Salvation Row (3 page)

Nothing.

“Come on, Six. Acknowledge!”

He felt the damp sweat as it gathered in his palms. His hands slipped on the wheel as he turned it. What had happened to Milton? This was bad.

He wondered whether he should abort. He could easily turn around and go back to the hotel. He would be safe there. He could wait the storm out and work out what to do next. Milton would return there, presuming that he was still alive. And, if he didn’t—if he wasn’t—Ziggy would be able to call London for directions. They would send backup. There were other agents, ready to be activated, who would be able to come and clean up the aborted mess of the operation.

He gripped the wheel tighter.

No.

What if Milton had left in time? He might not want to abort. If Ziggy kept a tail on Maguire, he could find him and finish what they had started.

Ziggy had been anxious about the operation. Shot up with adrenaline, but nervous, too. There had been too many times during his life where he had allowed his nerves to betray him. Too many times when he had thought twice and taken the safer, easier option. He had been lobbying for fieldwork for months. Damned if he was going to let his apprehensiveness get in the way of him improving his reputation.

No.

He was going to see this through.

He gritted his teeth, rubbed his palms against his trousers to wipe away the sweat, and kept driving.

THEY TOOK Milton into the room behind the bar. It was a storeroom. There were trays of beers, bottles of wine and spirits. A desk was in the corner with a computer and a pile of paper arranged across it.

“You want to tell me who you are now?” McCluskey asked him.

The younger man had looped his arms beneath Milton’s shoulders, his hands clasped behind Milton’s neck. Milton’s stomach was exposed and McCluskey punched him there as hard as he could. He had some power in his fists, and Milton gasped as the air was blown out of his lungs. McCluskey hit him again with a left and then another right and then nodded to the man who was holding Milton up. His arms were released and he was allowed to fall to the floor, crashing heavily onto his knees. He bent double and retched, spitting phlegm onto the wooden floor.

“What about now? A little more talkative?”

Milton coughed.

“Let me tell you something, buddy, you’re about up to your nose in pig shit. You got to decide which one of two things is gonna happen next. One, you tell me who you are and who you work for, and we give you a little working over and toss you outside with the trash or, two, you don’t and I put a bullet in your thick skull. What’s it gonna be?”

Milton coughed again, loud and long. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

McCluskey looked up at the other guy, raised his eyebrows and said, “Number two, then.”

The hideaway .25 NAA Guardian was Velcro-strapped to Milton’s ankle. The barman had stopped his search as soon as he had discovered the Sig. That was an amateur move that Milton would never have made in a million years. You finished the job, always, or you ended up with your ticket punched. That was just the way it was.

Milton tore the little pistol out of the strap. He was so close that it would have been impossible to miss. The first round took McCluskey in the gut. The younger man was still fumbling his finger through the trigger guard of Milton’s P226 when the second round struck him. The Sig dropped from his fingers as he took a step backwards, looking down with bafflement at the blood that was leaking out of the hole in his chest. Milton quickly turned back to McCluskey. The old man was on his knees, one hand reaching for his Glock and the other trying to staunch the blood from the wound. Milton stepped right up close, pressed the .25 against the back of his head and squeezed the trigger. He dropped flat to the floor, twitched once, and was still. Milton turned back to the barman. He was still alive. Milton went across to him, held the gun against his temple, and fired a fourth, and final, time.

Six seconds.

No witnesses.

There was a doorway in the back of the room. Milton covered his hand with his shirt tail, turned the handle and opened the door. There was a narrow alley between the bar and the adjacent building, the wind squalling along it. Milton replaced the Guardian in the ankle strap, collected the P226, and stepped outside.

ZIGGY PENN kept a safe distance between his Chevy and Maguire’s Nissan, but he was aware that there was very little traffic on the roads and that he couldn’t hope that Maguire wouldn’t notice that he was being tailed. He didn’t know what he would do when that happened. He’d just deal with it when it did, he guessed.

They crossed the bridge over the Industrial Canal and turned into the grid of streets that made up the Lower Ninth Ward.

His earbud crackled.

“Watcher, Six.”

