The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (84 page)

“I don’t believe you.”

“You think I care what you believe?” He stood up now, his right hand curled more tightly around the grip of the handgun. He pointed to the telephone on the desk with his left hand. “You know who I’m gonna call if you don’t start making tracks?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“I’m gonna call an ambulance. I’m telling you, man, straight up, you don’t get out of here right now, you won’t be leaving in one piece. I’m gonna fucking shoot your ass.”

“I tell you what—you tell me all about the escorting business and maybe I won’t break your arm. How’s that sound?”

He slapped his hand against the gun. “You miss this, man? Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?”

“Let’s say I’m someone you don’t want to annoy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m a concerned member of the public. And I don’t like the business you’re running.”

He assessed the distance between them—eight feet—and couldn’t say for sure that he would be able to get all the way across the room before the man could draw and shoot. And if he could get the gun up in time and shoot, it would be point-blank and hard to miss.

That wasn’t going to work.

Plan B.

Milton stepped quickly to the table, snatched up the eight-ball and flung it. His aim was good, and as Salvatore turned his head away to avoid it, the ball struck him on the cheekbone, shattering it.

Milton already had the pool cue, his fingers finding the thin end.

Salvatore fumbled hopelessly for the gun.

Milton swung the cue in a wide arc that terminated in the side of his head. There was a loud crunch that was clearly audible over the ambient noise from the restaurant, and a spray of blood splashed over the computer monitor. Salvatore slid off the chair and onto the floor. Milton stood over him and chopped down again three more times, fast and hard into his ribs and trunk and legs until he stayed down.

He discarded the cue and started to look through the papers on the desk.

TRIP WAS LISTENING to the radio when Milton reached the Explorer again. He opened the door and slid inside, moving quickly. He started the engine and pulled away from the kerb.

“You get anything?”

“Nothing useful.”

“So it wasn’t worth coming down here? We should’ve stayed in Belvedere?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I made an impression. There’ll be a follow-up.”

MILTON HEARD THE buzzer as he was cleaning his teeth. He wasn’t expecting a delivery, and since very few people knew where he lived, he was about as sure as he could be that whoever it was who had come calling on him at eight in the morning wasn’t there for the good of his health. He put the brush back in its holder and quietly opened the window just enough that he could look downwards. The window was directly above the entrance to the building, and he could see the three men who were arrayed around the door. There was a car on the corner with another man in the front. It was a big Lexus, blacked-out windows, very expensive.

Four men. An expensive car. He had a pretty good idea what this was.

Milton toggled the intercom. “Yes?”

“Police.”

“Police?”

“That’s right. Is that Mr. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Could we have a word?”

“What about?”

“Open the door, please, sir.”

“What do you want to talk to me about?”

“There was an incident yesterday. Fisherman’s Wharf. Please, sir—we just need to have a word.”

“Fine. Just give me five minutes. I work nights. I was asleep. I just need to get changed.”

“Five minutes.”

He went back to the window and looked down at them again. There was no way on earth that these men were cops. They were dressed too well in expensive overcoats, and he saw the grey sunlight flickering across the caps of well-polished shoes. And then there was the car; the San Francisco Police Department drove Crown Vics, not eighty-thousand-dollar saloons. He waited for the men to shift around a little and got a better look at them. Three of the men he had never seen before. The fourth, the guy waiting in the car, was familiar. Milton recognised him as he wound down the window and called out to the others. It was Salvatore. His face was partially obscured by a bandage that had been fixed over his shattered cheek. Milton waited a moment longer, watching as the men exchanged words, their postures tense and impatient. One of them stepped back, and the wind caught his open overcoat, flipping his suit coat back, too, revealing a metallic glint in a shoulder holster.

That settled it.

The three guys at his door were made guys; that much was for sure. So what to do? If he let them in, then the chances were they’d come up, subdue him, and Salvatore would be called in to put the final bullet in his head. Or if he went down to meet them, maybe they would take him somewhere quiet, somewhere down by the dock, perhaps, and do it there. He had known exactly what he was doing when he beat Salvatore, and the way he saw it, he hadn’t been given any other choice. There were always going to be consequences for what he’d done, and here they were, right on cue. An angry Mafioso bent on revenge could cause trouble. Lots of trouble.

