by Mark Dawson
She shook her head vigorously. “No way. Dad’s a pretty straightforward, buttoned-down guy. He wouldn’t get into anything that wasn’t legitimate.”
“What about your brother?”
“Like I said—he was a soldier. A straight shooter, just like Dad.”
“You said he was discharged?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
She looked down at the table for a moment and then back up at Milton. “Drugs,” she said. “He got in with the wrong crowd when he was young, and he joined up to try to go straight. It didn’t work out. But if you think this has anything to do with him—no. There’s no way.”
Milton wasn’t quite so ready to come to that conclusion, especially when her brother’s location was uncertain, but there was no profit in pushing her now. “Can you think of anything that might explain why those men were there? Anything at all?”
She shook her head, then looked back down at the splayed-open grease paper and Milton’s unfinished burger in the middle of it. “No. I have no idea. I wish I did know. It wouldn’t be so scary if I knew what was happening, but I don’t.”
Milton watched her face as she spoke and saw nothing that made him doubt her. She appeared sincere and, as far as he could tell, confused about what had happened.
Jessica opened a packet of ketchup, picked up a handful of fries and dipped them into it. “So what do I do now? Call 911?” She popped her fries into her mouth, then, as though suddenly realising she was starving, unwrapped her burger and took a bite.
Milton leaned back in his seat and took another bite of his burger. The easy option was to encourage Jessica to call the police, even though that would make things difficult for him. Milton had left three bodies at the Russo house, and any detective worth his or her salt would be able to see that the shots fired had not been simply lucky. Six shots, six hits, and two of those were kill shots from close range. He would have to explain what had happened. They would question where he had learned to shoot. Milton was already constructing a story that he could furnish if need be, but the thought of having to go through the charade made him uncomfortable. He didn’t enjoy attention, official or otherwise, and this promised to deliver a whole boatload of it. All that being said, if going to the police was the prudent thing to do, he would have suggested it.
“I don’t know if you should,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because these men have your father. I’m not suggesting you don’t speak to the police, but I think it might be wise to think about it for an hour or two. We need somewhere to stay so we can figure out the best thing to do.”
“And you’ll help?”
“If you’d like me to.”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful. You’ve already helped me so much. But I need to know who you are before we do anything else. You still haven’t told me.”
Milton knew full well he didn’t have to say anything, and he wasn’t obliged to be honest with her. He could just get up and go, the way he’d done countless times before. But then he thought about the Steps, and the blood on his conscience, and the chance to do another thing that was right in an attempt to make amends. He couldn’t leave her now if she said she wanted his assistance. Selfishness was a symptom of his condition, and he knew that if he allowed himself that luxury, then he would be taking a step along the path to his first drink in years, and he knew where that would lead.
“John?” she pressed. “Please. What did you used to do?”
“Special forces,” he said. “The SAS.”
“Like Delta?”
“Like them,” he said. “I did some things after I left the Regiment that I’m not proud of.”
“Legal things?”
He smiled without humour. “Legal,” he said. “I can’t tell you what they were, but I’m trying to make up for them now.”
It was a flavour of the truth, enough for Jessica to get a sense of what he meant. She listened intently, and Milton could see that she was weighing up what to say next. She took another bite of her burger, swallowed and, seemingly decided, gave a firm nod of her head.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’d like your help.”
Milton nodded.
Milton waited while Jessica went to the bathroom. He was involved now. The men who had seen him in the house were dead, so at least they wouldn’t be able to describe him. The only look that Oscar’s men would have had at him was through the windows of the GTO and the Porsche; the chances of him being identified from that were practically non-existent. On the other hand, Oscar now had the Pontiac and the documents that were inside it. Milton couldn’t say for sure that there was no way back to him through them.
Milton had also exacerbated the situation by speaking to Oscar and threatening him. Whatever it was that Oscar and his men were after, he knew that he would now be included as part of their problem.
He considered his options. The way he saw it, he had two.
First: he could find a safe place to put Jessica and then leave. But wherever that might be, it would only be safe for so long. She would make an error, Oscar would find her, and whatever Oscar wanted, he would get. It would mean abandoning the girl, and that went against Milton’s code.
Second: he could stay and help. That meant finding a spot where they could hunker down in safety so that Milton could get a better handle on the lay of the land.
He had no idea who they were up against. They were professional, well armed, and ruthless enough to have kidnapped a man. That made them dangerous. He had no way of knowing what type of organisation they were and what their reach might be. Oscar had sounded Latino. Mexican? Colombian? Milton had crossed a cartel before and had barely escaped with his life. He would have preferred not to have traficantes as enemies again, but he needed to assume the worst. It was possible.
But it didn’t really matter who it was, at least not for now. They were serious players. Few places would be safe.
He was going to need help.
