing I know for sure, if this dude was Special Forces, two crackheads are not gonna cut the mustard. He’ll wrap ’em up and send ’em back with a ribbon on ’em.”

“I told you,” Dubois snapped. “Not a problem.” Peacock was right, but he was irritated. It felt like the detective was blaming him for setting Melvin and Chad on the job. And two fricasséed junkies were beyond causing him headaches now.

Peacock shrugged his shoulders. “You want, I can make a suggestion?”

“About?”

“Someone you could put on this job. Someone who I can pretty much guarantee will get it done.”

“I’m listening.”

“I bet you are. First things first. Us taking this guy out wasn’t what the mayor agreed with your boss. He wanted the Bartholomew girl arrested, no more and no less. And we did that.”

“And then you let her out!” Dubois exploded.

“Did he really want a writ of habeas corpus going all the way to a judge? She starts blabbing, making wild claims, what if they get traction? Nah. We had to let her out. If you’d stopped them from getting to court, instead of fucking that up…”

Dubois entertained the notion of reaching down, pulling the shotgun and shooting this loud-mouthed, vulgar braggart. He fought it back and said, coldly and calmly, “What do you want, Detective?”

“My woman has a kitchen business in Elmwood. I know your boss has those granite quarries up there in Gallatin. I’m thinking, rather than give me cash, maybe he can send a truck of milled granite work surfaces to my woman’s shop. He does that in the next couple of days, I’ll take you and make the introduction to the man who will make all your problems go away.”

“Who is it?”

“Name’s Claude Boon.”

“And where do we have to go to find Mr. Boon?”

“We don’t go to him. Someone like Boon, we ask nicely, maybe he comes to us.”

“Asking nicely,” Dubois said. “How much does that cost?”

“No two ways about it, he’s expensive.”

“How much?”

“Fifty.”

Dubois was unperturbed. Fifty thousand was nothing. “That might be interesting.”

“Yeah, right. Like I said, he ain’t cheap, but he’s worth every last cent. Your man Milton, he won’t be a problem for long.”