The Driver

#2 MEGAN MELISSA GABERT

Meg Gabbert had always wanted to act. She was a born performer, that was what she would tell anyone who cared to ask her about her ambitions, and, as far as she was concerned, she was going to make it. She hadn’t decided exactly what her talents best suited — acting or singing, she could do both — but there was no question about it in her mind: she was going to be famous. It wasn’t in doubt.

When she was in seventh grade, she had taken to the stage in her school’s production of Bugsy Malone. She had hoped to play Tallulah, Fat Sam’s moll and Bugsy’s old flame, but that role had been assigned to a rival. She ended up playing Blousey Brown, a sassy dame who had designs on Hollywood and, once she had gotten over her disappointment, she decided that this was the better role, one that was more suited to her. She had a great voice and everyone said that she was brilliant on opening night. The local paper exclaimed that she stole the show. It was something she would never forget: the excitement she felt while she was standing there in the single spotlight, belting out the numbers to a roomful of parents and friends. If she had needed any confirmation about the course she had chosen for herself, this was it. From that point forwards, performing would be the only thing she was interested in doing.

Getting to the stage where she could make enough money to support herself through her acting was going to take some time and, until that happened, she had paid her way with a little hooking. It had started with webcams but then she had realised there was more to be made by going a little further. She had posted an ad on the Fresno/Adult Services page of Craigslist a year after she graduated from high school. She had a killer photo from a session she did for her acting portfolio and the replies had been instantaneous. She was hanging out with a guy in those days, this dude called Clay, nothing serious, just messing around, and she had persuaded him to come along and keep an eye on her. He drove her from job to job. They worked out a routine to keep her safe: he called her cell ten minutes after she went inside and if there was no answer then he would know that she was in trouble. If she answered, everything was fine. She charged a hundred bucks an hour and gave him twenty.

It was going okay but she was always a little nervous that she’d bump into a john again when she was off the clock. She knew, too, that there was better money to be made in a bigger city. She thought of Los Angeles but the idea of being closer to Hollywood and her dream frightened her; she wasn’t ready for that yet. San Francisco seemed like a good compromise.

The difference in the city was stark. It was full of johns, and they were of a much higher class than the bums and stiffs she was used to in Fresno. There were plenty of out-of-towners, away from home and bored and looking for a little fun. She would take her laptop to a hotel room, post an ad and wait for the calls. She could get through four or five appointments and clear a thousand bucks every night, easy. The men were a real mixture: some were old and wanted to daddy her; others were young and trim and good-looking. The money was amazing. She took rooms in the nicest hotels with views of the Golden Gate and ate in the best restaurants. She never had any problems with what she was doing. It was another performance, in a way. The johns were prepared to pay to spend time with her. She could play any number of parts for them: schoolgirl, vamp, prim secretary. Their adulation was instant and obvious. For as long as she was with them she was desired: full of potential, the centre of attention, loved, rich. And what was wrong with that?

She heard the Cadillac before she saw it. It backfired loudly from a couple of blocks away, the noise carrying down the street and around the corner to where she was waiting at 6^th and Irving. The engine sounded throaty and unhealthy, as if it was about to expire, and she had been nonplussed as it pulled over to stop at the edge of the sidewalk opposite her. The man she had spoken to on the phone had said that he was an executive from a company that dealt in cattle all the way across the south-west. He certainly had the accent for it, a mild southern burr that leant his voice a musical quality. She hadn’t expected him to be driving a beat-up car like this but, as she crossed the sidewalk to the open window, she chided herself for jumping to conclusions.

A bum begging for change next to the entrance to JC Penney watched as the door was opened for her. He watched as she carefully slid into the car, her hands pressing down her skirt as she lowered herself into the seat. The man didn’t think twice about it and she hardly registered; he was hungry, and more interested in adding to the couple of bucks in change that had been tossed in to the cap on the sidewalk before his folded legs. If he had paid attention, perhaps he would have noticed the look of confusion on the girl’s face as she looked, for the first time, at the man who had picked her up. He might have remembered more if he had known that he would be the last person to see the girl alive.

18

Milton leant back and traced his fingers against the rough vinyl surface of the table. It had been marked by years of graffiti: gang tags, racial epithets and unflattering remarks about the police, some of them quite imaginative. There was a dirty glass of water, an ashtray that hadn’t been emptied for days and, set against the wall, a tape recorder. He crossed his arms and looked up at police officers who were sitting opposite him. The first was a middle-aged man with several days of growth on his chin, an aquiline face and a lazy left eye. The second was a little older, a little more senior, and, from the way the two of them had behaved so far, Milton could see that he was going to keep quiet while his partner conducted the interview.

The young one pressed a button on the tape recorder and it began to spool.

“Just to go through things like we mentioned to you, we’re gonna do a taped interview with you.”

“That’s fine,” Milton said.

“There’s my ID. And there’s my partner’s.”

“Okay.”

“So I’m Inspector Richard Cotton. My colleague is Chief of Detectives Stewart Webster.”

“I can see that.”

“Now, first of all, can you please state your name for me?”

“John Smith.”

“And that’s S-M-I-T-H.”

“Correct.”

“Your date of birth, sir?”

“Thirty-first of October, 1973.”

“That makes you forty, right?”

“It does.”

“And your address at home?”

“259 Sixth Street.”

“What’s that?”

“A hotel.”

“An SRO?”

“That’s right.”

“Which one?”

“The El Capitan.”

“How are you finding that? Bit of a dive, right?”

“It’s alright.”

“You say so. Phone number?”

He gave them the number of his cellphone.

“Are you alright for water?”

“Yes.”

He tossed a packet of cigarettes on the table. “Feel free to light up. We know this can be stressful.”

Milton had to stifle a long sigh of impatience. “It would be stressful if I had something to hide. But I don’t, so I’ll pass, but thanks anyway. Now, please — can we get started? There’s already been too much waiting around. Ask me whatever you like. I want to help.”

Cotton squinted: one eye, a little spooky. “Alright, then. John Smith — that’s your real name, right?”

“It is.”

“And you’re English, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve been to England. Holiday. Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, all that history — one hell of a place.”

Milton rolled his eyes. Was he serious? “Just ask me about Madison.”

“In a minute, John,” the man said with exaggerated patience. “We just want to know a little bit about you first. So how come you ended up here?”

“I’ve been travelling. I was in South America for six months and then I came north.”

“Through Mexico?”

“That’s right.”

“How long you been here?”

“Nine months. I was here once before, years ago. I liked it. I thought I’d come back and stay a while.”

“How have you been getting by?”

“I’ve been working.”

Cotton’s good eye twitched. “You got a visa for that?”

“Dual citizenship.”

“How’s that?”

“My mother was American.” It was a lie but it was what his passport said. Dual citizenship saved unnecessary nonsense that would have made it more difficult for him to work. Being able to claim some connection to the United States had also proven to be useful as he worked his way north up the continent.

“Alright, John. Let’s change the subject — you want to talk about Madison, let’s talk about Madison. You know we’ve dug up two bodies now, right?”

“I’ve seen the news.”

“And you know none of them are her?”

That was news to him. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“That’s right — none of them. See, Madison had a metal pin in her hip. Fell off her bike when she was a girl, messed it up pretty good. They had to put one in to fix it all together. The remains in the morgue are all whole, more or less, and none of them have anything like that.”

Milton felt a moment of relief but immediately tempered it: it was still surely just a matter of time.

“That doesn’t mean we won’t find her,” Cotton went on. “If you’ve been watching the news, you’ll know that we’re still searching the beach and we’re very concerned that we’re gonna find more. So, with all that being said, let’s get down to meat and potatoes, shall we?”

“Please.”

“Why’d you do it, John?”

Milton wasn’t surprised. “Seriously?”

“What did you do with her body?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not kidding, John.”

“No, you’ve got to be. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“Answer the question, please.”

He looked dead straight at the cop. “I just answered it. I didn’t do it. I have absolutely no idea where she is.”

“So you say. But on your own account you were the last person to see her alive.”

He clenched his fists in sudden frustration. “No — that’s not what I said.”

“You got a temper, John?”

“I don’t know that she’s dead. I hope she isn’t. I said that I was one of the last people to see her before she disappeared. That’s different.”

“We know the two girls we’ve got in the morgue were all hookers. Madison was hooking when she disappeared. It’s not hard to join the dots, is it?”

“No, it isn’t. But it has nothing to do with me.”

“Alright, then. Let’s change tack.” He took a cigarette from the packet and lit it, taking his time about it. He looked down at his notes. “Okay. The night after she disappeared — this is the Friday — we’ve got a statement from Victor Leonard that says you went back to Pine Shore. He said he saw you coming out of the garden of the house where the party was the night before. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“We checked the security camera, Mr. Smith. There’s one on the gate. We looked and there you are, climbing over the wall. Why’d you do something like that?”

Milton gritted his teeth. The camera must have run off rechargeable batteries that would cut in when the power went out. “The gate was locked,” he said.

“Why didn’t you buzz to get in?”

“Because someone had changed the code to the gate after Madison disappeared. Rather than wasting your time with me, I’d be asking why that was. A girl goes missing and the next day the code to the gate is changed? Why would they want to keep people out? Don’t you think that’s a little suspicious?”

“We’ll be sure to bear that in mind. What were you looking around for?”

“Anything that might give me an idea what caused Madison to be so upset that she’d run away.”

“You spoke to Mr. Leonard?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Madison went to his house. I wanted to know what she said to him.”

“He say anything useful?”

He thought of Brady. “Not really.”

“And you don’t think all this is something that the police ought to do?”

“Yes, I do, but Madison’s boyfriend had already reported her missing and he got the cold shoulder. Most crimes are solved in the first few hours after they happen. I didn’t think this could wait.”

Cotton chain-smoked the cigarette down to the tip. “Know a lot about police work, do you John?”

“Do you have a sensible question for me?”

“Got a smart mouth, too.”

“Sorry about that. Low tolerance level for idiots.”

“That’s it, John. Keep giving me attitude. We’re the only people here keeping you from a pair of cuffs and nice warm cell.”

Milton ignored the threat.

Cotton looked down at his notes. “You said she was frightened?”

“Out of her mind.”

“That’s not what security at the party said.”

“What did they say?”

“Said you barged in and went after her.”

“I heard her screaming.”

“How’d you explain how one of them ended up with concussion and a broken nose?”

“He got in my way.”

“So you broke his nose and knocked him out?”

“I hit him.”

“It raises the question of that temper of yours again.”

Milton repeated himself patiently. “I heard Madison screaming.”

“So?”

“So I went in to see if she was alright.”

“And?”

“I told her I’d take her home.”

“And?”

“She got around me and ran.”

Cotton got up and started to circle the table. “You mentioned Trip Macklemore. We’ve spoken to him. He said you had Madison’s bag in the back of your taxi.”

“I did. I gave it to him afterwards.”

“What was it doing in your car?”

“She left it there.”

“But you’d already taken her where she needed to go. Why would she have left it?”

“I said I’d wait for her.”

“You didn’t have another job to go to?”

“She was nervous. I didn’t think it was right to leave her there, on her own, with no way to get back to the city.”

“You were going to charge her for that?”

“I hadn’t decided. Probably not.”

“A favour, then? Out of the goodness of your heart?”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“He’s English,” the other man, Webster, offered. “What is it you call it?”

“Chivalry?”

“That’s right, chivalry.”

“Don’t know about that, boss, doesn’t strike me as all that likely. Taxi drivers aren’t known for their charity.”

“I try and do the right thing,” Milton said.

He looked down at his notes. “You work for Vasilly Romanov, too, right? Mr. Freeze — the ice guy?”

“Yes.”

“We spoke to him. He had to have words with you the afternoon she went missing. That right?”

“I dropped some ice.”

“He says you were agitated.”

“Distracted. I knew something was wrong.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I already have.”

Cotton slapped both hands on the table. “Where is she?”

Milton stared at him and spoke calmly and carefully. “I don’t know.”

He drummed the table. “What did you do with her body?”

“It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Is she on the headland?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me share a secret with you, John. The D.A. thinks you did it. He thinks you’ve got a big guilty sign around your neck. He wants to throw the book at you.”

“Knock yourself out.” Milton calmly looked from one man to the other. “We can go around the houses on this all day if you want but I’m telling you now: if anything has happened to Madison it has absolutely nothing to do with me, and it doesn’t matter how you phrase your questions, it doesn’t matter if you shout and scream and it doesn’t matter if you threaten me — the answers will always be the same. I didn’t do it. It has nothing to do with me. And I’m not a fool. You can say what you want but I know you don’t think that I did it.”

“Really? How would you know that, John?”

“Because you would have arrested me already and this interview would be under caution. Look, I’m not a fool. I understand. I know you need to eliminate me. I know that I’m going to be a suspect. It stands to reason. I’ll do whatever you need me to do so that you can be happy that I’m not the man you want. The car I was driving that night is parked outside. Get forensics to have a look at it. You can do it without a warrant — you don’t need one, you have my authorisation. If you want to search my room, you’ve just got to ask.” He reached into his pocket and deposited his keys on the table. “There. Help yourself.”

“You’re awfully confident, John.”

“Because I have nothing to hide.” Webster was fingering the cigarette packet. Milton turned to him. “You’re the ranking officer here, right? I’m not going to tell you your job but you’ve got to put a lead on your friend here and get off this dead end — right now. You’re wasting time you don’t have. If Madison is still alive, every minute we’re doing this makes it less likely she’ll be alive when you find her.”

