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

by Mark Dawson

  He drove a little faster.

  #

  HE FOUND him parked at the side of the road. He slotted the Corolla behind the Hyundai and stepped out onto the baking asphalt, a denunciation ready on his lips. He had told Ziggy to keep driving. He stalked to the car, but, before he could say anything, Ziggy opened the door and stepped out.

  “I found him.”

  “What? How?”

  “The exits back at the roundabout?”

  “Yes. Two of them.”

  “This one bends back to the northwest after a mile, and then they run pretty much parallel to each other. There’s a mile, maybe two, between them. I drove on, just put the StingRay onto track, and it picked up his phone.”

  He stepped aside and Milton glimpsed into the car. The StingRay was on the passenger seat with an Apple MacBook resting on top of it, the laptop angled so that the screen was easily visible to the driver. The computer was displaying a map. The StingRay had placed a glowing red dot on the map in the countryside between the two roads.

  “How accurate is it?”

  “Right now? Not very. All it has is the signal strength and the general direction of the ping. It’ll give us a search area of two or three miles in diameter. I need to get more readings. If I can get five or six, the software can draw circles from each point and wherever they intersect will be within one hundred metres of the location.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “An hour.” He opened the door, collected the computer and rested it on the roof. He traced the local features with his finger. “This road bends around and joins the other one ten miles ahead, here. If we follow that, come back on the other one, we should get what we need.”

  “We need to do it now. He’s going to think about moving Alexander soon. I need to attack before he does. Out here will be a lot better than if he takes him back into the city.”

  #

  MILTON FOLLOWED Ziggy’s car. He was driving at a steady forty, and Milton watched as he frequently turned his head to the laptop on the seat next to him, occasionally reaching across to, he guessed, tap something on the keyboard that was out of his line of sight.

  They followed the road to the north, turned west, then came down on the other side of the area within which Bachman’s cell had been located. They reached the roundabout that led back to the interstate and took the second exit again. They completed the loop for a second time.

  Eventually, Ziggy drew over to the side of the road next to a narrow track that disappeared into the swamp.

  “I’ve got him,” he said through the open window of the car.

  Milton looked into the cabin. Ziggy held the laptop for him to see. The red dot had shifted half a mile closer to them. The satellite image of the terrain revealed the track and, next to the dot, a collection of small buildings.

  “You’re sure?”

  “That’s where the phone is. I’ve got seven readings. That’s about as certain as I can be.”

  Milton nodded. “Well done.”

  “What’s next?”

  “You go back to the city.”

  He looked disappointed. “You don’t want me to stick around. In case—”

  “No,” he cut him off. “It’s too dangerous. He’s had a day or two to prepare this. I’m guessing there’ll be tripwires, maybe grenades. And I’ve no idea what hardware he’s got. I can’t worry about you, too.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Stay with Isadora. Bachman might not be working on his own. And I’m not playing them straight. There’s no reason they won’t be doing the same with us.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  MILTON WATCHED Ziggy’s Hyundai as it disappeared to the southeast. He went to the back of the Corolla, popped the trunk, and took out the equipment that he had retrieved from the buried cache. He took a covert ballistic vest. It was lightweight, made from layers of high-grade Kevlar. It would be effective against knives and most small-calibre, low-velocity rounds. Bigger bullets would still make a mess, but he’d try to make sure that he didn’t get hit by any of those. The weather was baking hot, and he was already sweating. Wearing the vest was going to be a bitch, but it would be worth the discomfort. He pulled it on and fastened the zip. It was a little small, but not uncomfortably so. It would do.

  He went back to the trunk and looked down at the weapons arrayed there. He had not expected to have a use for the M16, but now he was pleased to have it. He took it out, ejected and checked the magazine, then pushed four spare mags into his pockets. He took the P226, shoved it into his jeans, and added the MP5, too. None of the weapons were particularly heavy and, since he had no idea what he would face when he reached Bachman’s location, he preferred to have more than he needed rather than less.

  He slapped his palm against the magazine of the M16, making sure that it was snugly fitted into the well, and then pulled back the charging handle. He tapped the forward assist assembly to ensure the bolt was closed, released the handle and the bolt slammed home, feeding a round into the chamber and locking into place. The rifle was equipped with a strap, and he put it over his head, arranging the gun so that it was diagonally across his back.

  He closed the trunk, took out his cellphone, and called up the map.

  Due east.

  One mile.

  He crunched across the gravel at the side of the road, descended the slope into the scrubby vegetation below, and kept moving.

  #

  CLAUDE BOON took a bottle of water from the fridge, unscrewed the cap, and slugged down half of it in hungry gulps. Babineaux was paying him and Lila a lot of money for this, but he was beginning to doubt whether it was worth it. Forced out into this godforsaken swamp, eaten alive by mosquitoes, with John Milton out there to deal with. It took plenty to give Boon cause for concern, but Milton had managed to do it.

  Lila came out of the kitchen with a plate of gumbo.

  “You hungry, baby?”

  “Famished.”

