Salvation Row (13 page)

THE CREW had a practised routine. First they went through the overgrowth on foot, looking out for large items that would damage their machinery. This morning’s haul included a rusted claw-foot bath, two wheels, and a child’s tricycle. Milton went into the scrub with them and quickly saw the truth in Pedro’s admonition. There were all manner of stinging plants in the morass, and it didn’t take him very long to abandon any pretence of being able to avoid their attention. His legs prickled with irritation, patches turning an angry red that was more embarrassing than anything else. One of the men saw his discomfort and, after laughing at him for a moment, took pity on him and tossed over a bottle of ointment. Milton slathered it onto his skin, feeling the cooling relief almost at once.

Once the debris was cleared to the curb, one of the men drove the tractor, a two-wheel-drive Mahindra 4025, right into the heart of the vegetation. The tractor was equipped with a whirling set of blades that chopped down most of the weeds. The ones that were left, taller and stronger, were bent down and snapped as the tractor plowed over the top of them. The shrubs, some as tall as basketball hoops, were avoided.

The tractor finished and the men took powerful weed trimmers from the backs of the pickups, yanking the starters to set them off.

“Give me one of those strimmers,” Milton said.

“One of those
what
?” Pedro said, puzzled.

Milton pointed.

“
Right
,” Pedro said, laughing. “We call them weed whackers.”

“Fine. Give me one of those weed whackers.”

Milton took one of the spares. It ran on gasoline, a sharp metal spool at the end of the lance that rotated hundreds of times a second. Milton fired it up and set to work, sweeping it left and right, demolishing the weeds.

When they were finished, the cleared lots still looked as if there was plenty of work to be done. The growth was sheared down as close to the ground as they could get it, with some patches thicker than others. There was a great amount of cut vegetation spread out, ankle deep. But that, and the roots, would be churned up by a large rotavator they would bring to the site in the morning.

They took a break. Pedro opened a pack of cigarettes and passed them around. Milton took one, lit it, and took a deep lungful of smoke.

The grizzled Mexican paused next to him for a moment.

“Legs okay?”

“You might have had a point.”

One of the other men, a Salvadoran who Izzy had introduced as Hector, looked down at Milton’s legs—by now a medley of red welts and white ointment—and hooted his own amusement.

Pedro chuckled, too. “You work hard. You did well,
Esé
.”

A motor coach trundled down Salvation Row to the new houses and the cleared lots. The bus was emblazoned with the logo of a local tourist service, and Milton could make out the shapes of the passengers behind the tinted glass.

Hector walked out onto the edge of the sidewalk and spat into the road. “You should be fuckin’ ashamed,” he yelled out. “This ain’t no tourist spot. This is a disaster. We ain’t working to entertain your soft white asses, neither. I lived here. My wife
died
here.” His face turned a deep, beetroot red. “What y’all pay? Forty bucks? We don’t get a red cent out of that and we the ones who suffered. You think you buy a ticket and that gives you the right to come down here and enjoy what happened to us? You think we some kind of fuckin’ zoo?”

Pedro went over to him and said something in Spanish. The bus trundled by and turned right, into the still-devastated parts of the parish, but not before Hector flipped it the bird and spat after it again. Pedro put his hand on the man’s shoulder and turned him away, back to the group of sweating workers, and Milton saw the tension gradually drain out of his shoulders.

“He’s got a point,” Izzy said quietly.

“They come often?”

“Six or seven of them a day. It’s not the tours themselves. It’s that the organisers are making bank on them and not giving anything back to us. And the tourists can be disrespectful. They get out, trample all over people’s property, take pictures. I don’t know how people could ever think that was right.”

“No,” Milton said. “Neither do I.”

MILTON WAS tired and drained by the end of the day, but, as he looked at the space that they had cleared, it was impossible not to feel a sense of pride. The others sat down with their backs to the wall of one of the unfinished houses. A disposable barbecue and a crate of beer appeared from inside. Hector tossed one of the bottles over to Milton. He caught it, felt the cold and wet glass—felt the flicker of desire—and handed it back.

