Salvation Row - John Milton #6 (John Milton Thrillers)

by Mark Dawson

  The black dude looked over at him and then back at her. He was sucking his teeth, considering. Izzy could almost see the thoughts running through his head. If either of them were packing, she knew that this could get ugly. And fast. For Vinnie and then for them. But it could have gotten ugly if Vinnie had stayed inside, too.

  The black man turned back to her. “You got a date in court the day after tomorrow. You don’t want to go. Ain’t safe for you to be there, you feel me?”

  “I’ve called the police,” Elsie called out from behind her, her voice quivering. “They say they coming.”

  Her father was struggling to a sitting position behind her. She wanted him to stay down. The stress of what he might try to do if he got back to his feet made her feel a dozen times worse.

  The man nodded, a resolution reached. “You heard what I had to say. You got a day to change your mind. If you don’t, and we have to come back again, it’s gonna end different from this. Won’t matter who’s here, you get me?” He turned to the second man, said, “Come on,” and led the way back down the path to their car.

  Vinnie crossed the lawns and came over to the front door. He saw Solomon still dazed on the floor and helped him up.

  “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “That was Joel Babineaux,” she said.

  “They still want us gone?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “You know what I say?” he said, lowering his voice so that Elsie couldn’t hear him. “I say fuck ’em.”

  Izzy said that she agreed, but it was impossible not to think about the trouble that Babineaux and his money could cause. The court case was one thing. But this, hiring thugs and sending them to make threats, well, she thought, that was an escalation. She didn’t know how she could forestall it. Her mom and pops were old, and although she knew that they would back her—her father, especially, now that his dander was up—she knew it would be bad for them. She couldn’t put them through a battle like that, especially if it turned ugly.

  She started to wonder whether Babineaux’s offer, the money he would give them to move, wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Perhaps she could squeeze a little more out of him, find another spot of land, and start again. She looked around, at the tops of the wild trees that had claimed the plots around Salvation Row. Wasn’t as if there was a shortage of real estate.

  But then she saw the row of pretty little houses and thought of the sweat that had been invested in each of them, and she didn’t know whether she could do it to the people she would have to disappoint.

  She didn’t know.

  Chapter Nineteen

  MILTON HAD noticed a motel on the road out of New Orleans to Raceland as he drove west earlier. Now, heading east again, he took the exit ramp and pulled into the parking lot. It was a cheap looking place, with a row of rooms accessed by a covered veranda. He would have been surprised if the place had seen a lick of paint since the eighties. Alexander was snoring across the backseats, and Milton gambled that he would stay that way while he booked a room for the night. The clerk, a teenage girl who couldn’t have looked more bored if she had tried, chewed gum as he told her that he wanted a room.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the soap she was watching on a small portable TV. “Fifty bucks,” she said. “Up front.”

  “Can you let me have one with empty rooms on either side?”

  She turned away from the screen, regarding him with a perplexed look on her face. “Say what?”

  “I don’t sleep well. Noises wake me.”

  “You ain’t gonna get no problem here,” she said. “We ain’t got anyone staying here tonight. You can have your pick.”

  Milton took the room at the end of the row and laid down two twenties and a ten. The girl took the money, slid it into the till, gave him a key with a bright plastic fob, and went back to her soap as if he wasn’t even there.

  Milton got back into the car. Alexander was still asleep. He drove into the empty lot, disturbing piles of rubbish and weeds that had erupted through the cracked asphalt. He reverse parked the car and went to check the room. It was cheap and threadbare, the furniture in need of replacement and with unpromising stains on the walls. At least it had a coffee maker.

  He went up and down the row, knocking on the doors to check that the rooms were all empty. It appeared that they were.

  Very good.

  He went back to the car. Milton decided that there was no sense in moving Alexander until he had to. He waited with him for another hour until he started to stir. The night had fallen properly now, the sun retreating to leave a woozy humid heat that radiated up out of the baked ground. Milton got out, opened the passenger door, and gently pulled Alexander until he was out of the car. He moaned, his eyes flickering open and shut. Milton dragged him across the lot, up the steps of the veranda and inside.

  He laid Alexander out on the bed.

  He shut and locked the door.

  Alexander groaned.

  Milton took a dusty glass from the bureau, filled it with lukewarm water from the tap in the bathroom, and put it on the bedside table next to his head.

  He came around slowly over the course of the next ten minutes.

  “Alexander.”

  “Shit,” he mumbled eventually, the consonants slurred.

  “Wake up.”

  “My head…”

  “Open your eyes.”

  He did as he was told, blinking in the dim light, and, as he saw Milton, he must have remembered it all.

  “You… you…”

  “Easy.”

  “You hit me!”

  “You didn’t give me much choice.”

  “What you do, hit me with a fucking hammer?”

  He had a point. A large, vivid, purple bruise was forming on his jaw where Milton had struck him.

