by Mark Dawson
He was comfortable with that.
Part of his solitary journey through South America had been to give himself time to come to terms with what, he knew, was the only possible way that he could live out the rest of his life. He had done too many bad things to deserve happiness and, even if he could have accepted that he did deserve it, he was too dangerous to allow anyone else to drift into his orbit. That had been demonstrated to him in spades in London, with what had happened to Sharon and Rutherford. Burned half to death and shot in the head, all because they had allowed him to cross their paths. Death followed him, always close at heel, always avid, always hungry. And now Control had found him again and flung his agents at him from half a world away. What if he had allowed himself to draw closer to someone, perhaps one of the women whose bed he had shared over the last six months? What if he had allowed himself a wife? Children? The thought was preposterous. The Group would offer him no quarter and anyone who was found with him would be executed. It would have to be that way. What might he have told them? What secrets divulged? The shoe had been on the other foot before, and he knew what the orders would be. No loose ends.
No.
There had already been too much innocent blood spilt.
He could only ever be alone.
He took off his boot and massaged his heel. He had been travelling for thirty-eight hours straight. He had taken a couple of naps in the car, parked on the side of the road, but that was it. He was as tired as a dog. It was absolutely still, the quiet so deep that it was all-consuming, enough to make you wonder that you had gone deaf. As he listened to his own heartbeat keeping him company, he wondered whether death could possibly be more serene.
He had returned Plato’s car, left it in the car park of a maquiladora at one in the morning. The rifle was in the back, hidden beneath a travelling blanket. He exchanged it for a stolen Volkswagen and crossed the city. He drove carefully for fear of attracting attention, only accelerating properly once he was among the scrubland and the start of the desert. He had followed the highway for two hundred miles and then he had pulled over to the side of the road, soaking siphoned diesel into the upholstery and tossing in a match. With the heat of the burning car braising his cheeks, he turned to the north and set his face to America.
He walked.
Big Bend National Park was ahead, the Chisos Mountain range welcoming him to the border. Milton picked the distinctive shape of Emory Peak at the end of a deep valley as his waypoint. He walked. It hardly seemed to draw closer at all, but distance was almost impossible to judge, that was the way of it in the desert, and especially so at night. Milton was not concerned. He had navigated through bleaker landscapes than this.
He was close.
He walked.
The path led towards red-headed buttes at the foot of which red-headed vultures pecked at the carcass of a desert fox. He came across an abandoned railway track, an idle row of orphaned boxcars daubed with graffiti across the rust. The dawn was coming up now. The darkness was weakening, lilac blooming at the edges of the horizon, the light fading the constellations, the herald of the glorious golden desert sunrise that would be on him all too quickly. Somewhere on the mesa, a coyote howled. The long, mournful wail was followed by a yipping chuckle until it almost sounded as if the dog was laughing.
He kept walking.
John Milton trudged across the border as the light turned from black to mauve, the sun coming around again.
* * *
The Driver
* * *
We stood at the turning point. Half-measures availed us nothing.
– The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous
“Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind,
Therefore, send not to know,
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
– ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls,’ John Donne
#1
TABITHA BETTY WILSON
TABBY WILSON updated her Craigslist profile on the night she was murdered. She tweaked her personal information a little and added a new selfie that she had taken that same afternoon. It was a good likeness of her: she was wearing wispy red lingerie, her skin was smooth and blemish-free and she was wearing a crazy blonde wig that made her look a little like Lana del Rey. She looked fine, she thought. Her expression was sultry and provocative, almost daring men to contact her. She was slender and had big eyes, androgynous with that alien look that was so popular on the blogs that she bookmarked and the magazines she thumbed through in Wal-Mart or when she was waiting at the laundromat.
It was important that she looked her best. The Craigslist ad was her shop window and, as she touched up the blemishes in Photoshop, she was pleased with the results. She had porcelain skin, a short bob of dark hair, and those big eyes were green and expressive. She was twenty-one and had left school when she was seventeen to have a baby. She never went back. She had two children now, each with a different father, although she never saw either man. Her mom helped to bring up the kids. Until recently, she had worked in telemarketing. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Vallejo funded by the alimony that her son’s father had been ordered to pay. Apart from the fact that cold-calling saps to sell them new windows wasn’t what she had in mind for her career, the alimony and her wages didn’t cover all of her expenses. Things got worse when she was fired for missing her sales targets. Delivering pizza or running the register at Wal-Mart were not what she had in mind as her career, either, and those jobs ended just as soon as they had started.