Webster cocked an eyebrow. “You like telling us what we should be doing so much, Mr. Smith — what would you be doing?”

“I’d be looking at the footage from that CCTV camera. Maybe you’ll see what happened. And everyone who went to the party that night will have gone through the gate. You should start looking into them.”

“The footage has been wiped,” he said.

“What?”

“There’s nothing from the Friday night.”

“Who wiped it?”

“We don’t know.”

“You need to talk to whoever did that, then. Right?”

“It was three months ago. It’s not unreasonable.”

Cotton took over. “You got anything to tell us, John?”

Milton thought about the two men in the house after the party. He would have told the cops what had happened, what he had overhead, but how could he do that without telling them that he had broken in? Why would he have done something like that? It wasn’t going to be possible. That was a lead that he would have to follow for himself.

“Alright, officers. Is there anything else?”

They said nothing.

“I’m going to be on my way. You know where I am and you’ve got my number. If you want me to stay, you’re going to have to arrest me.”

He pushed the chair away and stood up from the table.

19

Milton needed a meeting. As he drove across town he felt as if he needed one even more than usual. He wasn’t overly worried — he knew he would be able to run rings around the police — but the interview had still left him angry and frustrated. He had known that the police would treat him as a suspect — he would have done the same, if the roles had been reversed — but they seemed fixated. The longer they wasted on him, the worse it would be for Madison. And also, for a man in his particularly precarious position, there was the overriding need to be careful. More than careful. An arrest, his fingerprints and mugshot taken, metadata passing between anonymous servers, he knew that was all the spooks at GCHQ or the NSA would need to pin him down and then it would all kick off again. The firestorm that had blazed around him in Juárez would spark back to life. Worse this time. He knew the prudent thing to do would have been to jump town the moment that there had been even a sniff of trouble. The day after Madison had disappeared. Now, though, he couldn’t. The city had closed around him like a fist. If he ran, the police would see it as a sign of guilt. They would have all the evidence they needed to push their suspicions about him up a notch. There would be a manhunt. His name would be in the papers. His picture on the internet.

He might as well telephone Control.

I’m in San Francisco.

Come and get me.

No, he thought, as he drove across town.

He had to stay and see this through until the end.

He gripped the wheel tightly and concentrated on the pattern of his breathing. The rooms had taught him that anger and frustration were two of his most delicate triggers. A good meeting was like meditation and he knew that it would help him to put the lid back on his temper.

Eva was waiting for him, leaning against the wall by the door. She was wearing a woollen jumper, expensive, long enough to reach well down beyond her waist, a pair of jeans and chunky leather boots. She had a black felt beret on her head. She looked supremely cute.

“Hello, John.”

“You’re early.”

She leaned forward, pressing herself away from the wall. “Thought maybe I’d give you a hand. That alright?”

“Course,” he said.

They worked quickly and quietly: preparing the room, setting up the table with the tea and coffee, washing the crockery. Milton’s thoughts went back to the meeting with the police. He thought about everything he knew. Two escorts found dead on the same stretch of headland. Madison going missing just five miles from the same spot. It looked bad for her. Maybe there was another explanation for what had happened, but, then again, maybe there wasn’t. The most obvious explanation was often the right one.

“You alright?” Eva asked him.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Looks like you’re a thousand miles away.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got some stuff on my mind.”

“A problem shared is a problem halved.”

“I know.”

The regulars started to arrive twenty minutes before the meeting was scheduled to start. Milton went behind the table and made their coffees. The room was quickly busy. Eva was waylaid by a young actor who obviously had a thing for her. She rolled her eyes and, as he nudged her towards the room for the start of the meeting, she paused by the table.

“You want to get dinner again?”

“I’m not sure I’ll be the best company tonight.”

“I’ll take the risk”.

She looked straight at him and winked.

“Okay,” he smiled. “That’d be great.”

The room emptied out as it got closer to the top of the hour and Milton quickly poured himself a coffee.

Smulders hijacked him as he was about to go inside.

“About time you opened that mouth of yours in a meeting, John.”

“Do I get to say no?”

Smulders looked at him with an intense sincerity. “Man, you need me to remind you? You need me to explain? You’re sick. And the cure for your sickness, the best cure I ever found, is to get involved and participate.” He enunciated that last word carefully, each syllable pronounced slowly, and then pressed a pamphlet into his hands. The title on the pamphlet was THE TWELVE PROMISES. “Here they are, Smith. Read them out when I tell you and think on them when you do. Alright?”

“Fine.”

Milton sat down as Smulders brought the gavel down and opened proceedings. He had recruited a speaker from another meeting that he attended, a middle-aged woman with worry-lines carved in deep grooves around her eyes and prematurely grey hair. She started to speak, her share focussed on the relationship with her ex-husband and how he had knocked her around. It was worthy, and she was a powerful speaker, but Milton found his thoughts turning back to the interview and the police. They had already wasted too much time and now they threatened to waste even more. It was three months already. Milton did not know if Madison was still alive but if she was, and if she was in danger, the longer they wasted with him made it less likely that they would be able to help her.

The speaker came to the end of her share, wiping away the tears that had fallen down her cheeks. Smulders thanked her, there was warm applause, and then the arms went up as men and women who had found similarities between the speaker’s story and their own — that was what they were enjoined to look for, not differences — lined up to share their own feelings. Milton listened for ten minutes but couldn’t help zoning out again.

Richie Grimes put his hand up. He had come into the room late and Milton hadn’t noticed him. He looked now and saw, with shock, that the man’s face was badly bruised. His right eye was swollen and almost completely shut, a bruise that ran from black to deep purple all the way around it. There was a cut on his forehead that had been sutured shut and another beneath his chin. Milton watched as he lowered his arm again; he moved gingerly, pain flickering on his face. Broken ribs.

“My name is Richie, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi Richie,” they all said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Look at the fucking state of me, right? It’s like what I was sharing about last time, you know, the trouble I’m in? I guess maybe I was hoping it was all bluster, that it’d go away, but I always knew that was just wishful thinking. So I was coming home from work last night and — boom — that was it, I got jumped from behind by these two goons with baseball bats. Broken nose, two broken ribs. I got a week to pay back all the money that I owe or they’re coming back. I’d tell the police but there’s nothing they can do — what are they gonna do, put a man on me twenty-four hours? Nah,” he shook his head, “that ain’t gonna happen. If I can’t find the money, I’m gonna get more of the same and now, with the ribs and everything, I’m not sure I can even work properly. I gotta tell you, I’m closer to a drink today than I have been for months. I’ve been to two other meetings today already. Kinda feel like I’m hanging on by my fingertips.”

The others nodded their understanding and agreement. The woman next to him rested her hand on his shoulder and others used his story to bounce off for similar experiences of their own. If Richie was looking for advice, he didn’t get any — that was ‘grandiose,’ and not what you came to A.A. to find — but he got sympathy and empathy and examples that he could use as a bulwark against the temptation of getting drunk. Milton listened to the simple tales that were told, his head down and his hands clasped tightly on his lap.

The meeting drew towards a close and Smulders looked over to him and nodded. It was time. Milton took the pamphlet that his fingers had been fretting with all meeting and cleared his throat.

“‘If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.’” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “‘We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. The feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Are these extravagant promises?’”

The group chimed back at him “We think not.”

“‘They are being fulfilled among us — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialise if we work for them.’”

Peace.

Serenity.

We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.

We will not regret?

Milton doubted that could ever possibly come to pass. Not for him. His transgressions were different to those of the others. He hadn’t soiled himself in the office, slapped his wife, crashed his car. He had killed nearly one hundred and fifty men and women. He knew that he would always regret the past, every day for as long as he lived, and what was the point in even trying to shut the door on it? The room behind his door was stuffed full of bodies, stacked all the way up to the ceiling, one hundred and fifty corpses and gallons of blood, and the door wouldn’t begin to close.

They said the Lord’s Prayer and filed out. Milton put away the coffee and biscuits and started to clean up. The usual group of people were gathering in the lobby to go for their meal together and Eva was with them, smoking a cigarette and waiting for him to finish up. Milton was turning the tea urn upside down in the sink when the door to the bathroom opened and Richie Grimes hobbled out.

Milton turned to Eva and mouthed that he would be five minutes. She nodded and went outside.

“You alright?” Milton asked Grimes.

“Yeah, man.”

Milton held up the plate that had held the biscuits; it was covered with crumbs and one solitary cookie. “Want it? Last one.”

“Sure.” He reached across and took it. “Thanks. It’s John, right?”

“Right.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever heard you share.”

“I’m more of a listener,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been ten rounds with Tyson.”

“But it was good to get it off your chest?”

“Sure. Getting rid of the problem’s another matter. I ain’t barely got a cent to my name. How am I gonna manage to find five large?”

“There’ll be a way.”

“I wish I shared your confidence. The only way I can think is to get another loan, but that’s just putting it off.” He gave him an underwhelming smile. “Time to run. See you next week?”

The man looked like a prisoner being led out to the gallows. Milton couldn’t let him go like that.

“This guy you owe the money to — who is he?”

“What good’s it gonna do, telling you that?”

“Try me. What’s his name?”

“Martinez.”

“Works down in the Mission District?”

“That’s right. You know him?”

Milton shrugged. “Heard the name.”

“I should never have gotten involved with him.”

“If it were me, Richie, I’d make sure I stayed in my place apart from when I was at work or at meetings. I wouldn’t put myself somewhere where I could get jumped again.”

“How am I gonna get the cash if I hide out at home?”

“Like I say,” Milton said, “there’ll be a way. That’s what they tell us, right — we put our faith in a power greater than ourselves.”

“I’ve been praying for six months, John. If there’s a power, it ain’t been listening.”

“Keep praying.”

20

Arlen Crawford was nervous. The first debate was two weeks to the day before the primary. It was held in a converted hat factory that had been turned into a new media hub with start-ups suckling the teats of the angel investor who owned the building, offering space in exchange for a little equity. There was a large auditorium that had only recently been done out, still smelling of fresh plaster and polyethylene. There was a live audience; card-carrying local party members packed into the cramped seating like sardines in a tin. There was a row at the front — fitted with much more comfortable seating — that was reserved for the heavy-hitters from Washington who had made the trip west to see the candidates in action for the first time. Crawford looked down from the back of the room and onto the temporary stage, bathed in the glare of the harsh television lights. Each candidate had a lectern with a name card placed along the top. Governor Robinson’s was in the centre; that had been the prize following an hour’s horse-trading with the other candidates. The prime position would be fought over for the remaining two debates. Other bargaining chips included the speaking order, whether or not there would be opening and closing remarks, and a host of other ephemera that might have appeared trivial to the unenlightened observer. Crawford did not see them that way at all: to the politicos who were guiding the campaigns of the candidates, they were almost worth dying for. You lose the little battles and you better get ready to lose the war.

The negotiations before the debate had been exhausting. Crawford had had little sleep and the evening had already taken on a surreal tinge that was accentuated by his fatigue. It was already a strange scene. The building wasn’t big enough to offer the candidates individual rooms before the debate and so a communal greenroom had been arranged, with each combatant ensconced in a corner with his or her spouse and seconds close at hand. Food had been laid on — platters of sandwiches — together with cans of soda and an urn of coffee. Robinson was the only candidate who looked totally at ease in the room, his monumental confidence sweeping out of him in great waves. He overwhelmed the room, or so it seemed. His backup team was as frantic as the others, making last minute calibrations to his opening statement and preparing a series of stock lines to fall back on should he need them. It was a little late for that, Crawford thought, but he understood the need to be busy with something if only as a distraction from the nerves.

Robinson moved among his rivals like a Mafia don, giving them his double-clasped handshake, clapping them on the shoulders, squeezing their biceps, all the while shining out his gleaming smile. He laughed at their jokes and made his own, the consummate professional. Crawford didn’t have that ease with people, and never had. It was an unctuousness that you had to possess if you were going to make it as a player on the national stage. That was fine. He was happy with his strengths and he recognised his weaknesses. That kind of self-awareness, in itself, was something that was rare to find and valuable to possess. Robinson had amazing talents but his instincts were off. Crawford’s instincts were feral, animal. He was a strategist, a street fighter, and you needed a whole different set of skills for that. Robinson was surface but Crawford was detail. He devoured every tiny bit of public life. He hovered above things like a hawk, aware of the smallest nuances yet always conscious of the whole. He could see how one small change might affect things now or eleven moves down the line. It wasn’t a calculation he was aware of making; it was something that he processed, understood on a fundamental level.

One of the local party big shots came into the room and announced that it was time. Robinson, who was talking to the Senator for New Mexico, wished everyone good luck and led the way to the door. Crawford waited at the back, absorbing the energy of the room and the confidence — or lack thereof — that he could see in other candidates. The retinues filtered into the auditorium. He hooked a doughnut from the refreshment table and followed them.

The debate couldn’t have started any better. Robinson was totally in control, delivering his opening position with statesmanlike charm, so much so that Crawford found himself substituting the drab surroundings of the auditorium for what he imagined the General Assembly of the United Nations might look like with his boss before the lectern, or with the heavy blue drapes of the Oval Office closed behind him during an address to the nation. He was, Crawford thought with satisfaction, presidential. The first question was posed — something on healthcare reform — and Robinson stayed away from it, letting the rest tear strips out of one another. Crawford watched and could hardly believe their luck. It wasn't hard. They were murdering themselves. Scott Martin tried to explain his very elaborate health-care scheme and got so bollixed up that he threw up his hands and said, “Well, this thing makes a lot more sense on paper.”