  “Listen carefully. You’re staying here tonight. We both are. You’re going to lie down and sleep off whatever it is that you’ve been smoking.”

  He screwed his eyes shut and then opened them again. “Where are we?”

  “In a motel.”

  “I ain’t staying here,” he said, stumbling to his feet.

  Milton got up and blocked the way to the door. Alexander staggered over to him, as unsteady as a drunken sailor on a rolling ship, and, when Milton didn’t step clear, he awkwardly tried to jostle him back to the door. Sighing with impatience, Milton held his right hand vertically and struck him with the heel, right on his clavicle, pushing all the way through his body as if the target was five inches behind him. It was a sudden blow, and Alexander—already dazed and unbalanced—lost his feet and landed on his rear end, his shoulders bouncing off the edge of the bed.

  “You are going to get some sleep, Alexander. There are two ways that can happen. First, you lie down on the bed, close your eyes, and if you ask me nicely, I’ll sing you a nice lullaby. The second way, I’ll put your lights out for you again. One is a lot more pleasant than the other. You choose.”

  “You’re fucking crazy, man!”

  “You’re probably right. But you’re staying here tonight.”

  #

  ALEXANDER HAD dropped off quickly once Milton had persuaded him that he had no choice but to stay in the motel room with him. Milton had pulled the armchair across to block the door and, once he had satisfied himself that there was no other way out nor any weapons that Alexander could lay his hands upon, he had slept in the chair with his legs on the bed. If Alexander tried to get out, he would wake him up.

  He didn’t try.

  Milton awoke first the next morning. He checked his watch, saw that it was five, and moved quietly across the room so as not to disturb Alexander. He rinsed his face in cold water, used the toilet, and then went back to the bed. He was still asleep.

  He opened the door and stepped onto the veranda. It was still dark. He patted down his pockets for his cigarettes, put one to his lips, flicked his Zippo, and smoked it. He sat quietly for an hour and watched the sun rise. He smoked anothe
r. He watched the steady increase in the morning’s traffic on US-90.

  He heard the sound of stirring in the room and, grinding his cigarette under his boot, he went back inside and switched on the coffee maker.

  #

  “WHERE AM I?”

  “A motel, just outside New Orleans.”

  He looked at him, his befuddlement replaced by anger as he remembered what had happened. “You kidnapped me!”

  “Semantics,” Milton said with a shrug. “I wanted to talk to you; you didn’t want to talk to me. This seemed like the most efficient way to arrange it.”

  “You knocked me out.”

  “You tried to pull a gun on me. That wasn’t clever, Alexander.”

  “You…” He rubbed his chin, a bruise there from where Milton had hit him. “You knocked out Bernard, too, right? You know he’s connected?”

  “To what?”

  “You heard of the Ride or Die?”

  “No. But it sounds colourful.”

  The bafflement returned. “Colourful? This ain’t a joke. They’re serious players.”

  “Do I look as if I care about them, Alexander? Your friend pulled a gun on me, too. He doesn’t have the credit in the bank that you do. He’s lucky he’s still breathing.”

  He looked at him, confused. “The credit?”

  “From Katrina. Remember?”

  He shook his head, as if trying to clear sawdust from between his ears. “What you doing, man?”

  “A couple of things. First thing. You stole something from me.”

  “I didn’t!”

  Milton pointed at his wallet. He had found it in Alexander’s pocket when he had drifted off to sleep, taken it out and left it on the bedside table. All the money had been taken out.

  “I don’t take particularly well to people who steal from me. That wasn’t clever, either. That credit I told you about? It’s just about all used up now.”

  Alexander sat up and rubbed his bruised chin. Milton could see, immediately, that he was very different when he was sober than when he was high. The brashness and the attitude were gone.

  “We need to talk about the second thing,” Milton said. “You’ve got a problem, and I think I can help.”

  “I ain’t got no problem,” he said, although doubt had flooded into his voice.

  “You do. You know you do.” Milton found two styrofoam cups and poured out the coffee. “I’m going to tell you a story, and I want you to listen and tell me whether you hear any similarities between my experience and yours.” He gave Alexander the first cup. “If you listen, and you still don’t think we have anything in common, I’ll stand up out of your way and let you leave. You can go back to Raceland if you want, get high, kill yourself, I don’t really care. But you’re going to listen to me first. Does that sound reasonable to you, Alexander?”

  “Sounds like you’re crazy,” he replied, but he made no attempt to leave.

  Milton took his cup to the chair, sat down, and, between sips, he told Alexander his story. It was the edited version. There were some things, some reasons that explained the way that he felt the way that he did, that he couldn’t have imparted. He had told Alexander that he had been in New Orleans for business when he met him in the storm. He had told him that he was in IT. That was a lie, and he wasn’t able to describe what that business had really entailed. He could not have told him about the roster of dead that he was responsible for, including the two Irishmen he had executed in the French Quarter bar that night. Reasons and motivations had to be left opaque, as was the case every time he shared in a meeting.

