Salvation Row - John Milton #6 (John Milton Thrillers)

by Mark Dawson

  Boon shut the front door, put on the latch, held up a hand, mouthed “stay here,” and stepped farther into the room. He checked the bathroom, held his hand against the porcelain sink. It was damp, still a little warm, a tideline of scum just below the level of the overflow. Little bristles. Milton had shaved. He knelt down beside the shower cubicle, reached down to the tray, felt that it was wet. He had been here, and not long ago.

  He went back into the room and approached the interconnecting door. He paused there, listening. A toilet flushed somewhere, and a door latch clicked. Didn’t sound like it was next door, maybe one of the rooms farther along the line. He held the gun ahead of him, his finger tight around the trigger. He only needed just an extra ounce or two of pressure to bring it all the way back and fire.

  He yanked the door. A woman sat up in the bed, naked, her breasts exposed. Boon shot her three times and left her blood spread across the headboard and the wall behind it. The bathroom door swung open and a man in pajamas was standing there, his mouth open. Boon shot him three times, just as quick, sending him back into the bathroom, blood splashing onto the threadbare carpet and the salmon bathroom tiles.

  Boon paused, listening. Floorboards creaked, but not here, maybe the next room over. This couple were not involved. It looked domestic, two people stopping for the night, wrong place, wrong time. Tough luck. Their cases were open, pushed up against the wall, clothes spilling out of them. The only thing out of place was the front door. It was unlatched and ajar.

  Boon crept ahead, his gun arm steady, but, before he could reach the door, he heard the sound of an engine. He heard lots of revs and the screech of rubber, biting on asphalt. He opened it as a Toyota Corolla raced away, taking the sharp bend out of the lot at speed, making the road and melting into the early traffic.

  “Shit,” Lila said.

  She was behind him, just inside the door. She looked at the dead woman in the bed, saw the legs of the dead man stretching out through the door to the bathroom. She wasn’t perturbed by either of them. She had seen plenty of death in the last two years, plenty worse than this. It was the sight of the open front door, the sound of the car, the evidence that Milton had evaded them. It was that which had annoyed her.

  “Yeah,” Boon said. “Shit.”

  “He knows we’re coming now.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was our best chance to get at him.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “He’ll be impossible now.”

  “Not impossible. Difficult.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You know what we do, baby. Leverage. We pick a different target.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  MILTON DROVE at a steady sixty. Not too fast to risk attention from the police, but not so slow that he would give Bachman the chance to get ahead of him.

  His body was flooded with adrenaline. His hands were trembling.

  Avi Bachman.

  That was something that he couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

  And it changed everything.

  He took out his phone and looked at the time.

  8.30AM.

  He dialled Izzy, activated the speaker, and rested the phone on the dash.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me. Where are you?”

  “At the hotel. Just getting ready.”

  “Stay there. Do not leave your room without me.”

  “I wasn’t going to. You said—”

  “Listen to me, Izzy. Your parents, too. They need to come with us today.”

  “To court?”

  “They need to be with us.”

  “What’s happened, Milton?”

  He held his tongue. No sense in worrying her any more than she was already worried. “Something has changed. I’ll tell you when I see you. But it’ll be fine. I just want us to be extra careful from now on.”

  “You’re worrying me, John. I told you, no secrets, okay? Sounds like you’re holding out on me. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”

  “Everything is fine. I’ll explain when I get there. Just stay in the room.”

  #

  MILTON ARRIVED at the Comfort Inn and called Izzy again. She came out five minutes later, dragging her document case behind her. Her parents followed behind. Milton left the engine running, stepped out and waved them over. The pistol was jammed against his hip, a comforting presence. He let them come all the way over to him, unwilling to allow himself the distraction of meeting them halfway. He scanned with avid, hungry eyes. If the roles had been reversed, and he was in Bachman’s shoes, this would have been a prime opportunity. He felt the buzz of adrenaline again as he looked left and right. But there was nothing.

  Izzy stepped out, put a little distance between herself and her parents. “What is it?” she hissed at him.

  “I’ll explain later. When we’re alone.”

  “You’re frightening me.”

  “I’m sorry. You have to trust me.”

  Solomon and Elsie reached the car. “Morning, John,” the old man said. “Got room in the car for the two of us? Izzy says we need to see her in action today.”

  “Plenty of room,” he said, opening the back door, his eyes still roving left and right.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Elsie said as she lowered herself onto the bench seat.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Solomon got in alongside his wife, and Milton shut the door.

  “What?” Izzy hissed again. “You tell me now, or we’re not going anywhere and you can explain to them what the hell is going on.”

  Milton gritted his teeth. Why couldn’t things be easy, just one time?

  “Someone came after me this morning.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someone I know, from a long time ago. He came to kill me.”

  “What the—?”

  “It’s fine. I saw him coming—”

  “It’s fine?”