“You don’t want? A beer, after a day like today, you say no?”

“I don’t drink.”

“What you mean, you don’t?”

“I like it too much.”

Hector nodded. “I get it,
Esé
. No problem. You want to eat? We got burgers.”

“I’d love to, but I can’t stop.”

He grinned. “You got somewhere better to be?”

“I have an appointment.”

Hector put out his hand and Milton clasped it. “We see you tomorrow, Smith?”

“You will.”

Milton took a taxi to the nearest Hertz, hired a Buick Encore, and set off for Raceland. He headed out of the city, running on Baronne Street until he got to the ramp for US-90. He followed the road for just short of thirty miles, turning off onto the LA-182 and then rolling into town.

He took out the business card that Izzy had given him and found Brocato Lane with its trailers, derelict shacks, cars with mismatched bodywork, some of them resting on bricks. It was like a shanty. Men and women shuffled along the sidewalk. Music blared from open windows and passing cars. The address he wanted was a wooden shack, painted blue. The roof was damaged, patched with a flapping sheet of blue tarpaulin. There was a pile of timber on the scrubby patch of ground to the front of the property.

Milton sat in the car for three hours, just watching the place. There was a steady flow of people going in and out. There was no pattern to discern. Some were dressed cheaply, in dirty clothes and mismatched shoes, while others wore decent suits, refugees from the city. They all went around to the side, knocked on the screen door, and spoke to someone who opened it a crack, and then went inside. Some emerged after a few minutes, hurrying to their cars or away down the street with the demeanour of a person with an important appointment to keep. Others stayed inside the property for an hour or two, and, when they emerged, it was with a slouched and enervated gait. Milton knew what crackheads looked like.

Milton sat quietly, the radio off, smoked six cigarettes and observed.

It was growing dark when a car drew up opposite the house, three cars ahead of where he was parked. The doors at the front of the car opened and two men got out. The man who had been driving the car was big and heavy, waddling a little as he fumbled in his pocket for a pack of smokes. He was wearing a yellow do-rag on his head and an XXL Saints jersey with BREES on the back. He turned to the other man and called something over the top of the car, but Milton couldn’t distinguish the words from the noise of the street.

The second man turned, looking back down the street in Milton’s direction. It was Alexander Bartholomew. He shouted something back at the first man and laughed, but his face didn’t indicate humour. Instead, he looked sour and angry.

Milton opened the door and stepped outside into the sluggish evening warmth.

The fat man saw him first, eyeing him warily as he walked straight at them. His eyes narrowed as Milton kept coming, and he turned to place his considerable bulk square on.

“What you want, bro?”

“To speak to your friend.”

“That right?” He turned to Alexander. “You know this dude?”

Alexander’s brow knitted and, after a moment, he shook his head. “Nah, man. Never seen him before.”

“You heard him,” the first man said. “Get gone.”

Milton sniffed the air. He could smell the acrid tang of crack drifting out of the window of the car. “I want to talk to you, Alexander. Hear me out. Ten minutes, then I’m on my way.”

Alexander blinked, and Milton could see that his words were making no sense to him. He was high. Milton assessed quickly and considered whether it would be better to beat a tactical retreat and return again tomorrow, when Alexander was better able to understand him, or whether he should stay.

The first man made the decision for him. “On your way, shitbird,” he said, stepping up, narrowing the distance between himself and Milton. That was his first mistake. He got a little too close, reaching a meaty paw and resting it on Milton’s shoulder. That was his second mistake. Milton’s response was hardwired, automatic. He straightened his fingers and jabbed the man beneath his chin, right on his larynx. His eyes bulged wide and then, as he recognised he couldn’t breathe, his hands went up to his throat and he dropped to his knees.

Milton was committed now.

He stepped around the man. Alexander had taken a step back, his mouth agape, and then he reached down to his waistband, his fingers fumbling with the butt of a pistol that he was carrying there.