Tabby liked to think that she was a positive person and so she concentrated on her ambitions. She had always wanted to be a model. There was money in that, lots of money, and she was sure that she was pretty enough and had a good enough figure to make a go of it. She created Pinterest and Instagram pages that she filled with photographs: selfies with the camera held as far away from her face as possible, others showing her in the full-length bedroom mirror, a selection that she had culled from the shoot that a photographer friend had conducted in exchange for a night with her. She knew that she needed to do something to get her career moving in the right direction. She spent a lot of time working on her page and it wasn’t long before she noticed the ads for modelling. She clicked on a site called ModelBehavior.com which offered free hosting for the portfolios that girls sent in. She set up an account and uploaded the best photos from the shoot. She started to see enquiries right away. She was hoping for offers from catalogues and magazines but they were all from agencies that said that they could book her for those kinds of jobs but, when she clicked onto their sites, it was obvious that what they were really looking for were hookers and escorts.
She started to take the offers more seriously when she saw how much money she could earn. Escorting was like webcam stripping, only in person, with no sex involved. And it wasn’t hard to be tempted by the money she could make if she did have sex. But she couldn’t see the point of signing up for a service and giving them half of the money she made.
She could do it all herself.
That was when she had started advertising on Craigslist.
THAT NIGHT’S JOB had been booked on the phone. The john had emailed her to say that he was interested and she had done what she always did: gave him the number of her work phone so that she could talk with him and lay out the prices and what he could expect to get in return. Insisting on a call also gave her the chance to screen the guys who had never booked her before. There were always weirdos and she’d been knocked around by a couple. Talking to someone was better than reading an email to get an idea of what they were like. She had refused bookings with several men who had just sounded wrong on the phone. Tabby liked to say that she was a good judge of character. She was careful, too.
This guy, though? He sounded alright. A southern accent, a bit of a hillbilly twang going on, but he’d been polite and well spoken. He’d explained to her that he was a police officer, in town for a law enforceme
nt conference, and said that he wanted a little bit of fun. He had no problem with her charges and so she had arranged to meet him.
She was on the corner of Franklin and Turk at eight, just as they had arranged, smoking a cigarette and watching the traffic go by. She was thinking about her kids and about how she had made enough money already this week to pay the rent, pay for the groceries and maybe even take them to Six Flags for a treat. There was one at Vallejo. She was thinking about that as the Cadillac slowed to a stop beside her. Her old man had been a mechanic and she had been big into cars when she was younger so that she could impress him; she recognised it as an Eldorado, probably twenty years old. It wasn’t in the best condition. The front-right wing was dinged, the registration plate was barely attached to the chassis and the engine backfired as the driver reached over and opened the passenger side door for her.
He called out her name in the same redneck accent that she remembered from the phone call.
She picked up her bag and stepped into the car.
She was never seen again.
* * *
PART ONE
Regular John
* * *
1
THE GREY SEPTEMBER MIST had rolled in off the Bay two days earlier and it hadn’t lifted yet. It softened the edges of objects within easy sight but, out beyond ten or fifteen feet, it fell across everything like a damp, cold veil. June was often the time when it was at its worst––they called it June Gloom for a reason––but the fog was always there, seeping down over the city at any time, without warning, and often staying for hours. The twin foghorns––one at either end of the Golden Gate Bridge––sounded out their long, mournful, muffled ululations. John Milton had been in town for six months and he still found it haunting.
It was nine in the evening, the streetlamps glowing with fuzzy coronas in the damp mist. Milton was in the Mission District, a once-blighted area that was being given new life by the artists and students who swarmed in now that crime had been halted and rents were still low. It was self-consciously hip now, the harlequinade of youth much in evidence: long-haired young men in vintage suits and fur-trimmed Afghans and girls in short dresses. The streets looked run-down and shabby. The girl Milton had come to pick up was sitting on a bench on the corner. He saw her through the fog, difficult to distinguish until he was a little closer. He indicated right, filtered out of the late evening traffic and pulled up against the kerb.
He rolled the passenger-side window down. The damp air drifted into the car.
“Madison?” he called, using the name that he had been given.
The girl, who was young and pretty, took a piece of gum out of her mouth and stuck it to the back of the bench upon which she was sitting. She reached down for a rucksack, slung it over her shoulder, picked up a garment bag and crossed the pavement to the Explorer. Milton unlocked the door for her and she got in.
“Hi,” she said in a lazy drawl.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for being so quick. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“You know the McDonalds in Balboa Park?”
He thought for a moment. Six months driving around San Francisco had given him a decent grasp of local geography. “I know it.”
“That’s where we’re headed.”
“Okay then.”
Milton changed into first and pulled back out into the sparse traffic. The rush hour had dissipated. He settled back into his seat and nudged the car up to a steady forty-five. He looked in the mirror at his passenger: Madison had opened her rucksack and taken out a book. It looked thick and substantial; a text-book, he thought. The dispatcher had told him to look for a blonde when she had relayed the booking although her skin was a very dark brown, almost black. Her hair was light and straightened and Milton wondered whether it might be a wig. She was curvaceous and small and dressed in jeans and a chunky sweater. Definitely very pretty. She read her book in silence. Milton flicked his eyes away again and concentrated on the road.