  “It’s fine—”

  “It’s not fine. They ran us off the road, tried to kill us, now they send someone else after you.”

  He put his finger to his lips. “Not now. You want to worry them?”

  Her parents were talking to each other in the car.

  “When?”

  “After court. Get through today, we can talk about it then. All right?”

  She fired a hot stare at him. “Fine. But no sugar-coating. I need to know everything. I need to know that this is still worth it, whether the stakes are getting too high, you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Get in the car, Izzy. We don’t want to be late.”

  Chapter Forty

  BOON FOUND the place without any trouble. It was a large, modern building, and the lights in the windows glittered in the wan light of dusk. He turned off the road and found a space in the parking lot. He switched off the engine and turned to Lila.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Sure. It’ll be fine. Easy. Won’t take long.”

  Lila was wearing a police officer’s uniform. It was authentic, supplied by Detective Peacock from out of the NOPD’s stores. He reached across and rested his hand on his wife’s knee. “Be careful.”

  Lila smiled. “I’m always careful.” She leant over and kissed him, then opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot.

  Boon left the engine running, reached down for the radio and tuned through the stations. He found nothing that he liked and switched it off.

  He looked out at the building and thought of Lila inside it. She was shrewd and clever and a quick study. She had worked hard to make their partnership as effective as it had turned out to be. She was an excellent face woman, chameleonic in her ability to morph into whomever the job at hand required her to be. Their last job, the liquidation of the owner of a fracking operation in Pennsylvania, had required Lila to work for the target as one of his PAs for three weeks. The target’s schedule was ascer
tained far enough in advance that Boon had known precisely when he would visit his remote lakeside cabin so that he could lie up and wait for him. The information she had provided on the target’s security detail provided him with what he needed to find the vulnerabilities, and allowed for the efficient execution of the operation.

  Lila emerged from the building and stepped into the parking lot. She had a black man with her, her hand on his shoulder with a proprietary air. Boon reached over into the back and opened the door for them. The man’s face clouded with confusion when he saw the Ford and not the police cruiser he must have been expecting, but, by that time, Lila had drawn the 9mm and discreetly pressed it into the small of the man’s back. Boon looked at him, recognised Alexander Bartholomew from the description Peacock had given him, and nodded in satisfaction.

  Boon watched in the mirror as the man slid across the seat to the opposite door, yanking the handle. It was no good. The child lock had been activated.

  “Hello, Alexander.”

  “What is this, man?”

  “We need you to come with us for a little while.”

  “Who are you?”

  “That doesn’t matter. But it’s best that you just take it easy. There’s no sense in making this more difficult for yourself than it needs to be.”

  Lila got in next to Alexander and shut the door.

  Boon pulled away. “Any trouble?”

  “Easy,” Lila said with a broad, white-toothed smile.

  “Well done, baby,” Boon said.

  He turned out of the parking lot and aimed the car to the west. They had an hour’s drive ahead of them.

  #

  THE PLACE was in the middle of the bayou. Boon drove carefully along the single track, the ruts and dips baked in the daytime heat until they were as solid as rock. They passed stands of cypress and oak, with ugly roots and malignant nooses of Spanish moss weighing down the boughs of the trees. Their destination was remote and isolated. The track wound its way through the overgrown vegetation, picking a path between the wide expanses of swamp. It had turned to night as they drove out of town, and the darkness was total here, the stars and moon blocked out by the thick canopy of leaves. Boon found himself gripping the wheel a little tighter. The atmosphere was tense and foreboding. He remembered the Lovecraft books that he had read as a child, and found himself picturing the reddish glares of distant fires and voodoo orgies.

  They came to the end of the track. There were two tumbledown shacks, arranged side to side in the shape of an L, and, twenty yards away from them, two freight containers that had been adapted so that they could be used as accommodation. The place had been a meth lab until it was busted six months earlier. Peacock had suggested that it would be a suitable place to keep Bartholomew. Boon had scouted it earlier and had been satisfied with it.

  He parked the car and, leaving the headlamps on so that the path ahead was lit, helped Lila take Bartholomew to one of the containers. A door had been cut into one side. The door opened out and was secured by a metal bar that slotted through two brackets that had been welded on either side of the aperture. Boon pulled the bar free, opened the door, and muscled Alexander inside. There was a single light fixture on the ceiling, a bedroll, and a bucket to be used as a toilet. Nothing else.

  Boon released his grip on Alexander, and he dropped to the floor.

  “You can’t leave me in here.”

  “Just for a while. Until the person who is paying us has gotten what he wants.”

  “What does he want? What does it have to do with me?”

  “Your sister needs to learn that being stubborn isn’t in her best interests. Or yours.”

  He left the light on and stepped back. He took out his phone, snapped a quick picture, then pushed the door closed and slotted the bar back through the brackets. They had only taken a handful of steps to the shacks when the door clanged and rattled against the bar.

