Salvation Row

Chapter Seven

John Milton trudged into the parking lot of the restaurant. It had been raining for the last three hours, and the weather had slowed him down. He had hoped to travel twelve miles before stopping for breakfast, but he had only managed ten. Spokane was still another eighty miles to the west. The sight of the diner, a warm and bright oasis on the edge of the road, was too tempting for him to pass by. He was hungry and cold, and the prospect of resting his weary feet for an hour while he filled his belly was very attractive.

He stepped into the lobby and unslung his rifle and his pack. He took off his coat and draped it on a hook, drops of run-off water splishing and splashing onto the tiled floor. He visited the restroom and dried himself as best he could with a combination of the paper towels and the hand dryer and, when that was done, he took his gear and went through into the diner.

The waitress looked at him: unshaven, soaked, dirty. “You can’t just sit in here, buddy. I know it’s raining, but this ain’t a shelter. You got to eat something.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got money.”

“You want to show me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your money, you want to show me you got some money?”

She stopped, her scepticism very evident. Milton reached into his waterproof money pouch and took out his roll of notes. He peeled off a twenty and laid it on the table. “There. All right?”

Her disapproval was ameliorated by the sight of the cash. “Sorry, honey. We get people here, no money, think this is a shelter.” She took a copy of the large laminated menu and handed it to him. He ordered ham and eggs and hash browns, a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, a large glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee.

He stretched out his legs and let the warmth seep into his bones.

Milton had been on the road for a month since the trouble in the Upper Peninsula. The bullet wound in his bicep had healed nicely, just a puckered little scar that joined the collection of other scars that decorated his body. Just another story to tell, although, he admitted, that was a particularly good one. He had tramped west from Truth, making it to Minneapolis with two days to spare for the concert that he had been intending to attend. The Arctic Monkeys were good and well worth the trek to get there.

He ended up staying for a week, hiring a car and driving up to Mille Lacs Lake, and then, when he was ready to move again, he loaded up his pack and went on his way. He walked for ten hours a day, usually managing four miles an hour if the weather was good. He had covered a thousand miles and had seen Bismarck and Billings and Missoula. He had camped along the route, tarrying for a little longer near Kalispell to explore the Flathead National Forest. It had been a pleasant trip, with perfect solitude for days at a time, and Milton felt renewed, the bulwarks against his drinking reinforced and sturdier than they had been for months. Doing it alone was against everything that the Fellowship ordained, and his sponsors wouldn’t have approved, but Milton had decided that since his way worked, why change it?

Being able to spend time in one place, without the urgent necessity of exfiltration, was a luxury that he had never expected and one of which he didn’t think he would ever tire. He had travelled to dozens of countries during his career with Group Fifteen, but those stays had all been brief. A quick in-and-out was necessary for his safety and the integrity of the operation. As soon as the job was done, he had hurried away again lest he find himself a person of interest in the inevitable investigations that followed in his wake. His resignation from the Group had opened up a whole world of possibilities, and he intended to savour them as much as he could. Even a day like this, wearing cold and clammy clothes in a second-rate diner in the middle of nowhere, had its own peculiar attractions.

The waitress returned with his food. He took up the cutlery and set about it hungrily. He cleared the plate in five minutes and ordered another stack of pancakes and a refill of the coffee pot.

The short order cook aimed a remote at the old TV that had been positioned on a ledge above the door and flicked over to the news. It was near the end of the bulletin. The screen showed the footage from a helicopter: a grid of flooded streets, houses swept away, cars propped upside down, debris bobbing through fast-flowing currents. Archive footage. He recognised New Orleans and what Katrina had done to it.

The report cut to an outside broadcast. A reporter, blinking in the bright sun, inky shadows painted on the street behind him, was interviewing a young woman. She was black, had thick, lustrous hair, a bright smile, and steel in her lively eyes.

Milton sat up as if he had been prodded.

“Turn it up?” he called over.

The cook aimed the remote again.

“—and, Miss Bartholomew, what do you say to those who say that a mall down here, with all the jobs that it would create and all the prosperity it would bring, is better for the area than what you’re doing?”

“I’d say that all those people who they’d want to work in the mall would need somewhere to live. You seen these houses? You think a few shops selling things no one around here could ever afford, you think that’s a better use for this land than houses to bring back the people Katrina forced away?” She shook her head and her eyes flashed with passion. “No, you can’t say that.”

“So what would you say to city hall, bringing proceedings against your charity so that they can force you to sell this land?”

Isadora Bartholomew smiled. “I’d say they ought to bring it on. And I’d say they better like a fight, because I’m gonna give them more than they can handle.”

The cook switched channels to a rerun of a NASCAR race from the weekend. Milton was about to complain, but bit his tongue. He had seen enough.

“What’s the nearest airport to here?” he asked when the waitress came back to see if he wanted anything else.

“What, you going on a trip, now?”

Her grin faded as he levelled his gaze at her.

“Nearest airport, that’d be Spokane. You want to get there, assuming you don’t wanna walk, there’s a bus runs twice a day from the other side of the road. Takes two hours from here.” She looked at her watch. “Next one goes in an hour.”

“Thank you,” Milton said. “Can I get the check, please?”

Chapter Eight

Milton got off the bus and went through into the airport terminal. He bought a fresh pair of jeans, new underwear and three white T-shirts. He went through into the bathroom, took off his shirt, and washed in the sink. He lathered his face, and using the cut-throat razor that he had inherited from his father, he carefully and precisely removed the straggled whiskers that he had allowed to grow out over the course of his trek. He combed his hair. He took off his muddy jeans and dumped them, along with his damp shirt, in the bin. He changed into fresh underwear and dressed in his new clothes. By the time he was done, he felt clean and revived.

He checked that his ruck was properly packed, slung it over his shoulder with the case for his rifle, and went to the ticket desk. He beamed a big smile at the clerk — his cheeks aching from the unnatural exercise — and asked for a one-way ticket to New Orleans. He paid, cash, and went to check-in. He smiled, again, at the agent, and waited for her to allot him a seat.

“Any luggage, sir?”

“Two bags. One with an unloaded firearm.”

The agent looked him over. Milton concentrated on maintaining a relaxed, confident expression. The woman satisfied herself that this smart, well-groomed man was responsible and could be trusted, and handed him a tag that recorded that the bag contained an unloaded gun. Milton slipped it into the cylindrical TuffPak carrying case and put it, and his ruck, onto the belt. They disappeared into the cargo area hidden behind the clerk.

“Enjoy your flight, sir.”

Milton slept on the flight. It was busy and it looked as if plenty of his fellow passengers were flying down to Louisiana for Mardi Gras. A couple of them were rowdy, already drunk. He heard the jangle of the drinks trolley after lunch, and not wishing to put unnecessary temptation in his way, he put on his eye mask, pushed his earbuds into his ears, and reclined his seat. He heard the first two songs from the Queens of the Stone Age compilation he had put together, but fell asleep soon after that.

It was a four-hour flight with a fifty-minute layover in Denver. He slept through all of it and when the stewardess woke him by gently touching his shoulder, telling him to raise his seat as they circled for their landing slot, he felt refreshed. Milton did as he was told, pushed up the blind and gazed out through the porthole window as they began their approach.

Milton hadn’t been back to New Orleans since Katrina. He had not been in the habit of taking holidays during his time with Group Fifteen. His work sent him around the world anyway, and he had no inclination to travel during his infrequent down time. In the early days, when he had been enthusiastic, he had spent all of his time in training. Latterly, consumed by his demons, he had sought solace in the nearest bar.

The last time that he had been in a jet above the city, nine years ago, the landscape had been very, very different. The dividing line between Lake Pontchartrain and the streets and houses that he could see now had been simply absent then, as if erased. He remembered the water, lapping over the roofs of the houses, a green and blue mantle that stretched for miles in all directions. Now, the waters had been pushed back. The levees had been rebuilt. Milton looked at the unyielding weight of the water that the berms were holding back and wondered, when a hurricane bore down on the city again, whether they would hold. It was difficult to ignore the notion that New Orleans had been built on a promise, that the city existed at the whim of Nature and that, one day, she would wipe it all away.

The jet touched down at Louis Armstrong International Airport and rolled up to the gate. Milton had no carry-on luggage and had been at the front of the plane. He made quick progress through the building and collected his pack and his rifle from the carousel. He got a ticket for a luggage storage locker and stowed his gun, then he stepped out of the terminal and into the warm broil of the tropical heat outside.

He waited in line for a cab.

“Where we going, man?” the cabbie asked.

“The Lower Ninth.”

The man looked up in the mirror, glancing back. “You sure, dude? You not here for Mardi Gras?”

“No. There, please.”

“What you want, going over there?”

“There’s a project. New houses being built by a charity. You know about that?”

“Sure,” the man said. “That’s Salvation Row. Everyone knows about that.”

They drove east on I-10, into the city, the increasing affluence reflected in the grandiosity of the buildings. Soon, though, the buildings became older and shabbier, the money scarcer and less obvious. They took the Claiborne Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal, and then bounced along fractured asphalt into the poorer districts of the city.

Into the Lower Ninth.

Milton looked out onto an alien landscape.

The homes had been reduced to husks. Some of them were choked with vines, others still bore the spray-painted Xs that meant that a body had been found inside them. There were piles of construction debris that had been dumped on the sidewalks. Milton had read about contractors who just drove down into the Lower Ninth to get rid of their unwanted materials rather than taking them to the city dump. Auto shops, instead of paying the fee to dispose of used tires, brought trailers of them down here and pushed them off the back.

“What you think?” the driver said, looking at Milton in the mirror.

Milton was distracted. “What?”

“About this. What the storm did.”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“You telling me, brother. We got snakes here. Long, thick snakes. King snakes. Rattlesnakes. I seen raccoons. Egrets. Pelicans. It’s like the jungle, and I’m not kidding.”

There were burned piles of household trash, clumps of insulation foam, stained PVC pipes, waterlogged couches that were bloated like sea sponges and covered in lichen.

“See the cars?” the driver said. “You never know what you gonna find if you go looking in them too closely. I remember there was a Dodge Charger, down on Choctaw and Law. The police found this corpse in it, all burned up and shit. Car been there for months before someone thought to look into it. By the time they did, it was hidden inside all this grass, taller than a man. Animals had eaten that poor sucker up. What else they gonna find in the grass and jungle?”

They moved on, the driver slowing so that Milton could look out and soak in the whole scene. They passed a handwritten sign: “Tourist. Shame on you. Driving by without stopping. Paying to see my pain. 1600 died here.” An entire stretch of street was no longer visible. It had been devoured by forest. Every housing plot on both sides of the street for two blocks, between Rocheblave and Law, was abandoned.

The driver gestured out the window with flicks of his fingers. “And we got packs of wild dogs. Some of them, beautiful Rottweilers, they owners either dead or don’t care for them no more. They been roaming around, scaring the shit out of folk. First time I see them, they were nice looking animals, inside-the-house animals. Now they just look sad, they ribs all showing and shit.”

Vast stretches of the land had been abandoned. Sometimes, it was possible to see the ghostly marks of old foundations, all that was left of the houses that had once stood here. In other places, more often, the vegetation had grown up so much that it was impossible to see where one plot ended and the next began. There was Southern cut grass, giant ragweed, Chinese tallow trees. It was all totally out of control.

The driver was watching Milton’s reaction in the mirror.

“What you think?”

He said nothing.

The parish no longer resembled an urban environment. Where there had once been rows of single-family homes with driveways and front yards, all in apple-pie order, now there was jungle. The vegetation had all sprouted since Katrina. Trees that did not exist before the storm now stood taller than the broken-backed street lamps. The asphalt was buckled and twisted with spreading roots. The inhabited lots, about one per block, looked out of place. Their owners kept their lawns mowed, the fences painted, the houses well maintained. But they were fighting back the wilderness on all sides.

“What you doing down here, then? You just come to look around?”

“No.”

“Reason I ask, we got people coming here now just to look. You saw that sign, right? Tourists, can you believe that? They got buses and shit running around here like it’s some sort of freak show.”

“I’m here to help.”

“You got a billion dollars?”

“I read about the Build It Up Foundation. The new houses.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “They’ll do a good job, if the city let’s ’em.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lot of bureaucracy. Lot of people trying to line they pockets, take advantage of others’ misery. You see. Same old N’Awlins, buddy. Same old, same old.”

It wasn’t difficult to find the plot of land that had been purchased by the Build It Up Foundation. It was a wide expanse of several acres, bounded by Reynes Street, North Galvez Street, Caffin Avenue and North Derbigny Street. It was, Milton saw, very close to where the Solomon house had once been. He recognised the junction where Ziggy Penn had been taken out by the Irish, and remembered the configuration of the road, but, beyond that, everything was different. The rows of houses that had formed the roads and avenues had all been demolished. Wide swathes of the vegetation had been cleared and, as they drove through one block, they watched workers as they cut back the worst of the overgrowth.

And then they turned onto a new road. A sign, bright and clean, read SALVATION ROW. Beyond it, he saw a line of brand new houses. Jaunty and bright, a snaggle of sawtooth angles in various vivid colours.

“Here you go,” the driver said.

Milton handed over a twenty, told the man to keep the change, and got out. The humidity slapped down at him, a broiling heat that made him wish that he was wearing something on his head. He reached back inside for his pack and hauled it out.

The car rolled away as he turned to the nearest of the new houses. It was not just a slapdash replacement. It was well built and substantial, a mustard-yellow, four-bedroom house perched on seven-foot-tall stilts with a roof that slanted up from front to back and leant to the side. It was very impressive.

A black man came out of the house and made his way down the neatly tended path to the sidewalk.

“Can I help you?”

“I hope so. I’m looking for Isadora Bartholomew.”

“Izzy?” The man laughed. “You in the right place, brother.” He turned and pointed down the street to where several new houses were being built. “She’s over there. Up on the roof.”

Chapter Nine

Milton examined the new house as he approached it. It was built on concrete pilings and elevated to the same seven feet above the ground. The fibre-cement sidings were reinforced, and the window and door frames were built of hurricane-resistant Kevlar.

A sign planted in the lawn outside the front door said “JUST $1,500 CASH DOWN.”

He turned off the sidewalk and walked up to the house.

He saw Isadora Bartholomew before he was halfway to the front door. She was up on the roof, wearing high-cut, frayed shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that exposed her slender midriff. She was wearing a tool belt and a yellow safety helmet, her long hair tied up in a tail so that it poked out of the back. She was affixing a solar panel to the shingles, the last unit before that aspect of the roof was covered with them.

Milton cleared his throat.

The electric drill that she was using was too loud, so she didn’t hear him.

“Hello,” he called, careful not to surprise her.

“One minute,” she said, not turning.

Milton waited, taking a step back so that he could see her more clearly. She took a screw from a pouch on her belt, lined it up with the corner of the unit, and drilled it into the roof. She reached down and tugged it until she was satisfied that it was properly secured, rested the drill against the top edge of the panel and turned around.

She swiped the sweat from her eyes. “Can I help you?”

“Isadora,” Milton said.

“That’s my name. How can I help you?”

“It’s John Smith.”

She peered down at him. “Sorry. I—”

“We met the night of the hurricane. Your brother helped my friend. We were in your parents’ house when it—”

“Shit,” she said, her eyes going wide. “Mr. Smith? What are you doing here?”

“I was in town,” he said, smiling the lie away. “I read about what you were doing. Thought I’d come and take a look.”

“Mr. Smith,” she said for a second time. “Shit.”

He felt bad that she only had the false name that he had given her. It was too late to correct that now, not without prompting questions that he wouldn’t be able to answer. That would lead to suspicion, and he wouldn’t be able to help her if she doubted him. That was just one of the gifts with which his profession had furnished him: he had to live with a lot of lies.

“It’s John,” he said. “Please, you have to call me John.”

Izzy clambered down a ladder and took him back to a portable office behind the show home and showed him inside. It was being used as the base for the project. There were charts on the wall, photographs and sketches, schedules and plans. There was a single desk in the middle of the cabin. A man in a high-vis jacket was on the opposite side of the desk, smoking a cigarette while he argued with someone on the telephone. He saw Isadora, clocked Milton and — perhaps mistaking him for someone important — collected his helmet from atop the pile of papers on the desk and went outside. Izzy went around and sat in the newly vacated chair, indicating that Milton should take the other one. He did.