21
Beau Baxter stretched out his legs, crossing his right ankle over his left. His snakeskin boots were dusty, and he rubbed the leather against the denim of his jeans to clean it off. What with the swimming pools and the man-made lakes, it was easy to forget sometimes that this crazy-ass town was in the desert.
It was just after eleven at night and the lights beneath the surface of the water threw shimmering reflections up against the sides of the building, where they were muted by the glow from the neon signs that reached up high overhead. The H in HOTEL was faulty, flickering on and off, the buzz of the electricity audible over the distant hum of the Strip.
Beau was at the El Cortez at 600 East Fremont. The place had been in Vegas since the forties; it had once been owned by Bugsy Siegel and didn’t look as if it had changed much over the intervening seventy years. He had no time for the swanky hotels that had come to dominate the Strip. He had been coming to Vegas for forty years, and he preferred to think of it as it had been: seedy, sinful, sleazy. Full of life. Everything was different now, and the changes were—at least to his eye—not for the better. The corporations with their vast resorts had destroyed the atmosphere that had made the place so special. They had sucked the sap right out of it. It was antiseptic now. Homogenised. The hotels might have looked different from the outside, but they were all the same once you went through the doors. He had stayed in the Bellagio when it opened, dropping top dollar for a suite just to see whether it could possibly have been worth the coin. He had been disappointed then and had promised never to go back. He never had.
This place, though? The El Cortez? He had first stayed here in the late nineties. He had been chasing a felon who had skipped jail in San Francisco in favour of a week of hedonism in Vegas. The man—Beau remembered that his name was Becker—had robbed a bank, and the police had never found out where he had stashed his loot. It turned out that he had given it to his wife, and she had come out to meet him for one last blowout. T
he man hadn’t put any effort into hiding his tracks, and it had taken Beau less than forty-eight hours to find him in one of the high-roller suites at Caesar’s. He had collared the man on the roulette wheel just as his bet—fifty large on black—came good. Becker had offered Beau his winnings if he would give him another hour with his wife. Beau wasn’t a hard-ass, but a job was a job, and he had taken him in there and then. You give an inch, they take a mile. Beau never gave an inch, but he had taken the man’s cash.
The hotel hadn’t changed a bit between then and now, and that made Beau as happy as a hog in slop. The slot machines in the casino still ran on real quarters, the carpets hadn’t been changed in twenty years, and the wait staff were old and jaded and bitter, tending to the patrons with a sourness that Beau preferred to the megawatt smiles of the pretty young things who worked the main joints downtown.
He had been in the casino all night, taking a place in the weekly hold ’em contest that they had. It was popular with the local hustlers, who figured it was a good chance to feast on the sucker tourists who thought they knew what they were doing. Beau had been playing poker since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and had stuck around all the way to the final table, placing sixth out of the two hundred who had entered and winning himself five grand into the bargain. The trip was fixing to be a profitable one: he’d add the prize money to the interest he’d claim from the skipper’s mom once he ran her errant son to ground.
Beau was reaching over for his beer when his cellphone glowed with an incoming call. He picked it up. “Hello.”
“It’s John Smith.”
Beau put the bottle to his lips and took a sip, washing the dust from his tongue. “Howdy, English. You in town yet?”
“I am,” he said. “And you?”
“Got in late afternoon. You drive?”
“I did.”
“You enjoy it?”
“It had its moments.”
“I bet it did.” He sipped again and then wiped the cool glass against his brow. “What’s up? You need me for something?”
“I do,” Milton said. “Something came up.”
“You got yourself into trouble again?”
“Am I that predictable?”
“What do you need?”
“Somewhere safe to stay. Off Strip. You got any ideas?”
Beau leaned back and glanced at the neon-drenched showgirl sign that flashed on and off overhead.
“Well, then,” he said. “Turns out I do.”
22
It was eleven when the two beaten-up Suburbans finally reached the warehouse on East Cartier Avenue. Oscar Delgado looked out of the windshield as Castellanos went to unlock the gate. The warehouse was the last in a line of similar buildings, all of them two storeys tall, brick-built and rendered in neutral tones of beige and white. The building had been occupied by a hoist company until last year. Oscar had rented it and had replaced the signage on the wall with the branding of the front company that they had been using to get the product into the city.
VegasLead imported lead from South America to be turned into ballast that was then sold on to local industry. The ingots came into the country by ship and were transported to Vegas on the backs of trucks, one arriving every week. The cartel had perfected a method whereby the product would be hidden inside steel boxes that were then hidden inside the ingots. The lead couldn’t be X-rayed and, thanks to a contact at the port, they knew the maximum length of the drill bits that the customs officials would use should an attempt be made to cut into them. It was an elegant way to deliver the cocaine, and it had already been successful to the tune of eight hundred kilograms safely imported. Oscar’s men removed the product before melting down the lead and selling that in the course of the company’s legitimate business. The coke was cut and sold to wholesalers across the southwest.