  Instead, he told him how he used drink to make him forget. He described his feelings in broad strokes. He described the shame and regret he would feel when he awoke the day after a heavy session, the blackouts that meant that he couldn’t remember what he had said, the panic and fear that he must have done something that he shouldn’t. He described how the obsession for alcohol became so powerful that it was all he could think about. He described how he could only focus on the next drink. He spoke about morning drinking, hiding bottles around the houses of the women he was seeing, of stealing money, getting into fights, drinking to oblivion. Anger. How self-neglect became self-harm and how he had entertained thoughts of putting an end to his misery. He told him about the promises that he made to himself and others that he would try to control his drinking and how every single attempt had failed. He told him that he was constitutionally unable to be honest when it came to drink. How he could not accept his problem. He explained how he had learned that his alcoholism was a disease, a progressive disease that would get worse the longer it was left unacknowledged and untreated. He explained how it would always get worse, never better.

  As Milton told the story, he watched Alexander carefully. He had expected hostility or ridicule or the inevitable denial that he had a problem, but there was none of it.

  Instead, Milton watched as he fell apart.

  “You gotta help me, man. I know I got a problem, I tried to stop, but I can’t do it on my own. I tried, man. I tried, but I can’t.”

  Milton told him that he could help him. He knew NA and AA were based on the same twelve steps. The old tropes spilled out. He explained how, if he took his recovery seriously, then, one day at a time, he could put his addiction behind him. There would be no judgment, no recriminations. He could have peace. The same peace that Milton had, mostly, found.

  Alexander’s chin started to quiver and then, pathetic and forlorn, he started to sob.

  #

  MILTON CHECKED out, relieved to see that Alexander was still in the car when he returned to it. He took his cellphone from his pocket. He found Isadora’s business card and dialled the number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s John.”

  “Where are you?”

  He frowned. “What?”

  “One day too much for you?”

  He understood. “I’ve been busy. I’m with your brother.”

  “You’re what?”

  “He’s in my car right now.”

  “How…? What…?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you, but I want to get moving in case he changes his mind.”

  “Changes his mind from what?”

  “You said that your father had paid for him to have a place in rehab?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “He’s going?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Hold on. It’s on my phone.” There was a pause, so Milton turned to the car and held up two fingers to Alexander to indicate that he would be with him soon. “I found it,” Isadora said. “I sent you the contact details.”

  Milton’s phone pinged. Bridge House, 4150 Earhart Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70125.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll take him and check him in.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  Chapter Twenty

  JACKSON DUBOIS opened the door to the bar and went back to the usual booth. Melvin Fryatt and Chad Crossland were waiting there, half-empty bottles of beer on the table before them. He looked at them, dirty clothes, scum caught beneath their nails, full of the twitches and tics of long-term addicts. He ignored the usual feeling of distaste at having to deal with the two of them and sat down opposite them.

  “What happened?”

  “We delivered the message like you wanted us to.”

  “And?”

  Fryatt snickered. “And we delivered it, you know what I’m saying? Old man came to the door, started giving us lip, giving us attitude, so Chad put a lick on him.”

  Dubois turned to the white guy. “You hit him?”

  “Sure, Mr. Dubois. That alright?”

  Neither he nor Babineaux had any qualms with violence. If they had, he wouldn’t have hired men with a propensity towards it. “What did they say?”

  “After? Didn’t get no time to say anything. This big brother came out
of the house next door and, seeing as we’d already told them what you wanted us to tell them, we didn’t think you’d want no escalation, least not last night.”

  “And when you go back again tonight?”

  “You want us to go back?”

  “Of course, I do.”

  “I thought you was bluffing.”

  “Do I look like the bluffing type?”

  “I don’t—”

  “I don’t bluff, Melvin. When I say something, I do it.”

  “No, I—”

  “You go back and you tell them they need to decide now. Right now.”

  “That’s no problem, Mr. Dubois.”

  “And when you go back, what you going to do?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “You’ll ‘escalate’, will you?”

  Melvin bristled. “Sure.”

  “How will you do that, Melvin?”

  “You want, we’ll put a nine right in the old man’s head.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ISADORA HAD a shorter journey than Milton and Alexander, and she was already waiting in the parking lot as Milton pulled off the road. She got out of her car and leaned against it, waiting as Milton swung into the lot.

  Alexander stiffened in the passenger seat. “What’s she doing here?”

  “She wants to help.”

  Alexander scowled.

  “Is that all right?”

  “If she’s all pious and shit, I’m just gonna jet.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “So you say.”

  “Shut up, Alexander.”

  He parked next to Isadora’s beaten-up Ford Taurus.

  “I’m serious.”

  “She won’t be pious. She’s worried about you. And you’re not going anywhere.”

  “No?”

  “No. Because if you run, I’ll just come and get you again. You know what that will be like, right?”

  He stared at him. “You said all I had to do was listen.”