“What are you doing here?” she said again.

“Like I said. I heard about all this”—he spread his arms—“saw you were involved, and thought I’d come and have a look.”

She looked squarely at him. “What do you think?” There was the edge of a smile on her lips, but it was obvious that the answer meant a lot to her. Not that it was his answer that she wanted, not especially. Milton guessed that she invested a lot in the answer every time she asked the question.

“I think it’s amazing. The houses. They’re very impressive.”

“We’re building the houses first, and then, eventually, a community centre.”

“How many?”

“Ten, so far, but we’ve got plans for fifty. That depends on a few things going right for us, though.”

“Money?”

“We’ve got the money. It’s self-sustaining. It’s…well, bits of it are more complicated than others.”

Milton could see there was more to that than she had explained, and he remembered what she had said on the television, but he decided that this wasn’t the right time to focus on a negative. There were too many positives to acknowledge first. “Who set the charity up?”

“I did. Five years ago. It was small then. Just me, really.”

“But?”

“But I raised some money, and…well, we started to grow.” She smiled at him warmly, her bright teeth showing. “Look, I could talk to you about it, or I could give you the tour. You got half an hour?”

“I’ve got all day.”

“Come on, then.”

She got up and, as she did, she bumped up against the desk. A framed photograph that had been standing there toppled over. Milton caught it before it could fall to the floor and put it back.

He looked at it. The photograph was of a family: two young parents, two kids. They were standing on the porch of one of the new houses, the siding painted a bright and optimistic yellow. “Happy customers?”

“Happy homeowners,” she corrected. “The second family we moved in here. We’ve got a homeownership counsellor on the books, she managed to get them $75,000 in down payment and closing assistance. They paid just north of $90,000 for a home that would have cost twice that before the storm, one that’ll last them for as long as they need it for their kids to grow up. They lost their home in the flood. Lost everything. They’d been in a shelter for four years. Seeing the kids smile like they did when they moved in… man, I could retire right now and be happy.”

“They were the second family? Who was the first?”

“Come on,” she said. “We’ll go see them.”

They went outside, back into the smack of the heat.

“You want the standard tour or the extended one?”

“Whichever you think I need.”

“All right.” She touched his shoulder, and they set off down Salvation Row away from the new houses. They walked for five minutes until they turned a corner and started down a street that had not been cleared. It had the same row of tumbledown shacks as Milton had seen during his taxi ride, the same overgrown vegetation.

“You come in from the city?”

“Yes.”

“So you saw what the parish is like? Like this?”

“Like a nuclear bomb went off.”

She nodded somberly. “Pretty brutal. The houses were all wrecked. Most of them were demolished. The ones that were still structurally sound were flooded out. Eighty-five percent of the families who lived here, they’re all gone now. Most of them will never come back. The neighbourhood died overnight.”

They walked down the street. Milton saw species of vegetation that had no business being in an area like this: crepe myrtle, black willow and golden rain trees garlanded with vines. There were weeds as high as basketball hoops. There was lantana, oleander, and oxalis.

Izzy saw that he was looking. “It grew fast. The soil’s rich from the alluvium in the Mississippi, and the climate’s perfect. They’ve had botanists down here to look at some of it, try to explain why it started to grow.”

“They didn’t try to clear it?”

“Sure, they tried. The city appointed a contractor to clear it; he turned out to be a felon. They appointed another; he took the money but did a poor job. They’ve got a crew of twelve ex-cons, going around now to try to keep on top of it. But as soon as it’s cleared, it starts to grow again. You leave a lot untended for three months and it’ll be thick with knee-high weeds. After five months, you’ll see saplings. The only way to reclaim the area is to put people back in here again. You been in the city yet? The centre?”

“Not yet.”

“You’re not here for Mardi Gras?”

“Not especially.”

“Wait ’til you get up there. You wouldn’t know Katrina even happened. The oldest, wealthiest districts — the whitest ones — they’re all on higher ground. The poorer neighbourhoods, where the native New Orleanians live, all those are below sea level. You know the difference between the French Quarter and this area around here?”

He said that he didn’t.

“Nine feet,” she said.

They reached the end of the row and turned again. Milton saw that they were following a long, rectangular route. There were more wrecked and deserted houses on this stretch of the road, but, as they reached the junction and turned to the right, they were back on Salvation Row.

“And then we get to this,” she said proudly. “Better than it ever was before. All ecologically sound, the houses generate most of their own power from the solar panels, the carbon offsetting means that there’s no footprint at all.”

“It’s amazing, Isadora.”

“Izzy,” she corrected. “You sound like my father.”

They reached the first house at this end of the block. The siding was painted red, the colour a flamboyant counterpoint to the bright blue sky.

“You asked about the first family we moved in?”

He nodded.

“Come on,” she said, turning onto the path. “I’ll introduce you.”

Chapter Ten

Izzy didn’t knock on the door. She opened it, stepped inside and shouted out, “I’m home.”

There was a moment of silence and then the sound of slippered feet shuffling and slapping across the floor. The door to the right opened, and Solomon Bartholomew was standing there.

Izzy went over and embraced her father, and then, stepping back, she turned so that he could see Milton waiting on the stoop.

“Papa,” she said, “there’s someone here come to say hello to you and Momma.”

“That right?” The old man fumbled in his breast pocket. “Let me get my spectacles. I can’t see a damn thing without ’em.”

“They’re on your head,” Izzy said indulgently.

Her father patted his crown, found the glasses and slid them down onto his nose. He squinted through them for a moment, saw Milton, crumpled his nose as he tried to remember if he recognised him and then his eyes went wide with surprise. “Well, I’ll be. It’s Mr. Smith, isn’t it?”

“You remember him?”

“Remember him? I ain’t likely to forget no part of that day, child. Of course, I remember him.”

He looked much older, every day of the nine years. His skin was striated with a host of tiny wrinkles, his hair had turned from grey to white, and he looked smaller, wizened. He was dressed impeccably, just as before, with a shirt and tie, a comfortable-looking cardigan, and beautifully pressed trousers.

Milton shook his hand. “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Bartholomew.”

“What happened to your friend?” Solomon asked. “He make it?”

“He did. They got him to hospital, fixed up his leg. He had broken ribs, too, and a fractured skull. They said if it wasn’t for what Alexander did for him, he would most likely have died. Even if he had survived, he would definitely have lost the leg.”

The news was good, and Solomon nodded at it, but the mention of his son brought a troubled cast to the old man’s face. “What you doing back in town?” he said, evidently moving the conversation away from that direction.

“Just passing through.”

“You on business again?”

“A little different this time.”

There came the sound of a door closing from the rear of the house and then footsteps padding towards them. Elsie Bartholomew came through the door into the hallway. She looked older, too, moving a little more carefully than Milton remembered.

“It’s Mr. Smith,” Solomon said. “You remember him? From the storm?”

“Don’t say such a fool thing, Solomon, ’course I remember him. How you doing, Mr. Smith?”

“I’m well,” he said.

“What you doing here?”

“I was just saying to your husband—”

“Hold on a minute. You can just say it to me, too. You want to stay for a coffee?”

“I’d love to, but I’ve got to go and check into my hotel.”

“Where you staying?”

“Just a little place on the outskirts of town.”

“Gonna be loud,” Elsie opined, “Mardi Gras and all.”

Milton smiled.

“You got plans for dinner?”

The old woman looked at him expectantly, and Milton knew it would be churlish of him to lie and say that he had plans. He was aware that Izzy was looking at him, too, similarly hopeful, and he knew then that he would say that he didn’t. “No. No plans.”

“Then you come back down here, you hear? We’d love you to have a look around the new place, but Solomon has his sleep now—”

“Woman, I don’t need no—”

“—but you come back tonight, I’ll cook a pot of jambalaya, and we can have a proper talk. You like shrimp?”

“I do,” he said, before thinking that shrimp wouldn’t be cheap and he didn’t want to put them to expense.

“Seven thirty good for you?”

“Perfect.”

“That’s settled, then.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Izzy said as soon as they were outside again. She didn’t look particularly sorry. There was a wry, amused grin on her face.

“No need,” Milton said.

“If you have other plans…”

“I don’t. Dinner sounds great. It would be nice to spend some time with your parents, under different circumstances from before, you know.”

They walked down the path to the road.

“What are you doing now?” he asked her.

“Got some paperwork I need to finish for the case.”

“Case?” he said, remembering what he had heard on the television.

She waved a hand absently. “Piece of litigation we’ve been dragged into. I’d tell you about it tonight, but it’s very dull.”

The mention of the proceedings, whatever they were, had quickly nudged her into an introspective disposition. Milton decided that he should leave her to attend to it. “I’ll go and check in,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, her focus flicking back on him again. “I’ll get you a cab.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk.”

“You want to walk?”

“The best way to get to know a place is to walk. I’d like to look around a little more.”

And so Milton walked. He passed memorial signs on the lawns of the houses that were still standing. Others displayed collections of signs and symbols: a United States flag, a cross, a placard calling out George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and a stone etched with the names of a man’s mother and daughter, both lost to the flood. He passed a man, very old, bent double as he sowed a vegetable patch. Another local, an elderly woman, picked up the trash that had blown across the street, snagging against the stems of the jungle blight that had grown up opposite her house.

There were people here. A community. It felt friendly, the way that a small town might feel. Lights glowed in porches, bright little oases that made the absence of neighbouring houses even more obvious. Friends gathered to drink beer and shoot the breeze, the sound of their laughter following him as he walked on. The roads, often rutted and with potholes unfilled, reminded Milton of the gravel roads he had followed while he hiked in the Michigan countryside miles from civilisation.

He walked for forty minutes, crossing the Industrial Canal and heading east on St. Claude Avenue into Bywater. He asked a homeless man washing windscreens at the junction with Poland Avenue for a decent place to stay and gave him a ten-dollar bill after he recommended a motel. It was just off the main drag, facing the railroad and, beyond that, the canal. The place was set back from the road, behind a chain-link fence. It was comprised of a line of rooms, the building looking tired and drab, and the attempts at decoration — the large pots that contained loquat and pecan trees, the Stars and Stripes that riffled in the wind — just made the shabbiness even more obvious.

Milton went into the office and booked a room. The clerk, an energetic and friendly woman, said that they had a room but that Mardi Gras meant they were only offering weekly rentals. Milton said that was fine, paid cash in advance, and followed her along the line of rooms to one at the end. It was as tired as the rest of the place, but Milton wasn’t bothered with the décor. It was clean, it looked comfortable, and it was reasonably priced. Since all he was going to do was sleep there, it would do him very well.

He peeled off his sweaty clothes and stepped into the shower.

Chapter Eleven

Joel Babineaux took off his brogues and padded across the deep pile carpet to the window of his large corner office. He wiggled his toes in the thick pile, liking the way that the expensive fabric felt against his stockinged feet. His office was on the top floor of One Shell Square, a two-hundred-metre-high ziggurat that was the tallest building in New Orleans. He looked down from his eyrie, high over the sprawl of the city, all the way out to the wetlands and then the Gulf. It was a splendid view, unobstructed, and he stood there for a moment and watched a flatbed truck as it negotiated a path from the centre of town to the south.

Babineaux noted the buildings along its route in which he had an interest. The big office complex, the shopping mall, the restaurants. He followed the yellow dot over the Claiborne Avenue Bridge all the way into the Lower Ninth and nodded in satisfied recognition as it trundled through the parish that the mayor had decreed as suitable for the location for Babineaux’s new mall. It would be his signature development, the crowning achievement of years of hard work in a business in which success was hard to achieve. You needed more than brains. You needed luck, insight, powers of persuasion and, he contentedly admitted, an ethical flexibility that meant you could ignore your qualms when unusual tactics were required.

Babineaux focussed back on the reflection staring back at him. He was six foot two, still as muscular and fit as when he had been a soldier, always dressed to the nines and excellently groomed. His prosthetic leg was so good, so expensive, that it would have been impossible to notice without the knowledge that it was there. The injury that had robbed him of his right leg, below the knee, had been the result of a piece of stray shrapnel from an IED that had detonated on the road out of Nad-e-Ali in Afghanistan. Operation Anaconda. Even now, and despite that, he remembered it fondly. His buddies had made jokes about him being one-legged now, and his rivals in the property game had picked up on it, dubbing him the Pirate of Canal Street. Babineaux didn’t mind that in the least. He was at ease with himself and, he knew, the award of a nickname was a sure sign that he had attained the notoriety he had always cherished.

And, he liked to remind himself, he was a pirate.

Anything he wanted, he took.

Babineaux prided himself on knowing what was worth taking. He had an innate sense of the value of things. He knew what was worth pursuing, and what was better abandoned. His time was the most valuable asset that he had, and he allotted it carefully on the projects that would bring him the best returns. It was something that he made a point of and, he knew, he was good at it. Instinctive. It was one of the reasons why he had become a very wealthy man.

He knew, for example, that the Bentley he had in the basement garage fifty floors below his office was worth $200,000. The desk that faced the window was made of polished teak and had cost $30,000. His suit, imported from Savile Row in London, had cost $10,000. These things, expensive though they would be to most people, were trifles compared to the thing that he wanted now.

He refocussed on the devastated expanse of the Lower Ninth Ward. What was its worth now? Not very much in the state that the city had left it. Almost all of it had been flattened, and that fact was especially evident from his elevated vantage point. A few houses still stood. Shacks, barely upright, the odd house owned by stubborn New Orleanians who had refused to leave and had renovated and renewed the places themselves. And, there, between North Galvez and North Derbigny, an obscene strip of various colours, the ten houses that made up Salvation Row. It looked as if a fleet of pastel-coloured UFOs had descended onto the surface of the moon.

He knew the value of those houses. In simple terms, each lot was worth one hundred thousand dollars, give or take. There were ten houses, and so he should have been able to purchase them for a million, add another $200,000 to make sure and call it a round $1,200,000. It would cost him another $50,000 to demolish them.

He would have been prepared to find the money to do all of that, because he knew that the mall project that he was fronting stood to make him more.

Much, much more.

$100,000,000 more.

He always weighed up the consequences of the tactics that he was considering against the gains that he stood to make. This project, his crowning glory, was an end to justify just about any means.

He went back to the desk and picked up his telephone. His secretary asked him what he needed. “Send Jackson in, please.”

The man who came into the office was built like Babineaux, big and strong. He was dressed in a suit that cost almost as much as his boss’s. On paper, Jackson Dubois was not qualified for his role as the senior vice president of Babineaux Properties. One might have expected a certain minimum: a law degree from Yale, perhaps, or an MBA from Harvard. Dubois had none of that. He had grown up with Babineaux in St. Gabriel, a low-income semi-slum in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. They had gone to school together. Dropped out together. Chased girls together. Got drunk and high together. And then, at Babineaux’s suggestion, they had enlisted in the army together. Both were sent to Ranger School. They were allocated to the 75th Ranger Regiment and were sent out together to fight.

It was Dubois who had been with him when the IED had taken his leg. The whole thing had been an ambush. The bomb was designed to disable the Humvee, and then insurgents had popped out of cover to pick off the Americans as they scrambled to defend themselves. Dubois had risked his own life, running into the crossfire to drag his friend back behind the burning armoured shell of the vehicle. He and another soldier had stayed with him for half an hour, fighting off the jihadis until they had almost run dry. They were down to their last magazines when the two Apaches had arrived to fight off the bad guys.

And Babineaux had never forgotten that.

He had been awarded a healthy lump sum for the injury, and he had invested that in his first property. He moved that quickly, turning a healthy profit, and repeated the trick. Dubois had stayed in the military, but he had nothing when he finally called it quits. Babineaux brought Dubois onto the team when he had made his first million, and they had stayed together ever since.

Their shared history meant that Babineaux trusted Dubois with his life, and that was important. Dubois also had an ethical flexibility that was a prerequisite in the world within which Babineaux was operating. That was also important.

“Joel?”

He turned to his old friend. “We need to step things up.”

“What do you need?”

“Is the meeting with Morgan still going ahead?”

“I haven’t heard anything from them to say that it isn’t. Do you need me to be there?”