“Next question,” the moderator said.

“Delores Orpenshaw.” A shrew in a green dress and white pearls. “The way folk around here see it, this country is broken. My question for the candidates is simple: how would they fix it?”

“Governor Robinson?”

Crawford felt the momentary chill of electricity: nerves. Robinson looked the questioner right in the eye. “How would I fix it? Well, Delores, there are some pretty fundamental things that we need to do right away. We need to reverse the flood of Third World immigration. The Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans — we need to stop the flow and we need to send back the ones who are here illegally. It’s only logical that the more a country gets a Third World population, the more it will suffer from Third World problems. We need to reverse globalisation to bring back real jobs to this great country. That will help bring back personal pride and that helps restore pride in the community. We need to expose the climate change lies. That’s the constant claim of the technocrats but not everyone agrees. As an army of global warming zealots marches on Washington, the truth is that their Orwellian consensus is based not on scientific agreement, but on bullying, censorship and fraudulent statistics. We need to restore discipline in our schools and respect for others. We need to rebuild a sense of national unity and pride. Only if we do those things can we start to take back this great nation from the political elite in our nation’s capitol.”

There was a smattering of applause that grew in intensity, triggering more applause and then more, and then, suddenly, it had become a wave as the audience — almost all of them — rose to their feet and anointed the Governor with an ovation. The moderator struggled to make her voice heard as she asked the others for their views.

It went on for another hour in the same vein: Robinson picked his spots and was rewarded volubly every time he finished speaking. Eventually, the moderator brought the debate to an end. They all dashed to the spin room, another wide space that had been equipped with folding tables with trailing multi-plugs for laptops and cellphones. Crawford and the rest of his team split up and worked the room, button-holing the hacks from the nationals and talking up the points that Robinson had made that had gone down well, quietly de-emphasising the points that hadn’t found their marks. There was no need to spin things.

Crawford remembered the old political adage: losers spin, winners grin.

And they were winners.

21

Milton turned the key. The ignition fired but the engine didn’t start. He paused, cranked it again, but still there was nothing. He had serviced the car himself a month ago and it had all looked alright, but this didn’t sound good. He drummed his fingers against the wheel.

Eva paused at the door of her Porsche and looked over quizzically.

He put his fingers to the key and twisted it a final time. The ignition coughed, then spluttered, then choked off to a pitiful whine. The courtesy light dimmed as the battery drained from turning over the engine. He popped the hood, opened the door and went around to take a look.

“Not good?” Eva said, coming over as he bent over the engine.

“Plugs, I think. They need changing.”

Eva had insisted they come back to Top Notch. Julius had never let him down and the meal had been predictably good. The unease that Milton had felt after reading the Promises had quickly been forgotten in her company. He almost forgot the interview with the police. They had talked about the others at the meeting, slandering Smulders in particular; they agreed that he was well meaning, if a little supercilious, and she had suggested that he had form for coming onto the new, vulnerable, male members of the fellowship. She had cocked an eyebrow at him as she had said it. Milton couldn’t help but laugh at the suggestion. His troubles were quickly subsumed beneath the barrage of her wit as she took apart the other members of the group. The gossip wasn’t cruel but, nevertheless, he had wondered what she might say about him in private. He said that to her, feigning concern, and she had put a finger to her lips and winked with unmistakeable salaciousness. By the end of the main course Milton knew that he was attracted to her, and he knew that the feeling was mutual.

She watched now as he let the hood drop back into place.

“What are you going to do?”

“Walk, I guess.”

“Where’s your place?”

“Mission District.”

“That’s miles.”

That much was true. He wouldn’t be home much before midnight and then he would have to come back out in the morning — via a garage — to change the plugs. He was a little concerned about his finances, too. He had been planning to go out and drive tonight. He needed the cash. That obviously wasn’t going to happen.

“Come on — I’ll give you a ride.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“You’re not walking,” she said with a determined conviction.

Milton was going to demur but he thought of the time, and the chance to get some sleep to prime him for the day tomorrow, and he realised that would have been foolish. “Thanks,” he conceded as he locked the Explorer and walked over to her Cayenne with her.

The car was new, and smelt it. It wasn’t much of a guess to say that her job paid well — her wardrobe was as good a giveaway as anything — but as he settled back in the leather bucket seat he thought that perhaps he had underestimated how well off she really was.

She must have noticed his appraising look as he took in the cabin. “I’ve got a thing for nice cars,” she said, a little apologetically.

“It’s better than nice.”

“Nice cars and nice clothes. It used to be Cristal and coke. The way I see it, if you’re going to have an addiction it better be one that leaves you with something to show for it.”

She put on the new Jay-Z as she drove him across town. Milton guided her into the Mission District, picking the quickest way to his apartment. The area was in poor condition; plenty of the buildings were boarded up, others blackened from fire or degraded by squatters with no interest in maintaining them. The cheap rents attracted artists and students and there was a bohemian atmosphere that was, in its own way, quite attractive. It felt even cheaper than usual tonight and, as he looked out of the window of the gleaming black Porsche, he felt inadequate. They shared a weakness for booze but that was it; he started to worry that there was a distance between the way they lived their lives that would be difficult to bridge.

The El Capitan Hotel and Hostel was at 2361 Mission Street. It was a three storey building with eighty rooms. The frontage was decorated with an ornate pediment and a cinema style awning that advertised OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY and PUBLIC PARKING — OPEN 24 HOURS. It was a dowdy street, full of tatty shops and restaurants: to the left of the hotel was the Arabian Nights restaurant and, to the right, Modern Hair Cuts. Queen’s Shoes and Siegel’s Fashion for Men and Boys were opposite. There were tall palm trees and the overhead electricity lines buzzed and fizzed in the fog.

“This is me,” Milton said.

She pulled up outside the building.

She killed the engine. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That was fun.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“So — um…?” she said.

He looked at her with an uncertainty that he knew was ridiculous.

“You gonna invite me up?”

“You sure that’s a good idea?”

She smiled. “What do you mean? Two recovering addicts? What could possibly go wrong?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Really?”

“Maybe it was.”

“So?”

He paused, couldn’t find the words, couldn’t even think what he could have been thinking when he said it, and laughed at the futility of it. “Come on, then. It’s at the top of the building so you’re going to have to walk. And I’ll warn you now, save the view, it’s nothing to write home about. It’s not five star.”

“Not what I’m used to, you mean?” She grinned. “Fuck you too.”

She locked the Cayenne and followed him to the door of the building. The narrow heels of her shoes clacked against the pavement as she took his arm and held it tightly. He was aware of the powerful scent of her perfume and the occasional pressure of her breast against his arm. He opened up and accepted her hand as she pressed it into his.

The reception was incredibly bright; the fluorescent tubes did not flicker, shining down with unflattering constancy onto the occupants roaming the stairs and hallways, occasionally stopping by the front desk with its glass partition and signs apologizing for the inability to lend money and forbidding the use of hot plates in the rooms. The night manager, Ahmed, nodded at them from behind the glass enclosure. There were all manner of people here. For some, it was a permanent residence and, for others, a room for the night. Many of the residents had mental problems and Milton had seen plenty of disturbances in the time he had been there. No-one had ever bothered him — the cold lifelessness behind his eyes was warning enough — and the place had served him well.

They climbed the stairs together and he gently disengaged as he reached into his pocket for the key to his door. A short, unkempt man with stringy gray hair and an oversized brown jacket peered around a potted plant at them. He stared at them, vigorously rubbing his eyes, and, after Milton returned the stare with interest, he darted back around the corner again.

“A friendly neighbour,” he explained. He didn’t mention the man who was found hanging in his room across the other side of the building, or the woman who stood in her underwear in the corridor complaining about “the radiation.”

Milton opened the door. Inside was simple and ascetic but it was all he could afford. The owner was happy enough to take cash which saved him from the necessity of opening a bank account, something he would have been very reluctant to do.

Milton’s apartment was tiny: an eight-by-twelve room that was just big enough for a double bed with a chair next to it and a small table next to that. There wasn’t much else. The bathroom and kitchen were shared with the other rooms on the floor. Milton had always travelled light, and so storing clothes wasn’t an issue; he had two of everything and, when one set was dirty, he took it down to the laundromat around the corner and washed it. He had no interest in a television and his only entertainment was the radio and his books: several volumes of Dickens, Greene, Orwell, Joyce and Conan Doyle.

“What do you think?” he said, a slightly bashful expression on his usually composed face.

“It’s…minimalist.”

“That’s one way of describing it.”

“You don’t have much — stuff — do you?”

“I’ve never been much of a one for things,” he explained.

She cast a glance around again. “No pictures.”

“I’m not married. No family.”

“Parents?”

“They died when I was a boy.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was years ago.”

“Siblings?”

“No. Just me.”

He had a small pair of charged speakers on the windowsill; he walked across and plugged these into his phone, opening the radio application and selecting the local talk radio channel. The presenter was discussing the Republican primary; the challengers had just debated each other for the first time. The candidates were trying to differentiate themselves from their rivals. J.J. Robinson, the governor of California, was in the lead by all accounts. They were saying that the primary was his to lose. He killed the radio app and scrolled through to his music player. He selected ‘Rated R’, by the Queens of the Stone Age, and picked out the slow, drawled funk of ‘Leg of Lamb.’

“Good choice,” she said.

“I thought so.”

The room was on the third floor and the window offered a good view of the city. She stood and looked out as he went through the affectation of boiling the kettle for a pot of tea. It was a distraction; they both knew that neither would drink a drop. He took the pot to the table and sat down on the edge of the bed; she sat on the chair next to him. She turned, maybe to say something, maybe not, and he leant across to press his lips gently to hers. He paused, almost wincing with the potential embarrassment that he had misjudged the situation even though he knew that he had not, and then she moved towards him and kissed harder. He closed his eyes and lost himself for a moment. He was only dimly aware of the physical sensations: her breath on his cheek, her arms snaked around his shoulders as her mouth held his, her fingers playing against the back of his neck. She pulled away and looked into his face. Her fingers reached up and traced their way along the scar that began with his cheek and ended below his nose. She kissed it tenderly.

“How’d you do that?”

“Bar fight.”

“Someone had a knife?”

He had no wish to discuss the events of that night — he had been drunk, and it had ended badly for the other guy — and so he reached for her again, his hand cupping around her head and drawing her closer. Her perfume was pungent, redolent of fresh fruit, and he breathed it in deeply. He pulled off her sweater and eased her back onto the bed with him. They kissed hungrily. He cupped her neck again and pulled her face to his, while her hands found their way inside his shirt and around, massaging his muscular shoulders. They explored their bodies hungrily and Milton soon felt dizzy with desire. Her lips were soft and full; her legs wrapped around his waist and squeezed him tight; her underwear was expensively insubstantial, her breasts rising up and down as she gulped for air. He kissed her sweet-smelling neck and throat as she whispered out a moan of pleasure. He brushed aside the hair that framed her face. They kissed again.

His cellphone buzzed.

She broke away and locked onto his eyes with her own. Her eyes smiled.

“Don’t worry. I’m not answering.”

The phone went silent.

He kissed her.

Ten second later it rang again.

“Someone wants to speak to you.”

“Sorry.”

“Who is it? Another woman?”

He laughed. “Hardly.”

“Go on — the sooner you answer, the sooner they’ll shut up. You’re all mine tonight.”

Milton took the call.

“Mr. Smith?”

The boy’s voice was wired with anxiety. “Trip — is everything all right?”

“Did you see the police today?”

“Yes,” he said.

“They say you’re a suspect?”

“Not in as many words, but that’s the gist of it. I’m one of the last people to see her before she disappeared. It stands to reason.”

“They had me in, too. Three hours straight.”

“And?”

“I don’t know, I think maybe they think I’m a suspect, too.”

“Don’t worry about it. They’re doing what they think they have to do. Standard procedure. Most murders are committed by — well, you know.”

“People who knew the victim? Yeah, I know.”

Milton disentangled himself from Eva and stood. “You haven’t done anything. They’ll figure that out. This is all routine. Ticking boxes. The good thing is that they’re taking it seriously.”

“Yeah, man — like, finally.”

Milton took out his cigarettes and shook one out of the box. He looked over at Eva. She was looking at him with a quizzical expression on her face. He held up the box and she nodded. He tossed it across the room to her, pressed the cigarette between his lips and lit it. He threw her the lighter.

“There was another reason for calling.”

“Go on.”

“I had a call ten minutes ago. There’s this guy, Aaron, he says he was the driver who usually drove Madison to her jobs. He was the guy who didn’t show the night she went missing so she called you. He heard about what’s happened on the TV.”

“How did he get your number?”

“Called the landline. Madison must’ve given it to him.”

“You need to tell him to go to the police. They’ll definitely want to talk to him.”

“He won’t, Mr. Smith. He’s frightened.”

“Of what?”

“He knows the agency she was working for. He says they’re not exactly on the level. If he rats them out they’ll come after him.”

“You need to tell the police, Trip.”

“I would, Mr. Smith, but this guy, he says he’ll only speak to me. He says he’ll tell me everything.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow morning. I said I’d meet him at Dottie’s. Nine.”