“Six, Watcher. I’m here.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just off North Claiborne Avenue. I’m following.”

“Negative, Watcher. Stand down. Repeat, Watcher, stand down.”

The Nissan reached an intersection. The traffic lights were suspended above the junction on a long arm fixed to a metal post. The wind was toying with it, blowing the lights back and forth, the post creaking as it was slowly teased out of the concrete baulk that fastened it to the sidewalk. Ziggy rolled up behind the car, putting the engine into neutral and letting it idle.

He heard the sound of the Dodge from the road to his left. He looked out and saw it, a hundred feet away, picking up speed rather than slowing down. He knew, too late, that he had been made and that what was about to happen was the price of his mistake. The engine of the Dodge roared louder and he looked back, seeing two white men in the front seats. Then the fender slammed into the side of the rental, blasting the door inwards, detonating the glass in the window. The car was tipped up onto its two right-side wheels and then, overbalancing, it toppled down and slammed against the asphalt. The Dodge was thrown into reverse, metal shrieking as the mashed fender was yanked away from the torn remains of the door.

“Watcher, report.”

Ziggy coughed, blood in his throat.

“Watcher? Come in, Penn.”

He coughed again, trying to clear his throat so that he might speak. His vision seemed to dim; an envelope of darkness closed in from the edges.

“Help,” he croaked.

Outside, the wind started to wail.

MILTON BROKE into a car, hot-wired the ignition, and hit sixty as he headed out of the city and into the Lower Ninth. The radio had been left on by the car’s owner, and the newscaster was reporting that the storm had dropped from a category five hurricane to a category three and then changed direction and hit Gulfport instead of New Orleans. He ducked his head and looked up through the windshield into the tempestuous sky as if to confirm the information. It had weakened? That wasn’t obvious. It was still ferocious. The air pressure was still dropping, and Milton had to swallow to stop the popping in his ears.

He raced to the east, over the Claiborne Avenue Bridge and into the Lower Ninth. Most of the houses had had their shingles lifted clean off their roofs. Telephone poles had been torn out of the ground and snapped in two like matchsticks. Billboards had been ripped down the middle. The windows of strip malls had been punched in, and their roofs had been peeled off like the lids of tin cans.

Milton had heard the crash over the open channel. He tried to reach Ziggy, but there was nothing. Something had happened. The hurricane, perhaps, the car slapped by the wind and tossed onto its side? Or it was Maguire, ensuring that he was not followed, making his escape? Whatever it was, it was bad.

Ziggy was in trouble.

A convoy of police department vehicles flashed by in the opposite lane. Their flashers rippled blue and red but their sirens were muffled by the deafening roar of the wind. The road rose up on an elevated section, and Milton looked down to the left just as veins of lightning spread out across the sky. He saw a blue Chevy at an intersection, flipped up onto its side. It looked like Ziggy’s rental. He stomped on the brakes, feeding the wheel quickly through his hands as the stolen car slid around. He bumped across the median and took the opposite exit ramp. He drove down in the wrong direction, but figured it would be safe on a night like this. He looped around, speeding beneath the flyover, and drove to the intersection that he had noticed from above.

It
was
his rental. The rear of the vehicle was facing him. There was a small group of black and Hispanic men and women gathered around it. One man had clambered up onto the upturned side, looking down into the cabin. Others were clustered around the hood and the front of the vehicle. Milton brought the car to a stop and got out. As he ran across to the junction, he saw Ziggy Penn’s body as it was carefully lifted through the open windshield frame.

The crowd coalesced around Ziggy’s body as he was laid on the ground. Others were ambling out of their houses.

Milton pushed into the scrum. “Out of my way.”

“Easy, man,” said a man with shocking white hair.

“That’s my friend.”

There was a young woman on the ground next to Ziggy. She was stroking his head and, as she heard Milton’s voice, she turned to look up at him.

“You know him?”

“Yes,” Milton yelled over the roar of the wind. “Is he alive?”

“He’s alive, but he ain’t in a good way.”

“What happened?”

“I heard it. Our place is just over there. There was this huge crash, we came out, and this is what we saw.”

“The other guy?”