“No. I’ll handle him myself. I want you to concentrate on the Lower Ninth. We’ve been stalled too long, and it’s costing us money. Every day that we delay puts more interest on the bridging finance. They know that we’re going to win, but they could drag it out for another year. Can’t have that.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“The men you found. Are they reliable?”

“Diplomatically? I would say that depends on what we ask them to do.”

“But a simple task? Muscle?”

“Yes, well qualified for something like that.”

Apart from his instincts and intelligence, Dubois served a very important purpose. He was the fall guy. The cut-out. He stood between Babineaux and the often unpleasant tasks that he ordered. There were plenty of incentives — both benefits and disbenefits — that would ensure that, were they to be compromised by any of the underworld lowlifes that it was often necessary to turn to in matters such as this, he would take the rap. Any police or regulatory investigation would reach its terminus with him. Babineaux Properties LLC might take some flak from the press, but that was what the PR experts on the million-dollar retainer were for. Joel Babineaux himself would be held harmless above the fray. He was loyal to his old friend, but they both knew that Dubois would be sacrificed first if the moment demanded it. And they were both content with that arrangement.

“Do you want me to speak to them?”

“Yes. It’s time we upped the ante a little. Get on it.”

Chapter Twelve

Solomon Bartholomew opened the door to him. Milton could see at once that the old man was dressed in his best clothes, freshly shaved and fragrant with cologne. It made him feel a little uncomfortable. He didn’t like people to go to trouble on his account. He didn’t think that he was worth it. Solomon extended his hand and Milton shook it. The old man’s grip was strong.

“Glad you could make it, Mr. Smith.”

“It’s John,” Milton said, embarrassed again that he was going to have to perpetuate that old lie.

Elsie Bartholomew came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Hello, Mr. Smith.”

“John,” he said again, smiling, as he stooped to allow her to peck him on the cheek.

Izzy came down the stairs. She, too, had made an effort for him. She had changed into jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and her long hair looked as if it had been freshly washed. Milton couldn’t help but admire her. She had been attractive before, amid the craziness of that night nine years ago, but the intervening time had been very kind to her. She had been a girl then. She was a woman now.

“Hello, John.”

“Izzy.”

She put a hand on his shoulder and leaned across to kiss him. She smelled good and her lips felt soft against his cheek. Milton had to remind himself why he was here.

“You get a hotel?”

“Yes,” he said. “Nothing special, but it’ll do me.”

“I’m telling you,” Solomon said, “we could’ve put you up, couldn’t we, Elsie?”

“We surely could.”

“No,” he said. “It’s fine, really.”

“You never had the tour. At least let me show you around. Let me show you what my little girl has done for us.”

Izzy smiled indulgently, but Milton got the impression that she wanted him to see the house, too.

“I’d love to.”

“Come and look in here first.”

Solomon bid him to follow.

The room beyond was small. It was a third bedroom and would have been big enough to fit a single bed, at a push. It had been turned into the old man’s study. There were shelves on the wall that were laden down with books and old vinyl records. Jazz, Milton saw. There was a desk, with a big ledger that was left open, revealing careful passages of handwriting. Framed pictures on the wall showed a number of different birds, with their names and genus in Latin. The single window looked out onto the backyard. There was a pair of binoculars resting on the sill.

“What you think?” he said, looking around at his things with evident pride.

“Very nice.” He indicated the pictures. “You like birds?”

“Like?” Izzy said. “You’ve got to be kidding. He’s obsessed.”

Solomon ignored her. “One thing about Katrina, she wiped the slate clean. The months after the storm, you could walk out in the city and you wouldn’t hear nothing. No birdsong, I mean. You could hear a boom box from five blocks away. The birds, they all knew what was coming. They flew away as soon as the hurricane came in and they stayed away for months. Then, after a while, they started to come back. We got all this new vegetation, all these trees and bushes and shrubs, and new birds, ones I ain’t never seen before. They started to show up, too. All the rodents that turned up, they attracted raptors. Hawks, falcons, shrikes. Barn owls started to build nests in the wrecks.”

He went over to the desk, picked up the ledger and gave it to Milton. “I keep a record of ’em. Every one I see, I put it in there.” He stood next to Milton and stabbed a finger to the entry beneath today’s date. “Look at this, just this afternoon I seen blue jays, cardinals, American crows, Eastern phoebes, killdeer, a loggerhead shrike, kestrel, bronzed cowbirds and a Lewis’s woodpecker. Yesterday we saw an egret, walking right down the middle of Salvation Row just like it owned the damn place, stalking lizards.”

Milton put the ledger back on the desk.

“Other wildlife, too, like you wouldn’t believe. I seen armadillos, coyotes. We had a raccoon climbing on the roof last week. I went out to scare it off. Huge, man, I’m telling you, critter was just like a dog. First time I heard it, I thought it was a dude trying to get in upstairs.”

Elsie put her head through the door.

“He boring you with his birds?”

“No,” Milton said. “It’s fascinating.”

“Well, if he hasn’t exhausted himself, he can tell you more at the dinner table. I’m serving up.”

The jambalaya was delicious. The stew included chicken, andouille sausage, rice, shrimp, celery and spices. Milton had never tasted anything like it. He finished his bowl and, when Elsie asked him if he would like seconds, he said that he would. She took his plate and returned it with another full serving, as big as the first, and he finished that, too. When he was done, he felt stuffed to the gills.

“Jambalaya,” she said. “Means jumbled in French. You liked it?”

Milton gestured down at the empty bowl. “Delicious. What was the spice?”

“Onion powder, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, lots of paprika. Lots of cayenne pepper, too.”

“It had a kick.”

“And I toned it down for you, too,” she said. “Didn’t know how you like your spice.”

Milton thanked her again. She got up to prepare dessert, and Solomon leaned over the table, his fingers steepled. “What you make of what Izzy’s been doing?”

“I think it’s amazing.”

He turned to his daughter and reached for her hand. “My little girl’s done something pretty wonderful, right?”

“More than wonderful,” Milton said. “Incredible.”

Izzy waved it off, but Milton could see that it filled her with happiness to be acknowledged like this by her father.

“The city wouldn’t have done nothing,” Solomon said. “Still ain’t doing much.”

“I’m not defending them,” Izzy interposed, “but, the way they saw it, it’s just a question of math. All kinds of folk moved into the city in the sixties and seventies. City got up to nearly 700,000 people at one point. They expanded into marshland that everyone said at the time was no good for habitation. They were the poorer areas, right, like around here, and it was those areas that got flooded when the levees broke. A year after Katrina, the population dropped back down to 200,000. But the city’s footprint, since the seventies, had increased by more than ten percent. The mayor didn’t think a city built for three times as many people could maintain that kind of size.”

Elsie’s face took on a distasteful cast. “We don’t mention the mayor in this house. Man’s a low-down crook, you ask me.”

Izzy continued, “They were asking whether fewer taxpayers could afford to maintain services like garbage removal, policing, sewer pipes and miles of streets, plenty of them still underwater from the flood. Decided they couldn’t. Economics, they said. I don’t know if that was wrong or right.”

“Yeah, you do, baby,” her father said. “You know.”

“So they just left them to rot, and the people who were forced out, the ones who wanted to come back home, well, that was just bad luck. I didn’t think it was right to just give up. So we started Build It Up.”

“She says ‘we,’” Solomon said. “She means ‘I.’ ‘I’ started it.”

She shushed him.

“How did you get into it?” Milton said. “You were studying law before the storm.”

She shrugged. “Gave that up. Didn’t see the point of it no more, not afterwards. But, in a funny way, it’s been useful. There’s red tape to deal with on a project like this. I’ve saved thousands of dollars by doing that myself. And then there’s the court case.”

This was what she had referred to earlier, the trouble. “You haven’t really mentioned that.”

She looked at her parents with worry.

Solomon waved her concern away. “Go on. You tell him, girl. We know you got it covered. We ain’t worried.”

She nodded and then frowned, searching for the right place to start. Eventually she said, “All the land I showed you today, Salvation Row, that’s what we’ve done so far. The way we work it, we get the money together to buy a plot, we clear it, then we build. We can turn a house around, start to finish, in three months. The families pay us, we take the money for the house and put it into the next plot of land. It’s all cheap round here, no one else is doing anything with it. We could keep doing it until there was no land left to build on. And there’s a lot of demand for houses now. People who had to move out, they’ve seen the places we’ve put up, they’ve seen they’re nice, they want to move back again. We could sign up fifty families tomorrow, no problem.” She finished her coffee and rattled the cup as she placed it back on the saucer.

“So?”

“So, about six months ago, we find out that this developer is interested in all this land. They offered to buy the houses. Everyone told them no. They came back, offered more than the plots are worth. The Joneses said yes, needed the money for their boy’s medical costs, but most people still held out. We just moved back. Some of these families, they’ve been here sixty years, and they don’t want to move. I couldn’t understand why they’d be interested. No one else is interested in buying land down here, and then these guys come in. They’ve bought fifty acres all around us. Didn’t make sense. So I dug into it a bit and found out that this corporation wants to put up a mall. The kind of place with shops and cinemas, the whole nine yards.”

Izzy frowned again. “We found out two months ago that the only way they can make their development work is to put their access roads right through the houses we just built. We own the land, but the city thinks the mall is more important than the houses, and they’re insisting we sell.”

“Can they do that?”

“We told them that we wouldn’t sell, so they’ve gone to court to get an order that’ll make us.”

“They can do that?”

She nodded. “It’s called eminent domain. That’s the case I’ve been fighting. There’s no way I’m going to let them do it. After everything we’ve done, the work we’ve put into these houses, just to let them drive a bulldozer through them? No way. That happens over my dead body.”

She spoke more and more passionately, her eyes flashing with anger. Her father nodded, his face stern and resolute, and her mother reached across to take her hand. Milton didn’t know what to say. He had no experience in the law, but he knew what was right and what was wrong.

“Can you fight it?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m doing it myself, so the cost is as low as I can make it. But, even so, there are experts and fees to pay. The money won’t last forever. And they have deep pockets. I’ll make it as difficult and expensive for them as I can. We’ll see what happens.”

“You haven’t had any time to yourself for weeks,” Elsie said. “You work late, weekends—”

“You know the worst thing?” she interrupted. “It’s not that, or the stress. It’s that it takes me away from running the charity. It stops me from working on new houses, finding new plots, speaking to families who want to move in. We’re not a big team. It’s me and whoever else is prepared to work for nothing. If I’m not running things, everything will stop. We’re already losing momentum.”

Milton heard the door open and, as he looked up quizzically, saw the concern on the faces of Solomon and Elsie. He had his back to the kitchen door and, as he turned back, it opened.

Alexander Bartholomew came inside.

Milton remembered him from that night in the storm. He had aged badly. He could only have been in his late twenties now, but he could have passed for someone ten years older. He was thin, wiry like a speed freak. His hair was a mess, a straggled ’fro that was shot through with grey.

“Alexander,” Elsie said.

“Mom.”

“You okay?”

“Just passing through. Thought I’d come say hi.”

“You didn’t say—”

“I can’t put my head through the door, say hello to my folks?”

His tone was jocular, but there was aggression and threat behind the words. He was slurring, too, drunk or high. Milton started to feel uncomfortable. The atmosphere had soured. It was obvious that there were developments within the family that he still had to understand.

Alexander walked across to the kitchen counter. Elsie had prepared a Key lime pie for dessert and, without asking, he took a spoon and clawed off a chunk from the edge. Elsie frowned, more with discomfort than disapproval, and Milton decided, for sure, that Alexander Bartholomew had taken a turn for the worse since the time he had last seen him.

“You remember John Smith?” Solomon said.

Alexander put the spoon into his mouth and chewed with laconic hostility as he looked down at Milton. “No,” he said. “Refresh my memory.”

“During Katrina, him and his friend—”

“Oh, shit, him. Yeah, sure, I remember.”

Milton stood and extended his hand. “Hello.”

Alexander sucked the spoon clean. He left Milton’s hand hanging.

“What did you do after Katrina? You stick around?”

“No,” Milton said.

“Flew straight out of here, right? Forgot all about us?”

“No. I didn’t forget.”

“Bullshit.”

“Alexander,” Elsie said severely, looking at Milton in apology.

“Nah, Mom, things like that, they gotta be said. What’s this like for you, you here to look at how the poor black folk are managing? Like a bit of misery with your tourism?”

“That’s enough,” Solomon said, pressing his hands down on the table so that he could get his feet beneath him.

Alexander smiled, sudden and surprising, and pressed his hand on his father’s shoulder to stop him from rising. “S’alright,” he said, slurring. “I was just pulling his chain, is all. How you doing, buddy?”

“I’m well,” Milton said.

“What do you want?” Solomon asked his son.

“Told you. I was in the neighbourhood. Thought I’d come over and say hi to my mom and pops.”

“You don’t ever just do that,” Elsie chided him sadly.

“Well, you know, I’m busy—”

“Doing what?” Solomon interrupted. “Last time I looked, you weren’t doing shit.”

“Thinking about going back to finish my studies,” he said, pretending hard to be hurt. It was an obvious lie. Milton saw through it the moment the words came out of his mouth, but Solomon’s face opened a little and showed a little hope. Milton felt a prickle of anger that Alexander was toying with him that way.

He could see that Izzy wasn’t fooled. Elsie wasn’t, either. “What do you really want, Alex, like I needed to ask?”

“I was hoping, maybe you could advance me a little cash. I’m behind on my rent. Landlord say he’s gonna throw me out if I don’t get straight with him, and, that happens, there ain’t no way I’m going to be able to think about getting that qualification.”

Solomon reached into the pocket of his slacks and pulled out his wallet. “How much you want?”

“No,” Izzy said, standing so quickly that she knocked over her empty glass.

Alexander turned to her, his face dark with anger. “Back off.”

She ignored him. “No, Pops. Put it away.”

“I said back—”

“You know what he’s going to spend it on as well as I do. You don’t pay rent, Alex. The places you been living, they don’t charge, least not for that, do they?”

“What would you know about the places I been living?”

“I’ve seen enough of them. I built houses where some of them used to be.”

Milton felt exquisitely awkward. He had expected an interesting evening, one that had the potential to be pleasant, and now he was in the middle of a personal family argument. He knew that the Bartholomews were proud people, it was obvious from their hospitality and the way that they worked at their house, and he knew that this would be terribly embarrassing for them. Knowing that, and that his presence made it so much worse for them, made him feel embarrassed, too.

He stood. “I should be going,” he said apologetically.

“No,” Elsie said firmly. “Please — sit down. We haven’t finished our meal yet. Alexander’s the one who needs to be leaving.”

Alexander looked at her for a long moment, and Milton feared that he was going to defy her. He started to consider what he would do if he became violent. He would have to do something. Alexander was scrawny and would be simple enough to subdue, but would that just make things worse?

Alexander sneered at them. “Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck you, all y’all. You prefer to have your dinner with someone like that, someone who don’t give a good goddamn fuck about you, you go right ahead, it don’t mean nothing to me.”

“Mind your language in this house,” Solomon said.

“Yeah, and fuck you too. I’ll find the money somewhere else.”

With that, he turned on his heel and left the room. There was a pause, the sound of something soft being thrown to the floor, and then the slamming of the door.

Milton remembered. His jacket was hanging out there, and his wallet was inside it. He knew, without even having to check, that Alexander had lifted it. Izzy went into the hall, and Milton followed behind. The jacket was on the floor. She picked it up and gave it to him. It was lighter, and he didn’t need to check.

“He hasn’t taken anything?”

Milton shook his head. “Nothing in it to take,” he said.

The atmosphere was subdued after that. Solomon tried to lighten the mood by telling the story of his friend who said that he had seen a four-foot alligator drinking from a broken water hydrant on Choctaw. Elsie managed a laugh, reminding her husband that his acquaintance had been smoking weed for years and had once sworn an affidavit that he had been abducted and experimented upon by aliens. Solomon chuckled that that was true, but that, on this occasion, he believed him. They tried hard to remove the stain of Alexander’s visit, but it was something that couldn’t easily be forgotten.

They cleared the table. Milton offered to wash up, but Elsie would hear none of it. She called her husband to help, and the two of them shepherded Milton and their daughter out into the lounge, but not before Izzy snagged a couple of long-necked beers from the fridge.

They went outside, closing the door after them and sitting down on the wooden porch with their backs up against the wall.