So maybe discretion was the better part of valour this morning. He dropped his cellphone in his jacket pocket and went through into the corridor. There was a window at the end; he yanked it up. The building’s fire escape ran outside it. He wriggled out onto the sill, reached out with his right hand, grabbed the metal handrail, and dropped down onto the platform.

He climbed down the stairs and walked around the block until he had a clear view onto the frontage of the El Capitan. The Lexus was still there, and the three hoodlums were still waiting by the door. One of them had his finger on the buzzer; it looked like he was pressing it non-stop.

He collected the Explorer. It was cold. He started the engine and then put the heater on max. He took out his cellphone and swiped his finger down, flipping through his contacts. He found the one he wanted, pressed call, and waited for it to connect.

THE SIGN in the window said BAXTER BAIL BONDS. The three words were stacked on top of one other so that the three Bs, drawn so they were all interlocked, were the focus that caught the eye. The shop was in Escondido, north of San Diego, and Beau Baxter hardly ever visited it these days. He had started out here pretty much as soon as he had gotten out of the Border Patrol down south. He had put in a long stint, latterly patrolling the Reaper’s Line between Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales and, worst of them all, Juárez. Beau had run his business from the shop for eighteen months until he came to the realisation that it was going to take years to make any serious coin, and, seeing as he wasn’t getting any younger, he figured he needed to do something to accelerate things. He had developed contacts with a certain Italian family with interests all the way across the continental United States, and he started to do work for them. It paid well, although their money was dirty and it needed to be laundered. That was where having a ready-made business, a business that often ran on cash and dealt in the provision of intangible services, sometimes anonymously, came in very handy indeed.

So Beau had kept the place on and had appointed an old friend from the B.P. to run it for him. Arthur “Hank” Culpepper was a hoary old goat, a real wiseacre they used to call “PR” back in the day because he was the least appropriate member of the crew to send to do anything that needed a diplomatic touch. He had always been vain, which was funny because he’d never been the prettiest to look at. That didn’t stop him developing a high opinion of himself; Beau joked that he shaved in a cracked mirror every morning because he thought of himself as a real ladies’ man. His airs and graces might have been lacking, but he had made up for that by being a shit-hot agent with an almost supernatural ability to nose out the bad guys.

He wasn’t interested in the big game that Beau went after nowadays; there was a lot of travel involved in that, and there was the ever-present risk of catching a bullet in some bumble-fuck town where the quarry had gone to ground. Hank was quite content to stick around San Diego, posting bond for the local scumbags and then going after them whenever they were foolish enough to abscond. He had his favourite bar, his hound and his dear old wife (in that order), and anyways, he had a reputation that he liked to work on. Some people called him a local legend. He was known for bringing the runners back in with maximum prejudice, and stories of him roping redneck tweakers from out of the back of his battered old Jeep were well known among the Escondido bondsmen. It was, he said, just something that he enjoyed to do.

Beau pulled up and took a heavy black vinyl sports bag from the rear of his Cherokee. He slung it over his shoulder, blipped the lock on the car, crossed the pavement, and stopped at the door. He unlocked it, pushed down the handle with his elbow, and backed his way inside. The interior was simple. The front door opened into the office, with the desk, some potted plants, a standard lamp and a sofa that had been pushed back against the wall. There was a second door, opposite the street door, that led to a corridor that went all the way to the back of the building. There was a kitchenette, a bathroom and, at the end, a small cell that could be locked.

The safe was in the kitchen, the kettle and a couple of dirty mugs resting atop it. Beau spun the dial three times—four-nine-eight—and opened the heavy cast-iron door. He unzipped the bag and spread it open. It was full of paper money.

Fifteen big ones.

The smell of it wafted into the stuffy room. Beau loved that smell.

He took out the cash, stacked the fifties in neat piles, and locked the safe.

He locked the front door, got back into his Cherokee, and headed for the hospital.