“Drove off. Didn’t get the plate.”

Milton knelt down. He knew a little battlefield medicine, but he didn’t need it to know that the woman was right. Ziggy was not in a good way at all. He had been knocked out, and there was a deep cut on the side of his head that was bleeding heavily. His breath was rattling in and out of his mouth, and it looked like his left leg had been broken.

“He needs a doctor.”

“My pops called 911, but they say they can’t tell us when an ambulance will be around. Full capacity, they said. The storm, you know.”

“The hospital, then?”

“I don’t know, sir. They were saying on the radio that they’re full.”

“Turning people away,” added one of the onlookers who was closer behind them.

“That’s not good enough. He needs help.”

“It’s what I was just saying to my mother before you turned up. My brother, Alexander, he can help. I called him. He says he’s coming over, if he can get here. If we can get your friend inside our house, Alex will be able to get him straightened out until we can get him to the hospital.”

“Where’s the house?”

She pointed across the road to a two-storey house that stood amid a welter of battered wooden shacks. “That’s us.”

Milton went around to Ziggy’s head and carefully slipped his hands beneath his shoulders. One of the men took his legs, and moving quickly, but carefully, they transported his unconscious body across the road and into the house.

THE HOUSE was on a corner plot. It was constructed on a raised foundation and had an asphalt roof that was bearing up well to the battering that it had received from the storm. The sidings were wooden planks, many of which had been secured with additional nails. There were five sash windows on the ground floor and each had been boarded over. The raised porch, which might have contained a table and chairs, had been cleared. The woman led the way, climbing onto the porch and opening the front door. Milton backed inside, cradling Ziggy’s body as gently as he could.

There was an elderly couple waiting just inside the door.

“What’s this?” the man said. “He the guy who got hurt in the crash?”

“That’s right, Pops,” the young woman said. “He’s pretty bad.”

“Well, you best bring him straight in and get him in the front room. Alexander be calling ten minutes ago. He’s on his way. Be here soon.”

Milton nodded to the man who had helped carry Ziggy from the car and, on a count of three, they hoisted him up again and brought him into the house’s main room. The light inside was provided by hurricane lamps. The warm orange flickered around a spacious and pleasant front room. The floors were polished hardwood, the ceiling featured crown moulding, and the furniture was clean and well maintained. They laid Ziggy on the sofa.

“Best of luck to him,” the other man said, nodding down at Ziggy’s recumbent form.

Milton thanked him, and the man nodded to the old man—it appeared as if he knew him—and left.

Milton turned to the young woman. “Could I get him some water?”

“Sure,” she said, her hand laid across Ziggy’s brow. “Kitchen’s out back.”

“I’m sorry—I don’t know your name.”

“I’m sorry, I should’ve told you. I’m Isadora Bartholomew. That’s my pops, Solomon Bartholomew, and that over there’s my mamma, Elsie. Who are you?”

“John Smith,” he said.

“And your friend?”

“Ziggy Penn.”

Milton went through into a pleasant kitchen with wooden work surfaces and patched-up appliances. He started to make an assessment of his situation. They were in a run-down part of town. The house was well looked after, but it couldn’t have been worth more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The furniture was well maintained, but cheap. The Bartholomews were a proud family, doing well with the little that they had.

Milton went back into the front room. Isadora took the bowl of water, moistened a dishcloth, and started to mop Ziggy’s brow.

“Your brother—”

“He’ll be here.”

“No, I mean, what does he do?”

“Like I said, just finished college. He’s smart.”

“Gonna make a fine veterinarian,” Solomon Bartholomew opined.

“A
vet
?”

Solomon shrugged. “Best help your friend’s gonna get tonight.”

Milton looked down at Ziggy and knew that he was in trouble. He hoped that Isadora and her father were right, and not just full of familial pride. Ziggy’s life depended upon it.

ALEXANDER BARTHOLOMEW arrived twenty minutes later. He was driving an old Acura that looked like it had seen better days. The hurricane screamed as he pushed against it to open the car door, slamming it back as soon as he let go. He struggled against the wind, crossed the short yard, and came inside the house.