“You want one?” she said, holding the cold bottles up.

Milton felt the usual quiver, the waver in his resolve. It would be nice, after all, to share a drink with a pretty girl. That was what civilised people did after a pleasant meal, after all. Right? And then there came the persuasive suggestions — you’ll be all right, it’s just one beer, you’ll be better company with a little booze inside you, it’ll help you ignore the voice telling you that you’re not worth her time — and he moved a little closer to saying yes. But he had been concentrating on his sobriety for the last few months, that had been the purpose behind his long trek through the wilderness in Michigan and Minnesota, and, for now at least, he was buttressed well enough to recognise the danger.

“No,” he said.

“What do you mean, no?”

“I don’t drink.”

“Not ever?”

“I’ve got a problem with it,” he admitted, surprised at his own candour. “With drink. It got out of control a year or two after I was here last. I had to stop completely to get it sorted out. It’s been a while now.”

She looked down at the bottles as if embarrassed that she had brought them out.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You have a drink. It’s fine. I don’t mind at all. I’ll have a smoke. That’s my vice now.”

She popped the top of one of the bottles and took a long slug of beer. She finished half the bottle, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and stood it up next to her.

“Gimme one,” Izzy said, eyeing the cigarettes.

Milton opened the pack and she pulled one out, putting it to her lips and ducking her head so that Milton could light it for her. The flame of his Zippo glittered in her dark eyes.

“Stupid habit,” she said, sucking down and then blowing out a languorous jet of blue-grey smoke.

Milton watched her. He waited for her to bring up what had just happened.

It didn’t take very long.

“Look — I’m sorry about that.”

“Alexander? Don’t worry.”

“My brother’s in a mess. He’s not doing so good. He’s…” She paused, putting the bottle to her lips and taking another swig as she composed her next words. “You know he was training to be a vet?”

“Yes. I remember.”

“He only had another year to study, and he would have graduated. That’s a good career right there. That’s a profession. But just after Katrina, after what happened to Mom and Pop and the house, he went off the rails. Totally lost his head. He always drank a lot, too much, probably, but he started to drink all the time. He missed his classes because he was hungover or still out drinking. We tried to get him to see what he was doing to himself was crazy, but he didn’t care. It was as if he wanted to sabotage everything.”

“He didn’t want to help with the charity?”

She shook her head. “That made it worse. We started to do good work and I think it made him feel more of a failure. I asked him to work with me, once, and he just laughed. ‘Why would I want anything to do with that?’ he said.” She mimicked the way he spoke now, the low drawl of aggression. “‘Dumbass niggers too lazy to pull themselves up, always be looking for a helping hand.’ I told him that he was out of line, and we had a big argument. Papa got involved, that made it even worse, and then he left. I haven’t seen him much since then.”

She finished the first beer, stood it neatly on the step, and took another of Milton’s cigarettes.

“Where is he?”

“Living in a crack house in Raceland.”

“Crack?”

“Got in with a bad crowd. Started doing drugs six months ago from what I can work out.”

“Where’s Raceland?”

“An hour west of NOLA. Why?”

“Why don’t I go and talk to him?”

She looked at him with cynicism. “Seriously?”

“I could.”

“Good of you to offer, John. But, no offence, what are you going to say? Seriously? You saw the way he looked at you.”

“I’ve got my own problems, just like he does. Compulsions.” He nodded at her empty bottle. “Sometimes you just need someone who speaks the same language.”

“He won’t listen to you.”

“No, maybe not. But it’s worth a try.”

He thought that she would thank him, tell him it was pointless, fob him off in some way or another, but, instead, she reached into her pocket and took out one of her business cards and a pen. BUILD IT UP! was printed on one side. She turned it over, and next to the lines of text that said ISADORA BARTHOLOMEW — EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, she wrote down an address on Brocato Lane, Raceland.

“Why not?” she said, giving it to him. “I’m fresh out of other ideas. If you do see him, you tell him that Papa has emptied out his bank account so he can have a place in rehab. I tried to stop him — Christ, it’s not like they can afford it — but he wouldn’t listen to me. It’s paid for and waiting for him. All he has to do is show up.”

There was no hope in her voice, just resignation. He could see that she didn’t think it would help, but the relationship between her brother and the rest of the family was already so corrupted that it would hardly be possible for him to make it any worse.

“I’ll talk to him,” Milton said, slipping the card into his pocket.

She looked at him questioningly. “Why would you do that? You don’t have to.”

“I do. I owe your family. You saved my friend’s life. And I got to fly out of New Orleans the day afterwards like nothing had happened. Your brother was right. And I never felt comfortable about it.”

“You don’t live here. Why would you have stayed?”

“That’s not the point.”

They were silent for a moment. Milton looked out over the street, at the row of beautiful new houses, the well-tended gardens, the jungle that grew up behind them all. He listened to the sound of the nocturnal animals. He heard the noise of a bin being tipped over and then a feral scuffling inside it. He heard the hooting of an owl overhead. He sucked down on his cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs, enjoying the sensation of a full belly.

“The legal thing,” he began. “The eminent—”

“Domain,” she finished.

“The eminent domain.”

She laughed grimly. “Yeah, it’s all sweetness and light around here.”

“Seriously. Can you fight it?”

She sighed. “I couldn’t lay it all out honestly, not in front of my mom and pop. The other guy has millions to throw at it. The city council is on their side. And it’s just me and a few volunteers. I can make it expensive and inconvenient for them, but, eventually?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Nah. Probably not. You ask me, in six months, they’ve won and these houses, they aren’t here anymore. And we’re through.”

“Can I do anything to help?”

“Got a couple million bucks floating around? I could hire a slick law firm, even things up a little.”

He smiled ruefully. “Afraid not.”

“Then there’s not much you can do.”

They were quiet again. Izzy pointed into the darkness at the end of the street. They both watched as a possum trotted out of it, making its way along the sidewalk. It was big and brazen, unafraid of them.

“This place is nuts,” Izzy said when it had waddled away again.

“I want to help. I want to do something.”

“With what?”

“You said you have volunteers, right?”

“Sure.”

“So this is me volunteering.”

She finished the cigarette, carefully screwed it into the concrete, and dropped the end into the mouth of her empty bottle. “You’re crazy, John, you know that? But I’m not going to turn my nose up. You want to help, be at the office tomorrow at eight o’clock. There’s plenty of work to get done.”

Chapter Thirteen

The meeting with Pierce Morgan had been scheduled for nine in the evening. It was a drive of a couple of hours and, although Babineaux would have been quite content to have been driven there in the Bentley, using the time to catch up on his emails, he wanted to make an impression. So, instead, he had his driver take him to the Downtown Heliport south of Tremé.

The driver took him all the way out to the apron where his helicopter was waiting. He had purchased the AgustaWestland AW101 VVIP helicopter several months earlier. The company was the registered owner of the aircraft, but, in truth, it was Babineaux’s personal plaything. It had cost twenty-one million dollars, but he thought it was worth every last cent. They were typically sold to air forces who needed to fly heads of state and other VIPs, and they were equipped with that in mind. It had the largest cabin in its class, nearly three metres across, fitted with eight leather reclining chairs, enhanced air conditioning, video entertainment systems with personal monitors, a galley and a washroom. The cabin was divided at one end to accommodate Babineaux’s private suite with a separate air-stair entrance. There was a bed, a leather sofa, and a private en suite bathroom.

He circled the big helicopter, inspecting it carefully. He looked for signs of corrosion, stone damage to the tail rotor, or erosion beyond the bond line on the blades. He rapped each panel as he walked along, then rapped the surface of the tail and the stinger. He knew what those impacts should sound like, and he had always found it an accurate and safe way to be sure that all was well.

There was nothing to worry about tonight. The wiper blades and the windscreen had been washed, and all looked good. Babineaux opened the pilot-side door, climbed inside, put on his helmet, strapped himself into his seat and completed the rest of the preflight checks. The chopper had already been fuelled, with plenty of range to get him out to Lafayette and then back again. Babineaux started the engines, felt the vibration through his seat, then looked out to see the big blades slowly begin to turn.

He touched the mic so that it was suspended just above his throat, and keyed the channel.

“New Orleans Downtown, Westland Golf Echo Golf November Romeo, on west apron, with information Tango. Request clearance to lift off, departing to the west.”

“Westland, this is Downtown. Cleared for flight, sir.”

He repeated the clearance to confirm that he had received it, put the RPM into the normal operating range, and then increased the power. He added anti-torque pedal and added cyclic to counter the tendency of the rotor to roll. The helicopter grew light on its landing gear, and Babineaux could tell now that his control positions were correct. The chopper was stable, with no pitching or rolling, and the cyclic was properly centred. He raised the collective until the helicopter transitioned into the air. He lowered the nose by two degrees and felt the very slow acceleration. He hit his climb-out airspeed, started to gain altitude, and put the airport behind him.

Babineaux was religious in ensuring that he put in the requisite number of hours to keep his licence. He loved to fly. He had learned early, and being successful in business had meant that there were plenty of opportunities to go up.

He corrected his course to the west and settled in for the flight. Across the dusty mesa, the looming shadows grew. Above was a small silver moon and, as Babineaux looked down through the cockpit window, he thought of rattlesnakes going in pursuit of their quarries. Predators and prey. Life-and-death struggles locked in eternal embrace, a cycle that would repeat forever.

He piloted the AgustaWestland from New Orleans to Lafayette, following the route of I-10. He passed over LaPlace, Gonzales and Prairieville, oases of light smothered by the overwhelming blackness of the wilderness around them. He approached the headquarters of Morgan Construction from the direction of Broussard to the south. It was a large, sprawling facility, with offices and warehouses, engineering sheds and rows of heavy machinery. He flew over it, circled back, and touched down in a wide field to the rear.

He was met there by one of Pierce Morgan’s personal staff. He showed him to a golf cart and drove him the short distance to the main building. The place was ostentatious, with sculpture and extensive grounds that must have cost thousands of dollars to irrigate. Morgan was worth millions, much more than Babineaux, but money was useless until it was put to proper use. Morgan Construction was traditional, slow, and lazy. In Babineaux’s opinion, it was much like its patron. He, on the other hand, represented hunger and drive. And the corporation that he led was nimble enough to pivot quickly when opportunities presented themselves, just like they had presented themselves in New Orleans.

The attendant delivered him to a conference room on the second floor. There was a wide floor-to-ceiling window that would have offered a splendid vista over the gardens during daylight. Now, the trees and plants were picked out by discreet external lighting here and there.

“Where’s Mr. Morgan?” he asked.

“He’ll be a few minutes. Could I get you anything while you wait?”

“No,” Babineaux said.

It was a chump move, entirely predictable, but it annoyed him nonetheless. The message was obvious: I am in charge, I am the senior man, we will meet when I am good and ready. He had been waiting twenty minutes and was beginning to think that Morgan was going to stand him up entirely, and whether it might just be better to save what was left of his reputation and return to the helicopter and beat a retreat, when the door opened and Morgan bustled in.

“Sorry ’bout that,” the man said. He had a slow, deep southern drawl that Babineaux found particularly grating. “Heard you flew in?”

“That’s right.”

“You know, I used to be a flyer in the army. Vietnam? Hueys.”

Babineaux nodded amiably enough, but he knew that Morgan was blowing smoke up his ass. He had commissioned a two-hundred-page report on him, including his history and his family. The alcoholic daughter, the son who would have done time for statch rape without his old man paying the victim off. The investigator had looked for anything that might have been useful, any lever that he could have used, but he had struck empty. One benefit of the report, which he had studied again before taking off this evening, was that he didn’t believe that Morgan had ever flown a Huey. His war had been spent with the National Guard. By the time he deigned to go out to the front line, the shooting was practically over. Babineaux was proud of his service, and that kind of bullshit was the kind of thing that could make him hate a man.

But he smiled, took his hand, and said, “Thank you for seeing me, Pierce.”

“Always a pleasure. You want a drink?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, you won’t mind if I do? It’s cocktail hour around here.”

“How is Elizabeth?”

“She’s well. Sends her best wishes.”

Babineaux knew that was a lie, too. Elizabeth Morgan was a catty old bitch who had always made her disdain for him very obvious. The Morgans were the epitome of old money. The company had originally belonged to Pierce Morgan Senior and, before him, his father and then his father’s father. Four generations of Morgans had striven for nearly two hundred years to make the company what it was today. Elizabeth Morgan thought of Babineaux as a parvenu. New money. Distasteful, brash, vulgar. Babineaux was quite sure that her husband shared her opinion. It did not concern him. The opinions of others were irrelevant. The only score that was worth keeping was the size of your bank balance, and Babineaux knew that what he had planned would put the Pierce and Elizabeth Morgans of this world in his shadow once and for all.

There was another five minutes of inane small talk that Babineaux had to suffer through. Morgan was good at it, all that fancy chit-chat and hail-fellow-well-met, all that shit. It was a skill that Babineaux just did not have. He couldn’t butter people up, pretend to be their friend, when all he really wanted to do was take that glass, smash it, and grind the edge into his face. He did his best to conceal his impatience, nodded, said the right things, answered the pointless questions, but he couldn’t do it without giving himself away, and that made him even angrier. He was used to being in control and, here, he was not.

Finally, a member of the staff brought through a bottle of scotch and two glasses. Morgan sat down at one of the conference table chairs and indicated that Babineaux should do the same. He did. Morgan poured himself a large measure, offered the bottle to Babineaux, and shrugged with a gesture of helplessness when he turned it down again. He crossed his right leg over his left, and Babineaux’s eyes were drawn to the snakeskin cowboy boots that he was wearing beneath his suit. He had to stifle a snort of derision since he found it so ridiculous. All this southern bullshit. The man was a fool.

Morgan leant back in the chair and spread his hands. “So what can I do for you, partner, coming all this way at this time of night?”

“You can probably guess.”

“Well, then, yes, I probably could. You want to talk about the mall.”

“Yes. I was hoping we could put it all behind us.”

“Nothing to put behind us, Joel. Just a friendly bit of competition, that’s all it is.”

“Yes, of course, but it has the potential to become unpleasant. I’d much rather that was avoided.”

“Won’t get unpleasant on my account. May the best man win, that’s what my old man always used to say.”

He raised his glass and grinned at him, and Babineaux was suddenly fearful that Morgan had him at a disadvantage. Possibilities flashed through his mind. Was the mayor double-dealing? Playing one of them off against the other so that he could improve the terms of his own involvement? He felt his blood rise.

“I tell you what,” Morgan said, pretending to be magnanimous. “When we win the bid, and we will win the bid, there’s going to be a lot of smaller jobs that we’ll be looking to sub out. You want, I could make sure that you get those jobs.”

Babineaux couldn’t stop the moment of detestation that rippled across his face. He smiled it away, trying to hide it with bluster as he said that he’d better be getting back, but when he stood, his false leg clattered against the chair with a metallic ring and he grimaced, suddenly sure that he had betrayed himself as out of his depth. That thought made him angrier still, and it took supreme effort to stop his fingers from curling into a fist and great strain to ward away the urge to drive that fist into Morgan’s fat, pendulous, gloating face.

“You going?”

“I think so.”

“Shame.” Morgan stood, too. “When this is done, put behind us, you come over to the house. Elizabeth said she’d really love to see you again. We’ll go do some shooting, if, you know, you can.” He nodded his head down to the false leg.

Babineaux’s smile was a rictus and, as he took Morgan’s proffered hand, he could no longer restrain himself. He squeezed his fleshy, sausage-like fingers in his iron grip, grinned into Morgan’s face as the pain flickered there, held it a moment too long and then relinquished it.

“That would be wonderful,” he said.

He got out of the golf cart and stalked across the field to the helicopter. He performed a second inspection, too careful to dismiss the possibility, however remote, that Morgan might have stooped to having a flunky sabotage it. Finding nothing, he got back into the cockpit, took out his phone, and called Jackson Dubois.

“Where are you?”

“In the French Quarter.”

“What are you doing?”

“Meeting the two men we spoke about.”

“Good. I want them on this right away. I’m not getting delayed a minute longer by that bitch.”

“You got it. And Morgan?”

He gritted his teeth, the fury threatening to spill out. “No,” he managed. “He wants to go toe to toe with me. If that’s what he wants… No one’s standing in my way, not any longer. Especially not him.”