Business had been good and, under normal circumstances, Oscar would have felt the usual buzz of pride at the thought of what he had been able to achieve. But these were not normal circumstances, and he didn’t feel that way. Instead, he was angry and frustrated and fearful. And Richard Russo was the source of all of that.
Castellanos was struggling with the padlock.
“What is he waiting for?” Oscar snapped. He lowered the window and called out, “Get it open!”
The outside space and access to the loading bay were guarded by a metal fence with a gate inside it. Castellanos finally unlocked the gate and hauled it back. The Chevrolets followed him as Castellanos jogged to the building and opened the roller door. The two vehicles drove inside the building. Castellanos switched on the overhead lights and then dragged the door down again.
Oscar got out. He gestured to Russo. “Put him in the office,” he snapped. “I’m gonna take a piss and then he’s gonna tell me where he’s put the money he stole.”
There was a restroom next to the loading bay. Oscar went inside and locked the door, then went to the mirror and stared at his reflection. He thought that he had managed to hold it together. The last few days had been the worst since he had left Mazatlán to come and run the business in Las Vegas. The cartel’s bookkeeper had discovered the discrepancy in the ledger. Someone had been siphoning cash—a lot of cash—from the VegasLead account. It had taken no time at all to conclude that Russo was responsible.
Delgado had recriminated with himself already. If he had stayed within the limits of his assignment, then none of this would have happened. But Russo had come to him with a proposal. He had large medical bills to pay and the urgency of his predicament had led him to consider illegal means of making the money he needed. His proposal promised outsized profits for minimal risk. The scam was neat, and Delgado had been unable to resist it. The cartel paid him well, but no one had said anything about him being unable to develop alternative sources of income. He knew of others back home who had done the same thing and, provided La Bruja received a cut, there was never a problem with it.
But Delgado had been careless and Russo had been greedy. Oscar knew that his failure to notice would be held against him when the inevitable investigation was completed. He knew that his only chance to save his skin was to recover the money that had been taken and to punish those who had been so stupid as to steal from them.
Tonight had taken things to another level. He had lost three men and had been embarrassed in front of the others. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if La Bruja learned about what had gone down. An example would have to be made of everyone who had been foolish enough to cross the cartel.
Everyone.
Oscar would start with Russo. Then the girl. The other man—Smith, whoever he was—well, he would vent the bulk of his fury and frustration on him.
Oscar ran the tap, cupped his hands and filled them with water and then dunked his face. He looked up again, the beads of water rolling down his cheeks and forehead. There was fear in his eyes. He couldn’t afford to let any of the others see that.
He reached for a paper towel from the dispenser and wiped his face. He thought back to earlier. Russo had been easy enough to collect. He had put up a fight, driven by the fear of what he must have known was about to happen to him, but they had subdued him without any significant effort.
As they had driven him away, Oscar had recognised the girl in the oncoming car as the old man’s daughter. Having her would have been useful. The question of her well-being would have been another threat to hold over her father. But, of course, that had not turned out the way he had planned.
Oscar found his thoughts snagging on the stranger once again. They knew his name was Smith from the paperwork in his car. Clearly, he was a problem. He had killed Pérez, Lòpez and Morazán and then escaped from both SUVs on the freeway. Oscar had no idea who he was or why he was with the girl, but he was going to have to find out.
23
Milton kept the Porsche comfortably under the speed limit as he drove through Harry Levy Gardens and Marble Manor, heading due east. The rear of the car was dented, there was
a bullet hole in the windshield and one of the wing mirrors had been torn off. The Macan was already conspicuous, and he didn’t want to draw any additional attention to it.
She looked over at him. “So you’re basically Steven Seagal.”
“Sorry?”
“Under Siege?”
He shrugged. “What? The film?”
“Yes, the film.”
“I only remember the girl in the birthday cake.”
“He’s a soldier pretending to be a cook.”
“Right,” Milton said. “And you think I’m pretending?”
She waited for him to answer his own question.
“No, Jessica. I really am a cook.”
He kept a regular watch in the rear-view mirror, but it stayed clear. The two Suburbans would have been damaged, but he couldn’t discount the possibility that the occupants—or others in their group—had access to fresh vehicles and might be trawling the main arteries into and out of the city in the hope of a lucky hit. Right now, he didn’t see anything or anyone else that they needed to be on guard for. They were free of them, at least for the moment.
On the other hand, it was obvious that their pursuers were professionals and that they would not stop coming.
The best ones never did.
He glanced over at his passenger. Jessica was slumped against the door, staring out at the blur of lights as they made their way into town. Her eyes were glazed over; she was somewhere else.
Milton checked the mirrors again.
Still clear.
The glittering neon lights of the Strip shone in the distance up ahead. The lights ahead of them glowed brighter as they approached, the hotels rising into the sky like temples to audacity and flamboyance, each trying to outdo the next.
“Are we going to the Strip?” Jessica asked, pushing herself off the door.
“No,” Milton said. “I don’t think that’s safe.”