Milton knew it: Dottie’s was a San Francisco institution and, conveniently enough, it was right at the top of Sixth Street, just a couple of minutes from the El Capitan. Milton yanked up the sash window and tossed the cigarette outside. “I’ll be there,” he said.

The relief in Trip’s thanks was unmistakeable.

“Don’t worry. Try and sleep. We’ll deal with this tomorrow.”

Milton ended the call.

“What was that?”

Milton hadn’t told her anything about Madison but he explained it all now: the night she disappeared, Trip and the days that he had helped her to look for her, the dead bodies that had turned up on the headland, the interview with the police.

“Did you have a lawyer there?” she said. There was indignation in her voice.

“I didn’t think I needed one.”

“They spoke to you without?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Are you an idiot?” she said angrily. “You don’t speak to the police investigating a murder without a lawyer, John.”

“Really,” he said, smiling at her. “It was fine. I know what I’m doing.”

“No,” she said, sitting up. “You don’t. Promise me: if they bring you in again you tell them you’re not speaking until I get there. Alright?”

“Sure,” he said. “Alright.”

“What did he want?”

Milton related what Trip had told him.

“Alright, then. This is what we’re going to do. I’m taking tomorrow morning off. I’ll drive you so you can get your car fixed and then you can go and see him.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“You don’t listen much, do you, John? This isn’t a democracy. That’s what we’re doing. It’s not open to debate.”

22

Eva drove Milton to the garage to pick up a new set of glow plugs and then to the meeting hall. She waited while he changed the plugs and until the engine was running again.

He went over to the Porsche. They hadn’t said much during the ride across town to his car and he felt a little uncomfortable. He had never been the best when it came to talking about his feelings. He had never been able to afford the luxury before, and it didn’t come naturally to him.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said.

“Charming!”

He laughed, blushing. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” she said, the light dancing in her eyes. “I’m joking.”

The words clattered into each other. “Oh — never mind.”

“You’re a funny guy, John,” she said. “Relax, alright? I had a nice night.”

“Nice?”

“Alright — better than nice. It was so nice that I’d like to do it again. You up for that?”

“Sure.”

“Be at the next meeting. My place for dinner afterwards. Now — come here.”

He leant down and rather awkwardly kissed her through the window.

“What’s up?”

“I was wondering,” he said. “Could you do me a favour?”

“Sure.”

He told her about Doctor Andrew Brady and his potential involvement on the night that Madison went missing. He explained that he had worked at St Francis, like she did, and asked if she could find out anything about him.

“You want me to pull someone’s personnel file?” she asked with mock outrage. “Someone’s confidential personnel file?”

“Could you?”

“Sure,” she said. “Can you make it worth my while?”

“I can try.”

“Give me a couple of days,” she said.

“See you,” he said.

“You will.”

Trip was waiting outside Dottie’s, pacing nervously, catching frequent glances at his watch. He was wearing a woollen beanie and he reached his fingers beneath it, scratching his scalp anxiously. His face cleared a little when he saw Milton.

“Sorry I’m late. Traffic. Is he here?”

“Think so. The guy at the back — at the counter.”

“Alright. That’s good.”

“How we gonna play this?”

“I want you to introduce yourself and then tell him who I am, but it might turn out best if I do the talking after that, okay? We’ll play it by ear and see how we get on.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Just talk. Get his story.”

“And then the police?”

“Let’s see what he’s got to say first — then we decide what we do next.”

The café was reasonably large, with exposed beams running the length of the ceiling with a flat glass roof above. The brickwork was exposed along one side, there was a busy service area with a countertop around it and the guests were seated at freestanding tables. Blackboards advertised breakfast and a selection of flavoured coffees. A counter held home-made cakes under clear plastic covers and quartered wooden shelving bore crockery and condiments. A single candelabra-style light fitting hung down from the ceiling and there were black and white pictures of old Hollywood starlets on the walls. The room was full. Milton assessed the man at the counter automatically: the clothes were expensive, the empty mug suggested that he was nervous, the Ray-Bans he still hadn’t removed confirming it. He was sitting so that he could see the entrance, his head tilting left and right as he made constant wary assessments of the people around him. Milton paused so that Trip could advance a step ahead of him and then followed the boy across the room.

“Aaron?” Trip asked.

“Yeah, man. Trip, right?”

“Yes.”

He looked up, frowned, stabbed a finger at Milton. “He with you?”

“Yes.”

“So who is he?”

“It’s alright. He’s a friend.”

“Ain’t my friend, bro. I said just you. Just you and me.”

“He was driving Madison the night she went missing.”

That softened him a little. “That right?”

“That’s right,” Milton said.

“I don’t like surprises, alright? You should’ve said. But okay, I guess.”

“Shall we get a table?”

A booth had emptied out. Aaron and Trip went first; Milton bought coffees and followed them.

“Thanks,” Aaron said as Milton put the drinks on the table. “What’s your name, man?”

“I’m Smith.”

“You a driver, then?”

“That’s right.”

“Freelance or agency?”

“Mostly freelance, bit of agency.”

“Police been speaking to you?”

“All afternoon yesterday.”

The hardness in his face broke apart. “I’m sorry about you being involved in all this shit. It’s my fault. It should’ve been me that night, right? — I mean, I’d been driving her for ages. The one night I didn’t turn up, that one night, and… I can’t help thinking if it had’ve been me, she’d still be here, you know?”

There was an unsaid accusation in that, too: if it were me, and not you, she would still be here. Milton let it pass. “You were good friends?”

“Yeah,” he said with an awkward cough. “She’s a good person. Out of all the girls I’ve driven, she’s the only one I could say I ever really had any kind of fun with.” He looked at Trip, and, realising the implication of what he had just said, added, unpersuasively, “As a friend, you know — a good friend.”

Milton found himself wondering if that disclaimer was insincere, the way his eyes flicked away from Trip as he delivered it, and he wondered whether Aaron and Madison had been sleeping together. The boy was certainly all broken up about what had happened. Milton wondered whether Trip had started to arrive at the same conclusion? If he had, he was doing a good job of hiding it.

“What do the police think has happened to her?”

“They’ve got no idea,” Trip said. “It took them finding the bodies on the headland for them to start taking it seriously. Up until then she was just a missing person, some girl who decided she didn’t want to come home, nothing worth getting excited about.”

“Jesus.”

“Why didn’t you call before?” Milton asked him. “She’s been gone three months.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I felt awkward about it, I guess, you being her boyfriend and all.”

“Why would that matter?” Trip said tersely.

“No, of course, it wouldn’t—”

Milton nudged Trip beneath the table with his knee. “You said you could tell us who Madison was working for.”

“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “Same agency I work for, right?”

“Has it got a name?”

“Fallen Angelz. It’s this Italian guy, Salvatore something, don’t know his second name. I was out of work, got fired from the bar I was working at, I had a friend of a friend who was driving for them, I had no idea what it was all about until he explained it to me. I had no job, no money, not even a car, but I had a clean licence and I thought it sounded like an easy way to make a bit of cash, maybe meet some people, a bit of fun, you know? Turns out I was right about that.”

“How did it work?”

“Straightforward. The girls get a booking, some john all on his own or a frat party or something bigger, some rich dude from out of town wants company all night, willing to pay for the convenience of having a girl come to his hotel room. Celebrities, lawyers, doctors — you would not believe some of the guys I drove girls to see. Each girl gets assigned a driver. If it’s me, the dispatcher in the office calls me up on my cell and tells me where I have to go to pick her up. They gave me a sweet whip: a tricked-out Lexus, all the extras. So I head over there, drive her out to wherever the party’s at, then hang around until the gig’s finished and drive her back home again or to the next job, whatever’s happening. It’s a piece of cake: the more girls I drive, the more money I make. I get a slice of their takings. The agency gives all the drivers and girls a chart — kinda like a tip calculator — with the different hourly pay rates, everything broken down into separate shares for the agency, the driver, the girl. The drivers always get the least, about a quarter, max, but when you’ve got a girl charging a grand for an hour and she’s out there for two, maybe three, hours, well, man, you can imagine, you can see how it can be a pretty lucrative gig, right? I was getting more money in a night than I could earn in a two weeks serving stiffs in a bar.”

“What about drugs?” Milton asked.

Trip shot a glance at him.

“What about them?” Aaron said.

“They ever involved?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Sure, man, what do you think? These girls ain’t saints. Some bring coke to help stretch the calls out beyond an hour or two. The dispatcher asks the john whether he wants any brought over — ‘party material’, they call it — they give it to me and I deliver it. Sometimes I’ll get some to sell myself — I’ve lived here my whole life, it’s not like I don’t know the right guys to ask, you know what I’m saying?” He delivered that line with a blasé shrug of his shoulders, like it was no big thing, but Milton wasn’t impressed and fixed him in a cold stare. “I ain’t endorsing it,” Aaron backtracked, “can’t say I was ever totally comfortable with having shit in the car but the money’s too good to ignore, you can make the same on top as you do with the girls. This one time, I was out of the city and we got pulled over. It was me and Madison, actually, way I recall it. Apart from the fact that they were looking for guys driving girls, going after us for procuring prostitution, we had three grams on us. I said she was my girlfriend and we got away with it.” He looked apologetically over at Trip.

“What about Madison?” Milton asked. “Does she use at all?”

“Yeah, man, sure she does.”

“Bullshit,” Trip said.

Aaron looked at Trip with a pained expression. “You don’t know?”

“She doesn’t.”

“It’s the truth, dude, I swear. They use, all of them do.”

Trip flinched but held his tongue.

“What does she use?”

“Coke. Weed.”

“Anything hallucinogenic?”

He shook his head. “Never seen that.”

“Alright. Tell us about her.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know, man, I’d driven her before, this one time, maybe a year ago. We hit it off right away. She’s a great girl, a lot of fun — the only girl I ever drove who I looked forward to seeing. Most of them — well, most of them, let’s just say they’re not the best when it comes to conversation, alright, a little dead behind the eyes, some of them, not the smartest cookies. But she’s different.”

“Go on.”

He looked over at Trip and then back to Milton. He looked pained. “Is this really necessary?”

“Come on,” Trip insisted. “Don’t pussy out now.” He must have known where this was going but he was tough and he wasn’t going to flinch.

He sighed helplessly. “Alright, man. I guess this was seven, eight months ago, before she went missing. The dispatcher said it was her and I was happy about it, I’d had the same girl for a week and she was driving me crazy. I went over to Nob Hill and picked her up in the Lexus, the same place we always met, and she got up in front with me, not in the back like they usually do. Sometimes there’d be more than one girl but it was just me and her this time and she talked and talked, told me everything that was going on in her life, said she was into books, I mean, that shit was never my bag, I ain’t the best in the world at reading, but she was into it big-time, loved it, writing too, and I thought that was kind of cool. Turns out that they put us together for two shifts after that. That’s like almost two whole days and nights. The third time out we were together the whole time. It was a day shift and it was quiet, just two or three gigs, and we kind of kept getting closer. The next night was the same. The shift ended, and we kept talking. I found a place to park the car, and she pulled out a fifth of vodka, and we drank it, then I had an eight ball of coke in the glove box and we ended up doing bumps of that, too. She said things about the work that I hadn’t heard from the other girls.”

“Like what?” Trip said, suddenly with a little aggression.

“That sometimes the calls are just about sex, sometimes they’re about keeping someone company — a john paying someone to hear him out. Said she liked those calls best.”

He cleared his throat and looked down at the table.

“Keep going,” Milton said, knowing what was coming next and hating himself for pressing, hating what it was going to do to Trip.

“Then — I guess it just sort of happened. We had the cash to get a hotel but I guess we didn’t wanted to wait. We had sex in the car.”

“And?”

“She said she liked it. I didn’t really believe it but then, the next time I was driving her, like a couple of days after that, it happened again.”

Trip stood abruptly. Without saying a word, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the café.

“I’m sorry, man,” Aaron said helplessly. “I didn’t want to say—”

Milton stared at him. “Keep going.”

He frowned, his eyes on the table again. “I had a girlfriend then but I ended it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Madison. I knew it wasn’t right, my girl was cut up and I knew Madison had a guy, but I couldn’t help it, neither of us could help it. I was getting pretty deep into working for the agency then and my girl had always been jealous about that, the girls I was driving, but Madison didn’t have any of that. No jealousy, just totally cool about it all. She got me, totally, understood where I was coming from. Sometimes I drove her and sometimes I didn’t, but it didn’t matter. We were both cool with how it was. When I drove her, we slept together between calls. Sometimes she’d pretend to be on call during the day but she’d meet me, we’d check into a hotel and stay there all day. We’d get room service, watch movies on the pay-per-view, I’d usually have a couple of grams on me and we’d work our way through that.”

“What was she like?”

“How do you mean?”

“Ever think she was depressed?”

“She had her moments, like all the girls, but no — I don’t think so. If you mean do I think she’s run away or done something worse, then, no, I’d say there was no chance. That’d be completely out of character. You want my opinion, I’d say that something bad has happened. No way she stays out of touch this long. She says nothing to me, nothing to your friend — no, no way, I ain’t buying that.”

“You know you have to tell the police, don’t you?”

“About us?”

“Yes, and about the agency.”

