The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  Lila came out of the kitchen with a plate of gumbo.

  “You hungry, baby?”

  “Famished.”

  “Got a recipe off the Internet. What do you think?”

  She put the bowl on the table, took an empty plastic bottle and filled it at the sink. Boon took a fork, speared a shrimp and put it in his mouth. It was delicious.

  “Good?”

  “Are you serious? Delicious.”

  She leant down and kissed him on the lips.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “What you think? Shitting himself.”

  “Yeah, well, nothing surprising in that. Most people would be shitting themselves, they find themselves locked up in a place like this.”

  “What we gonna do with him?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I guess that depends on what happens.”

  “What Milton say?”

  “He knows I’m serious, not to try to fuck around. He wants Bartholomew, we want Babineaux. We’re gonna do a swap. I’m thinking, when that happens, maybe you’re waiting with that.” He pointed to the AK-47 that was resting against the wall. “Bang, bang, no more Milton, no more Bartholomew.”

  Lila grinned. “That could happen.”

  Boon got up, collected the AK and brought it back to the table. He pressed the magazine release lever, rotated the magazine forward and pulled it out. Peacock had delivered the gun, one that had been confiscated from the meth cook who used it to defend this cookhouse. The man obviously wasn’t as scrupulous about keeping his weapons maintained as Boon was. He pulled the bolt handle to open the action, checked that the chamber was empty, and then removed the receiver cover. “Fuck’s sake,” he said, brushing out little fragments of dirt. “Look at this. People don’t look after their weapons, they’re asking for trouble. Last thing you want, this jamming when you need it. I’m gonna have to clean it.”

  “You do that, baby. There’s more stew on the stove.”

  “You gonna eat with me?”

  “In a minute.”

  “What you doing now?”

  “Giving that poor bastard his dinner.”

  #

  MILTON TRACKED ahead through a brake of giant cane. He stayed low, the cane brushing his shoulders and the top of his head. The M16 was cradled ready, the muzzle pointing low to the ground, but ready to be brought up and aimed.

  He came across a wide expanse of tea-coloured water, so still that a film of vivid green algae had grown over the top of it. Cypress trees stood in the middle of the water, veils of Spanish moss cascading down from their boughs. Heat weighed down on him. Everything was quiet. It was as if the insects and the animals were too woozy in the furnace to muster a chirp or a call. He passed between two trees with an enormous spider web strung between them, a huge spider scuttling away as he swiped the sticky fibres from his face. He heard the whir of a barred owl’s wings as it arrowed through the trees. Away from the swamp, the ground was caked and cracked as he walked across it. The swamp smelled musty and ancient, antediluvian.

  The ground was too hard for him to find a trail, but, after a short while, he came across a narrow track that was fringed on both sides by thick vegetation. He knelt down and ran his fingers across the ridged grooves that had been left by a car’s tires when the ground had been wet, later to bake in the heat until they were solid as rock.

  The track ran to the east, right to the spot where Bachman’s cellphone had pinged the StingRay.

  He stayed in the margins of the undergrowth and followed the track deeper into the swamp. The terrain rose up, the road cresting a ridge and then descending again into a flat-bottomed basin. Milton paused at the top and looked down onto the landscape that was spread out beyond. He saw the dull glitter of sunlight that struck off mirror-flat and duckweed-strewn lakes, areas of bog and fen. He saw stands of cypress and tupelo, huge swathes of salvinia, patches of water lilies, the trees on the banks of the waterways, their roots stretching thirstily down to the brackish water beneath them. In the middle of the basin, at the heart of an enclave from which the vegetation had been cut away, Milton saw a collection of buildings. Two wooden shacks had been arranged in the shape of an L; an outhouse, perhaps a privy, twenty feet away; and two freight crates, their orange paint decaying with rust. The track that Milton had been following snaked between Chinese tallow trees and oaks, ending at the buildings. A car had been parked beneath the spreading boughs of a big oak.

  Bachman’s Ford.

  Milton arranged the M16 so that he had the plastic forestock cupped in his left hand, the fingers of his right hand near the hand guard for a more accurate shot. He grasped the grip and placed his index finger on the side of the gun, over the trigger guard.

  He crouched down and crept on.

  #

  BOON TOOK a jar of cold water from the fridge, went back to the table and sat down with it. He refilled his bottle, took a long drag, and then fished his phone from his pocket.

  Miracle. The signal from before was still there.

  He dialled the number.

  “Yes?”

  Jackson Dubois sounded tense.

  “It’s me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I spoke to him.”

  “Yes—and?”

  “And we’re going to exchange. He brings your boss, I bring Bartholomew.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning at six. I’m going to call him with the location. There won’t be anyone there. Just him and us.”

  “And then?”

  “We get Babineaux, and then we take him out.”

  “You’ve got that in hand?”

  “You need to relax. You paid me to do it, it’ll get done.”

  “You have backup?”

  “I do. Don’t worry.”

  “No fuck-ups. This has already gone on too long.”

  He gritted his teeth. “It’ll be done.”

