The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  “Your brother—”

  “He’ll be here.”

  “No, I mean, what does he do?”

  “Like I said, just finished college. He’s smart.”

  “Gonna make a fine veterinarian,” Solomon Bartholomew opined.

  “A vet?”

  Solomon shrugged. “Best help your friend’s gonna get tonight.”

  Milton looked down at Ziggy and knew that he was in trouble. He hoped that Isadora and her father were right, and not just full of familial pride. Ziggy’s life depended upon it.

  #

  ALEXANDER BARTHOLOMEW arrived twenty minutes later. He was driving an old Acura that looked like it had seen better days. The hurricane screamed as he pushed against it to open the car door, slamming it back as soon as he let go. He struggled against the wind, crossed the short yard, and came inside the house.

  His mother embraced him. “Are you all right?”

  “Don’t ever remember a storm like this. It’s worse than they said.”

  “Gonna get worse before it gets better. I’m sure glad you’re here, baby.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “We fine,” she replied.

  “The house?”

  Solomon stepped forwards and clasped his son on the shoulder. “It’ll be fine. I battened it down good and tight this afternoon. We lose a few shingles, no big deal.”

  “It’s crazy out there,” Alexander said. “They’re saying that there are gangs on the streets. Looting. God knows how the police are gonna manage.”

  He turned, saw Milton and Ziggy, and stopped talking.

  “This is—” Isadora started to say, before forgetting Milton’s name.

  “I’m John Smith,” he said. “And my friend is Ziggy Penn.”

  “That was you in that smash outside?”

  “No, I wasn’t, I’m fine. Just him. He needs help.”

  Alexander went over to the couch and looked at Ziggy.

  “Can you help him?”

  “I’m not a doctor. I’m training to be a vet.”

  “But you’re the best he’s going to get tonight, right?”

  “Bad luck for him.”

  “The hospitals will be a waste of time,” Solomon said. “Mr. Smith is right. It’s you or nothing.”

  He paused, taking a deep breath. “Probably.” He sighed, cursing under his breath and then added, “Let’s have a look.”

  He undid Ziggy’s belt and pulled it out of the loops. Then, he unbuttoned the fly and took a pair of scissors, cutting down the seam. He carefully cut away the fabric so that he could look at the leg. Milton looked over his shoulder. The whole of the left leg, from the ankle up to the thigh, was discoloured with an awful contusion. The lower leg, halfway between the knee and the ankle, had been wrecked. A sharp splinter of bone had pierced the muscle and skin, a half inch, showing that was a shocking white against the purple and black.

  “Shit.” Alexander winced. “Not good. Compound fracture. A bad one, too.”

  He probed the rest of the leg with his fingers, following the line of the bones.

  “What do you think?”

  “Comminuted tibial shaft fracture. Broken in three places, at least. Displaced fracture here.” He pointed to just below the knee. Then, he indicated a spot above the shin. “Oblique fracture here. And the compound fracture here.”

  “What do we need to do?”

  “Hold on. Let me check the rest of him.” He worked his way around the rest of his body, pressing and probing with his fingers. “Might have a couple of broken ribs, too.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “A little, maybe. That’s an open wound. First thing, we need to stop it from getting infected. Is there anything else I need to know? Is he diabetic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mom, Pops. I need a sterile dressing. Do you still have the first aid kit?”

  “Sure we do,” Elsie said.

  “I’ll get it,” Solomon said.

  “You don’t know where it is,” the old woman said. “Come on.”

  She led him out of the room.

  “Anything else?” Isadora asked.

  “A knife. With the sharpest point you can find. Clean it under boiling water. And keep Mom and Pop out. They don’t need to watch this.”

  She nodded and followed her parents.

  “You got a strong stomach, Smith?”

  “Strong enough.”

  Isadora returned with a green plastic case with a white cross on the front. Alexander opened it and laid out the contents: dressings, tape, gauze. She had a kitchen knife, too. He took it and pressed his finger against the tip. “Good,” he said. “That’s sharp. Can you get me a bucket of water and something to splint his leg against? And a roll of tape.”

  She left them again.

  “What do you need from me?” Milton asked.

  “He has a lot of septic tissue around the puncture. If I don’t get rid of it, it’ll be infected, and if he’s lucky, he’ll lose the leg. If he’s not, the bacterial sepsis will kill him. I need to get rid of the dead flesh and a little of the healthy flesh, too. I need you to hold his leg. This is going to hurt like hell. If he wakes up, he’s going to kick. You need to make sure that doesn’t happen. I could easily slice through an artery.”

  Alexander took a cushion, placed it on the arm of the sofa, and then carefully elevated Ziggy’s left leg until it was resting there. Milton moved around so that he could anchor it. He knelt on the floor next to him, placed his right hand above the knee and the left around his ankle. He braced himself, ready to exert as much force as was needed to stop the leg from moving.

  “Ready?”

  Milton nodded.

