by Mark Dawson
“Just a quick word. In the office, back behind the bar. Would you come with me, please?”
Milton assessed the second man: younger, heavyset, thick knuckles that were marked with a tattoo that he couldn’t read, sleeves of ink up both arms, a T-shirt that had been cut at the shoulders.
“Maguire’s leaving. I’m going after him.”
Milton gritted his teeth in frustration. He wanted to say no, to order Ziggy to stand down, but he couldn’t very well do that now.
“Sir?”
“I don’t know what you want—”
“See, I ain’t in the business of asking politely.” McCluskey pulled up his shirt tails to reveal the butt of a Glock. “And we know what you are. I’m telling you, get in the back. Why don’t we try to keep it civil?”
Chapter Three
JIMMY MAGUIRE walked right past the rental without giving it a second look. Ziggy Penn watched as he crossed the road and got into a mauve Nissan. The courtesy light flicked on and then off, the rear lights flashed red and the headlamps glowed. The car pulled away into the empty road.
Ziggy gave him a head start of a hundred yards before he started the Chevy’s engine and set off after him. He had left the radio on, the volume down low, so that he could keep on top of what was happening with the storm. He turned it up as the announcer repeated the warning that everyone needed to find shelter. He said that anyone without anywhere else to go should go to the Superdome, but that there were already long lines of people who were trying to get inside. The governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, interrupted the broadcast to plead to anyone still left in the city to get to the dome or get out. She said that the storm was enormous, a monster. The words of another official were replayed, the man sounding like he was on the edge of mania, practically yelling out that it didn’t matter that landfall had shifted a few miles to the west. A dead hit wasn’t necessary for a hurricane as big as this. A glancing blow would still kill thousands.
He switched the radio off.
The last streaks of light overhead had been extinguished now. The black clouds were piling overhead, hundreds of feet high. Ziggy could feel the air pressure plunging. The smell in the air, the salt from the sea, now seemed to be mixed with something sulphurous.
Ziggy didn’t notice the Dodge with the blown-out muffler that pulled out and rolled after him.
#
MILTON FEIGNED drunkenness as he allowed himself to be hauled from his chair. McCluskey had his hands beneath his armpits and the second man, the younger guy, tugged at his shoulders.
“What’ve I done?” Milton stammered out with a mixture of faked bewilderment and fear. His act would confuse them, and it allowed him a moment to make his assessments. They couldn’t be sure that he was the man who had been sent for Maguire. Milton was concerned that the mission had been leaked, but he doubted that he had been compromised beyond that. Very few photographs existed of him. And no one, save Control and Ziggy, knew that he had been assigned this job. That particular inquest could wait.
The bar was still busy, maybe busier than it had been when he had arrived, and the patrons had dispensed with any pretence towards moderation and were plunging headlong into proper drunkenness. The band were playing loud, a series of vigorous folk songs that blended one into the other in a seamless barrage of notes and rhythm. The drinkers at the bar had glasses lined up like dead soldiers, their faces oily and slick. Two stranded Japanese tourists sat at one of the tables, the only people not already two sheets to the wind, sipping decorously at glasses of Scotch.
Not here. Too many witnesses.
The barman came up close behind him and started to pat him down. The P226 was impossible to miss. Milton felt the man’s hand as it closed around the grip, and then the metal, warm now from being pressed against his skin, as it was pulled out from the back of his trousers. Milton was facing McCluskey as the barman revealed the weapon. He saw the older man’s face change from uncertainty to anger.
“Let’s go.”
McCluskey squeezed his elbow and led him into the back. Milton permitted it. The second man followed close behind.
#
ZIGGY PICKED up the car and kept it within easy sight.
“Six, Watcher,” he said into his throat mic.
There was no response.
“Six, Watcher. Come in, Six.”
Nothing.
“Come on, Six. Acknowledge!”
He felt the damp sweat as it gathered in his palms. His hands slipped on the wheel as he turned it. What had happened to Milton? This was bad.
He wondered whether he should abort. He could easily turn around and go back to the hotel. He would be safe there. He could wait the storm out and work out what to do next. Milton would return there, presuming that he was still alive. And, if he didn’t—if he wasn’t—Ziggy would be able to call London for directions. They would send backup. There were other agents, ready to be activated, who would be able to come and clean up the aborted mess of the operation.
He gripped the wheel tighter.
No.
What if Milton had left in time? He might not want to abort. If Ziggy kept a tail on Maguire, he could find him and finish what they had started.
Ziggy had been anxious about the operation. Shot up with adrenaline, but nervous, too. There had been too many times during his life where he had allowed his nerves to betray him. Too many times when he had thought twice and taken the safer, easier option. He had been lobbying for fieldwork for months. Damned if he was going to let his apprehensiveness get in the way of him improving his reputation.
No.
He was going to see this through.
He gritted his teeth, rubbed his palms against his trousers to wipe away the sweat, and kept driving.
#
THEY TOOK Milton into the room behind the bar. It was a storeroom. There were trays of beers, bottles of wine and spirits. A desk was in the corner with a computer and a pile of paper arranged across it.