  “You just make sure it is.”

  Boon ended the call and put the phone back into his pocket. It was just as well that the pay for the job was significant, because he sure as hell wouldn’t have put up with Dubois’s attitude if they had tried to short-change him.

  #

  THE RIDGE descended into the basin down a steep slope. The swamp encroached all around the buildings, and they were saved from being submerged by the slight camber of the plateau upon which they had been constructed. Milton stayed down low, picking his way through the greenbrier that piled down from the overhanging branches. He was halfway down the slope when he saw it: a thin filament of wire, almost transparent against the green of the vegetation, stretched for two metres between the trunks of an oak and a tupelo tree. He stopped, crouched right down, and followed the wire to the left where it had been fastened around the pin of a fragmentation grenade. Disturbing the wire would pull the pin and detonate the grenade. He would have been killed or maimed, and Bachman and whoever else was down in those buildings would know that the perimeter was breached.

  Milton cut the wire with his knife, undid the loop that attached it to the pin, and put the grenade in his pocket. It might be useful.

  He stopped again when he was thirty feet from the nearest of the two freight containers. A door had been cut into the side, kept shut by a metal bar that slotted through two metal brackets that had been welded to it on either side. It looked like a promising place to start.

  Milton put his hand to his face and wiped the sweat from his eyes, the taste of it salty in his mouth.

  As he paused there, formulating the best plan of attack, he heard the unmistakable sound of a cry of protest from inside the container. It was muffled, the words indistinguishable, a mixture of anger and desperation.

  Milton was sure that the voice belonged to Alexander Bartholomew.

  He shuffled ahead again, the rifle ready, and then he saw a flash of motion from the two buildings that made the L over to his left. He stopped dead, edging behind the generous fronds of a sweet acacia, sharing the co
ver of the leaves with a Carolina wolf spider as big as his fist.

  A woman Milton did not recognise came out of the shack. She was slender, attractive, and looked foreign. Arabic, maybe. That was unusual in a place like this. She was carrying a bowl with some sort of stew, jambalaya or gumbo, and a litre bottle of water. She had a pistol in her right hand. Milton watched as she crossed the distance between the shack and the freight crate, then waited as she set the plate and the bottle on the ground and worked the bar out of the brackets. She rested the bar against the crate and opened the door.

  She led with the gun, said something—Milton thought it was “food”—and then bent down to collect the stew and the water and disappeared inside with them both.

  Milton waited another ten seconds, his attention on the other buildings, but there was no sign of Bachman.

  This was too good of an opportunity to miss.

  He moved quickly through the shrubs and trees, his attention flicking between the open door and the other buildings. He reached the edge of the clearing and, vulnerable, he checked one final time and then sprinted for the door.

  The woman came out of the gloom just as Milton reached the opening. She opened her mouth, ready to yell, her hand with the pistol starting to rise, but Milton was much too quick for her. He reversed the rifle and jabbed the stock into her stomach. She staggered backwards, her hands flapping over her belly. Milton followed inside, his eyes quickly taking in the quickest flashes of the interior: a bedroll on the floor, a dirty plate, a bucket, another man in the corner.

  He stepped over to her quickly, pulled back the rifle and jabbed again, the stock crashing against the woman’s forehead. She toppled back, unconscious before she hit the floor.

  Milton scanned. Alexander Bartholomew was at the other side of the crate, crouched down, his knees bent, his back pressed up against the wall. There was no one else inside.

  “Keep quiet,” Milton said as he looped his hands beneath the woman’s shoulders and dragged her dead weight away from the door and into the deeper darkness. He checked her vitals. She was breathing, but out of it.

  “Help me,” Alexander said.

  “That’s what I’m here to do.” Milton looked at him. His eyes were wide, eloquent with fear, his cheeks bore two days’ growth, and he was caked with dirt. “How many people have you seen here?”

  “Just two. Her”—he pointed to the unconscious woman—“and another guy. She took me out of rehab. She said she was a policewoman.”

  “She’s not.”

  “No shit!”

  “I know the man a little. They’re working for someone your sister has annoyed. They’re trying to use you to make her do something that she doesn’t want to do.”

  “The houses?”

  “Yes.”

  Milton edged back to the door.

  “I thought they were going to kill me.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  #

  BOON SAW it in the corner of his eye. He was putting the AK back together again when there was a flash of motion, a quick disturbance in his peripheral vision that caused him to turn his head to look at the two storage containers. The door in the container they were using to keep Bartholomew was open, an oblong of darkness against the orange paint and the disfiguring scads of rust, and, as he squinted towards it with the sun spearing into his eyes, he saw a dim shape inside. He stared at it, his hand stretching out for the AK. Medium height, slender. A white male.

  Not Lila.

  Not Bartholomew, either.

  Milton?

  He was almost sick with fear.

  He collected the AK, slapped the magazine back into its housing, released the bolt and went to the open screen door. He raised the rifle, started to aim it when the figure in the doorway appeared again, facing out this time, staring right at him.

  It was Milton.

  He raised the AK and fired a six-shot burst.