“You ready to go?”

“Right now. Call everyone we need. Have them come in at midnight. All of them, no excuses.”

“You got it.”

“I’m going to grind that motherfucker into the dust.”

Chapter Fourteen

The bar was just off the French Quarter. It was a small room, a pine bar along one side and stools pressed up close against it. There were three booths in the wider part of the room, farthest away from the door, and it was in one of those that Jackson Dubois waited for the two men. He had no intention of letting them anywhere near the offices of Babineaux Properties. That would be reckless, and he was scrupulously discreet and careful. It would still have been possible for them to join the dots and work out who stood to benefit from the task that they were to be assigned, but, Dubois reminded himself, that would require a modicum of ingenuity, curiosity, and intelligence. Those were not qualities of which either man could boast.

The two men who came into the bar were hoods, pure and simple. Hired muscle. They were blunt instruments, absent any kind of intelligence or subtlety. Dubois had no problem with that. A builder needed tools for every kind of work, and sometimes a sledgehammer was better than a knife. Their names were Melvin Fryatt and Chad Crossland. They were both ex-cons, recruited when they were so fresh out of Angola that it was a simple enough thing to buy their loyalty. He knew that they did crack and junk, and that didn’t concern him, either. If the police should ever look into him, and the two of them could be persuaded to be as foolish as to give evidence, any lawyer would be able to make them look very unreliable indeed. Of course, Dubois kept the amount of information that he provided them with to the bare minimum. Just enough for them to do what he wanted them to do. That usually meant names, addresses, and the numbers of bones he wanted them to break.

They sat down in the booth, their faces avid and expectant. Like dogs waiting to be thrown a bone.

Fryatt was the brightest of the two, and he usually did the talking for both of them. “Yes, Mr. Dubois?”

“I have something for you.”

“Music to my ears.”

“Have you heard of the Build It Up Foundation, Melvin?”

“Building them houses in the Lower Nine? Sure, I heard of them.”

“They’ve built a row of houses,” he specified. “But, unfortunately, they’ve built them on a piece of land that is inconvenient for my business. We’ve tried to buy the houses from the owners, at a very good price, but they don’t seem minded to sell. Can you see what I’d like you to do, boys?”

“Persuade ’em to sell,” Melvin said. “Sure. I get it.”

“Go down there, look like you’ve got a bit of authority behind you, and go and see the Bartholomews. They’re the rabble rousers. The girl can get the others to do what she tells them to do. Tell them that it would be in their best interests to sell. Tell them the offer on the table is a fair offer, and that it will be withdrawn in three days, and, if they want to take advantage of it, they need to accept it before then. Tell them the offer that will replace it will be much less generous. Tell them that they, and everyone else, are going to be moving out. One way or another. Tell them there’s a hard way and an easy way. The easy way is where they get paid a good price for their shacks. That’s much easier than the alternative. I don’t mind if you use your imagination there, fill in the blanks a little. Elaborate on that as you see fit.”

He looked at Melvin and Chad and concluded that if they couldn’t get this job done — this simple, straightforward job — then he was going to have to dispense with their services and look to trade up. Decisiveness was another of the qualities that made Joel Babineaux such a successful businessman. And Dubois knew that if he didn’t show it, then he, too, would be dispensed with, despite their long friendship. There was no time for sentiment, not that Dubois held any affection for either of these two men. If they couldn’t do the job that he was paying them for, then they had no business being employed by him.

They were still sitting there, staring at him expectantly.

“What are you looking at?” he said impatiently.

“Is that all, Mr. Dubois?”

“That’s all. Go and get it done.”

Chapter Fifteen

The morning was hot, even at six, when Milton arose. He took a cold shower and dressed in a T-shirt. He took his spare jeans from his pack, took out his combat knife and sheared off the fabric from halfway below the knee. He had emergency funds and fake ID in his pack and he used a twenty to take a cab back down to the Lower Ninth, stopping at a Walmart en route so that he could buy a big bottle of water and a pair of steel-capped work boots. The cab’s air conditioner was broken, and the thermometer on the dash soon showed ninety. Milton had finished half of the bottle by the time they reached Salvation Row.

He got out and paid the driver. When he turned, Izzy Bartholomew was standing with her hands on her hips, staring at him with a smile on her face.

“What are you looking at?” he said.

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t think I meant it?”

“It’s easy to say it.”

“But?”

“But coming out here, a day like this, a hundred degrees, hundred and ten, the humidity… well, doing it is a lot harder than saying it.”

“Well, you can eat your words. Here I am.”

She grinned. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly. What needs doing?”

She shook her head with bemusement, then turned and gestured at a particularly dense patch of overgrown vegetation that had swept across a path of land that would once have accommodated two lots.

“We’ve pretty much finished the houses we were working on,” she said. “So we’re concentrating on clearing that.”

The charity was paying twelve local ex-cons to work on clearance, their number swollen whenever the builders and other staff could be spared. They drew up in two pickup trucks. They were wearing sunglasses, jeans, boots and bright yellow T-shirts. The front of the shirt was decorated with the city’s fleur-de-lis. The back had BUILD IT UP and, beneath that, “Fight the Blight.”

The foreman of the crew was a gruff Mexican. Izzy took Milton over to meet him.

“This is Pedro,” she said. “Pedro, this is John. He’s here to help.”

The man assessed him with a studied air. Milton suddenly felt a little foolish. He had been up in the north of the country for long enough that his usual tan had faded. Pedro had the leathery, weather-beaten skin of a man used to working outside. The other men were the same. He took the dog-end of the roll-up cigarette that he had clasped between his lips and flicked it into the bushes.

He looked down at his bare legs. “You gonna wear shorts, Esé?”

“Not a good idea?”

Pedro chuckled. “A lot of plants in there, they sting your legs to shit.”

“Too late to change now. I’ll take my chances.”

Pedro shrugged and went off to organise the men.

Milton turned to Izzy to say goodbye, only to find that she had pulled one of the yellow T-shirts over her head and was arranging her sunglasses on her face.

“You’re coming too?”

“Team effort. We’re all in it together.”

The crew had a practised routine. First they went through the overgrowth on foot, looking out for large items that would damage their machinery. This morning’s haul included a rusted claw-foot bath, two wheels, and a child’s tricycle. Milton went into the scrub with them and quickly saw the truth in Pedro’s admonition. There were all manner of stinging plants in the morass, and it didn’t take him very long to abandon any pretence of being able to avoid their attention. His legs prickled with irritation, patches turning an angry red that was more embarrassing than anything else. One of the men saw his discomfort and, after laughing at him for a moment, took pity on him and tossed over a bottle of ointment. Milton slathered it onto his skin, feeling the cooling relief almost at once.

Once the debris was cleared to the curb, one of the men drove the tractor, a two-wheel-drive Mahindra 4025, right into the heart of the vegetation. The tractor was equipped with a whirling set of blades that chopped down most of the weeds. The ones that were left, taller and stronger, were bent down and snapped as the tractor plowed over the top of them. The shrubs, some as tall as basketball hoops, were avoided.

The tractor finished and the men took powerful weed trimmers from the backs of the pickups, yanking the starters to set them off.

“Give me one of those strimmers,” Milton said.

“One of those what?” Pedro said, puzzled.

Milton pointed.

“Right,” Pedro said, laughing. “We call them weed whackers.”

“Fine. Give me one of those weed whackers.”

Milton took one of the spares. It ran on gasoline, a sharp metal spool at the end of the lance that rotated hundreds of times a second. Milton fired it up and set to work, sweeping it left and right, demolishing the weeds.

When they were finished, the cleared lots still looked as if there was plenty of work to be done. The growth was sheared down as close to the ground as they could get it, with some patches thicker than others. There was a great amount of cut vegetation spread out, ankle deep. But that, and the roots, would be churned up by a large rotavator they would bring to the site in the morning.

They took a break. Pedro opened a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Milton took one, lit it, and took a deep lungful of smoke.

The grizzled Mexican paused next to him for a moment.

“Legs okay?”

“You might have had a point.”

One of the other men, a Salvadoran who Izzy had introduced as Hector, looked down at Milton’s legs — by now a medley of red welts and white ointment — and hooted his own amusement.

Pedro chuckled, too. “You work hard. You did well, Esé.”

A motor coach trundled down Salvation Row to the new houses and the cleared lots. The bus was emblazoned with the logo of a local tourist service, and Milton could make out the shapes of the passengers behind the tinted glass.

Hector walked out onto the edge of the sidewalk and spat into the road. “You should be fuckin’ ashamed,” he yelled out. “This ain’t no tourist spot. This is a disaster. We ain’t working to entertain your soft white asses, neither. I lived here. My wife died here.” His face turned a deep, beetroot red. “What y’all pay? Forty bucks? We don’t get a red cent out of that and we the ones who suffered. You think you buy a ticket and that gives you the right to come down here and enjoy what happened to us? You think we some kind of fuckin’ zoo?”

Pedro went over to him and said something in Spanish. The bus trundled by and turned right, into the still-devastated parts of the parish, but not before Hector flipped it the bird and spat after it again. Pedro put his hand on the man’s shoulder and turned him away, back to the group of sweating workers, and Milton saw the tension gradually drain out of his shoulders.

“He’s got a point,” Izzy said quietly.

“They come often?”

“Six or seven of them a day. It’s not the tours themselves. It’s that the organisers are making bank on them and not giving anything back to us. And the tourists can be disrespectful. They get out, trample all over people’s property, take pictures. I don’t know how people could ever think that was right.”

“No,” Milton said. “Neither do I.”

Chapter Sixteen

Milton was tired and drained by the end of the day, but, as he looked at the space that they had cleared, it was impossible not to feel a sense of pride. The others sat down with their backs to the wall of one of the unfinished houses. A disposable barbecue and a crate of beer appeared from inside. Hector tossed one of the bottles over to Milton. He caught it, felt the cold and wet glass — felt the flicker of desire — and handed it back.

“You don’t want? A beer, after a day like today, you say no?”

“I don’t drink.”

“What you mean, you don’t?”

“I like it too much.”

Hector nodded. “I get it, Esé. No problem. You want to eat? We got burgers.”

“I’d love to, but I can’t stop.”

He grinned. “You got somewhere better to be?”

“I have an appointment.”

Hector put out his hand and Milton clasped it. “We see you tomorrow, Smith?”

“You will.”

Milton took a taxi to the nearest Hertz, hired a Buick Encore, and set off for Raceland. He headed out of the city, running on Baronne Street until he got to the ramp for US-90. He followed the road for just short of thirty miles, turning off onto the LA-182 and then rolling into town.

He took out the business card that Izzy had given him and found Brocato Lane with its trailers, derelict shacks, cars with mismatched bodywork, some of them resting on bricks. It was like a shanty. Men and women shuffled along the sidewalk. Music blared from open windows and passing cars. The address he wanted was a wooden shack, painted blue. The roof was damaged, patched with a flapping sheet of blue tarpaulin. There was a pile of timber on the scrubby patch of ground to the front of the property.

Milton sat in the car for three hours, just watching the place. There was a steady flow of people going in and out. There was no pattern to discern. Some were dressed cheaply, in dirty clothes and mismatched shoes, while others wore decent suits, refugees from the city. They all went around to the side, knocked on the screen door, and spoke to someone who opened it a crack, and then went inside. Some emerged after a few minutes, hurrying to their cars or away down the street with the demeanour of a person with an important appointment to keep. Others stayed inside the property for an hour or two, and, when they emerged, it was with a slouched and enervated gait. Milton knew what crackheads looked like.

Milton sat quietly, the radio off, smoked six cigarettes and observed.

It was growing dark when a car drew up opposite the house, three cars ahead of where he was parked. The doors at the front of the car opened and two men got out. The man who had been driving the car was big and heavy, waddling a little as he fumbled in his pocket for a pack of smokes. He was wearing a yellow do-rag on his head and an XXL Saints jersey with BREES on the back. He turned to the other man and called something over the top of the car, but Milton couldn’t distinguish the words from the noise of the street.

The second man turned, looking back down the street in Milton’s direction. It was Alexander Bartholomew. He shouted something back at the first man and laughed, but his face didn’t indicate humour. Instead, he looked sour and angry.

Milton opened the door and stepped outside into the sluggish evening warmth.

The fat man saw him first, eyeing him warily as he walked straight at them. His eyes narrowed as Milton kept coming, and he turned to place his considerable bulk square on.

“What you want, bro?”

“To speak to your friend.”

“That right?” He turned to Alexander. “You know this dude?”

Alexander’s brow knitted and, after a moment, he shook his head. “Nah, man. Never seen him before.”

“You heard him,” the first man said. “Get gone.”

Milton sniffed the air. He could smell the acrid tang of crack drifting out of the window of the car. “I want to talk to you, Alexander. Hear me out. Ten minutes, then I’m on my way.”

Alexander blinked, and Milton could see that his words were making no sense to him. He was high. Milton assessed quickly and considered whether it would be better to beat a tactical retreat and return again tomorrow, when Alexander was better able to understand him, or whether he should stay.

The first man made the decision for him. “On your way, shitbird,” he said, stepping up, narrowing the distance between himself and Milton. That was his first mistake. He got a little too close, reaching a meaty paw and resting it on Milton’s shoulder. That was his second mistake. Milton’s response was hardwired, automatic. He straightened his fingers and jabbed the man beneath his chin, right on his larynx. His eyes bulged wide and then, as he recognised he couldn’t breathe, his hands went up to his throat and he dropped to his knees.

Milton was committed now.

He stepped around the man. Alexander had taken a step back, his mouth agape, and then he reached down to his waistband, his fingers fumbling with the butt of a pistol that he was carrying there.

Milton felt a scintilla of annoyance.

Alexander got his fingers around the handle of the pistol and started to draw it. Milton closed on him and chopped his hand down hard on Alexander’s wrist. He dropped the gun to the ground. Milton drew back his right fist and drilled him in the chin, accepting the burden of his dead weight as he slumped into his arms. He looped his forearms beneath Alexander’s shoulders and dragged him back to the hire car, opening the back and shoving him inside, face down.

The big man was on his knees, his breathing restored, his fingers heading for the gun that Alexander had dropped. Milton diverted quickly to him, lashed the side of his foot into his temple, and knocked him out cold.

He went back to the car, got in, started the engine and drove away.

Chapter Seventeen

Joel Babineaux could have watched what he was going to do to Pierce Morgan from the offices of his bankers. He could, he supposed, have flown to New York and watched it from the offices of his brokers. He could have visited the Stock Exchange himself and, he conceded, that had been very tempting — to be a first-hand witness of the confusion and excitement that he was going to create. But he had decided that discretion was the most sensible course in the circumstances. He had watched in the boardroom, with C-SPAN on the large LCD screen. The denouement was scheduled for lunchtime, so he had instructed his chef to prepare him a lobster, and the waitstaff had served it in the boardroom. He sat there, alone, and watched it unfold.

There were two elements to the scheme. Both were simple, but, when combined, they had the potential to be very effective. The first part of the plan had been put into play last night. Babineaux’s lawyers had previously hired a firm of private investigators and they had found a number of disaffected employees who were prepared to go on record to state that they were aware of corners that had been cut in the building of some of Morgan Construction’s flagship properties. The investigators had found another ex-employee who accredited his lung cancer to the asbestos that he said he had been forced to work with. This man, wheezing eloquently into the camera of the local news affiliate that had been sent to cover his story, said that he was preparing to sue the company for millions and that he knew there were others in the same position as him.

The twin stories had been released in accordance with the terms of a carefully structured media plan. Palms were greased and favours called in, and what started as a series of small pieces rapidly gained traction, and, by the time two members of the Stanley Cup-winning Blackhawks team rang the opening bell at the Chicago Stock Exchange, a firestorm had been created around Morgan Construction’s stock.

The second part of the plan had been put into play at the same time as trading began. Babineaux Properties had acquired a small, but significant, amount of equity in Morgan Construction over the course of the last three years. The shareholding totalled 3.9 % and had cost several million dollars to acquire, but Babineaux had foreseen the likelihood that he would come into conflict with Morgan at some point in the future, and he had decided that it was a sensible strategic position to take. The stock had been acquired by dozens of clandestine corporations and trusts that were, on the face of it, independent. None of them could be traced back to Babineaux or his corporation.

