Blackout

by Dawson, Mark

  Milton approached. Access to the interior of the bakery was blocked by a metal cage, with transactions carried out through an open slot. Milton idled there, pretending to look at the simple menu that had been painted onto a wooden board and propped against the wall. The café specialised in pandesal, sweetened dough that was rolled into long loaves that were then rolled in fine bread crumbs. The bakery also sold hot coffee, and Milton watched through the bars as an old woman ripped off a hunk of a loaf, dipped it in her mug and then ate it.

  There was a woman being served ahead of him, and he watched as she chatted with the man serving her. She put a dozen of the loaves into a white plastic carrier bag, gave the man a handful of pesos, and went on her way.

  Milton stepped forward.

  “Hello,” he said. “Do you speak English?”

  The man shrugged, his top lip curling a little. “What do you want?”

  “I was looking for Jessica.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend.”

  “She dead,” the man said.

  “What?”

  “Last week.”

  Milton feigned shock. “How?”

  “Manila,” the man said, as if the suggestion that someone should go to the capital was the height of foolishness. “Someone kill her.”

  “That’s awful. I’m sorry.”

  The man shrugged. “Not so unusual there. Should have stayed here.”

  “Are you family?”

  He shook his head. “I just work here.” He pointed behind Milton at a woman who was waiting to be served. “What you want?”

  “Did Jessica have any family?”

  “Her father. He owns the bakery.”

  “And children?”

  The man frowned his annoyance at the continued questions. “She got a boy. You want any bread, mister?”

  “Yes,” Milton said. There was a tray of prepared snacks just inside the bars. Milton pointed to one. “What’s that?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You want?”

  “Please.”

  The man picked up the sandwich with his fingers and folded it inside a piece of grease paper. He handed the parcel through the bars. “Seven pesos.”

  The menu said that the sandwiches should have cost three pesos. The man was taking advantage of what he must have concluded was a naïve foreigner, but Milton didn’t mind. He gave him a ten-peso coin and held up his hand to say that he didn’t expect the change.

  Milton stepped aside. The woman behind him came forward, regarding him with a distasteful expression and then saying something in Filipino that drew a derisive chuckle from the server.

  Milton took his sandwich and crossed the road. He got back into the car and settled in to wait.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS had passed when Milton saw a boy on a bicycle pull up outside the bakery. He put the half-finished sandwich on the passenger seat and looked out at him: he was young, perhaps ten years old, and slender. He was wearing a gold and black New Orleans Saints cap beneath which Milton could see an unruly mop of black hair.

  Milton put his hand on the handle of the door, and then paused.

  He realised he still had no idea what he had come here to do.

  The boy took a key from his pocket and unlocked a door to the side of the metal cage. He opened it and wheeled his bicycle inside.

  Milton stayed where he was.

  The boy emerged again, closed and locked the door, and crossed the road to the car wash on the other side.

  Milton clenched his fists in frustration.

  He grabbed the plastic bag from the passenger seat, opened the door and got out.

  “Hello.”

  The boy looked at him anxiously. “Who are you?” he replied in excellent English.

  “My name is John. I was a friend of your mother. What’s your name?”

  “Danilo.”

  The boy had dark skin and dark hair and his eyes were dark and soulful, just like his mother’s had been. He wasn’t the same as the boy whose pictures Milton had seen. That boy had borne a resemblance to him, but Danilo could never have been mistaken for his kin. There was no similarity at all.

  “I just wanted…” Milton was floundering. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about what happened to her.”

  The boy looked at him in confusion.

  Milton heard an angry shout from the bakery. He turned to see that the cage door had been opened and a man was coming out. It wasn’t the server to whom he had spoken before, but an older man with white streaks in his hair and a grizzled grey beard.

  He called out in Filipino.

  Milton waited for him to make his way across.

  “I’m a friend of Jessica,” he said.

  “I never seen you before.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  The old man took the boy by the elbow and impelled him back to the building.

  “She’s dead,” he said gruffly once the boy was inside and out of earshot.

  “I know,” he said. “Are you her father?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry. I have something for you. For the boy, really.”

  He handed the man the plastic bag. He opened it and looked inside.

  “What is this?”

  The man reached in and took out one of the bundles of banknotes. Milton had split Mendoza’s money: half for Josie and half for Jessica’s son.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s yours,” Milton insisted.

  “Where you get it?”

  “I hope it helps.”

  Milton didn’t wait for the man’s response. He got back into the car and looked out of the windshield as the man stared dumbly from the bundle of notes to the car and then back again.

  He started the engine and drove off, leaving the bakery behind him.

  He tried to work out how he was feeling.

  Was it relief?

  Disappointment?

  He sat quietly and realised that he knew what it was.

  It was that same sense of loneliness that he had come to consider as his closest friend. It had been his companion for all the months he had been travelling, all the thousands of miles that he had covered. It had been there as he had tried to make a modest life for himself in London. It was always there, an ache in his gut that he could always find whenever he closed his eyes and searched for it.

  He had kept a tiny fraction of the money for himself. It was in the glovebox. There was enough for a ticket on the long-distance ferry from Manila to Ho Chi Minh City and then enough to keep him going for a month or two after that.

  He hadn’t been to Southeast Asia for years. He thought he might start in Vietnam, then head into Thailand, Myanmar and India. He liked the idea of Nepal. He hadn’t seen Everest before. Maybe he’d go to Base Camp. That would be something to aim for.

  It would be just him and the road. That was fine. He enjoyed his own company. He welcomed solitude. He decided to cherish it for a little while.

  He turned north, back to the city and to whatever might come next.

  A Word From The Author

  Thank you for reading BLACKOUT. I hope you enjoyed it.

  Milton’s story begins in a series of fast paced thrillers that take him (and you) all around the world. The first story, THE CLEANER, tells how Milton left Group Fifteen. The next , SAINT DEATH, sees Milton resurface on the Mexican side of the US border, in a thrilling confrontation with an international drug cartel. THE DRIVER finds Milton in San Francisco, investigating a series of murders for which he is the prime suspect. And 1000 YARDS is a dip into his case files. Milton is sent into the most dangerous failed state in the world – North Korea – with orders to assassinate a key military target.

  The books are available individually. But you can save 25% by downloading the Box Set (containing all four thrillers).

  GET THE FIRST JOHN MILTON BOX SET

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  Building a re
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  But I do have something much more powerful and effective than that, and it's something that those publishers would kill to get their hands on.

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  Thank you very much.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the members of Team Milton for technical advice and support. Thanks to Pauline Nolet and Jennifer McIntyre for editorial assistance. And thanks to you for investing your time in reading this story. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  John Milton will be back.

  About the Author

  Mark Dawson is the author of the breakout John Milton, Beatrix Rose and Soho Noir series.

  For more information:

  @pbackwriter

  markdawsonauthor

  www.markjdawson.com

  mark@markjdawson.com

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