by Mark Dawson
“Yes. I was hoping we could put it all behind us.”
“Nothing to put behind us, Joel. Just a friendly bit of competition, that’s all it is.”
“Yes, of course, but it has the potential to become unpleasant. I’d much rather that was avoided.”
“Won’t get unpleasant on my account. May the best man win, that’s what my old man always used to say.”
He raised his glass and grinned at him, and Babineaux was suddenly fearful that Morgan had him at a disadvantage. Possibilities flashed through his mind. Was the mayor double-dealing? Playing one of them off against the other so that he could improve the terms of his own involvement? He felt his blood rise.
“I tell you what,” Morgan said, pretending to be magnanimous. “When we win the bid, and we will win the bid, there’s going to be a lot of smaller jobs that we’ll be looking to sub out. You want, I could make sure that you get those jobs.”
Babineaux couldn’t stop the moment of detestation that rippled across his face. He smiled it away, trying to hide it with bluster as he said that he’d better be getting back, but when he stood, his false leg clattered against the chair with a metallic ring and he grimaced, suddenly sure that he had betrayed himself as out of his depth. That thought made him angrier still, and it took supreme effort to stop his fingers from curling into a fist and great strain to ward away the urge to drive that fist into Morgan’s fat, pendulous, gloating face.
“You going?”
“I think so.”
“Shame.” Morgan stood, too. “When this is done, put behind us, you come over to the house. Elizabeth said she’d really love to see you again. We’ll go do some shooting, if, you know, you can.” He nodded his head down to the false leg.
Babineaux’s smile was a rictus and, as he took Morgan’s proffered hand, he could no longer restrain himself. He squeezed his fleshy, sausage-like fingers in his iron grip, grinned into Morgan’s face as the pain flickered there, held it a moment too long and then relinquished it.
“That would be wonderful,” he said.
#
HE GOT out of the golf cart and stalked across the field to the helicopter. He performed a second inspection, too careful to dismiss the possibility, however remote, that Morgan might have stooped to having a flunky sabotage it. Finding nothing, he got back into the cockpit, took out his phone, and called Jackson Dubois.
“Where are you?”
“In the French Quarter.”
“What are you doing?”
“Meeting the two men we spoke about.”
“Good. I want them on this right away. I’m not getting delayed a minute longer by that bitch.”
“You got it. And Morgan?”
He gritted his teeth, the fury threatening to spill out. “No,” he managed. “He wants to go toe to toe with me. If that’s what he wants… No one’s standing in my way, not any longer. Especially not him.”
“You ready to go?”
“Right now. Call everyone we need. Have them come in at midnight. All of them, no excuses.”
“You got it.”
“I’m going to grind that motherfucker into the dust.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE BAR was just off the French Quarter. It was a small room, a pine bar along one side and stools pressed up close against it. There were three booths in the wider part of the room, farthest away from the door, and it was in one of those that Jackson Dubois waited for the two men. He had no intention of letting them anywhere near the offices of Babineaux Properties. That would be reckless, and he was scrupulously discreet and careful. It would still have been possible for them to join the dots and work out who stood to benefit from the task that they were to be assigned, but, Dubois reminded himself, that would require a modicum of ingenuity, curiosity, and intelligence. Those were not qualities of which either man could boast.
The two men who came into the bar were hoods, pure and simple. Hired muscle. They were blunt instruments, absent any kind of intelligence or subtlety. Dubois had no problem with that. A builder needed tools for every kind of work, and sometimes a sledgehammer was better than a knife. Their names were Melvin Fryatt and Chad Crossland. They were both ex-cons, recruited when they were so fresh out of Angola that it was a simple enough thing to buy their loyalty. He knew that they did crack and junk, and that didn’t concern him, either. If the police should ever look into him, and the two of them could be persuaded to be as foolish as to give evidence, any lawyer would be able to make them look very unreliable indeed. Of course, Dubois kept the amount of information that he provided them with to the bare minimum. Just enough for them to do what he wanted them to do. That usually meant names, addresses, and the numbers of bones he wanted them to break.
They sat down in the booth, their faces avid and expectant. Like dogs waiting to be thrown a bone.
Fryatt was the brightest of the two, and he usually did the talking for both of them. “Yes, Mr. Dubois?”
“I have something for you.”
“Music to my ears.”
“Have you heard of the Build It Up Foundation, Melvin?”