  Alexander took the knife and started to debride the wound. He leant in close, his nose just a few inches from the wound, and started to remove the dirt and foreign bodies that had gathered around the area of the leg where the bone had erupted. There were pieces of glass, fragments of cloth from his trousers, tiny slivers of metal from the door. Patches of skin were blackened, already dead and rotting, and he used the knife to slice them away. He used the edge of the knife to scrape away the debris that had gathered on the shard of bone. He picked out several small pieces of unattached splinters that had been created by the pulverising force of the impact.

  It took fifteen minutes. Ziggy shuddered several times, but he did not wake. Milton found that his hands were shaking a little from the adrenaline, but he had not needed to restrain him more than holding the leg firmly in place. Alexander washed out the wound, applied a sterile dressing and then fastened it in place.

  Isadora had collected a broom and a roll of packing tape. Alexander undid the broom from the handle and laid it out along the length of the leg.

  “I can’t set the bones here. That’s surgery. If I start messing with it, I’ll just make it worse.” He took the tape and started to unroll it around the leg. He used half of the roll, swaddling it generously until the handle was splinted firmly against his leg.

  “Thank you,” Milton said.

  “Don’t thank me yet. I’m worried that didn’t wake him up.”

  “Concussion?”

  “If he’s lucky.”

  “And if he isn’t?”

  “If he has internal bleeding?” He shrugged. “Then he’s dead. I can’t do anything about that here.”

  “You think he has?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Chapter Six

  THEY FINISHED treating Ziggy at just past midnight. Solomon and Elsie Bartholomew were hovering around outside the room, anxious to offer their help, but since there was nothing to do, Isadora sent them to bed. They were old, she said. They needed their sleep.

  Milton doubted whether anyone would sleep tonight.

  The room was lit by the lamps and a handful of tea lights that they had placed on the table and the windowsills. The light was warm and evocative. The hurricane shrieked outside, the winds rushing around the house and batte
ring at it as if furious that it had the temerity to resist. Milton went to the front door, opened it and peered out. The wind had stripped the shingles from the roof of the house opposite and, as he watched, it uprooted the individual boards of a fence as if with gentle fingers, flicking them down the street at a hundred miles an hour. The windows rattled in their frames and a loose piece of siding crashed against the house, a last rattle before it was peeled off and flung away. That apart, the house was standing up to the battering.

  Milton closed the door and sat down on the floor, his back pressed up against the wall.

  “You want a drink, Alex?” Isadora asked.

  Her brother opened his eyes and nodded.

  “Mr. Smith?”

  “It’s John.”

  “You want a drink?”

  He exhaled. “Thanks.”

  Isadora went through into the kitchen just as Ziggy stirred, a low groan emitted between dry lips. Alexander went over to him, pulled back his eyelids and shone the flashlight on his cellphone into his eyes. He shook his head. “Still out,” he said.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s a coma.”

  “Serious, then?”

  He looked at him as if he was an idiot. “Do I think it’s serious? He didn’t wake up when I cut his leg with a knife. What do you think?”

  Alexander had a sharp response to everything. He was smart, Milton could see that very clearly. But his attitude was abrasive, as if he had a chip on his shoulder. He had snapped at his sister several times, lacing his replies with sarcasm. Milton didn’t even try to begin to diagnose him. He was difficult, but if Ziggy recovered it would have been entirely thanks to the young man’s efforts. He didn’t know Milton and he didn’t know Ziggy. He could have refused to help, but he hadn’t done that. Milton was prepared to cut him a lot of slack for that.

  Isadora returned with a bottle of bourbon and three shot glasses.

  “Izzy—” Alexander began.

  “I know,” she interrupted. “It’s Papa’s. But I don’t know about you, but I could sure do with something right about now. If that wind don’t stop, it’s gonna peel the roof right off of this place.”

  “Sure,” her brother relented. “Why not? It’s not like I’m driving home tonight.”

  “Mr. Smith? Sorry—John?”

  It was Milton’s usual practice to have a drink after the completion of an assignment. ‘One drink’ was putting it on the low side, especially recently; he had found that he needed more and more to forget the faces of the people he had dispatched. The addition of another two names to that long roster was not a reason to celebrate. He drowned himself in alcohol so that he might forget.

  “John?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

  She poured three large measures and passed them around.

  “To your friend,” she said.

  Milton turned his head to Ziggy and raised his glass. “Yeah,” he said.

  He necked the whiskey and revelled in the warmth that spread out from his gut. Izzy and Alexander drank theirs with similar alacrity, and Milton did not object when she stood to pour replacements. Once he started to drink, he often found it difficult to stop. He would have one more, and that would be that. He couldn’t afford to relax.

  Izzy sat down on the floor opposite Milton and extended her long legs. The candles on the table to her left cast her face in warm friendly light and Milton saw again that she was extraordinarily striking. Her skin was flawless, light chocolate, smooth and bursting with health and vitality. Her eyes were big and round, the same colour as her skin, and her lips were wide and soft. Her manner, too, was attractive. She was caring and seemingly completely open, uncomplicated and honest. Her brother was more of an enigma, with hidden depths; she was his antithesis, his mirror.

  Milton found that he was staring at her. She looked over at him, noticed, and smiled.

  “You want another?” she said.

  His glass was empty. He hadn’t even noticed that he had finished it.