  “Got a recipe off the Internet. What do you think?”

  She put the bowl on the table, took an empty plastic bottle and filled it at the sink. Boon took a fork, speared a shrimp and put it in his mouth. It was delicious.

  “Good?”

  “Are you serious? Delicious.”

  She leant down and kissed him on the lips.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “What you think? Shitting himself.”

  “Yeah, well, nothing surprising in that. Most people would be shitting themselves, they find themselves locked up in a place like this.”

  “What we gonna do with him?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I guess that depends on what happens.”

  “What Milton say?”

  “He knows I’m serious, not to try to fuck around. He wants Bartholomew, we want Babineaux. We’re gonna do a swap. I’m thinking, when that happens, maybe you’re waiting with that.” He pointed to the AK-47 that was resting against the wall. “Bang, bang, no more Milton, no more Bartholomew.”

  Lila grinned. “That could happen.”

  Boon got up, collected the AK and brought it back to the table. He pressed the magazine release lever, rotated the magazine forward and pulled it out. Peacock had delivered the gun, one that had been confiscated from the meth cook who used it to defend this cookhouse. The man obviously wasn’t as scrupulous about keeping his weapons maintained as Boon was. He pulled the bolt handle to open the action, checked that the chamber was empty, and then removed the receiver cover. “Fuck’s sake,” he said, brushing out little fragments of dirt. “Look at this. People don’t look after their weapons, they’re asking for trouble. Last thing you want, this jamming when you need it. I’m gonna have to clean it.”

  “You do that, baby. There’s more stew on the stove.”

  “You gonna eat with me?”

  “In a minute.”

  “What you doing now?”

  “Giving that poor bastard his dinner.”

  #


  MILTON TRACKED ahead through a brake of giant cane. He stayed low, the cane brushing his shoulders and the top of his head. The M16 was cradled ready, the muzzle pointing low to the ground, but ready to be brought up and aimed.

  He came across a wide expanse of tea-coloured water, so still that a film of vivid green algae had grown over the top of it. Cypress trees stood in the middle of the water, veils of Spanish moss cascading down from their boughs. Heat weighed down on him. Everything was quiet. It was as if the insects and the animals were too woozy in the furnace to muster a chirp or a call. He passed between two trees with an enormous spider web strung between them, a huge spider scuttling away as he swiped the sticky fibres from his face. He heard the whir of a barred owl’s wings as it arrowed through the trees. Away from the swamp, the ground was caked and cracked as he walked across it. The swamp smelled musty and ancient, antediluvian.

  The ground was too hard for him to find a trail, but, after a short while, he came across a narrow track that was fringed on both sides by thick vegetation. He knelt down and ran his fingers across the ridged grooves that had been left by a car’s tires when the ground had been wet, later to bake in the heat until they were solid as rock.

  The track ran to the east, right to the spot where Bachman’s cellphone had pinged the StingRay.

  He stayed in the margins of the undergrowth and followed the track deeper into the swamp. The terrain rose up, the road cresting a ridge and then descending again into a flat-bottomed basin. Milton paused at the top and looked down onto the landscape that was spread out beyond. He saw the dull glitter of sunlight that struck off mirror-flat and duckweed-strewn lakes, areas of bog and fen. He saw stands of cypress and tupelo, huge swathes of salvinia, patches of water lilies, the trees on the banks of the waterways, their roots stretching thirstily down to the brackish water beneath them. In the middle of the basin, at the heart of an enclave from which the vegetation had been cut away, Milton saw a collection of buildings. Two wooden shacks had been arranged in the shape of an L; an outhouse, perhaps a privy, twenty feet away; and two freight crates, their orange paint decaying with rust. The track that Milton had been following snaked between Chinese tallow trees and oaks, ending at the buildings. A car had been parked beneath the spreading boughs of a big oak.

  Bachman’s Ford.

  Milton arranged the M16 so that he had the plastic forestock cupped in his left hand, the fingers of his right hand near the hand guard for a more accurate shot. He grasped the grip and placed his index finger on the side of the gun, over the trigger guard.

  He crouched down and crept on.

  #

  BOON TOOK a jar of cold water from the fridge, went back to the table and sat down with it. He refilled his bottle, took a long drag, and then fished his phone from his pocket.

  Miracle. The signal from before was still there.

  He dialled the number.

  “Yes?”

  Jackson Dubois sounded tense.

  “It’s me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I spoke to him.”

  “Yes—and?”

  “And we’re going to exchange. He brings your boss, I bring Bartholomew.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning at six. I’m going to call him with the location. There won’t be anyone there. Just him and us.”

  “And then?”

  “We get Babineaux, and then we take him out.”

  “You’ve got that in hand?”

  “You need to relax. You paid me to do it, it’ll get done.”

  “You have backup?”

  “I do. Don’t worry.”

  “No fuck-ups. This has already gone on too long.”

  He gritted his teeth. “It’ll be done.”

  “You just make sure it is.”