Milton felt a scintilla of annoyance.

Alexander got his fingers around the handle of the pistol and started to draw it. Milton closed on him and chopped his hand down hard on Alexander’s wrist. He dropped the gun to the ground. Milton drew back his right fist and drilled him in the chin, accepting the burden of his dead weight as he slumped into his arms. He looped his forearms beneath Alexander’s shoulders and dragged him back to the hire car, opening the back and shoving him inside, face down.

The big man was on his knees, his breathing restored, his fingers heading for the gun that Alexander had dropped. Milton diverted quickly to him, lashed the side of his foot into his temple, and knocked him out cold.

He went back to the car, got in, started the engine and drove away.

JOEL BABINEAUX could have watched what he was going to do to Pierce Morgan from the offices of his bankers. He could, he supposed, have flown to New York and watched it from the offices of his brokers. He could have visited the Stock Exchange himself and, he conceded, that had been very tempting—to be a first-hand witness of the confusion and excitement that he was going to create. But he had decided that discretion was the most sensible course in the circumstances. He had watched in the boardroom, with C-SPAN on the large LCD screen. The denouement was scheduled for lunchtime, so he had instructed his chef to prepare him a lobster, and the waitstaff had served it in the boardroom. He sat there, alone, and watched it unfold.

There were two elements to the scheme. Both were simple, but, when combined, they had the potential to be very effective. The first part of the plan had been put into play last night. Babineaux’s lawyers had previously hired a firm of private investigators and they had found a number of disaffected employees who were prepared to go on record to state that they were aware of corners that had been cut in the building of some of Morgan Construction’s flagship properties. The investigators had found another ex-employee who accredited his lung cancer to the asbestos that he said he had been forced to work with. This man, wheezing eloquently into the camera of the local news affiliate that had been sent to cover his story, said that he was preparing to sue the company for millions and that he knew there were others in the same position as him.

The twin stories had been released in accordance with the terms of a carefully structured media plan. Palms were greased and favours called in, and what started as a series of small pieces rapidly gained traction, and, by the time two members of the Stanley Cup-winning Blackhawks team rang the opening bell at the Chicago Stock Exchange, a firestorm had been created around Morgan Construction’s stock.

The second part of the plan had been put into play at the same time as trading began. Babineaux Properties had acquired a small, but significant, amount of equity in Morgan Construction over the course of the last three years. The shareholding totalled 3.9% and had cost several million dollars to acquire, but Babineaux had foreseen the likelihood that he would come into conflict with Morgan at some point in the future, and he had decided that it was a sensible strategic position to take. The stock had been acquired by dozens of clandestine corporations and trusts that were, on the face of it, independent. None of them could be traced back to Babineaux or his corporation.

As soon as the bell had sounded, those shares had begun to be sold. It was slow at first—a third of a per cent here, a quarter of a per cent there—but as sale followed sale followed sale, the market began to take notice. The dispositions accelerated and then, as analysts were starting to report them to their investors, all of the rest were dumped at once. Connections were made with the media stories, and the market panicked. Within an hour, analysts were marking the stock with sell recommendations. Small investors were piling out and the price began to fall. As larger investors noticed the trend, they, too, began to sell. The price went into free fall. The biggest investors—the pension funds and the institutions—couldn’t ignore the trend and they, too, began to divest themselves of the stock.

Babineaux had waited until the perfect moment. He knew that the negative stories would eventually be managed, that Morgan’s bankers would be ringing around to decry them and to start to persuade investors that there was no reason to sell. He couldn’t wait for their efforts to bear fruit, but he didn’t want to start the third stage of the plan too early, either. He had to strike when the price was as low as it was going to go, just before it started to recover.

He used his instinct. His gut. It had always served him well, and it didn’t fail him now.

He waited until eleven thirty, and then he pulled the trigger.

Using the money that he had made when he sold the first shares at the top of the market, he started to buy back into the company again. Each share had been worth three dollars when he sold, but now three dollars bought ten shares.