They passed through Mission Bay, Potrero Hill and into Balboa Park. The McDonalds, a large drive-thru, was in the grid of streets south of Ocean Avenue. There were advertisements for three-for-two on steak burritos and cups of premium roast coffee for a dollar.
“Here you go,” he said.
“Thanks. Is it okay to wait?”
“What for?”
“A call. We’re just stopping here.”
“Fine––but I’ll have to keep the clock running.”
“That’s okay. I got to wait until the call comes and then we’ll be going someplace else. Is that okay with you?”
“As long as you can pay, we can stay here all night.”
“I can pay,” she said with a broad smile. “How much do I owe you?”
Milton looked down at the meter. “Twenty so far.”
“Twenty’s no problem.” She took a purse out of her bag, opened it and took out a note. She reached forward and handed it to him. It was a hundred.
He started to feel a little uncomfortable.
“That should cover it for a couple of hours, right?”
Milton folded it and wedged it beneath the meter. “I’ll leave it here,” he said. “I’ll give you change.”
“Whatever.” She nodded at the restaurant, bright light spilling out of the window onto the line of cars parked tight up against it. “I’d kill for a Big Mac,” she said. “You want anything?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“You sure?”
“I ate earlier.”
“Alright.”
She got out. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He rolled the window down.
“Actually,” he said, “could you get me a coffee? Here.”
He reached in his pocket for a dollar bill.
She waved him off. “Forget it. My treat.”
Milton watched as she crossed the car park and went into the restaurant. There was a queue and, as she slotted into it to await her turn, Milton undid his seat belt and turned around so that he could reach into the back. She had left her bag on the seat. He checked that she was facing away and quickly unzipped it, going through the contents: there was a clutch bag, two books, a mobile phone, a bottle of vodka, a box of Trojans and a change of clothes. He zipped the bag and put it back. He leant back against the headrest and scrubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand.
He had been very, very stupid.
The girl returned with a bagged up Happy Meal, a tall soda and a large coffee. She passed the Styrofoam cup through the open window, slid into the back seat, took the bottle of Stolichnaya from her bag, flipped the plastic lid from the soda and poured in a large measure.
“Want a drop in your coffee?”
“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t drink.”
“Not at all?”
“Never.”
“Wow. What is that, like a lifestyle choice?”
He wasn’t about to get into that with her. “Something like that,” he said vaguely.
“Suit yourself.”
She put the straw to her mouth and drew down a long draught.
“Madison,” Milton said. “I need you to be honest with me.”
She looked up at him warily. “Yeah?”
“There’s no delicate way to put this.”
She stiffened, anticipating what was coming next. “Spit it out.”
“Are you a prostitute?”
“You’re a real charmer,” she said.
“Please, Madison––no attitude. Just answer the question.”
“I prefer ‘escort.’”
“Are you an escort?”
“Yes. You got a problem with it?”
“Of course I do. If we get pulled over I could get charged with promoting prostitution. That’s a felony.”
“If that happens, which it won’t, then you just tell them that I’m your friend. How they gonna say otherwise?”
“You make it sound like it’s happened to you before
.”
“Hardly ever, and, whenever it has, it’s never been a big deal.”
“No,” Milton said. “I’m sorry. It’s a big deal for me.”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t need a criminal record. You’re going to have to get out. You can call another cab from here.”
“Please, John,” she said. He wondered for a moment how she knew his name and then he remembered that his picture and details were displayed on the laminated card that he had fixed to the back of his seat. “I can’t afford this right now.”
“And I can’t take the risk.”
“Please,” she said again. He looked up into the mirror. She was staring straight at him. “Come on, man. If you leave me here I’ll never get a ride before they call me. I’ll miss the party and these guys, man, this agency I work for, they’ve got a zero tolerance policy when the girls no-show. They’ll fire me for sure and I can’t afford that right now.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not my problem.”
“Look, man, I’m begging you. I’ve got a little kid. Eliza. She’s just two years old––you’ve got no idea how cute she is. If I get fired tonight then there’s no way I’m going to be able to pay the rent. Social services will try to take her away from me again and that just can’t happen.”
Milton stared out at the queued traffic on Ocean Avenue, the glow of a hundred brake lights blooming on and off in the soupy fog as they waited for the junction to go to green. He drummed his fingers on the wheel as he turned the prospect over in his mind, aware that the girl was looking at him in the mirror with big, soulful, hopeful eyes.
He knew he was going to regret this.