  “No,” he said, although he had been sorely tempted to say yes.

  “Sure?”

  “I’m good.”

  Alexander took the bottle and poured himself a third glass. Milton hoped that he or Izzy might take the bottle back to the kitchen, where he couldn’t see it, but he left it on the table.

  Alexander looked at Milton. “What did you say you were doing in town?”

  “I didn’t. Business.”

  “What business is that?”

  He fell back on the cover story that had been created for him. “I’m in IT. We’re over for a conference.”

  “From England, right?”

  “I am.”

  He pointed at Ziggy. “Is he the same?”

  “Yes. We work together.”

  “So what were you doing down here?”

  Milton had anticipated that question. It wasn’t an easy one to answer, and certainly not truthfully.

  “Give it a break, Alex,” Izzy said. “What is this, 60 Minutes?”

  “Just curious. Why would you want to come down here anyway? And in the middle of a hurricane?”

  “It’s Ziggy,” Milton said. “He has a problem.”

  “What kind?”

  “Drugs.”

  Alexander cocked an eyebrow.

  “We were in a bar tonight. He got a call, the next thing I know, he’s off. Bang. Couldn’t get a taxi, so he breaks into a car and heads down here. I followed him. My guess, he was coming down to get whatever he needed. Coke. That’s his thing. I think he was coming to buy some. He has that crash and then, you know, here we are.”

  “Seriously?”

  “What can I say?”

  “Shit,” Izzy exhaled.

  “Yeah,” Alexander added with a curl of his lip. “Shit.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Izzy asked.

  Alexander put the glass to his lips, left it there for a minute to savour it, and then knocked it back. “Nothing,” he said. “Bad mood, I guess.”

  He got up and poured another drink, then looked morosely down at the golden liquid. He was about to say something, changed his mind, knocked back the whiskey in one hit and thumped the glass down on the table next to the bottle.

  “I’m done,” he said. “I was up early. Need to sleep.”

  “Have my bed if you want.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t be crazy. John and me can sleep down here. If he wakes up”—he indicated Ziggy—“maybe he’ll need me. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  She nodded, pressed herself up to her feet and smiled sweetly. “In the morning.”

  “Thanks,” Milton said. “You’ve been very good to us.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I guess, things were the other way around, you’d do the same for us, right?”

  Milton was aware that Alexander was watching him.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Alexander’s lip curled up again, as if ready to deliver a sarcastic retort, but he kept his tongue.

  “Night,” Izzy said.

  “Goodnight.”

  #

  IT TOOK MILTON an hour to get to sleep and, even when he managed it, it was fitful and unfulfilling. He found it difficult to relax in an unfamiliar place, and the hurricane howling around the house was a reminder of how vulnerable he was there. There were frequent bangs and crashes as debris was tossed around and car alarms sounded without surcease, the owners of the vehicles showing no interest in going outside to switch them off. Alexander, too, was agitated. They didn’t speak, but Milton could sense that he was awake.

  He got up at six. The dawn was overcast with the remnants of the storm, and rain was still lashing down. At least the storm had blown itself out. He opened the door and stepped outside. The houses on the street had been badly damaged. Most of them had lost shingles, some of them naked beneath rafters that had been denuded of their covering. Yards were strewn with rubbish, windows shattered. Cars were nudged off kil
ter, some of them pushed across the street. As Milton stared out at the devastation, he counted another dozen locals who were doing exactly the same thing. They assessed the damage and, no doubt, wondered where they were going to find the money to replace the things that had been lost.

  “Ain’t right, is it?”

  It was Alexander.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, how is it fair that the poorest get hit the worst? Tell me how that’s fair.”

  “It’s not,” Milton said.

  He went back inside.

  #

  ELSIE BARTHOLOMEW made herself busy in the kitchen. Alexander had suggested that he would drive home, but she had stopped him with the offer of breakfast. “Like you like it,” she said, and Milton had watched the first honestly spontaneous smile break over his face. He went over to his mother, stroked her arm and said that she’d persuaded him. She puffed herself up, pretended to be indignant when she said that there wasn’t any way a son of hers was going to go outside in that without a full belly, but Milton could see that she was happy to be teased by him.

  Alexander had said that he would take a look at Ziggy when they all heard a deep, resounding boom. It could have been an electrical transformer, popping in the distance.

  “What was that?” Isadora said.

  There came another boom, and now Milton thought it sounded more like an explosion.

  The old man looked concerned.

  “What was it, Pappy?”

  “I been in New Orleans all my life,” he said. “I was in the city in ’65 for Betsy. I’ll never forget it. They blew the levees back then. Bombed them, flooded the Lower Nine to save some of those rich white folks’ houses in Lakefront. I reckon it sounded just like that.”

  “You sure?”

  “Can’t be sure, but it sounded awful similar.”

  Milton looked to Alexander. “We need to get him upstairs.”

  The two of them carefully lifted Ziggy from the sofa and took him up the stairs. There were two bedrooms on the first floor. Elsie bustled ahead of them, opening the door to the room that she evidently shared with her husband, and insisted that they lay Ziggy on the bed.