“You want to tell me who you are now?” McCluskey asked him.
The younger man had looped his arms beneath Milton’s shoulders, his hands clasped behind Milton’s neck. Milton’s stomach was exposed and McCluskey punched him there as hard as he could. He had some power in his fists, and Milton gasped as the air was blown out of his lungs. McCluskey hit him again with a left and then another right and then nodded to the man who was holding Milton up. His arms were released and he was allowed to fall to the floor, crashing heavily onto his knees. He bent double and retched, spitting phlegm onto the wooden floor.
“What about now? A little more talkative?”
Milton coughed.
“Let me tell you something, buddy, you’re about up to your nose in pig shit. You got to decide which one of two things is gonna happen next. One, you tell me who you are and who you work for, and we give you a little working over and toss you outside with the trash or, two, you don’t and I put a bullet in your thick skull. What’s it gonna be?”
Milton coughed again, loud and long. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
McCluskey looked up at the other guy, raised his eyebrows and said, “Number two, then.”
The hideaway .25 NAA Guardian was Velcro-strapped to Milton’s ankle. The barman had stopped his search as soon as he had discovered the Sig. That was an amateur move that Milton would never have made in a million years. You finished the job, always, or you ended up with your ticket punched. That was just the way it was.
Milton tore the little pistol out of the strap. He was so close that it would have been impossible to miss. The first round took McCluskey in the gut. The younger man was still fumbling his finger through the trigger guard of Milton’s P226 when the second round struck him. The Sig dropped from his fingers as he took a step backwards, looking down with bafflement at the blood that was leaking out of the hole in his chest. Milton quickly turned back to McCluskey. The old man was on his knees, one hand reaching for his Glock and the other trying to staunch
the blood from the wound. Milton stepped right up close, pressed the .25 against the back of his head and squeezed the trigger. He dropped flat to the floor, twitched once, and was still. Milton turned back to the barman. He was still alive. Milton went across to him, held the gun against his temple, and fired a fourth, and final, time.
Six seconds.
No witnesses.
There was a doorway in the back of the room. Milton covered his hand with his shirt tail, turned the handle and opened the door. There was a narrow alley between the bar and the adjacent building, the wind squalling along it. Milton replaced the Guardian in the ankle strap, collected the P226, and stepped outside.
Chapter Four
ZIGGY PENN kept a safe distance between his Chevy and Maguire’s Nissan, but he was aware that there was very little traffic on the roads and that he couldn’t hope that Maguire wouldn’t notice that he was being tailed. He didn’t know what he would do when that happened. He’d just deal with it when it did, he guessed.
They crossed the bridge over the Industrial Canal and turned into the grid of streets that made up the Lower Ninth Ward.
His earbud crackled.
“Watcher, Six.”
“Six, Watcher. I’m here.”
“Where’s that?”
“Just off North Claiborne Avenue. I’m following.”
“Negative, Watcher. Stand down. Repeat, Watcher, stand down.”
The Nissan reached an intersection. The traffic lights were suspended above the junction on a long arm fixed to a metal post. The wind was toying with it, blowing the lights back and forth, the post creaking as it was slowly teased out of the concrete baulk that fastened it to the sidewalk. Ziggy rolled up behind the car, putting the engine into neutral and letting it idle.
He heard the sound of the Dodge from the road to his left. He looked out and saw it, a hundred feet away, picking up speed rather than slowing down. He knew, too late, that he had been made and that what was about to happen was the price of his mistake. The engine of the Dodge roared louder and he looked back, seeing two white men in the front seats. Then the fender slammed into the side of the rental, blasting the door inwards, detonating the glass in the window. The car was tipped up onto its two right-side wheels and then, overbalancing, it toppled down and slammed against the asphalt. The Dodge was thrown into reverse, metal shrieking as the mashed fender was yanked away from the torn remains of the door.
“Watcher, report.”
Ziggy coughed, blood in his throat.
“Watcher? Come in, Penn.”
He coughed again, trying to clear his throat so that he might speak. His vision seemed to dim; an envelope of darkness closed in from the edges.
“Help,” he croaked.
Outside, the wind started to wail.
#
MILTON BROKE into a car, hot-wired the ignition, and hit sixty as he headed out of the city and into the Lower Ninth. The radio had been left on by the car’s owner, and the newscaster was reporting that the storm had dropped from a category five hurricane to a category three and then changed direction and hit Gulfport instead of New Orleans. He ducked his head and looked up through the windshield into the tempestuous sky as if to confirm the information. It had weakened? That wasn’t obvious. It was still ferocious. The air pressure was still dropping, and Milton had to swallow to stop the popping in his ears.
He raced to the east, over the Claiborne Avenue Bridge and into the Lower Ninth. Most of the houses had had their shingles lifted clean off their roofs. Telephone poles had been torn out of the ground and snapped in two like matchsticks. Billboards had been ripped down the middle. The windows of strip malls had been punched in, and their roofs had been peeled off like the lids of tin cans.
Milton had heard the crash over the open channel. He tried to reach Ziggy, but there was nothing. Something had happened. The hurricane, perhaps, the car slapped by the wind and tossed onto its side? Or it was Maguire, ensuring that he was not followed, making his escape? Whatever it was, it was bad.