HANK WAS SITTING up in bed, his cellphone pressed between his head and shoulder while his right hand was occupied with tamping tobacco into the bowl of the pipe in his left hand. He was in his early sixties, same as Beau was, and lying there in bed like that, he looked it. Man, did he ever look
old
. The whole of his right side was swathed in bandages, and there was a drip running into a canula in the back of his hand. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, and that added on a few extra years. The colour had leeched from his face, and now his skin was as white as the sheets the Klan folks used to bleach up special for a Saturday night cross-burning session. He wasn’t wearing anything above the waist, and his arms—Beau remembered them when they were thick with muscle—looked withered and old. The tattoo of the snake that he had had done in Saigon was wrinkled and creased where once it had been tightly curled around his bicep.

Old age, Beau thought. That was the real reaper. Coming for all of us. Still, he thought, I’d rather eat five pounds of cactus thorns and shit-sharp needles than look like that.

He raised a hand in greeting, and Hank reciprocated with a nod, mouthing that he would be two minutes before speaking into the receiver again: “I’m telling you, Maxine, the judge don’t give a sweet fuck about that. What he’s gonna get now ain’t a pimple on a fat man’s ass compared to what he’s gonna get. If he don’t make it for the hearing tomorrow, he’ll make an example out of him. I’m telling you, no shit, he’s looking at five years before he even gets a sniff of parole. Five. Is that what you want for him? No? Then you better tell me where he’s at.”

Beau could hear the buzz of a female voice from the receiver.

There was a coffee machine in the hall, and Beau went outside for two brews in white Styrofoam cups. He searched the small wicker basket next to the machine for a packet of Coffee-mate, came up empty, went back through into the room, and found a bowl of sugar instead. He spooned a couple into both cups, stirring the sludgy brown liquid until it looked a little more appealing.

“Fine. Where—Pounders? All right, then. I’m gonna send someone to go and get him.”

Beau sat down and stared at his old friend. He thought about the first time they had met. 1976. They’d graduated from the Border Patrol Academy and been posted up in Douglas at about the same time. Hank had been a uniformed cop near the border in El Centro, California, before coming on duty with the B.P. The two men were partnered up on a cold, dark night in February. They had been assigned a wide sector up near the old copper-smelting operation near Douglas. The air stank of sulphur, and you could smell it in your clothes and taste it on your tongue for days after you had been out at night. On the other hand, it wasn’t all bad: the train that circulated the edge of the smelter’s slag piles would dump three-ton buckets of bright orange, liquid ore over the hundred-foot-high waste bed that lit up the borderland with a brilliant flow of man-made lava that you could see for miles around.

The two of them were thankful for the glow on that particular evening; they were laid up in wait for a group of marijuana backpackers who, according to the word they’d heard, were headed north. They were scouting the desert trails looking for them. Beau had his .357 revolver and a 12-gauge pump shotgun loaded with buckshot. Hank had the same .357, but instead of the shotgun, he had a .30 calibre M1 Carbine with a thirty-round banana magazine for extra firepower. The M1 wasn’t legitimate load-out for the Border Patrol, but the way Hank saw it, there was truth in the adage “peace through superior firepower.” If the bad guys had .22s, you wanted .44s. You always wanted the upper hand. That was the logic, and it made sense to Beau, too.

As they walked south on the desert trail they heard the faint crunch of footsteps ahead. They thought it must have been cattle at first, but then Beau remembered the rancher had moved his herd onto a different pasture the week before. The mules were coming right at them. They raised their weapons and called out the order to stop. The bad guys were armed, and they capped the first shot, the muzzle flash so close at hand that Beau was temporarily blinded by the burst of bright white light that scorched across his retinas. He fired back with the 12 gauge and emptied it. Hank took over with the M1, the mules firing back as they started to retreat. The smelter train made a delivery of glowing slag, and in the sudden flare as the embers crashed to the ground, Beau’s vision cleared as he turned to look at the profile of the man beside him. It was the instant of fullest illumination, and the image was vivid, clear—and weird—enough to have stayed with him ever since. Hank looked like he was close to the moment of sexual release, balls-deep with a raging hard-on and ready to blow. He was smiling in ecstasy. The son of a bitch had this wicked-ass smirk on his face as he ripped through the clip. He wasn’t scared. He was enjoying it. Beau knew that feeling from ’Nam, too, and it was all he needed to take out his .357 and start warming up the barrel.