His eyes flickered with fear. “No way, man. Talk to the cops? You mad? Salvatore, he’s connected, you know what I mean? Connected. It’s not like I know everything about how it works, but, my best guess, the things I heard from the girls and the other drivers, he’s fronting it for the Lucianos. You know them, man? The fucking Lucianos? It’s fucking mafia, right? — the Mafia! Ain’t no way I’m getting myself in a position where they might think I was ratting them out to the cops. No way. You know what happens to guys they reckon are rats, right?”

“Your name doesn’t have to come out.”

“Fuck that shit, man! What you been smoking? That kind of stuff don’t ever stay under wraps. They got cops on the payroll, everyone knows it. My name would be on the street in minutes and then they’ll be coming over to talk to me about it and that ain’t something that I want to think about. Next thing, I’d be floating in the Bay with my throat cut. Fish food, man.”

“Alright,” Milton said, smiling in the hope that he might relax a little. “It’s okay. I understand.”

Aaron looked at him suspiciously. “You’re just a driver, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So why you asking all the questions, then?”

He spoke with careful, exaggerated patience. “Because I’m one of the last people to have seen Madison before she disappeared. That means I’m a suspect and I’d rather that I wasn’t. Trip is a suspect now, too, and it’ll probably get worse for him when the police find out that you were sleeping with his woman. Jealousy, right? That’s a good motive. The more information you can give us, maybe that makes it easier for us to find out what happened to her and then maybe the police realise me and him had nothing to do with it. Understand?”

“You wait for her that night?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you help her, then? If it was me out there, I guarantee nothing would’ve happened.”

Milton looked at him dead straight, staring right into his eyes; the boy immediately looked down into the dregs of his coffee. “She didn’t give me a chance,” Milton said sternly. “Something happened to her at that party and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. By the time I got to her she was already in a mess.”

“So where is she?”

“She ran. That’s all I know.”

He gestured towards the door. “That dude — you tell him I’m sorry, will you? I didn’t want to say anything and, you know, muscling in on another guy’s girl, that ain’t the way I do things, that ain’t my style at all, you know what I’m saying?”

“I’m sure it isn’t,” Milton said.

“Alright,” he said. “I’m done.”

“The agency. How can I get in touch with them?”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I’m going to visit them.”

“And?”

“And get as much information as I can.”

“No way, man. I can’t. That shit’s gonna come back to me, right? They’ll figure out I’ve been talking. I don’t know. I don’t know at all.”

He got up quickly, the chair scraping loudly against the floor. He made to leave but Milton reached out a hand, grabbed the boy around the bicep and squeezed.

“Shit, dude!” he exclaimed. “That hurts.”

Milton relaxed his grip a little but he didn’t let go. “Have a think about it,” he said, his voice quiet and even. “Think about Madison. If you care about her at all you give me a call and tell me how I can get in touch with the agency. Don’t make me come and find you. Do we understand each other?”

“Shit, man, yeah — alright.”

Milton took a pen from his pocket, pulled a napkin from the chrome dispenser and wrote his number on the back. “This is me,” he said, putting it in the boy’s hand. “Take the rest of the day to think about it and call me. Okay?”

The boy gulped down his fear and nodded.

Milton released his grip.

23

Milton drove them as near to Headlands Lookout as he could get. Trip was nervous, fidgeting next to him, almost as if he expected them to find something. The police had blocked the road a hundred yards from the parking lot, a broad cordon cutting from the rocky outcrop on the right all the way down to the edge of the cliff on the left. Half a dozen outside broadcast trucks had been allowed down to the lot and they were crammed in together, satellite dishes angled in the same direction and their various antennae bristling. Milton slowed and pulled off the narrow road, cramming the Explorer up against the rock so that there was just enough space for cars to pass it to the left. The skies were a slate gray vault overhead and rain was lashing against the windscreen, pummelling it on the back of a strong wind coming right off the Pacific. Visibility was decent despite the brutal weather, and, as Milton disembarked, he gazed out to the south, all the way to the city on the other side of the Bay.

They made their way through the cordon and down to the parking lot. There were several dozen people there already, arranged in an untidy scrum before a man who was standing on a raised slope where the phalanx of cameras could all get a decent view of him. Milton recognised him. It was Commissioner William Reagan, the head of the local police. He was an old man, close to retirement, his careworn face chiselled by years of stress and disappointment. The wind tousled his short shock of white hair. He pulled his long cloak around him, the icy rain driven across the bleak scene. An officer was holding an umbrella for him but it wasn’t giving him much shelter; he wiped moisture from his face with the back of his hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said into the upheld microphones, “before I get into my remarks let me identify those who are here with me. I got Chief of Detectives Stewart Webster, everyone knows the Chief, and I got Inspector Richard Cotton.” He cleared his throat and pulled out a sheet of paper. “As you know, we’ve found two bodies along this stretch of the headland. I wish we hadn’t, but that’s the sad fact of it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two bodies ended up in this area. It appears that they were taken down from the road into the foliage and hidden there so that they wouldn’t be seen. We’re assuming they were dumped here by the same person or persons.”

A brusque man from cable news shouted loudest as he paused for breath. “You identified them yet?”

“No,” Reagan said. “Not yet.”

“So you’re saying you’ve got a serial killer dumping victims along this stretch of land?”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two ended up in this area, but I don’t want anyone to think we have a Jack the Ripper running around with blood dripping from a knife.” He blinked. “Which might be the impression that some people would get … ” He trailed off. “This is an anomaly,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“You expect to find anyone else?”

“That’s impossible to say. But we’re looking.”

“There’s snow forecast for the weekend. Does that add pressure?”

“It doesn’t help. We want to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

“So are you or are you not looking at it being the same guy?”

“Well, you know, I’m not gonna say that but, certainly, we’re looking at that.”

The Press Roadshow decamped and moved to Belvedere. A slow crawl of traffic worked slowly along the narrow road, Milton and Trip caught in the middle of it. Their purpose in driving out of the city had been to go and speak to Brady but Milton had not anticipated all this extra company. It made him nervous. The vehicles turned left and headed north, taking the right and doubling back to the south. Milton gripped the wheel tightly and ran the morning’s developments through his mind. It wasn’t surprising that they had reached the conclusion that Madison’s disappearance must have been connected. Why not? Two working girls turning up murdered just a few miles away, another working girl goes missing: it was hardly a stretch to think that she was dead, too, and dead at the hands of the same killer.

As they reached Pine Shores it was obvious that the prospect of a community of potential suspects was just too tempting to ignore. The gates stood open — it looked as if they had been forced — and the cavalcade had spilled inside. Reporters and their cameramen had set up outside the two key properties: the house where the party had taken place and Dr. Brady’s cottage. Police cruisers were parked nearby but the cops inside seemed content to let them get on with things. Milton parked the Explorer and joined Trip at the front of the car. They watched as two reporters for national news channels delivered their assessments of the case so far — the discovery of the two bodies, the fact that a third girl had gone missing here — and suggested that the police were linking the investigations.

Milton looked at the cameras.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said, more to himself than to the boy.

“What are they doing outside his place?” Trip said, his eyes blazing angrily as he started up the street towards Brady’s cottage.

“Trip — stop.”

“They think he did it, right? That must be it.”

Milton followed after him and took him by the shoulder. “We need to get back in the car. They’ll be all over us if they see us and figure out who we are.”

Trip shook his hand away. “I don’t care about that. I want to speak to him.”

He set off again. Milton paused. He knew he should leave him, get back into the car and drive back to the city. He had been stupid to come up here. He should have guessed that it would be swarming with press. It stood to reason. He didn’t know if they would be able to identify him but, if they did, if he was filmed and if the footage was broadcast? — that would be very dangerous indeed.

Milton’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Smith?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Aaron Pogue — from this morning.”

Milton put his hand over the microphone. “Trip!”

He paused and turned. “What?”

“It’s Aaron.”

The boy came back towards him.

“You there?” said Pogue.

“Yes, I’m here. Hello, Aaron.”

“I’ve been thinking, about what you said.”

“And?”

“And I’ll tell you what you need. The agency, all that.”

“That’s good, Aaron. Go on.”

“I don’t have a number for the agency — the number they use when they call, it’s always blocked, so there’s nothing I can do to help you there. But Salvatore, the guy who runs it, I know he owns the pizza house in Fisherman’s Wharf. That’s just a cover — the agency is his main deal, that’s his money gig, he runs it from the office out back. That’s it.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll keep my name out of it?”

“I’ll try.”

“I hope you find her.”

Milton ended the call.

“What did he say?”

“He told me where to find the agency.”

The thought of confronting Brady seemed to have left his mind. “Where?”

“Come on,” he said. “It’s in the city. Want to come?”

24

Milton parked the car on the junction of Jefferson and Taylor. He had explained his plan to Trip during the drive back into the city and persuaded him that it was better that he go in alone. He had objected at first but Milton had insisted and, eventually, the boy had backed down. Milton didn’t know what he was going to find but, if the agency was backed by the Mafia, what he had in mind was likely to be dangerous. He had no intention of exposing Trip to that.

“I won’t be long,” he said as he opened the door. “Wait here?”

“Alright,” Trip said.

Milton stepped out and walked beneath the huge ship’s wheel that marked the start of Fisherman’s Wharf. He passed restaurants with their names marked on guano-stained awnings: Guardino’s, The Crab Station, Sabella & LaTorre’s Original Fisherman’s Wharf Restaurant. Tourists gathered at windows, staring at the menus, debating the merits of one over another. A ship’s bell clanged in the brisk wind that was coming off the Ocean, the tang of salt was everywhere, the clouds pressed down overhead. It was a festival of tacky nonsense, as inauthentic as it was possible to be. Milton continued down the road. The Classic Italian Pizza and Pasta Co. was between Alioto’s and The Fisherman’s Grotto. He climbed the stairs to the first floor and nodded to the maitre d’ as he passed him as if he were just rejoining friends at a table. It was a decent place: a salad and pasta station, tended to by a man in a chef’s tunic and a toque, was positioned beneath a large Italian tricolour; string bags full of garlic and sun-dried tomatoes hung from a rack in the area where food was prepared; a series of tables was arranged on either side of an aisle that led to the bar; the tables were covered with crisp white tablecloths, folded napkins and gleaming cutlery and glassware. Two sides of the restaurant were windowed, the view giving out onto the marina beyond on one side and the Wharf on the other. It was busy. The smell of fresh pizza blew out of the big wood kiln that was the main feature of the room.

He went into the kitchen. A man in grimy whites was working on a bowl of crab meat.

“I’m looking for Salvatore.”

The man shifted uncomfortably. “Say what?”

“Salvatore. The boss. Where is he?”

“Ain’t no-one called Salvatore here.”

Milton was in no mood to waste time. He stalked by the man and headed for the door at the end of the kitchen. He opened the door. It was a large office. He surveyed it carefully, all eyes. First, he looked for an exit. There was one on the far wall, propped open with a fire extinguisher. There was a window, too, with a view of the Wharf outside, but it was too small to be useful. There was a pool table in the middle of the room and a jukebox against the wall. There was a desk with a computer and a pile of papers. A man was sitting at the computer. He was middle-aged, burly, heavy shoulders, biceps that strained against the sleeves of his t-shirt, meaty forearms covered in hair. Both arms were decorated with lurid tattooed sleeves, the markings running all the way down to the backs of his hands and onto his fingers.

The man spun around on his chair. “The fuck you want?”

“Salvatore?”

He got up. “Who are you?”

“My name is Smith.”

“And?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“You think you can just bust into my office?”

“We need to talk.”

“Then make an appointment.”

“It’s about your other business.”

The man concealed the wary, nervous turn to his face behind a quick sneer.

“Yeah? What other business?”

Milton looked at him with dead eyes. He had always found that projecting a sense of perfect calm worked wonders in a situation like that. It wasn’t even a question of confidence. He knew he could take Salvatore, provided there were no firearms involved to even the odds. Milton couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost a fight against a single man. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost a fight against two men, either, come to that.

“Your escort business, Salvatore.”

“Nah.”

“Fallen Angelz.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It would be better to be honest.”

“I don’t know nothing about it, friend.”

Milton scanned for threats and opportunities. There were drawers in the desk that might easily contain a small revolver. No way of knowing that for sure, though, so he would just have to keep an eye on the man’s hands. There was a stack of cardboard trays with beer bottles inside, still covered by cellophane wrap, but Milton wasn’t worried about them. Bottles made for poor weapons unless you had the chance to smash them and it would take too long to tear through the plastic to get at these ones for them to be useful. No, he thought; the pool table was the best bet. There were the balls, hard balls made up of six ounces of phenolic resin that were good for throwing or for using as blunt weapons in an open fist. There were half a dozen cues held in a vertical rack on the nearest wall. A pool cue was a good weapon. Nice and light and easy to wield, balanced with lead shot in the fat end, long enough to offer plenty of range.

Milton watched the Italian carefully. He could see from the way that the veins were standing out in his neck and the clenching and unclenching of his fists that it would take very little for things to turn nasty.

So — let’s talk about it.”

“Don’t you listen? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So I wouldn’t find anything in those papers if I were to have a look?”

“Reckon that’d be a pretty dumb thing to go and try to do.”

Salvatore reached down slowly and carefully pulled up the bottom of his t-shirt, exposing six-inches of tattooed skin and the stippled grip of a Smith & Wesson Sigma 40F. He rested the tips of his fingers against it, lightly curling them around the grip.

“That’s not the first time I’ve seen a gun.”

“Could be your last.”