  Lila nodded back to the container. “He’s going to get on my nerves if he keeps that up.”

  “Only things that’ll hear him out here are the wildlife.”

  “I’m going to get a headache, baby.”

  He smiled. “Maybe we’ll feed him to the gators, then.”

  #

  THERE WAS no cellphone signal this far into the swamp, so Boon left Lila in charge of the camp and drove back down to the interstate until his iPhone showed a bar of reception. He parked by the edge of the road, got out, and rested against the hood of the car. Night had fallen properly now, and the car was lit by the occasional lights of cars that were rushing to and from the city. The winking lights of passenger jets passed high overhead, and stretched out for miles before him was the exhausted, fractured landscape of Louisiana. A desolate expanse of plain covered with tall sere grass that rustled in the nighttime zephyrs. There were blasted trees here and there, distant refineries and distilleries that fed off the network of pipes that funnelled offshore oil and gas, smokestacks spewing columns of chemical pollution, a coastline choked with detritus, all of it slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. Cancer Alley. Boon looked out at it, let it seep onto him. He wasn’t a religious man, but, he thought, if the apocalypse happened, it would look something like this.

  He lit a cigarette and then dialled the number that he had been given. He put the phone to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Isadora Bartholomew?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who I am isn’t important. You need to listen very carefully, Miss Bartholomew.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Your brother, Alexander, needs you to stop the case you have brought against those who are trying to improve the city—”

  “What do you mean, my brother?”

  “Listen to me, please, Miss Bartholomew, and don’t interrupt. Alexander is with me. I’m going to send you a picture of him when I end this call. You are to stop the case. You are to apologise for wasting the court’s time and withdraw your complaint. Is that clear?”

  There was no reply, just the sound of static buzzing on the line.

  “Miss Bartholomew, I need you to tell me that you understand.”

  “If you hurt him—”

  “He will be returned to you, unharmed, if you do what I ask. Are we clear?”

  There was more static.

  “I need an answer.”

  “We’re clear,” she said. “I understand.”

  “Drop the case and I will return him to you. Goodbye, Miss Bartholomew.”

  He ended the call. He selected the picture that he had taken of Alexander and sent it to her, then he put the phone back into his pocket. He remained propped against the car for a moment longer, the warm tropical wind blowing around him, and then ground his cigarette beneath his boot and returned to the car.

  Chapter Forty-One

  MILTON WAS watching outside the hotel when Izzy called him.

  “Where are you?” Her tone was frantic.

  “I’m outside. What is it?”

  “I need to see you.”

  “What is it, Izzy?”

  “Alexander.”

  #

  SHE CAME down five minutes later. Milton was waiting for her in the lobby.

  “What is it? He’s checked himself out?”

  “Someone came and took him.”

  She was frightened. Milton’s attention snapped into sharp focus. “What do you mean?”

  “What I said,” she snapped. “A woman, dressed as a police officer, went there and told them that he was wanted for questioning and they had to let him out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I called rehab. That’s what they said.”

  “How did you know that he was gone, Izzy?”

  “Whoever it was who took him, some man working with her, he called me.”

  “And said what?”

  “That I had to drop the case against Babineaux.”

  “What exactly did he say? Try to remember.”

  She waved her hand i
n irritation, puckered her forehead, and repeated as much of the conversation as she could. “They had him, I had to stop the case, they’d bring him back if I did. Then they sent me this.”

  She found the photograph on her phone and handed it to Milton. He looked and saw Alexander Bartholomew, his face bleached out by camera flash, shrinking away from whoever it was who was taking the picture.

  “All right,” he said.

  “All right? What am I going to do? They’ve got my brother.”

  She started to cry. Milton had never been one for affection, and he invariably felt awkward when presented with emotion. But when he reached out to touch her on the shoulder, she folded into his embrace and let him hold her, the breath sobbing out of her. He held her for a minute until she had brought her sobbing under control and, breathing deeply, she disengaged.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just… it’s just, I don’t want to sound like I’m whining, but there’s so much to think about. I don’t know where I am some times. And now this. I can handle things if I think I can control them, affect them, but this…I’m helpless. And being helpless frightens me.”

  “You’re not helpless. I’m here. I’m going to help you. We’re going to get him back.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “When have I let you down?” He didn’t give her a chance to think too deeply on that. “Come on. I want to speak to the rehab.”

  #

  ALEXANDER’S ABDUCTION had caused a commotion at the facility. They were met by a senior doctor who, while effusive in her apology, was defensive, too. Milton knew why. The woman was primed for the threat of a lawsuit. Perhaps she knew Izzy’s reputation from the court case since it had had enough media coverage, after all. She would be helpful, but there would be no admissions, and her help would only extend up until the point where it caused the clinic no harm.