As soon as the bell had sounded, those shares had begun to be sold. It was slow at first — a third of a per cent here, a quarter of a per cent there — but as sale followed sale followed sale, the market began to take notice. The dispositions accelerated and then, as analysts were starting to report them to their investors, all of the rest were dumped at once. Connections were made with the media stories, and the market panicked. Within an hour, analysts were marking the stock with sell recommendations. Small investors were piling out and the price began to fall. As larger investors noticed the trend, they, too, began to sell. The price went into free fall. The biggest investors — the pension funds and the institutions — couldn’t ignore the trend and they, too, began to divest themselves of the stock.

Babineaux had waited until the perfect moment. He knew that the negative stories would eventually be managed, that Morgan’s bankers would be ringing around to decry them and to start to persuade investors that there was no reason to sell. He couldn’t wait for their efforts to bear fruit, but he didn’t want to start the third stage of the plan too early, either. He had to strike when the price was as low as it was going to go, just before it started to recover.

He used his instinct. His gut. It had always served him well, and it didn’t fail him now.

He waited until eleven thirty, and then he pulled the trigger.

Using the money that he had made when he sold the first shares at the top of the market, he started to buy back into the company again. Each share had been worth three dollars when he sold, but now three dollars bought ten shares.

He had ten per cent of the company.

Then he had twenty.

He authorised massive spending, using the war chest that the company had acquired over the years for precisely this purpose.

The stock he had offloaded this morning now bought him thirty-five percent of the company.

He kept buying.

Forty-three per cent.

The plight of the corporation became one of the big stories of the day. Reporters had been dispatched to Morgan Construction’s headquarters in Lafayette, where they had interviewed stunned personnel as they clocked off from the early shift. Efforts were made to speak to members of the board, but requests were turned down. The whereabouts of Pierce Morgan were debated. One rumour was that he was flying the country from investor to investor, trying to persuade them that the run on his company’s shares was false. It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. By the time the original story was debunked, the plan had acquired too much momentum to stop.

Babineaux reached over and tore off the claws of the lobster and used a nutcracker to break off the tip of the larger section. He prised out the meat. He pushed his forefinger into the opened tip of the claw and out of the larger open end. He discarded the antennae, antennules and rostrum, and then forked the sweet meat into his mouth. It was delicious.

His private phone bleeped. He wiped the grease from his hands, picked up the phone, and put it to his ear.

It was Dubois. “Jackson?”

“Tell me.”

“Fifty-one per cent. Congratulations. You are now the majority owner of Morgan Construction.”

Babineaux wouldn’t have been able to suppress the beam of pleasure that he felt even if he had been minded to try. “Very good,” he said.

“What would you like me to do?”

“Set up a meeting with Morgan tomorrow. Tell him I’ll fly to Lafayette.”

“You think he’ll see you?”

“He will.”

He activated the speaker, rested the phone on the table, and then picked up the tail of the lobster with one hand and the back with his other. He twisted the two sections apart, and then used his finger to push the tail meat out of the open end. He peeled off the top of the tail, removed the digestive tract, and scooped out the rest of the meat. “What else have you got for me?”

“I’ve spoken to the men about Salvation Row.”

“And?”

“They’ll be intimidating.”

“Enough to get rid of them?”

“I think so.”

“They better be. Now that Morgan is out of the way, there’s nothing else to stop the project. We need to see that they accept the offer. If they don’t, they need to know that things will get unpleasant for them.”

“I know. It’s in hand.”

“When’s it happening?”

“Tonight. I’m on top of it. You can leave it with me.”

“I know I can.”

Babineaux turned his attention to the carapace and picked out the small chunks of meat around the gills. He picked out the roe and ate that, too. He knew the value of things, and he didn’t like to leave waste. Those last small flecks of meat, only consumed by the most intrepid diners, tasted the best of all. He loaded the last morsels onto his fork and slid them into his mouth, sucking the juices off the tines.

Today had been a good day. The takeover could have failed at any number of moments, but he had planned it with his usual care, and it had been executed with aplomb by an expensive team of professionals upon which he knew that he could rely. What remained to be done was grubby and unpleasant in comparison, but just as important.

Babineaux knew that different tasks required different approaches.

Different tools.

Morgan Construction had been skewered by clever stock market manipulation.

Salvation Row would require something else.

He had tried to be civilised with the inhabitants of that street, and they had shunned his entreaties. That was their choice. America was a free country, and they could do whatever they wanted. Of course, by setting their faces against his generosity, they had narrowed the range of options available to him. Now he had a smaller selection of tools from which to choose. He had tried magnanimity, and he had been rejected.

Now he would use force.

Chapter Eighteen

Melvin Fryatt brought the car to a stop and flicked off the lights. Chad was in the seat next to him. The two of them had met while they were doing time together. They had been in Angola, both of them up on drug charges. They were in the same cell and, given that Chad had a little bit of the feminine about his appearance and manner, Melvin had decided that he’d take him as his sissy. Chad had taken a little bit of persuasion, but Melvin had made it clear that he was acting in the boy’s best interests. A pretty guy like him, it was inevitable that he was going to get taken by someone, so he promised that he’d make it a whole lot easier than some of the sharks who would’ve gone harder on his skinny white ass.

“Which one is it?” Chad asked him.

Melvin squinted through the darkness and saw the number that had been fixed to the side of the door. “That one,” Melvin said. “Number two. In there.”

“How you want to play this?”

Melvin sucked his teeth, a habit he had when he was giving things some thought.

“We go up to the door, lay it out all nice and clear. They accept the offer for the house and move out.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we make it plain that they don’t have no choice. They move out, or we move them out.”

Chad nodded, looking anxious, his big Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat.

“What’s up with you, baby?”

“Nothing.”

“You look nervous.”

“A little, I guess.”

“You want something to help?”

“You got anything?”

“Come on. You know I do.”

He reached into the pocket of his jeans, fumbled through the loose change and the junk, and pulled out the little baggie of coke that he had scored earlier that afternoon from a dealer he knew. He opened the top, unclipped his safety belt and leant forwards so that he could tip out a little onto the dash. He chopped out two fat lines, rolled his last twenty, and inhaled one of them. He passed the note to Chad and watched as he did his line. Melvin reached over and squeezed Chad’s leg. Boy was fine, he thought, kind of made it okay to ignore his good intentions to find a woman now that he was back on the outside again. He’d find a bitch eventually, that much was for sure, but there was no need to hurry about it.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Isadora had been in the shower for fifteen minutes, washing off the sweat and grime of another long and difficult day. Her body ached from the hours of hard work that she had put in. She washed her long hair, the dirty water trailing away into the drain.

It was hard work, had been ever since she started the charity, but she had never been involved in anything that was as rewarding. It was a simple thing to look around and appreciate the things that they had achieved. There was the view out of the window, the row of beautiful houses that accommodated families who had gone through so much since Katrina had turned all of their lives upside down. And, as she drew her focus in, there were things in the bathroom that spoke of the attention to detail that pervaded the whole project: the perfect job that the tiler had done with the shower cubicle, the careful planning that had made the small footprint of the bathroom almost seem spacious. Everything she saw filled her with pride at a job well done.

Almost made her forget about her brother.

She dried herself and put on her dressing gown. She was brushing her teeth and gazing out of the window when she saw the car roll slowly down the street. It was an old Lexus LS400, dinged on the wing, and with the fender half hanging off. Her cautiousness would have alerted her to it in any event. They were probably gangbangers, rolling down the street looking for houses that might be suitable to burgle. Her phone was in her bedroom, but she hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary. The car would keep on rolling, and that would be that.

But it didn’t.

It stopped, right outside their house.

She looked more carefully and saw the two figures inside. One of them leaned over until his head was over the dash and then the other did the same. Then, the driver’s side door opened and a tall black man stepped out. The passenger door opened and a skinny white guy followed. The driver looked up and down the street, said something to the passenger, and then both started up the short driveway to the front door.

Isadora was tying the belt of her gown as she heard the knock. She opened the door and hurried along the landing, calling out, “I’ll get it,” but she was too late.

Her father was already there.

She heard the voice from outside. “Mr. Bartholomew?”

“That’s right,” her father said as she turned onto the stairs. “Who’s asking?”

“Doesn’t matter who we are. We’re here because someone wants to give you a message.”

She saw her father’s stance change. He straightened his back and squared his shoulders. She panicked, flying down the stairs, her wet feet slapping on the treads.

“They do, do they? Better tell me what it is.”

“Someone wants to buy this place, right? You gotta accept the offer. It’s generous and if you don’t say yes, it’s off the table. Next offer won’t be as nice. You know what I’m saying, old man?”

She came up behind her father and saw the man that he was talking to. It was the driver, the black dude. The white guy was behind him, shifting uncomfortably.

“Papa,” she said.

“I got this, baby.”

“What you want us to say, old man? Yes or no?”

“You tell that son of a bitch that he can shove his offer up his ass. My daughter built this house. This and all the other houses you can see, you look left and right. Only way your boss is getting me out of here is in a wooden box. You tell him that.”

Izzy put her hand on her father’s shoulder, trying to gently manoeuvre him away from the doorway, but his blood was up and he wasn’t going to show weakness to the punks outside. He half turned to look at his daughter, started to say something to her, when the white guy pushed past the black guy and cold-cocked him with a hard punch to the side of his head. The man was skinny, looked like he couldn’t be more than a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet, but he was built like a wiry Mexican featherweight, and he’d loaded his right fist with everything he had. Solomon’s legs crumpled and he toppled backwards, twisting at the waist, Izzy just managing to wrap her arms around his trunk so that she could lower him down to the floor.

Elsie Bartholomew appeared in the doorway to the kitchen and dropped the plate that she had been drying. It shattered over the floor.

Izzy stood up, stepping over her father to put herself between him and the two men outside. “Get away from him!”

“You must be the daughter,” the black guy said.

“Momma,” she called out. “Call 911.”

The black guy chuckled. “Like five-oh is coming down here, this time of night. Even if they do, how long you think it’s gonna take? Long enough for you and me to get better acquainted.”

She stood her ground. “You tell Babineaux we’re not going anywhere. It doesn’t matter how much he offers, no one on this street is moving. He wants to build his mall, he’s going to have to build it around us.”

“I got a message for you specifically. That court case you got going on, it’d be better for you if you let that go. You want me to spell out what ‘worse’ looks like, sugar?”

The porch light on Vinnie Hayles’ property flicked on and the door opened. Vinnie came out. “You all right, Izzy?” he called. Vinnie was a big man, played defensive end to a good standard when he was younger, and had run in the gangs himself until he had found God. He still looked like a player, with thick forearms and shoulders, an array of gang tattoos visible on his neck.

The black dude looked over at him and then back at her. He was sucking his teeth, considering. Izzy could almost see the thoughts running through his head. If either of them were packing, she knew that this could get ugly. And fast. For Vinnie and then for them. But it could have gotten ugly if Vinnie had stayed inside, too.

The black man turned back to her. “You got a date in court the day after tomorrow. You don’t want to go. Ain’t safe for you to be there, you feel me?”

“I’ve called the police,” Elsie called out from behind her, her voice quivering. “They say they coming.”

Her father was struggling to a sitting position behind her. She wanted him to stay down. The stress of what he might try to do if he got back to his feet made her feel a dozen times worse.

The man nodded, a resolution reached. “You heard what I had to say. You got a day to change your mind. If you don’t, and we have to come back again, it’s gonna end different from this. Won’t matter who’s here, you get me?” He turned to the second man, said, “Come on,” and led the way back down the path to their car.

Vinnie crossed the lawns and came over to the front door. He saw Solomon still dazed on the floor and helped him up.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“That was Joel Babineaux,” she said.

“They still want us gone?”

“Looks like it.”

“You know what I say?” he said, lowering his voice so that Elsie couldn’t hear him. “I say fuck ’em.”

Izzy said that she agreed, but it was impossible not to think about the trouble that Babineaux and his money could cause. The court case was one thing. But this, hiring thugs and sending them to make threats, well, she thought, that was an escalation. She didn’t know how she could forestall it. Her mom and pops were old, and although she knew that they would back her — her father, especially, now that his dander was up — she knew it would be bad for them. She couldn’t put them through a battle like that, especially if it turned ugly.

She started to wonder whether Babineaux’s offer, the money he would give them to move, wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Perhaps she could squeeze a little more out of him, find another spot of land, and start again. She looked around, at the tops of the wild trees that had claimed the plots around Salvation Row. Wasn’t as if there was a shortage of real estate.

But then she saw the row of pretty little houses and thought of the sweat that had been invested in each of them, and she didn’t know whether she could do it to the people she would have to disappoint.

She didn’t know.

Chapter Nineteen

Milton had noticed a motel on the road out of New Orleans to Raceland as he drove west earlier. Now, heading east again, he took the exit ramp and pulled into the parking lot. It was a cheap looking place, with a row of rooms accessed by a covered veranda. He would have been surprised if the place had seen a lick of paint since the eighties. Alexander was snoring across the backseats, and Milton gambled that he would stay that way while he booked a room for the night. The clerk, a teenage girl who couldn’t have looked more bored if she had tried, chewed gum as he told her that he wanted a room.

She didn’t take her eyes off the soap she was watching on a small portable TV. “Fifty bucks,” she said. “Up front.”

“Can you let me have one with empty rooms on either side?”

She turned away from the screen, regarding him with a perplexed look on her face. “Say what?”

“I don’t sleep well. Noises wake me.”

“You ain’t gonna get no problem here,” she said. “We ain’t got anyone staying here tonight. You can have your pick.”

Milton took the room at the end of the row and laid down two twenties and a ten. The girl took the money, slid it into the till, gave him a key with a bright plastic fob, and went back to her soap as if he wasn’t even there.

Milton got back into the car. Alexander was still asleep. He drove into the empty lot, disturbing piles of rubbish and weeds that had erupted through the cracked asphalt. He reverse parked the car and went to check the room. It was cheap and threadbare, the furniture in need of replacement and with unpromising stains on the walls. At least it had a coffee maker.

He went up and down the row, knocking on the doors to check that the rooms were all empty. It appeared that they were.

Very good.

He went back to the car. Milton decided that there was no sense in moving Alexander until he had to. He waited with him for another hour until he started to stir. The night had fallen properly now, the sun retreating to leave a woozy humid heat that radiated up out of the baked ground. Milton got out, opened the passenger door, and gently pulled Alexander until he was out of the car. He moaned, his eyes flickering open and shut. Milton dragged him across the lot, up the steps of the veranda and inside.

He laid Alexander out on the bed.

He shut and locked the door.

Alexander groaned.

Milton took a dusty glass from the bureau, filled it with lukewarm water from the tap in the bathroom, and put it on the bedside table next to his head.

He came around slowly over the course of the next ten minutes.

“Alexander.”

“Shit,” he mumbled eventually, the consonants slurred.

“Wake up.”

“My head…”

“Open your eyes.”

He did as he was told, blinking in the dim light, and, as he saw Milton, he must have remembered it all.

“You… you…”

“Easy.”

“You hit me!”

“You didn’t give me much choice.”

“What you do, hit me with a fucking hammer?”

He had a point. A large, vivid, purple bruise was forming on his jaw where Milton had struck him.

“Listen carefully. You’re staying here tonight. We both are. You’re going to lie down and sleep off whatever it is that you’ve been smoking.”

He screwed his eyes shut and then opened them again. “Where are we?”

“In a motel.”

“I ain’t staying here,” he said, stumbling to his feet.

Milton got up and blocked the way to the door. Alexander staggered over to him, as unsteady as a drunken sailor on a rolling ship, and, when Milton didn’t step clear, he awkwardly tried to jostle him back to the door. Sighing with impatience, Milton held his right hand vertically and struck him with the heel, right on his clavicle, pushing all the way through his body as if the target was five inches behind him. It was a sudden blow, and Alexander — already dazed and unbalanced — lost his feet and landed on his rear end, his shoulders bouncing off the edge of the bed.

“You are going to get some sleep, Alexander. There are two ways that can happen. First, you lie down on the bed, close your eyes, and if you ask me nicely, I’ll sing you a nice lullaby. The second way, I’ll put your lights out for you again. One is a lot more pleasant than the other. You choose.”

“You’re fucking crazy, man!”