Milton ignored that. “Let me tell you some things I know, Salvatore. I know you run girls out of this office. I know you distribute drugs on the side. And I know you sent Madison Clarke to a party at the house in Pine Shore.”

“Yeah? What party was that?”

“Three months ago. The one where she went missing.”

He stared at him. A flicker of doubt. “Madison Clarke? No. I don’t know no-one by that name.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You think I care what you believe?” He stood up now, his right hand curled more tightly around the grip of the handgun. He pointed to the telephone on the desk with his left hand. “You know who I’m gonna call if you don’t start making tracks?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“I’m gonna call an ambulance. I’m telling you, man, straight up, you don’t get out of here right now, you won’t be leaving in one piece. I’m gonna fucking shoot your ass.”

“I tell you what — you tell me all about the escorting business and maybe I won’t break your arm. How’s that sound?”

He slapped his hand against the gun. “You miss this, man? Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?”

“Let’s say I’m someone you don’t want to annoy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m a concerned member of the public. And I don’t like the business you’re running.”

He assessed the distance between them — eight feet — and couldn’t say for sure that he would be able to get all the way across the room before the man could draw and shoot. And if he could get the gun up in time and shoot, it would be point blank and hard to miss.

That wasn’t going to work.

Plan B.

Milton stepped quickly to the table, snatched up the eight-ball and flung it. His aim was good and, as Salvatore turned his head away to avoid it, the ball struck him on the cheekbone, shattering it.

Milton already had the pool cue, his fingers finding it at the thin end.

Salvatore fumbled hopelessly for the gun.

Milton swung the cue in a wide arc that terminated in the side of his head. There was a loud crunch that was clearly audible over the ambient noise from the restaurant and a spray of blood flashed over the computer monitor. Salvatore slid off the chair and onto the floor. Milton stood over him and chopped down again three more times, fast and hard into his ribs and trunk and legs until he stayed down.

He discarded the cue and started to look through the papers on the desk.

TRIP WAS LISTENING to the radio when Milton reached the Explorer again. He opened the door and slid inside, moving quickly. He started the engine and pulled away from the kerb.

“You get anything?”

“Nothing useful.”

“So it wasn’t worth coming down here? We should’ve stayed in Belvedere?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I made an impression. There’ll be a follow-up.”

25

Milton heard the buzzer as he was cleaning his teeth. He wasn’t expecting a delivery and, since very few people knew where he lived, he was about as sure as he could be that whoever it was who had come calling on him at eight in the morning wasn’t there for the good of his health. He put the brush back in its holder and quietly opened the window just enough that he could look downwards. The window was directly above the entrance to the building and he could see the three men who were arrayed around the door. There was a car on the corner with another man in the front. It was a big Lexus, blacked-out windows, very expensive.

Four men. An expensive car. He had a pretty good idea what this was.

Milton toggled the intercom. “Yes?”

“Police.”

“Police?”

“That’s right. Is that Mr. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Could we have a word?”

“What about?”

“Open the door please, sir.”

“What do you want to talk to me about?”

“There was an incident yesterday. Fisherman’s Wharf. Please, sir — we just need to have a word.”

“Fine. Just give me five minutes. I work nights. I was asleep. I just need to get changed.”

“Five minutes.”

He went back to the window and looked down at them again. There was no way on Earth that these men were cops. They were dressed too well in expensive overcoats and he saw the grey sunlight flickering across the caps of well polished shoes. And then there was the car; the San Francisco Police Department drove Crown Vics, not eighty thousand dollar saloons. He waited for the men to shift around a little and got a better look at them. Three of the men he had never seen before. The fourth, the guy waiting in the car, was familiar. Milton recognised him as he wound down the window and called out to the others. It was Salvatore. His face was partially obscured by a bandage that had been fixed over his shattered cheek. Milton waited a moment longer, watching as the men exchanged words, their postures tense and impatient. One of them stepped back and the wind caught his open overcoat, flipping his suit coat back, too, revealing a metallic glint in a shoulder holster.

That settled it.

The three guys at his door were made guys, that much was for sure. So what to do? If he let them in then the chances were they’d come up, subdue him, and Salvatore would be called in to put the final bullet in his head. Or if he went down to meet them maybe they would take him somewhere quiet, somewhere down by the dock, perhaps, and do it there. He had known exactly what he was doing when he beat Salvatore, and, the way he saw it, he hadn’t been given any other choice. There were always going to be consequences for what he’d done and here they were, right on cue. An angry Mafiosi bent on revenge could cause trouble. Lots of trouble.

So maybe discretion was the better part of valour this morning. He dropped his cellphone in his jacket pocket and went through into the corridor. There was a window at the end; he yanked it up. The building’s fire escape ran outside it. He wriggled out onto the sill, reached out with his right hand, grabbed the metal handrail and dropped down onto to the platform.

He climbed down the stairs and walked around the block until he had a clear view onto the frontage of the El Capitan. The Lexus was still there and the three hoodlums were still waiting by the door. One of them had his finger on the buzzer; it looked like he was pressing it non-stop.

He collected the Explorer. It was cold. He started the engine and then put the heater on max. He took out his cellphone and swiped his finger down, flipping through his contacts. He found the one he wanted, pressed call and waited for it to connect.

26

The sign in the window said BAXTER BAIL BONDS. The three words were stacked on top of one other so that the three Bs, drawn so they were all interlocked, were the focus that caught the eye. The shop was in Escondido, north of San Diego, and Beau Baxter hardly ever visited it these days. He had started out here pretty much as soon as he had gotten out of the Border Patrol down south. He had put in a long stint, latterly patrolling the Reaper’s Line between Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales and, worse of them all, Juárez. Beau had run his business from the shop for eighteen months until he came to the realisation that it was going to take years to make any serious coin, and, seeing as he wasn’t getting any younger, he figured he needed to do something to accelerate things. He had developed contacts with a certain Italian family with interests all the way across the continental United States and he started to do work for them. It paid well, although their money was dirty and it needed to be laundered. That was where having a ready-made business, a business that often ran on cash and dealt in the provision of intangible services, sometimes anonymously, came in very handy indeed.

So Beau had kept the place on and had appointed an old friend from the B.P. to run it for him. Arthur “Hank” Culpepper was an hoary old goat, a real wiseacre they used to call “PR” back in the day because he was the least appropriate member of the crew to send to do anything that needed a diplomatic touch. He had always been vain, which was funny because he’d never been the prettiest to look at. That didn’t stop him developing a high opinion of himself; Beau joked that he shaved in a cracked mirror every morning because thought of himself as a real ladies’ man. His airs and graces might have been lacking but he had made up for that by being a shit hot agent with an almost supernatural ability to nose out the bad guys. He wasn’t interested in the big game that Beau went after nowadays; there was a lot of travel involved in that and there was the ever present risk of catching a bullet in some Bumblefuck town where the quarry had gone to ground. Hank was quite content to stick around San Diego, posting bond for the local scumbags and then going after them whenever they were foolish enough to abscond. He had his favourite bar, his hound and his dear old wife (in that order) and, anyways, he had a reputation that he liked to work on. Some people called him a local legend. He was known for bringing the runners back in with maximum prejudice, and stories of him roping redneck tweakers from out of the back of his battered old Jeep were well known among the Escondido bondsmen. It was, he said, just something that he enjoyed to do.

Beau pulled up and took a heavy black vinyl sports bag from the rear of his Cherokee. He slung it over his shoulder, blipped the lock on the car, crossed the pavement and stopped at the door. He unlocked it, pushed down the handle with his elbow and backed his way inside. The interior was simple. The front door opened into the office, with the desk, some pot plants, a standard lamp and a sofa that had been pushed back against the wall. There was a second door, opposite the street door, that led to a corridor that went all the way to the back of the building. There was a kitchenette, a bathroom and, at the end, a small cell that could be locked.

The safe was in the kitchen, the kettle and a couple of dirty mugs resting atop it. Beau spun the dial three times — four-nine-eight — and opened the heavy cast iron door. He unzipped the bag and spread it open. It was full of paper money.

Fifteen big ones.

The smell of it wafted into the stuffy room. Beau loved that smell.

He took out the cash, stacked the fifties in neat piles and locked the safe.

He locked the front door, got back into his Cherokee and headed for the hospital.

Hank was sitting up in bed, his cellphone pressed between his head and shoulder while his right hand was occupied with tamping tobacco into the bowl of the pipe is his left hand. He was in his early sixties, same as Beau was, and, lying there in bed like that, he looked it. Man, did he ever look old. The whole of his right side was swathed in bandages and there was a drip running into a canula in the back of his hand. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and that added on a few extra years. The colour had leeched from his face and now his skin was as white as the sheets the clan folks used to bleach up special for a Saturday night cross-burning session. He wasn’t wearing anything above the waist and his arms — Beau remembered them when they were thick with muscle — looked withered and old. The tattoo of the snake that he had had done in Saigon was wrinkled and creased where once it had been tightly curled around his bicep.

Old age, Beau thought. That was the real reaper. Coming for all of us. Still, he thought: I’d rather eat five pounds of cactus thorns and shit sharp needles than look like that.

He raised a hand in greeting and Hank reciprocated with a nod, mouthing that he would be two minutes before speaking into the receiver again: “I’m telling you, Maxine, the judge don’t give a sweet fuck about that. What he’s gonna get now ain’t a pimple on a fat man’s ass compared to what he’s gonna get. If he don’t make it for the hearing tomorrow he’ll make an example out of him. I’m telling you, no shit, he’s looking at five years before he even gets a sniff of parole. Five. Is that what you want for him? No? Then you better tell me where he’s at.”

Beau could hear the buzz of a female voice from the receiver.

There was a coffee machine in the hall and Beau went outside for two brews in white Styrofoam cups. He searched the small wicker basket next to the machine for a packet of Coffee-mate, came up empty, went back through into the room and found a bowl of sugar instead. He spooned a couple into both cups, stirring the sludgy brown liquid until it looked a little more appealing.

“Fine. Where — Pounders? Alright, then. I’m gonna send someone to go and get him.”

Beau sat down and stared at his old friend. He thought about the first time they had met. 1976. They’d graduated from the Border Patrol Academy and been posted up in Douglas at about the same time. Hank had been a uniformed cop near the border in El Centro, California, before coming on duty with the B.P.. The two men were partnered up on a cold, dark night in February. They had been assigned a wide sector up near the old copper-smelting operation near Douglas. The air stank of sulphur and you could smell it in your clothes and taste it on your tongue for days after you had been out at night. On the other hand, it wasn’t all bad: the train that circulated the edge of the smelter’s slag piles would dump three-ton buckets of bright orange, liquid ore over the hundred-foot-high waste bed that lit up the borderland with a brilliant flow of man-made lava that you could see for miles around.

The two of them were thankful for the glow on that particular evening; they were laid up in wait for a group of marijuana backpackers who, according to the word they’d heard, were headed north. They were scouting the desert trails looking for them; Beau had his .357 revolver and a.12 gauge pump shotgun loaded with buckshot. Hank had the same .357 but, instead of the shotgun, he had a .30 calibre M1 Carbine with a thirty-round banana magazine for extra firepower. The M1 wasn’t legitimate load-out for the Border Patrol but, the way Hank saw it, there was truth in the adage “peace through superior firepower.” If the bad guys had .22s, you wanted .44s. You always wanted the upper hand. That was the logic and it made sense to Beau, too.

As they walked south on the desert trail they heard the faint crunch of footsteps ahead. They thought it must have been cattle at first but then Beau remembered the rancher had moved his herd onto a different pasture the week before. The mules were coming right at them. They raised their weapons and called out the order to stop. The bad guys were armed and they capped the first shot, the muzzle flash so close at hand that Beau was temporarily blinded by the burst of bright white light that scorched across his retinas. He fired back with the.12 gauge and emptied it. Hank took over with the M1, the mules firing back as they started to retreat. The smelter train made a delivery of glowing slag and, in the sudden flare as the embers crashed to the ground, Beau’s vision cleared as he turned to look at the profile of the man beside him. It was the instant of fullest illumination and the image was vivid, clear — and weird — enough to have stayed with him ever since. Hank looked like he was close to the moment of sexual release, balls-deep with a raging hard-on and ready to blow. He was smiling in ecstasy. The son of a bitch had this wicked-ass smirk on his face as he ripped through the clip. He wasn’t scared. He was enjoying it. Beau knew that feeling from ‘Nam, too, and it was all he needed to take out his .357 and start warming up the barrel.

“I’m serious, Maxine,” Hank was saying, “if he comes back, you call me right away. He really doesn’t want to rile me up right now. I’m not in the mood to go chasing him down all over the state and, if he makes me do that, I ain’t promising he don’t get brought back in cuffs and with a bloody nose. You hearing me straight, darling? I ain’t messing. Don’t you dare make me look like a fool, now.”

He ended the call.

“You ain’t chasing anyone tonight, partner,” Beau said, dropping down onto the room’s small sofa.

“She don’t know that.”

“Who is it?”

“Fellow named George Bailey. Been stealing cars. This time, though, the dumb fuck had a pistol on him while he was doing it. ‘Possession of a concealed weapon,’ he’s looking at five, minimum, probably seven or eight depending on which judge he gets. He decided he’d take his chances on the road, I’m trying to persuade his lovely girlfriend” — that word was loaded with sarcasm — “otherwise. He’s out getting drunk so I’m going to send George McCoy to go pick him up. Unless you wanna do it?”

