The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

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

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

  “I’m well,” he said.

  “What you doing here?”

  “I was just saying to your husband—”

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

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

  “Where you staying?”

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

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

  Milton smiled.

  “You got plans for dinner?”

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

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

  “Woman, I don’t need no—”

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

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

  “Seven thirty good for you?”

  “Perfect.”

  “That’s settled, then.”

  #

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

  “No need,” Milton said.

  “If you have other plans…”

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

  They walked down the path to the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk.”

  “You want to walk?”

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

  #

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Eleven

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

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

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

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

  Anything he wanted, he took.

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

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

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

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

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

  Much, much more.

  $100,000,000 more.

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

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

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

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

  And Babineaux had never forgotten that.

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

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

  “Joel?”

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

  “What do you need?”

  “Is the meeting with Morgan still going ahead?”

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

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

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “The men you found. Are they reliable?”

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

  “But a simple task? Muscle?”

  “Yes, well qualified for something like that.”

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

  “Do you want me to speak to them?”

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

  Chapter Twelve

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

  “Glad you could make it, Mr. Smith.”

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

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

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

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

  “Hello, John.”

  “Izzy.”

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

  “You get a hotel?”

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

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

  “We surely could.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s fine, really.”

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

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

  “I’d love to.”

  “Come and look in here first.”

  Solomon bid him to follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Milton put the ledger back on the desk.

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

  Elsie put her head through the door.

  “He boring you with his birds?”

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

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

  #

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