“You’re probably right. But you’re staying here tonight.”

Alexander had dropped off quickly once Milton had persuaded him that he had no choice but to stay in the motel room with him. Milton had pulled the armchair across to block the door and, once he had satisfied himself that there was no other way out nor any weapons that Alexander could lay his hands upon, he had slept in the chair with his legs on the bed. If Alexander tried to get out, he would wake him up.

He didn’t try.

Milton awoke first the next morning. He checked his watch, saw that it was five, and moved quietly across the room so as not to disturb Alexander. He rinsed his face in cold water, used the toilet, and then went back to the bed. He was still asleep.

He opened the door and stepped onto the veranda. It was still dark. He patted down his pockets for his cigarettes, put one to his lips, flicked his Zippo, and smoked it. He sat quietly for an hour and watched the sun rise. He smoked another. He watched the steady increase in the morning’s traffic on US-90.

He heard the sound of stirring in the room and, grinding his cigarette under his boot, he went back inside and switched on the coffee maker.

“Where am I?”

“A motel, just outside New Orleans.”

He looked at him, his befuddlement replaced by anger as he remembered what had happened. “You kidnapped me!”

“Semantics,” Milton said with a shrug. “I wanted to talk to you; you didn’t want to talk to me. This seemed like the most efficient way to arrange it.”

“You knocked me out.”

“You tried to pull a gun on me. That wasn’t clever, Alexander.”

“You…” He rubbed his chin, a bruise there from where Milton had hit him. “You knocked out Bernard, too, right? You know he’s connected?”

“To what?”

“You heard of the Ride or Die?”

“No. But it sounds colourful.”

The bafflement returned. “Colourful? This ain’t a joke. They’re serious players.”

“Do I look as if I care about them, Alexander? Your friend pulled a gun on me, too. He doesn’t have the credit in the bank that you do. He’s lucky he’s still breathing.”

He looked at him, confused. “The credit?”

“From Katrina. Remember?”

He shook his head, as if trying to clear sawdust from between his ears. “What you doing, man?”

“A couple of things. First thing. You stole something from me.”

“I didn’t!”

Milton pointed at his wallet. He had found it in Alexander’s pocket when he had drifted off to sleep, taken it out and left it on the bedside table. All the money had been taken out.

“I don’t take particularly well to people who steal from me. That wasn’t clever, either. That credit I told you about? It’s just about all used up now.”

Alexander sat up and rubbed his bruised chin. Milton could see, immediately, that he was very different when he was sober than when he was high. The brashness and the attitude were gone.

“We need to talk about the second thing,” Milton said. “You’ve got a problem, and I think I can help.”

“I ain’t got no problem,” he said, although doubt had flooded into his voice.

“You do. You know you do.” Milton found two styrofoam cups and poured out the coffee. “I’m going to tell you a story, and I want you to listen and tell me whether you hear any similarities between my experience and yours.” He gave Alexander the first cup. “If you listen, and you still don’t think we have anything in common, I’ll stand up out of your way and let you leave. You can go back to Raceland if you want, get high, kill yourself, I don’t really care. But you’re going to listen to me first. Does that sound reasonable to you, Alexander?”

“Sounds like you’re crazy,” he replied, but he made no attempt to leave.

Milton took his cup to the chair, sat down, and, between sips, he told Alexander his story. It was the edited version. There were some things, some reasons that explained the way that he felt the way that he did, that he couldn’t have imparted. He had told Alexander that he had been in New Orleans for business when he met him in the storm. He had told him that he was in IT. That was a lie, and he wasn’t able to describe what that business had really entailed. He could not have told him about the roster of dead that he was responsible for, including the two Irishmen he had executed in the French Quarter bar that night. Reasons and motivations had to be left opaque, as was the case every time he shared in a meeting.

Instead, he told him how he used drink to make him forget. He described his feelings in broad strokes. He described the shame and regret he would feel when he awoke the day after a heavy session, the blackouts that meant that he couldn’t remember what he had said, the panic and fear that he must have done something that he shouldn’t. He described how the obsession for alcohol became so powerful that it was all he could think about. He described how he could only focus on the next drink. He spoke about morning drinking, hiding bottles around the houses of the women he was seeing, of stealing money, getting into fights, drinking to oblivion. Anger. How self-neglect became self-harm and how he had entertained thoughts of putting an end to his misery. He told him about the promises that he made to himself and others that he would try to control his drinking and how every single attempt had failed. He told him that he was constitutionally unable to be honest when it came to drink. How he could not accept his problem. He explained how he had learned that his alcoholism was a disease, a progressive disease that would get worse the longer it was left unacknowledged and untreated. He explained how it would always get worse, never better.

As Milton told the story, he watched Alexander carefully. He had expected hostility or ridicule or the inevitable denial that he had a problem, but there was none of it.

Instead, Milton watched as he fell apart.

“You gotta help me, man. I know I got a problem, I tried to stop, but I can’t do it on my own. I tried, man. I tried, but I can’t.”

Milton told him that he could help him. He knew NA and AA were based on the same twelve steps. The old tropes spilled out. He explained how, if he took his recovery seriously, then, one day at a time, he could put his addiction behind him. There would be no judgment, no recriminations. He could have peace. The same peace that Milton had, mostly, found.

Alexander’s chin started to quiver and then, pathetic and forlorn, he started to sob.

Milton checked out, relieved to see that Alexander was still in the car when he returned to it. He took his cellphone from his pocket. He found Isadora’s business card and dialled the number.

“Hello?”

“It’s John.”

“Where are you?”

He frowned. “What?”

“One day too much for you?”

He understood. “I’ve been busy. I’m with your brother.”

“You’re what?”

“He’s in my car right now.”

“How…? What…?”

“I’ll explain when I see you, but I want to get moving in case he changes his mind.”

“Changes his mind from what?”

“You said that your father had paid for him to have a place in rehab?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“He’s going?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Hold on. It’s on my phone.” There was a pause, so Milton turned to the car and held up two fingers to Alexander to indicate that he would be with him soon. “I found it,” Isadora said. “I sent you the contact details.”

Milton’s phone pinged. Bridge House, 4150 Earhart Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70125.

“Got it,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll take him and check him in.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Chapter Twenty

Jackson Dubois opened the door to the bar and went back to the usual booth. Melvin Fryatt and Chad Crossland were waiting there, half-empty bottles of beer on the table before them. He looked at them, dirty clothes, scum caught beneath their nails, full of the twitches and tics of long-term addicts. He ignored the usual feeling of distaste at having to deal with the two of them and sat down opposite them.

“What happened?”

“We delivered the message like you wanted us to.”

“And?”

Fryatt snickered. “And we delivered it, you know what I’m saying? Old man came to the door, started giving us lip, giving us attitude, so Chad put a lick on him.”

Dubois turned to the white guy. “You hit him?”

“Sure, Mr. Dubois. That alright?”

Neither he nor Babineaux had any qualms with violence. If they had, he wouldn’t have hired men with a propensity towards it. “What did they say?”

“After? Didn’t get no time to say anything. This big brother came out of the house next door and, seeing as we’d already told them what you wanted us to tell them, we didn’t think you’d want no escalation, least not last night.”

“And when you go back again tonight?”

“You want us to go back?”

“Of course, I do.”

“I thought you was bluffing.”

“Do I look like the bluffing type?”

“I don’t—”

“I don’t bluff, Melvin. When I say something, I do it.”

“No, I—”

“You go back and you tell them they need to decide now. Right now.”

“That’s no problem, Mr. Dubois.”

“And when you go back, what you going to do?”

“Whatever you want.”

“You’ll ‘escalate’, will you?”

Melvin bristled. “Sure.”

“How will you do that, Melvin?”

“You want, we’ll put a nine right in the old man’s head.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Isadora had a shorter journey than Milton and Alexander, and she was already waiting in the parking lot as Milton pulled off the road. She got out of her car and leaned against it, waiting as Milton swung into the lot.

Alexander stiffened in the passenger seat. “What’s she doing here?”

“She wants to help.”

Alexander scowled.

“Is that all right?”

“If she’s all pious and shit, I’m just gonna jet.”

“No, you’re not.”

“So you say.”

“Shut up, Alexander.”

He parked next to Isadora’s beaten-up Ford Taurus.

“I’m serious.”

“She won’t be pious. She’s worried about you. And you’re not going anywhere.”

“No?”

“No. Because if you run, I’ll just come and get you again. You know what that will be like, right?”

He stared at him. “You said all I had to do was listen.”

Milton looked at him. He had a slight smile on his lips, but there was steel in his eyes that would be impossible to misinterpret. “That was back then. You asked me to help you. That means that the rules have changed. You’re going to be helped, whether you like it or not.”

He cut the engine and stepped outside. Isadora pushed away from her Taurus and walked across to the Buick. She glanced at Milton, swept by him, and went around to the other side. Milton walked a few paces away from the car, turning just once to see that everything was all right, saw that brother and sister were embracing, and turned away from them so that they could have a moment of privacy.

Milton and Isadora accompanied Alexander into the facility. Bridge House was a long-term residential recovery centre. It was a wide, modern, four-storey building that had, judging from a plaque in the lobby, been constructed thanks to the generosity of a benefactor and a city grant. There were a series of bedrooms and, on the ground floor, meeting spaces where the patients could have their group therapy sessions.

Isadora led the way to the front desk. Alexander followed and Milton brought up the rear, close enough to him that he would know there would be little chance of getting far if he chose to bolt. A large crucifix had been hung on the wall behind the desk. Next to that was framed scripture, “Humble yourself before the Lord, and He will lift you up.” It was from the Book of James, and Milton remembered it from his own study of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous when he had started his own recovery.

Isadora spoke to the receptionist, explaining that there was a room ready for Alexander Bartholomew and that he was here and ready to check in. The woman took down his details and, with a gentle smile, invited them to sit in the waiting area.

“I ain’t religious,” Alexander protested, loud enough for a patient who was loitering near the desk to overhear. “You see the things I seen, you wouldn’t believe in nothing like a merciful God, either.”

“Shut up, Alex,” Isadora said.

“It’s all fairy tales, meant to keep us down. It’s—”

“I’m not religious, either,” Milton interrupted. “It’s not about religion.”

Alexander jerked his head in the direction of the desk. “What about that shit up there, the scripture, the cross?”

“AA, NA — all the recovery programmes that work say you need a Higher Power.”

“There, you see! You lying to me, man! It’s all about God.”

“A Higher Power. I didn’t say what that meant. Some people use God. Others say G-O-D means Group Of Drunks. It means you get your strength from somewhere outside of yourself. It means you can’t do it by yourself.” Milton frowned a little as he said it, knowing that he had failed to listen to his own advice for much too long. He felt the sting of his own hypocrisy.

“Say what you want,” Alexander said. “I can smell the Bible in here.” His surliness was returning, and Milton knew that if they didn’t admit him quickly, the chances were good that he would lose his nerve and make a run for it. And, despite what he had said, Milton didn’t much feel like chasing him down.

A doctor dressed in a white coat stepped through a pair of double doors. He looked down at a clipboard. “Mr. Bartholomew?”

“Come on,” Izzy said.

Alexander stood. He turned to his sister, an uncertain expression on his face. Then he took a step in the wrong direction, to the door. But Milton was in the way. He put out his hand and rested it gently on Alexander’s elbow. His instinct was to place his thumb and forefinger over the pressure points and squeeze, to impel Alexander around and across to the doctor, but he didn’t do that. Instead, he gave a short shallow nod, never taking his eyes from Alexander’s.

He looked back at him, then looked down, turned, and walked to the doctor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s me.”

They waited until the doctor had spoken to Alexander, and then watched as he turned to the doors. The doctor held them open and indicated that he should go inside. He did. The doctor gave them a nod and followed Alexander out of sight.

Izzy turned for the exit, her eyes wet.

Milton followed her. There was a stand of flyers on the desk. Milton recognised the blue AA symbol on the leaflet and withdrew one from the stand, folding it neatly and putting it in his pocket. That’s right, hypocrisy. He had been white knuckling his recovery, ignoring others, trying to do it on his own. That was stupid, and it would only end up in one place. He would start to put that right.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Izzy said that she wanted to buy him breakfast as a way of saying thanks. Milton was hungry and, since the prospect of an hour alone with her was not unpleasant, he didn’t demur. She led the way to Panola Street and Riccobono’s, a café that Milton would never have found on his own. She parked, leaving enough space for Milton to slot the Buick in behind her.

They went inside, took a booth and ordered. Izzy said the place was known for its egg breakfasts. She ordered huevos rancheros, and Milton took the One, Two, Three Plate: one egg, two strips of applewood-smoked bacon, and three silver-dollar pancakes.

Once the waitress had departed, Izzy reached across the table and placed her hand atop Milton’s.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I told you, I’m happy to help.”

“Where did you find him?”

“Raceland, the place you said.”

“And, what? He just came with you?”

Milton shrugged. “Not exactly.”

“How did you get him to come, then?”

“I can be persuasive.”

“That bruise on his chin?”

He shuffled a little. “Shall we just leave it at that?”

She looked at him, a new curiosity on her face. “I don’t really care how you did it,” she said eventually. “He’s in there, where he needs to be, that’s enough for me.”

There was a pause, a silence that felt friendly and companionable and not awkward. The waitress returned with their breakfasts. Milton started into it with gusto. The food was excellent, and they were both quiet as they ate.

Milton paused to take a long drink from the tall glass of orange juice. “So,” he said. “What needs doing today?”

“What do you mean?”

“The houses.”

“You don’t have to help,” she said. “It was good of you to help yesterday, but come on…you’ve done more than enough already.”

“I want to help, Izzy. Yesterday was good. It feels good to be doing something positive. And clearing those lots, or building something…you can see your progress. It’s tangible. And it feels therapeutic.”

“Never heard it described like that before,” she said as she smiled a little, but not enough to mask the flicker of discomfort that had passed across her face.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a problem.”

“What kind?”

She looked hesitant. Milton encouraged her to go on.

“Last night. Two men came to the house.”

“Who?”

“Thugs. They’d never say, they probably don’t even know, but it’s obvious they were from Babineaux.”

“Guy who wants to build the mall?”

She nodded.

“And?”

“They told us that we had to accept the offer to buy the houses or they’ll make us leave. And they said it wasn’t ‘safe’ for me to be in court. They threatened us. My father got involved, and one of them punched him. He’s all right, a nasty bruise, pride hurt, you know, but they say they’re coming back again tonight.”

“Call the police?”

“They won’t do anything,” she said dismissively. “You couldn’t pay them to come down to the Lower Nine.” She shook her head with certainty. “My papa is a proud man. He won’t stand down, especially if he thinks me or my momma are being threatened. And if something happens to him, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“And you think they’ll come back?”

“Maybe Babineaux will win in court. Probably he will. But I can drag it out and that’ll cost him money, lost revenue and lawyers’ fees, maybe a lot of money. People like him don’t get to where they are by letting the little people tell them what to do. So, yes, I think they’re coming back. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

Milton laid down his knife and fork. He knew that he was on the precipice of a decision. The things he had done so far were nothing. Small acts of kindness, inconsequential when laid against the grand scheme of things. Bringing Alexander to rehab, even if that meant knocking out a gangbanger to do it, that was nothing. If he helped Izzy with this, he would be standing alongside her against something more momentous. Making enemies, most likely.

Didn’t matter.

His decision was never in question.

“I’ll help, Izzy.”

“I don’t see how you can.”

“Can you persuade your parents to go out? I bet they haven’t been into town for months, right?”

“No—”

“Look, here.” He reached for his roll of notes and peeled off four fifties. He laid them on the table. “Take them out and get them dinner. Somewhere nice.”

She shook her head and slid the notes back to him. “No, John. Out of the question.”

“Take it.” He pushed the money back to her. “Tell them about your brother. That’s a reason to celebrate, right?”

She shook her head, anger on her face. “What’s that going to achieve?”

“I want to have a quiet word with these men. No one else around.”

“So they go after you, instead.”

“I can look after myself.”

Her eyes flashed at him. “There are two of them, John.”

“Really, Izzy. Trust me. It’ll be fine.”

“They’ll just come back tomorrow, or the day after that.”

“No,” Milton said. “They won’t.”