  Milton spun out of the way, leaving the darkness whole once again. The rounds left vapour trails through the humid air and sliced inside, right where he had been standing.

  #

  ALEXANDER SHRIEKED.

  Milton turned to look. “You hit?”

  He shook his head, then jerked a hand in the direction of the woman. Her skull had been caved in. One of the rounds had ricocheted off the metal roof and drilled her from the back of the head all the way to the front. It had made a mess, with blood splashes thrown all around and gouts of brain matter splattered against the wall.

  One less tango to worry about.

  “Listen to me, Alexander. The man outside is very dangerous, but so am I.”

  “But you work in IT!”

  Milton ignored that and held up the grenade. “He’s got us penned in, but I’ve got this. It’ll buy us a few seconds. When I say run, you run. Okay? As fast as you can. As soon as you come out of here, there’s a slope that heads up to your right. There’s cover up there, trees and shrubs. Get right into the middle of it, as deep as you can, and keep going.”

  Alexander nodded. Milton took him by the shoulder and pressed him back against the wall, next to the door. He slotted himself between him and the opening, took a fresh magazine from his pocket and held it with his left hand, pressed against the forestock of the rifle.

  “Bachman!”

  No response, just the sounds of the swamp.

  “You’ve missed twice now.”

  There was another pause, and then an angry voice shouting out, “You got lucky twice.”

  “You’re getting old.”

  “Maybe I am. But that’s it, Milton. You’re done.”

  Milton listened hard, eyes closed, trying to pinpoint the location of the voice.

  “Leave now, Bachman. I’ve got Bartholomew. If you’re still out there when I come out, I’ll shoot you.”

  “You’re not going anywhere!”

  There was an ear-splitting rattle as another fusillade from the AK studded the side of the container.

  Milton turned to Alexander and told him, with his eyes, to be ready.

  He wiped the sweat from his face, took a breath, and moved.

  He swivelled on his right foot until he was in the doorway, scanning out even as the muzzle of Bachman’s AK flashed again, continuing the pivot until his back was against the wall on the other side of the doorway. The bullets screamed at the crate, several pinging against it, a few whistling through the open doorway and crashing, with bright chings, against the metal walls.

  He breathed in and out, composing himself. He had to move quickly. Bachman was in the other building, but he would move positions soon.

  “Well done, Bachman. You just killed the container.”

  “Try it again and see what happens.”

  Milton took the grenade, pulled the pin and, his thumb over the spoon, counted to three.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  He pivoted back into the doorway and lobbed the grenade at where he had seen the flashing of the AK and took cover again.

  There was a burst of gunfire, bullets crashing against the metal, the sound of scrabbled footsteps, and then, as Milton’s count reached five, a crump as the grenade detonated.

  “Now!”

  Milton was first. He hurried out of the doorway, dropping down to one knee.

  Alexander stumbled out after him, tripping over the sill, his feet sliding through the dust as he fought to right himself, eventually scrambling into cover on the right.

  Milton brought the rifle up, pressing the butt between his breast and the front ball of his shoulder. He tilted his head so that his right eye was looking straight down the top of the barrel and focussed on the front sight, aimed into the blackened walls where the grenade had just exploded, and squeezed the trigger. The gun fired, chewing through the rounds in the magazine. The glass that remained in the frames went opaque before it was blown into the room beyond.

  When the M16 ran dry, Milton ejected the empty magazine with his right
hand and slapped in the fresh one with his left, firing off another burst as he took quick sideways steps to the fringe of the vegetation and the cover offered inside it. Alexander was just ahead of him, struggling through the monkey flower and milkweed. Milton caught up with him, took him by the elbow, and hauled him along.

  He had started to wonder whether Bachman had been caught in the storm of shrapnel from the grenade when the AK clattered again. The leaves rustled and the boughs jerked as the bullets scattered through them. Alexander’s face was rigid with terror, the colour blanched from it.

  “Come on,” Milton said. “We need to move.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  ALEXANDER CRASHED through the palmetto, ascending the ridge, his breath heaving out of his chest in ragged sobs. Milton came after him more carefully, pausing every fifty feet and turning back, the M16 raised and ready to fire. Bachman wouldn’t take unnecessary risks, but, he reminded himself, he had just lost the only bargaining chip that he had to use against them. Without Alexander, he would have to change his tactics or abandon the job, and his fee, and run. Milton didn’t know the man well enough to be able to guess, but he was dangerous enough that he preferred to assume the worst. If he was still coming after them, he would have no compunction in coming at them hard with everything he had.

  Milton reached the top and paused again, crouching down, raising the M16 and tracking it across the dense scrub through which they had passed. He couldn’t hear anything save the chatter of a startled egret and the wet slap of an animal in the algae-topped waters of the swamp. He held his breath, concentrating hard, looking for signs of a clandestine approach; he heard, and saw, nothing.

  And then, he did hear it. A rending, awful scream of anguish. It came from down the slope, from the direction of the encampment.

  At first, Milton thought it was an animal.

  And then he realised that it was Bachman.