“Building them houses in the Lower Nine? Sure, I heard of them.”
“They’ve built a row of houses,” he specified. “But, unfortunately, they’ve built them on a piece of land that is inconvenient for my business. We’ve tried to buy the houses from the owners, at a very good price, but they don’t seem minded to sell. Can you see what I’d like you to do, boys?”
“Persuade ’em to sell,” Melvin said. “Sure. I get it.”
“Go down there, look like you’ve got a bit of authority behind you, and go and see the Bartholomews. They’re the rabble rousers. The girl can get the others to do what she tells them to do. Tell them that it would be in their best interests to sell. Tell them the offer on the table is a fair offer, and that it will be withdrawn in three days, and, if they want to take advantage of it, they need to accept it before then. Tell them the offer that will replace it will be much less generous. Tell them that they, and everyone else, are going to be moving out. One way or another. Tell them there’s a hard way and an easy way. The easy way is where they get paid a good price for their shacks. That’s much easier than the alternative. I don’t mind if you use your imagination there, fill in the blanks a little. Elaborate on that as you see fit.”
He looked at Melvin and Chad and concluded that if they couldn’t get this job done—this simple, straightforward job—then he was going to have to dispense with their services and look to trade up. Decisiveness was another of the qualities that made Joel Babineaux such a successful businessman. And Dubois knew that if he didn’t show it, then he, too, would be dispensed with, despite their long friendship. There was no time for sentiment, not that Dubois held any affection for either of these two men. If they couldn’t do the job that he was paying them for, then they had no business being employed by him.
They were still sitting there, staring at him expectantly.
“What are you looking at?” he said impatiently.
“Is that all, Mr. Dubois?”
“That’s all. Go and get it done.”
Chapter Fifteen
THE MORNING was hot, even at six, when Milton arose. He took a cold shower and dressed in a T-shirt. He took his spare jeans from his pack, took out his combat knife and sheared off the fabric from halfway below the knee. He had emergency funds and fake ID in his pack and he used a twenty to take a cab back down to the Lower Ninth, stopping at a Walmart en route so that he could buy a big bottle of water and a pair of steel-capped work boots. The cab’s air conditioner was broken, and the thermometer on the dash soon showed ninety. Milton had finished half of the bottle by the time they reached Salvation Row.
He got out and paid the driver. When he turned, Izzy Bartholomew was standing with her hands on her hips, staring at him with a smile on her face.
“What are you looking at?” he said.
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t th
ink I meant it?”
“It’s easy to say it.”
“But?”
“But coming out here, a day like this, a hundred degrees, hundred and ten, the humidity… well, doing it is a lot harder than saying it.”
“Well, you can eat your words. Here I am.”
She grinned. “Are you serious?”
“Deadly. What needs doing?”
She shook her head with bemusement, then turned and gestured at a particularly dense patch of overgrown vegetation that had swept across a path of land that would once have accommodated two lots.
“We’ve pretty much finished the houses we were working on,” she said. “So we’re concentrating on clearing that.”
#
THE CHARITY was paying twelve local ex-cons to work on clearance, their number swollen whenever the builders and other staff could be spared. They drew up in two pickup trucks. They were wearing sunglasses, jeans, boots and bright yellow T-shirts. The front of the shirt was decorated with the city’s fleur-de-lis. The back had BUILD IT UP and, beneath that, “Fight the Blight.”
The foreman of the crew was a gruff Mexican. Izzy took Milton over to meet him.
“This is Pedro,” she said. “Pedro, this is John. He’s here to help.”
The man assessed him with a studied air. Milton suddenly felt a little foolish. He had been up in the north of the country for long enough that his usual tan had faded. Pedro had the leathery, weather-beaten skin of a man used to working outside. The other men were the same. He took the dog-end of the roll-up cigarette that he had clasped between his lips and flicked it into the bushes.
He looked down at his bare legs. “You gonna wear shorts, Esé?”
“Not a good idea?”
Pedro chuckled. “A lot of plants in there, they sting your legs to shit.”
“Too late to change now. I’ll take my chances.”
Pedro shrugged and went off to organise the men.
Milton turned to Izzy to say goodbye, only to find that she had pulled one of the yellow T-shirts over her head and was arranging her sunglasses on her face.
“You’re coming too?”
“Team effort. We’re all in it together.”
#
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.”
Chapter Sixteen
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?”