Milton and Izzy drove back to Salvation Row. The crew had already made good progress with the lot that they were going to clear today. This one was particularly overgrown, with a stand of sturdy-looking saplings and scrub that reached up past the waist. Milton changed into his work clothes and went over to greet the men.

Hector tossed over a bottle of water. “You doing okay, Esé?”

“Doing fine.”

“Gonna be a hot one again. You ready?”

“Sure.”

He took a slug of water, left the bottle in the shade, and took one of the weed whackers. He fired it up, the engine chugging and fumes spewing out. He started into the worst of what was left, taking out the height again so that it would be easier later to come back and dig the growth out by the roots. The sun slowly climbed above them, baking the ground, the heat radiating in dizzying, woozy waves. Milton finished the water and started another, the sweat dripping off him, the chewed-up fragments of vegetation sticking to his skin.

It was just past ten when Solomon Bartholomew turned the corner onto Salvation Row and walked over to them. The old man moved a little gingerly, favouring one side over the other. He stopped at the lot, saw Milton, and raised his hand in greeting. Milton killed the weed whacker’s engine, propped it against a stubborn dogbush, and stepped through the remains of the vegetation.

“Morning,” Solomon said. His nose and right eye socket were badly bruised, the eye partially closed by the puffy inflammation.

Milton wiped his dirty, sweaty hand against his T-shirt and held it out. The old man took it in the same strong grip.

Milton pointed to his face. “How are you doing?”

“This? Ain’t nothing, John. You heard about what happened?”

“Yes.”

“Took my eye off ’em for a moment and got cold cocked. My own stupid fault.”

“You need to be careful, Solomon.”

He waved the admonition off. “Would’ve been different ten years ago. Shit, would’ve been different five years ago. Izzy ever tell you I used to box?”

“She didn’t.”

“Hell, yeah. In the army. Used to have a right hook like a trip hammer. Had twenty-two fights, dropped the other guy in the first round fifteen times, never got beat once. Young punk like that, yeah, just five years ago, I would’ve stitched him square on his jaw, dropped him right on his ass.”

Milton smiled at him. “I used to box, too.”

“What weight?”

“Middle.”

“Were you any good?”

“Not too shabby. Long time ago, though.”

“You still look like you got a bit to you.”

“I don’t know. I’m too old for all that now.”

“You and me both.”

Solomon took a bottle of water from the crate and handed it to Milton. He unscrewed the top and drank half of it down in one draught.

“Can I speak frankly, John?”

“Of course.”

“It’s not me that I’m worried about. They can have a go at me, knock me about if they have to, but I can take it. It’s Izzy. She’s headstrong, you must’ve seen that.”

Milton nodded.

“She won’t back off. They won’t scare her away, not over something like this. I’m afraid that they’ll up the ante until it gets to be something that could be real dangerous. And if something happened to her…” He let the sentence trail off.

Milton wiped his hand across his brow, palming the sweat out of his eyes. “Nothing’s going to happen to her, Solomon.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, I can see that you’re capable, but how can you say that for sure? These guys, they got money, they got a real motive to get rid of us, too.”

“I’ll say the same thing to you as I said to her. You’ve just got to trust me. Nothing’s going to happen to her. You have my word.”

He nodded. “Good of you, John. But you be careful. These guys, they ain’t fooling around.”

“I know they’re not. And I will.”

“The other thing, what I came down here to say, I heard about what you did for Alexander. I’m grateful, John. Me and Elsie, we’re both very grateful.”

“It’s the least I could do. He saved my friend’s life.”

“That may be, but you didn’t have to get involved.”

No, Milton thought. I did. He shrugged it off. “I’m just glad that I could help.”

“Me and Elsie are going over there tomorrow. Izzy thinks that we should give him a day to settle in, work out what’s what. He don’t need me and his mother hovering over him until he’s started to get himself straightened out.”

“That sounds best.”

“All right, then. I said what I came here to say.” He reached out and took Milton’s hand again. “You’re a good man, John, you know that? Don’t go thinking we’re not appreciative of what you’re doing for us because we are, you hear?”

Milton smiled. Solomon squeezed his hand and looked into his eyes with gratitude and sincerity. It made Milton feel fraudulent. A good man? Hardly. He would never be that. He was trying to atone, one day at a time, but he would never be that.

The end of the day came, and Izzy gave Milton a key to the front door. He went back to his hotel, showered and changed into fresh clothes, and then drove back into the Lower Ninth. He parked at the end of Salvation Row and stayed there until he saw a taxi draw up. Izzy led her parents out of the house and down the path. They were dressed smartly, Sunday best, and, as they got into the taxi, Milton watched as she paused and looked up and down the road.

He opened the door and stepped out of his rental, nodding at her as their eyes locked.

Milton approached the house, surveilling the street in both directions. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. He unlocked the door and went inside. It was as neat and tidy as he remembered. The hall was filled with a delicious aroma. There was a note on the table just inside the front door. ‘Dinner in the oven and the fridge. Thank you.’

Milton went through into the kitchen. The oven was lit, and, inside, there was a warm bowl of Elsie Bartholomew’s jambalaya. He opened the fridge door and saw a slice of Key lime pie covered by a sheet of plastic wrap. Milton put on an oven glove, transferred the bowl to the table, poured himself a glass of water, and set about it.

Milton was washing up the bowl when there was a knock on the door. He carefully laid the bowl on the drying rack, put his clean cutlery back in the drawer, wiped his hands dry, and went into the hall. He looked through the fish-eye peephole and saw two men waiting on the stoop. One black, one white. They were both agitated, swaying to and fro, most likely both high.

Milton opened the door. “Hello.”

The black guy frowned. “Who you?”

“Who are you?”

“Don’t get cute, brother.”

“I’m a friend of the family.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“She’s not here.”

“So where is she?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You think?”

“No, it doesn’t. You two are dealing with me now.”

The man squared up to him, his lip curling in a sneer. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“So who are you?”

“Yes, that is an important question. I’ll tell you, and I want you to remember so you can tell whoever it was who sent you here.”

“This don’t work like that, bro. I be telling you what to do, you don’t be telling me.”

“My name is John Smith, but, as far as you two are concerned, since we’re not on first name terms, I’m Mr. Smith. I want you to tell your boss that he has no interest in these houses any longer. They’re not for sale.”

The man puffed up his chest, but it was bravado. Milton could see that he was confused. “That right?” He reached down to his belt and flicked his jacket aside with the back of his hand. Milton saw the handle of a pistol. He moved his right leg back a half pace. He knew that it would make him look nervous, which was good, but it would also allow him to distribute his weight just as he wanted it.

“I’d give you a proper message to deliver, but neither of you look particularly bright, and I’m not sure that you’d remember it. So, you’re going to be the message.”

“What you talking about?” the white guy said. “You listen to this dude, Melvin? Yo, man, what you been smoking? The two of us and the one of you? How’s that going to turn out?”

“Badly,” Milton said.

The black man, the one called Melvin, touched his fingers to the butt of his pistol just as Milton drilled him with the stiffest right-hand jab he could manage. He pushed off with his right leg, putting all of his weight into it, and his knuckles connected with the man’s mouth and nose. He felt the bones crumple, heard them snap, and Melvin staggered backwards, tripped over the step up to the porch, and landed on his back with a heavy impact. The white guy went for his own pistol, but Milton was onto him already. His momentum carried him out of the door, and he swung out a left hook that terminated just above the man’s right ear. His head went limp, his lights already out, and he toppled over onto his left-hand side, his temple bouncing off the concrete paving slabs that comprised the path.

Milton assessed. He was out and would be for a while.

The black guy was the one in charge. He was shaking his head, clearing the cobwebs, his hand patting aimlessly for the gun. Milton took a step up to him and booted him in the chest. The man jerked up off the ground, landed, jerked up a second time as Milton kicked him again. He worked on the ribs, intending to break a couple of them, and his third hefty boot was rewarded with the crack that he wanted. The man mewled piteously.

Milton crouched down, confiscated the pistol, then went back to the white guy and took his pistol, too. A Beretta and an S&W. Street weapons, serial numbers filed off, probably seen plenty of action. Milton ejected the magazines, let them drop to the ground, and dropped the guns.

He crouched down, grabbed the lapels of the black guy’s jacket, and yanked him up. He wasn’t heavy, and Milton managed his weight easily. He slammed him against the side of the house.

“Hurts,” Melvin gasped.

“I haven’t even started yet. Tell your boss not to come around here again. If he sends anyone else, I’ll send them back in a worse state every time. You two are getting off easy. You got that?”

The man managed a spastic nod.

“Now,” Milton said. “I’m going to help you get into your car, and you are going to fuck off. Okay?”

“Yes,” he whispered through a mouthful of blood.

Milton did as he promised. He dragged the white guy to the car and tossed him across the back seats. Then, he went back to the black man and dropped him onto the driver’s seat. He waited until the engine started and the car set off, slowly, wending around across the road.

Milton locked the door, hurried to his car, and set off in the direction that the two men had taken. He picked their Lexus LS400 up two blocks to the north, dropped back until he was a hundred yards behind them, and then followed.

They took North Claiborne Avenue, then a right onto Elysian Fields Avenue, then Abundance Street and, finally, they parked outside the bar at 623 Frenchmen Street. The Spotted Cat looked like a happening venue. There were plenty of people outside, tourists digging the hole-in-the-wall vibe, tattooed buskers toting instruments and hoping to sit in with the bands that would play until the small hours.

Milton watched as they got out of the Lexus and went into the bar.

He waited.

After five minutes, a second car arrived. It was a Jaguar, an expensive sedan that looked out of place in this grimy neighbourhood. The Jaguar slotted into the side of the road next to the battered Lexus. Milton watched as the lights flicked off and a tall well-dressed man emerged. It was too dark for him to see him clearly, but he was a little over six feet tall, dark-haired and wearing a long black overcoat that must have cost him several hundred dollars. Upright posture. Confident. Milton thought he looked ex-military. The man was carrying a folded manilla envelope in his right hand. He crossed the road and went into the Spotted Cat.

Milton opened the door of the Buick and got out. He didn’t know how long he would have to do what he needed to do, but he assumed that it wouldn’t be long. He went to the front of the rental and unscrewed the radio antenna. He went to the trunk, opened it, and took an emergency seatbelt cutter out of the breakdown kit. He walked to the Jaguar, checking the road to ensure that he was unobserved. A truck had pulled up alongside the car, blocking him from view. He took the cutter, inserted the thin end between the upper part of the door and the chassis and firmly tapped it into the space with the heel of his hand. The jammed cutter created a narrow gap, just enough for him to slide the antenna inside the cabin and down to the lock button. It took a moment to find it properly, but, once he had lined them up, a sharp jab was all that was needed to depress the button and pop the locks.

He opened the door. The cabin was neat and tidy, with a folded copy of the Times-Picayune resting on the dash. Milton opened the glove box and took out a clear plastic folder, within which were stored a neat sheaf of papers. He opened the folder and quickly shuffled through the contents. He found a card from Esurance Insurance Services, Inc. that confirmed that liability insurance was in place for the vehicle. The insured’s name was listed as Jackson K. Dubois, and his address was 5201 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans. The card was clipped to the car registration paper and confirmed that Dubois was the registered owner.

Milton took out his phone, activated the flash, and took pictures of each document. He replaced them in the folder and slid that back into the glove box. The truck pulled away. He got out, shut the door, and went back to the Buick.

The man — Jackson Dubois? — emerged from the bar five minutes later. Milton watched him as he crossed the road. As he passed beneath the glow of a street lamp, he saw that his face was stiff with suppressed anger. He walked quickly, as if anxious not to stay in the neighbourhood any longer than was absolutely necessary. He blipped the lock from ten paces away, not noticing that the doors were already unlocked. He got inside and quickly drove away.

Milton would have followed him, but that wasn’t necessary now.

It was a good start, but he wasn’t finished yet. Not even close. If Izzy was right, there were millions of dollars on the line. The kinds of businessmen who dealt in stakes that large, they were the sort with no time for scruples. The sort who had no compunction in sending two strung-out junkies to do their bidding for them. Milton had dealt with men and women like that before. There would be an escalation, and it would be more difficult to respond next time. More dangerous.

He was going to have to persuade Izzy to move her parents out of the house, just until things had settled down. He knew they wouldn’t like it, especially Solomon, but it wasn’t safe for them there. They would have to stay in a hotel until he had managed to put a lid of things.

But that wasn’t going to be easy.

Milton was going to need some leverage.

He was going to need help.

He was going to need to call in a favour.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Joel Babineaux flew to Lafayette in an entirely different mood from the miserable funk he had stewed through when he had last followed the route of the interstate, back east to New Orleans, two nights ago. This time, the Westland was carrying ten members of his executive team, and there was a co-pilot in the seat next to him in the event that he was needed elsewhere.

He buzzed the facility, swooping down deliberately low, and, rather than landing in the field, he brought the chopper down in the parking lot. A storm of dust was kicked up by the rotor wash. Little stones were flung around, many of them striking against the expensive cars that were parked a little too close. He pushed open the door, lowered himself carefully to the ground, and then stalked to the doors, aware of his limp, but dispassionate about it.

The Pirate of Canal Street.

It had never been more pertinent.

He swept into the lobby, his lawyers and executive staff trailing behind him. The security guards looked up at them in confusion.

“Get Morgan,” he said to the nearest man.

“He’s not—”

“Yes, he is. Get him, now, or you’ll be the first one I fire.”

The guard furrowed his brow in doubt, spoke to his colleague, picked up his handset, and spoke to someone on the other end of the line.

Pierce Morgan’s personal assistant emerged from the elevators less than three minutes later. She managed a thin, weak smile and invited them upstairs. Mr. Morgan would see them, she said.

The elevator deposited them on the executive floor. There was a lounge with plush furniture and deep carpets, and a picture window that offered the same resplendent view as the one from the conference room that Babineaux had been in just two days previously. He told the others to wait and followed the girl into the suite of offices. Morgan’s was the largest of them with thick deep-pile carpet, mahogany tables, and a huge desk.

Morgan was at his window, his back turned.

The assistant cleared her throat.

Morgan turned. His face was puce, livid with rage.

Babineaux grinned.

“You’re responsible for this?”

“Let the best man win. That’s what you said.”

“This c-c-company,” he began, his voice cracking. “This company was started by my great-grandfather nearly two hundred years ago. I took it over when you were just a shake in your daddy’s pants. This company is an institution in the South. It’s… it’s…”

“Sit down,” Babineaux said, dismissively waving his hand at the chair.

Morgan glared at him, but, to Babineaux’s pleasure and surprise, he actually started to do as he was told.

Babineaux stalled him with a raised hand. “On second thought, don’t. Stay on your feet.”

“What…?”

“That’s not your seat anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That seat. It’s mine. I own it. That desk, this office, this whole building. I own all of it.” He walked over to the desk and picked up a framed picture of Morgan and his wife standing in the porch of what looked like a grand colonial house. “This where you live?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Lived, I should say. My lawyers said that the corporation owns the deeds, so that’s mine now, too. The cars. Your yacht. All your country club memberships, silly little things, you had them all in the corporation’s name. They’re all mine, Pierce.”

“I’m going to tie you up in litigation from here until eternity. I’m going to crush you, boy. You hear me? I am going to—”

Babineaux paced across the room, planting his good leg and pushing off faster than Morgan could move. He caught the older man by the lapels of his jacket and pushed him up against the plate-glass window. He braced his right forearm across Morgan’s withered old neck and pushed. “Shut the fuck up,” he hissed. “I’ve had as much as I can take of you telling me what I can and can’t do. How about this, boy? How about I tell you what I’m going to do. I am going to swallow all of this up. By the time I’m done, you won’t be able to tell where you end and I begin.”

“This won’t stand,” he gasped. “The lies, manipulating the share price… I know what you’ve done. I can’t even begin to think about the laws that you’ve broken today.”

Babineaux pulled his arm away and stood back, straightening out the old man’s ruffled suit and smiling broadly at him. “So, sue me. But remember, the mall contract is mine. All of it. You want to think about how many lawyers $326 million is going to buy me.” He stepped back. “A lot of lawyers. But, come on, we’re old friends, right? I’m not going to be a blowhard about it. Take your personal things. I’ll see that you get a box. You can have thirty minutes. After that, I want you off my property.”