Ziggy was in trouble.
A convoy of police department vehicles flashed by in the opposite lane. Their flashers rippled blue and red but their sirens were muffled by the deafening roar of the wind. The road rose up on an elevated section, and Milton looked down to the left just as veins of lightning spread out across the sky. He saw a blue Chevy at an intersection, flipped up onto its side. It looked like Ziggy’s rental. He stomped on the brakes, feeding the wheel quickly through his hands as the stolen car slid around. He bumped across the median and took the opposite exit ramp. He drove down in the wrong direction, but figured it would be safe on a night like this. He looped around, speeding beneath the flyover, and drove to the intersection that he had noticed from above.
It was his rental. The rear of the vehicle was facing him. There was a small group of black and Hispanic men and women gathered around it. One man had clambered up onto the upturned side, looking down into the cabin. Others were clustered around the hood and the front of the vehicle. Milton brought the car to a stop and got out. As he ran across to the junction, he saw Ziggy Penn’s body as it was carefully lifted through the open windshield frame.
The crowd coalesced around Ziggy’s body as he was laid on the ground. Others were ambling out of their houses.
Milton pushed into the scrum. “Out of my way.”
“Easy, man,” said a man with shocking white hair.
“That’s my friend.”
There was a young woman on the ground next to Ziggy. She was stroking his head and, as she heard Milton’s voice, she turned to look up at him.
“You know him?”
“Yes,” Milton yelled over the roar of the wind. “Is he alive?”
“He’s alive, but he ain’t in a good way.”
“What happened?”
“I heard it. Our place is just over there. There was this huge crash, we came out, and this is what we saw.”
“The other guy?”
“Drove off. Didn’t get the plate.”
Milton knelt down. He knew a little battlefield medicine, but he didn’t need it to know that the woman was right. Ziggy was not in a good way at all. He had been knocked out, and there was a deep cut on the side of his head that was bleeding heavily. His breath was rattling in and out of his mouth, and it looked like his left leg had been broken.
“He needs a doctor.”
“My pops called 911, but they say they can’t tell us when an ambulance will be around. Full capacity, they said. The storm, you know.”
“The hospital, then?”
“I don’t know, sir. They were saying on the radio that they’re full.”
“Turning people away,” added one of the onlookers who was closer behind them.
“That’s not good enough. He needs help.”
“It’s what I was just saying to my mother before you turned up. My brother, Alexander, he can help. I called him. He says he’s coming over, if he can get here. If we can get your friend inside our house, Alex will be able to get him straightened out until we can get him to the hospital.”
“Where’s the house?”
She pointed across the road to a two-storey house that stood amid a welter of battered wooden shacks. “That’s us.”
Milton went around to Ziggy’s head and carefully slipped his hands beneath his shoulders. One of the men took his legs, and moving quickly, but carefully, they transported his unconscious body across the road and into the house.
Chapter Five
THE HOUSE was on a corner plot. It was constructed on a raised foundation and had an asphalt roof that was bearing up well to the battering that it had received from the storm. The sidings were wooden planks, many of which had been secured with additional nails. There were five sash windows on the ground floor and each had been boarded over. The raised porch, which might have contained a table and chairs, had been cleared. The woman led the way, climbing onto the porch and opening the front door. Milton backed inside, cradling Ziggy�
�s body as gently as he could.
There was an elderly couple waiting just inside the door.
“What’s this?” the man said. “He the guy who got hurt in the crash?”
“That’s right, Pops,” the young woman said. “He’s pretty bad.”
“Well, you best bring him straight in and get him in the front room. Alexander be calling ten minutes ago. He’s on his way. Be here soon.”
Milton nodded to the man who had helped carry Ziggy from the car and, on a count of three, they hoisted him up again and brought him into the house’s main room. The light inside was provided by hurricane lamps. The warm orange flickered around a spacious and pleasant front room. The floors were polished hardwood, the ceiling featured crown moulding, and the furniture was clean and well maintained. They laid Ziggy on the sofa.
“Best of luck to him,” the other man said, nodding down at Ziggy’s recumbent form.
Milton thanked him, and the man nodded to the old man—it appeared as if he knew him—and left.
Milton turned to the young woman. “Could I get him some water?”
“Sure,” she said, her hand laid across Ziggy’s brow. “Kitchen’s out back.”
“I’m sorry—I don’t know your name.”
“I’m sorry, I should’ve told you. I’m Isadora Bartholomew. That’s my pops, Solomon Bartholomew, and that over there’s my mamma, Elsie. Who are you?”
“John Smith,” he said.
“And your friend?”
“Ziggy Penn.”
Milton went through into a pleasant kitchen with wooden work surfaces and patched-up appliances. He started to make an assessment of his situation. They were in a run-down part of town. The house was well looked after, but it couldn’t have been worth more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The furniture was well maintained, but cheap. The Bartholomews were a proud family, doing well with the little that they had.
Milton went back into the front room. Isadora took the bowl of water, moistened a dishcloth, and started to mop Ziggy’s brow.