“Uh-huh,” Beau said with a big smile, shaking his head. “I’m not into that no more.”

“Only the big game for you now, partner?”

“That’s right.”

“What was the last one?”

“Mexican.”

“And?”

“Not so bad.”

Beau had finished the job the night before. It had been an easy one by his usual standards. The Lucianos had interests in a couple of big casinos in Vegas and one of their croupiers, this wiry beaner by the name of Eduardo del Rio, had entertained the thought that he could run south with fifty grand of their money. The family had sent Beau after him. It had been pretty easy. He must have been the most dumbshit robber in the Mexican state of Sonora that night and it had been an easy bust. He had run straight home to his wife and Beau had just to wait there for him. He’d been a little punchy when Beau confronted him but his attitude had adjusted just as soon as he starting looking down the barrel of Beau’s.12 gauge pump.

“Boy was as dumb as you like,” Beau said. “He wouldn’t have found his way to the kitchen for a taco in his own one-room hut.” He sipped his coffee; it was foul. “Alright,” Beau crossed his legs, the hem of his right trouser riding up a little to show more of his snakeskin cowboy boot. “Now then. You wanna tell me what in God’s name has been going down round here?”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning what? Which sumbitch shot you up, Hank?”

“Ever heard of Ordell Leonard?”

Beau shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

“Big, black brother from ‘Bama. Quiet fella until he gets on the drink then you never know what you’re gonna get. They had him for driving under the influence and resisting arrest. All he was looking at was a couple of months but he reckons they’re prejudiced against black men from the South round here and so he decides he’s gonna take his chances and takes off. I ended up in Arkansas before I could catch him. Fucking Little Rock, can you believe that shit? Two thousand miles, man. It took me three days there and three days back although, course, he was in the back coming home and so I had to listen to his goddamn problems the whole way. The whole experience made me think I ain’t getting a good enough shake out of this here thing we got going on.”

He was grinning as he said it; Beau knew he was fooling around.

“And then?”

“And then I got lazy, I guess. We was right back up at the store when I let him out. I was going to put him in the cell until I could transfer him to the courthouse. He’d been on best behaviour for the whole trip and I’d taken off his cuffs. Clean forgot. Dude cold-cocks me, knocks me down, then gets my shotgun from the front and fires off a load. I’m not sure how he missed, to be honest with you. Ended up catching me in the shoulder but it could’ve been a helluva lot worse.”

“Know where he’s headed?”

“Got a brother in Vallejo. I’d bet you a dime to a doughnut that’s where he’s gone.”

“Alright, then. You can leave that one to me.”

“You sure? Not much money in it, Beau.”

Beau looked at Hank again. He was getting on. Couldn’t have that many years left in him doing what they were doing. A shotgun, at close range? He’d got lucky. Maybe it was time Beau suggested Hank took it easy. Maybe it was a message. “Ain’t about money all the time, partner. Dude shot you all up. I can’t stand for that. Bad for our reputation.”

“Ah, shit — I’ll be fine. I was gonna enjoy seeing him again.”

“How long they going to keep you in?”

“Couple more days.”

“By which time he’ll be long gone. Nah, Hank, don’t worry about it. Leave him to me.”

Hank sucked his teeth and, eventually, nodded his assent. “Shit,” he said. “I remembered something: you had a call back at the office. Jeanette took the details down and told me about it.”

Jeanette was the secretary who kept things ticking over. “Who from?”

“She said he called himself Smith. Sounded like he was English, she said, he had that whole accent going on. She says you weren’t around and could she take a message for you and he says yes, she could, and he tells her that he wants you to call him pronto. He gave her a number — I’ve got it written down in my pants pocket.”

“He say what he wanted to speak to me about?”

“Nope,” Hank said, shaking his head, “except it was urgent.”

27

Beau drove north. It took him eight hours on the I-5, a touch under five hundred miles. He could have flown, or caught a northbound Amtrak from San Diego, but he liked the drive and it gave him some time to listen to some music and think.

He spent a lot of time thinking about duties and obligations. He had always lived his life by a code. It wasn’t a moral code because he couldn’t claim to be a particularly moral man; that would be fatuous, given the profession he had latterly chosen for himself. It was more a set of rules that he tried to live his life by and one of those rules insisted that he would always pay his debts. It was a matter of integrity. Beau’s father had always said that was something you either had or you didn’t have, and he prided himself that he did; he was made of integrity from the guts out. Getting the Mexican journalist away to safety had been the right thing to do, but he couldn’t in all honesty say that he thought it had completely squared the ledger between them. He figured the Englishman had done him two solids down in Mexico: he had saved him from Santa Muerta and then drew the fire of whoever it was who hit El Patrón’s mansion so that he and the girl could get away. Helping the girl had paid back only half of the debt. At the very least, he could drive up to San Francisco and hear what the Englishman had to say. If it wasn’t something he could help him with then he would book into a nice hotel for a couple of nights and enjoy the city. He really had nothing to lose.

And, if nothing else, he could find out how on earth Smith had gotten out of Mexico. It hadn’t looked so good for him when Beau and the girl had made tracks. That guy, though; he was something else. He could fall into a tub of shit and come out smelling like a rose every time.

Beau could mix in a spot of business, too. Ordell Leonard was up there and there was no way on God’s green Earth Beau was going to let him have even an extra second of liberty. He would never have admitted it to another person, but seeing Hank in the hospital like that, old and shot up, it had reminded him of his own advancing years. He had been thinking about his own mortality a lot recently. He was sixty-two years old. Every morning he seemed to wake up with another ache. Everyone came to the end of the road eventually, that was the one shared inevitability, but Beau was determined that he wasn’t there yet. The more he thought about it, the more he understood his own reaction: Ordell Leonard was a bad man, a dangerous man, and he would have been a challenge to collar ten years ago, when he and Hank were fitter and meaner than they were now. Bringing him in now would be his way of thumbing his nose at the notion that he was ready to retire.

Ordell would be the proof that Beau wasn’t ready to hang it up just yet.

He booked a suite at the Drisco and, five minutes before the time that they had agreed to meet, he was waiting in the bar downstairs.

John Smith was right on time.

“Beau,” he said, sitting down opposite him.

“Alright, English,” Beau said. “Didn’t think I’d ever be seeing you again.”

“I guess you never know what’s around the corner.”

“I guess you don’t.”

“What happened to the girl?” Smith asked.

“As far as I know, she’s safe and sound.”

“As far as you know?”

“That’s all I can say. The man who makes people disappear, this guy my employers use when they need to send someone out of harm’s way? — the arrangement is strictly between him and the client. No-one else gets to know anything about it. She could be in Alaska for all I know. She could be back in Mexico, although I hope for her sake she ain’t. But what I can say for sure is that I got her into the country like I said that I would and she was just fine and dandy when I dropped her off.”

Smith nodded at that. “You get paid for the job?”

“Sure did,” Beau said.

He had delivered the body of Adolpho González to the Lucianos three months ago. The job had been to bring him in dead or alive and yet there had been consternation that it was in the latter condition that Santa Muerta was delivered. Beau had explained what happened — that the girl journalist from Juárez had put a bullet in the Mexican’s head while he was outside their motel room getting ice — but his honesty had led to recriminations. The awkwardness had been underscored by the requirement, stipulated by Beau, that the girl was to be given a new identity and kept hidden from the cartels. There had been a moment when Beau had been unsure that they were going to let her leave in one piece but he had stuck to his guns and, eventually, they had conceded. Beau didn’t necessarily care about her either way — she wasn’t his problem, after all — but he had promised Smith that he would get her out of Mexico and set up in the States and Beau wasn’t the sort of man who went back on his word. Doing the right thing had eventually lightened his payment by fifteen grand: the Italians docked ten from his bounty for spoiling the fun they had planned for González and the other five went to pay the fee of the professional who made people disappear.

Fifteen thousand!

Beau hadn’t been happy with that, not at all.

“I appreciate it,” Smith said.

“No sweat, English. Least I could do, circumstances like they were.” He paused and lit up a smoke. “So — how’d you get out alive?”

“There was a lot of confusion. I took advantage of it.”

“Who were those dudes?”

“Best not to ask.”

“What about El Patrón?”

“What about him?”

“He got himself shot dead a couple of days later. That wouldn’t have been anything to do with you, would it?”

“Me? No,” Milton said. “Course not.”

Beau laughed and shook his head. The Englishman was something else. Quiet and unassuming for the most part but when he got all riled up there weren’t many people who would have concerned Beau more. He remembered the way he had strode through El Patrón’s burning mansion, offing gangsters just like he was shooting fish in a barrel. He had been ruthlessly efficient. Not a single wasted shot and not a moment of hesitation. The man was private, too, and Beau knew that there was no point in pushing him to speak if he didn’t want to. “You said you needed a favour,” he said instead. “What can I do for you?”

“The syndicate you’ve been working for — it’s the Lucianos?”

Beau paused and frowned a little. He hadn’t expected that. “Could be. Why?”

“I have a problem — you might be able to help.”

“With them? What kind of problem?”

“I put one of their men in the hospital.”

“Why would you want to do a crazy-assed thing like that?”

“He pulled a gun on me. I didn’t have much choice.”

“By ‘hospital’ — what do you mean?”

“He’s not dead, Beau. Broken nose, broken ribs. I worked him over with a pool cue.”

“Jesus, English.”

Smith shrugged.

“You wanna tell me why he was going to pull a gun on you?”

“They’re running an escort business. This man fronted it for them. I had some questions about it and he didn’t like them.”

“What were they?”

“They sent a girl to a party. She hasn’t been seen since and I was one of the last people to see her. Apart from anything else, the police have got me down as a suspect.”

“For what?”

“You hear about those dead girls up north?”

“Sure.”

“The party was right around there. I’d say there’s a good chance her body’ll be the next body they find.”

“Murder, then.”

“I’m not concerned about me, I know I didn’t do it and I know they’re just going through the motions.”

“Kicking the tyres.”

He nodded. “Exactly. But I got talking to her before.”

“An escort?”

“I was driving her. I have a taxi.”

“Chef. Taxi driver. You’re full of surprises.”

Smith brushed over that. “She’s nice girl. And her boyfriend’s a good kid. When they realise I don’t have anything to do with it they’re going to go after him, and maybe he isn’t quite as single-minded as me, maybe they need a conviction and he looks like he could be their guy. Maybe they make him their guy. I’d like to get to the bottom of what happened, one way or another.”

Beau shook his head. “You’ve got yourself in a mess over another woman? You got a habit for that. What is it with you, English?”

“I need to talk to them, Beau, but, at the moment, I think they’d rather put a bullet between my eyes. I was hoping you might be able to straighten things out.”

“Put a good word in for you, you mean?”

“If you like.”

Beau couldn’t help but chuckle. “You’re unbelievable. Really — you’re something else.”

“Can you do it?”

“Can I ask them not to shoot you? Sure I can. Will they listen? I have absolutely no idea.”

“Just get me in a room with whoever it is I need to speak to. It might not look like it, but we both have a stake in this. If she’s dead, I’m going to find out who killed her. It’s in their best interests that I do. Because if I don’t, there’s going to be a whole lot of heat coming their way. You’d be doing them a favour.”

“Well,” Beau said. “You put it like that, how can I possibly refuse?”

28

“I know you’ve got a temper,” Beau said to him as he reversed parked his Jeep into a space next to the bowling alley, “but you’ll want to keep it under wraps today, alright? Apart from the fact that I vouched for you, which means it’ll be me who gets his ass kicked if you start getting rambunctious, these aren’t the kind of dudes you want to be annoying if you catch my drift.” He paused. “You do catch my drift, John, don’t you?”

“Don’t worry, Beau,” Milton said. “I’m not an idiot.”

“One other thing: let me do the talking to start with. Introduce you and such like. Then you can take the conversation whichever way you want. If you get off on the wrong foot with them you’ll get nowhere — you might as well just pound sand up your ass. This has to be done right.”

The car park was half full, mostly with cheap cars with a few dings and dents in the bodywork, nothing too showy, the kind of first cars that kids new to the business of driving would buy with the money they had managed to scrape together. Beau had parked next to the most expensive car in the lot. It was a Mercedes sedan, darkened windows and gleaming paintwork. There was a driver behind the wheel. Milton could only just make him out through the smoked glass but there he was; it looked like he was wearing a uniform, the cap of which he had taken off and rested against the dash. He had reclined the seat and he was leaning back, taking a nap.

Milton followed Beau inside.

He looked around. It was a scruffy dive, dirty around the edges and showing its age, staffed by kids in mismatched uniforms trying to make beer money. There were two exits. One was the door they had just come through, the other was at the end of a long dark restroom corridor all the way in back. An air conditioner over the door was on its last legs, running so hard that it was trembling and rattling, but it wasn't making much difference to the humidity in the air. Seven bowling lanes had been fitted into what might once have been a large warehouse. It was a generous space, the roof sloping down towards the end of the lanes with dusty skylights at the other end. There was a bar at the back with ESPN playing on muted TVs, then some upholstered benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables, and then the lanes. There were computerised scoring machines suspended from the roof. All sorts of bottled beers behind the bar. The place was loud: music from a glowing jukebox was pumped through large speakers but that was drowned out by the sound of balls dropped onto wood, falling into the gully, smashing into the pins. The machinery rattled as it replaced the pins and the balls rumbled as they rolled back to the players.

“What is this place?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Looks like a bowling alley.”

“There you go.”

“The family owns it?”

“Sure they do. They own lots of things: pizza parlours, nail bars, couple of hotels.”

“All useful if you’ve got money you need to wash.”

“Yours words, John,” he said with a big smile that said it was all the way true.

Milton checked the clientele: counting people, scanning faces, watching body language. Kids, mostly, but there were a few others that caught his eye. At a table in a darkened corner away from the bar were two guys talking earnestly, their hands disappearing beneath the table, touching, then coming back up again. A dealer and his buyer. There were two guys further back in the room, sat around a table with a couple of bottles of beer. Big guys, gorillas in sharp suits. The first was a tall, wide man with collar-length hair and a black T-shirt under a black suit. The second was a little smaller, with a face that twitched as he watched the action on the nearest lane. They were a pair. Milton pegged them as bodyguards. Operators. Made men, most likely. He’d seen plenty of guys like that all around the world. They’d be decent, dangerous up to a point, but easy enough to take care of if you knew how to do it. There would be a point beyond which they were not willing to go. Milton had their advantage when it came to that; he didn’t have a cut-off. The men were sitting apart from each other but their twin gazes were now trained on the table in a private VIP area that was raised up on a small platform accessed by a flight of three steps and fenced off from the rest of the room.

A further pair of men were sitting there.

“Is that them?”

Beau nodded. “Remember — I’ll do the introductions and, for God’s sake, show them a little respect. You’re not on home territory here and I don’t care how tough you think you are, they won’t give two shits about that. Wait here. I’ll go and speak to them.”

Milton sat down at the bar. One of the televisions was tuned to CNN. They had a reporter out at Headland Lookout, ghostly in the thick shroud of fog that alternated between absorbing and reflecting the lights for the camera. The man was explaining how the police had charted out a search area, breaking it down into eight four-foot sections of maps they kept in a mobile command centre. The item cut to footage of the search. The narrow road he had driven down four days ago was marked with bright orange arrows, pointing south to the two spots where remains had been found. Fluorescent orange flags were planted in the scrub and sand on each of the sites. Officers were weeding through the bramble, fanning outward from the flags.

Beau came back across. “Alright,” he said. “They’ll see you. Remember: play nice.”

“I always do.”

Milton approached. One was older, wrinkled around the eyes and nose. He had a full head of hair, pure black, the colour obviously out of a packet. There was a beauty spot on his right cheek and his right eyelid seemed to be a little lazy, hooding the eye more than the other. He was wearing a shirt with a couple of buttons undone, no tie, a jacket slung over the back of the chair. The second man was younger. He had a pronounced nose with flared nostrils, heavy eyebrows and beady eyes that never stayed still.

Beau sat down on one of the two empty seats.

Milton sat down, too.

“This is Mr. Smith,” Beau said.

“How are you doing?” the older man said, nodding solemnly at him. “My name is Tommy Luciano.”

He extended his hand across the table. Milton took it. His skin was soft, almost feminine, and his grip was loose. He could have crushed it.

“And my friend here is Carlo Lucchese.”

Lucchese did not show the same hospitality. He glowered at him across the table and Milton recognised him; he was the one who had been on the intercom to him, one of the four who had come to kill him.

He didn’t let that phase him. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“Beau said it was important. That wouldn’t normally have been enough to interrupt my afternoon but he told us that you were very helpful with a small problem we had in Juárez.”

“That’s good of him to say.”

“And so that’s why we’re sitting here. Normally, with what you’ve done, you’d be dead.”

Lucchese looked on venomously.

“Perhaps,” Milton said.

“You had an argument with one of my men.”

“I’m afraid I did.”

“Want to tell me why?”

“I have some questions that I need to have answered. I asked him, and they seemed to make him uncomfortable. He threatened me with a gun. Not very civil. I wasn’t prepared to stand for that.”

“Self-defense on your part, then?”

“If you like.”

Beau put a hand down on the table and intervened: “John’s sorry, though — right, John?”

Milton didn’t respond. He just kept his eye on the older man.

“He don’t look sorry,” Lucchese said.

“Carlo…”

“This douche broke Salvatore’s face. Three ribs. Messed up his knee real good. And we’re talking to him? I don’t know, Tommy, I don’t, but what the goddamn fuck?”

“Take it easy,” the old man said, and Milton knew from the way that he said it that he was about to be judged. The next five minutes would determine what came after: he was either going to get the information he wanted or he was going to get shot. “These questions — you wanna tell me what are they?”

He didn’t take his eyes away from the older man. “There was a party in Pine Shore three months ago. September. I drove a girl up there.”

“You drove her?”

“I’m a taxi driver.”

Luciano laughed. “This gets better and better.”

Milton held his eye. “Something happened at the party and she freaked out. She ran and she’s never been seen since.”

“Pine Shore?”

“That’s right. Near where the two dead girls turned up.”

“I know it. And you think this girl is dead?”

“I think it’s possible.”

“And what’s any of it got to do with us?”

“Fallen Angelz. She was on the books.”

He looked at him with an amused turn to his mouth. “Fallen Angelz? That supposed to mean anything to me?”

Milton didn’t take his eyes away. “You really want to waste my time like that?”

Beau stiffened to Milton’s right but he said nothing. The younger man flexed a little. Milton stared hard at Luciano, unblinkingly hard. The old man held his glare steadily, unfazed, and then smiled. “You have a set of balls on you, my friend.”

“Aw, come on, Tommy — you can’t be serious. You said—”

“Go and do something else, Carlo. I don’t need you around for this.”

“Tommy—”

“It wasn’t a suggestion. Go on — fuck off.”

Lucchese left the table but he didn’t go far. He stopped at the bar and ordered a beer.

Milton didn’t relax, not even a little. He was very aware of the two bodyguards at the table across the room.

“Alright,” Luciano said. “So suppose I said I do know about this business. What do you want?”

“A name — who booked the girls that night.”

“Come on, Mr. Smith, you know I can’t give you that. That business only works if it’s anonymous. We got some serious players on the books. Well known people who would shit bricks if they knew I was letting people know they took advantage of the services we offer. They need to trust our discretion. I start spilling their names, there are plenty of other places who’ll take their money.”

“You need to think bigger than that, Mr. Luciano. Telling me who booked her that night is the best chance you’ve got of keeping the business.”

“That so? How you figure that?”

“One of your drivers told me that the girl was sent by the agency. You could say he’s had a crisis of conscience about it. He knows he ought to be telling the police. So far, that hasn’t been strong enough to trump the fact that he’s terrified that talking is going to bring him into the frame. That’s his worst case scenario.”

“No, Mr. Smith. His worst case scenario is that I find out who he is.”

“But you won’t find out, not from me.”

“So what’s his worry?”

“If he goes to the cops? That he gets charged with procuring prostitution.”

“So he’s not saying anything.”

“Not yet. But you know the way that guilt is. It has a way of eating at you. I’m betting that he’s feeling worse and worse about what happened every single day, and the longer the police dig away without getting anywhere, the harder it’s going to be for him to fight off going to them and telling them everything he knows. And if she turns up dead? I reckon he calls them right away. The first thing that’s going to happen after that is that Salvatore gets a visit about the murders. The second thing is that he gets arrested and charged. The police need to be seen to be doing something. They’ll go after the low-hanging fruit, and three dead prostitutes linked — rightly or wrongly — to an illegal agency like Fallen Angelz would be a perfect place to start. And, without wanting to cast aspersions, Salvatore didn’t strike me as the kind of fellow with the character to stand up to the prospect of doing time when there’s a plea bargain on the table. I don’t need to go on, do I?”

“You sure Salvatore flips? Just like that?”

“Are you sure he won’t?”

“You saying you can help me?”

“I’ve got a few days head start on the police. Maybe that’s enough time for me to find out what happened. Maybe my girl isn’t linked to the other two. Maybe something else has happened to her. And, maybe, if I can find some answers, the driver decides he doesn’t have to say anything.”

“And if this girl is dead?”

“Provided it had nothing to do with you, maybe I can find a way that leaves you out. That agency’s got to be valuable to you, right? It’s got to be worth giving me the chance to sort things out. What have you got to lose?”

Luciano looked at him shrewdly. “I could speak to the driver myself. Find out what he knows.”

“You don’t know who he is.”

“You do. You could tell me.”

He smiled thinly, suggestively.

“Forget it,” Milton said, smiling back. “I’m not frightened of you.”

“What did you do before you drove taxis, Mr. Smith?”

“I was a cook,” he said.

“A cook?”

“He was working in a restaurant when I met him,” Beau said.

“You think he’s a cook, Beau?”

“No.”

Luciano sucked his teeth.

Milton clenched his fists beneath the table.

“Alright — let’s say, just for the sake of discussion, that I give you what you want. Why are you so interested? What does it have to do with you?”

“The police have me down as a suspect and it’s not in my interest for my name to come out. The sooner I can clear this up, the better.”

“Publicity is bad for you?”

“Very bad.”

Luciano shook his head, a small smile playing on his lips. “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Smith. That’s all I need for now. I’ll speak to Beau. You can wait outside.”

Milton made his way down from the raised area and across the wide room. As he passed the bar he saw Carlo with another man. The newcomer held himself at an odd angle, his left arm clutched to his side as if he was in pain, and he had a huge, florid bruise on his cheek. There were purples and blues and greys in the bruise and the centre was pure black and perfectly rounded, as if it had been caused by a forceful impact with something spherical. The nose was obscured by a splint. Salvatore glared at Milton as he crossed in front of him, his eyes dripping with hate. Milton nodded once, a gesture he knew he probably shouldn’t have made but one that he just couldn’t resist. The injured man lost it, aggrieved at the beating that he had taken, aggrieved at seeing Milton walk out of the bowling alley with impunity, not a scratch on him, and he came in at an awkward charge, moving painfully and with difficulty, his right fist raised. Milton feinted one way and moved another. The Italian stumbled past, Milton tapped his ankles and Salvatore tripped and fell. He grimaced as he pushed himself to his feet again but by then Milton had backed off and turned around and was ready for the second go-around. Salvatore came at him again, his fist raised, lumbering like a wounded elephant. Milton ducked to one side and threw a crisp punch that landed square on his nose, crunching the bones again. Salvatore’s legs went and he ate carpet. He stayed down this time, huffing hard.

Milton raised his hands helplessly and looked over at the VIP area, wondering whether things were going to get heated. Beau looked anxious but neither Tommy Luciano or Carlo Lucchese did anything. Milton turned to look at Luciano, then to Lucchese, then to Salvatore, then he pushed out of the door and went outside to wait for Beau in the cold, bright afternoon sun.

29

Milton had gone to a meeting that evening. It wasn’t his usual and Eva wasn’t there. He had gone out for dinner afterwards with a couple of the guys and by the time he returned to his flat it was midnight. He was reasonably confident that there would be no more issues with the Lucianos — at least for the moment — but he couldn’t completely rule out that Lucchese might ignore his boss and come at him again and so he had driven around the block twice before going inside. He saw nothing to make him anxious, and there was nothing in the blindingly bright lobby to suggest that his visitors had returned or that they intended to. He climbed to the third floor. He knew exactly where the light switch was and it was with a single blur of motion that he opened the door, flicked it on and stood in the threshold with the door open wide, scanning the room with practised eyes. Everything looked as if it was in order. He stepped forward and locked himself inside, bending down to examine one of his own black hairs which still lay undisturbed where he had left it before going out, placed carefully across the drawer of the coffee table. He had left a faint trace of talcum powder on the handle of the bedroom door and that, too, had not been disturbed. These were, he knew, extravagant measures to confirm his safety but ten years in a business as dangerous as his had hardwired him with caution. Paying heed to that creed, and to his instincts, was the reason he was still alive. The precise application of a routine like this had saved his life on several occasions. The Mafia was a blunt instrument compared to the secret services of the countries that he had infiltrated — a cudgel as to a scalpel — but that was no reason to treat them with any less respect. A cudgel was still deadly.

He propped a chair beneath the door handle, locked the window that faced the fire escape and slept with his fingers wrapped around the butt of the Smith & Wesson 9mm that he kept under the pillow.

HE ROSE EARLY the next morning. There was a lot to do. First, though, he dressed in his running gear, pulled his battered running shoes onto his feet and went downstairs. It was a crisp, bright December day, the sun’s cold rays piercing the mist that rose off the Bay. Milton ran south on Mason Street, turned onto Montgomery Street and ran until he reached The Embarcadero, the piers, the bridge to Oakland and, beyond it, the greenish-blue of the ocean. He ran north, following the road as it curved to the west, listening to the rhythmic cadence of his feet and clearing his mind. This had always been his preferred way to think. It was his meditation before he found the sanctuary of the rooms, a peaceful retreat where he had the time and the luxury to let his thoughts develop at their own speed, without even being conscious of them.

He ran onto Jefferson, turned left inside Aquatic Park and then followed Hyde to Broadway and then, finally, Mason Street and home.

He passed through the lobby and took the stairs at a jog.

There were two men waiting outside the door to his room.

He recognised them both.

“Detective Cotton. Detective Webster.”

“Mr. Smith.”

“How can I help you?”

“We’re going to need to talk to you.”

“Again? Really?”

“A few more questions.”

“I answered them before. Is there anything else?”

“I’m afraid there is. We found another body this morning.”