  Boon ended the call and put the phone back into his pocket. It was just as well that the pay for the job was significant, because he sure as hell wouldn’t have put up with Dubois’s attitude if they had tried to short-change him.

  #

  THE RIDGE descended into the basin down a steep slope. The swamp encroached all around the buildings, and they were saved from being submerged by the slight camber of the plateau upon which they had been constructed. Milton stayed down low, picking his way through the greenbrier that piled down from the overhanging branches. He was halfway down the slope when he saw it: a thin filament of wire, almost transparent against the green of the vegetation, stretched for two metres between the trunks of an oak and a tupelo tree. He stopped, crouched right down, and followed the wire to the left where it had been fastened around the pin of a fragmentation grenade. Disturbing the wire would pull the pin and detonate the grenade. He would have been killed or maimed, and Bachman and whoever else was down in those buildings would know that the perimeter was breached.

  Milton cut the wire with his knife, undid the loop that attached it to the pin, and put the grenade in his pocket. It might be useful.

  He stopped again when he was thirty feet from the nearest of the two freight containers. A door had been cut into the side, kept shut by a metal bar that slotted through two metal brackets that had been welded to it on either side. It looked like a promising place to start.

  Milton put his hand to his face and wiped the sweat from his eyes, the taste of it salty in his mouth.

  As he paused there, formulating the best plan of attack, he heard the unmistakable sound of a cry of protest from inside the container. It was muffled, the words indistinguishable, a mixture of anger and desperation.

  Milton was sure that the voice belonged to Alexander Bartholomew.

  He shuffled ahead again, the rifle ready, and then he saw a flash of motion from the two buildings that made the L over to his left. He stopped dead, edging behind the generous fronds of a sweet acacia, sharing the cover of the leaves with a Carolina wolf spider as big as his fist.

  A woman Milton did not recognise came out of the shack. She was slender, attractive, and looked foreign. Arabic, maybe. That was unusual in a place like this. She was carrying a bowl with some sort of stew, jambalaya or gumbo, and a litre bottle of water. She had a pistol in her right hand. Milton watched as she crossed the distance between the shack and the freight crate, then waited as she set the plate and the bottle on the ground and worked the bar out of the brackets. She rested the bar against the crate and opened the door.

  She led with the gun, said something—Milton thought it was “food”—and then bent down to collect the stew and the water and disappeared inside with them both.

  Milton waited another ten seconds, his attention on the other buildings, but there was no sign of Bachman.

  This was too good of an opportunity to miss.

  He moved quickly through the shrubs and trees, his attention flicking between the open door and the other buildings. He reached the edge of the clearing and, vulnerable, he checked one final time and then sprinted for the door.

  The woman came out of the gloom just as Milton reached the opening. She opened her mouth, ready to yell, her hand with the pistol starting to rise, but Milton was much too quick for her. He reversed the rifle and jabbed the stock into her stomach. She staggered backwards, her hands flapping over her belly. Milton followed inside, his eyes quickly taking in the quickest flashes of the interior: a bedroll on the floor, a dirty plate, a bucket, another man in the corner.

  He stepped over to her quickly, pulled back the rifle and jabbed again, the stock crashing against the woman’s forehead. She toppled back, unconscious before she hit the floor.

  Milton scanned. Alexander Bartholomew was at the other side of the crate, crouched down, his knees bent, his back pressed up against the wall. There was no one else inside.

  “Keep quiet,” Milton said as he looped his hands beneath the woman’s shoulders and dragged her dead weight away from the door and into the deeper darkness. He checked her vitals. She was breathing, but out of it.

  “Help me,” Alexander said.

&n
bsp; “That’s what I’m here to do.” Milton looked at him. His eyes were wide, eloquent with fear, his cheeks bore two days’ growth, and he was caked with dirt. “How many people have you seen here?”

  “Just two. Her”—he pointed to the unconscious woman—“and another guy. She took me out of rehab. She said she was a policewoman.”

  “She’s not.”

  “No shit!”

  “I know the man a little. They’re working for someone your sister has annoyed. They’re trying to use you to make her do something that she doesn’t want to do.”

  “The houses?”

  “Yes.”

  Milton edged back to the door.

  “I thought they were going to kill me.”

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  #

  BOON SAW it in the corner of his eye. He was putting the AK back together again when there was a flash of motion, a quick disturbance in his peripheral vision that caused him to turn his head to look at the two storage containers. The door in the container they were using to keep Bartholomew was open, an oblong of darkness against the orange paint and the disfiguring scads of rust, and, as he squinted towards it with the sun spearing into his eyes, he saw a dim shape inside. He stared at it, his hand stretching out for the AK. Medium height, slender. A white male.

  Not Lila.

  Not Bartholomew, either.

  Milton?

  He was almost sick with fear.

  He collected the AK, slapped the magazine back into its housing, released the bolt and went to the open screen door. He raised the rifle, started to aim it when the figure in the doorway appeared again, facing out this time, staring right at him.

  It was Milton.

  He raised the AK and fired a six-shot burst.

  Milton spun out of the way, leaving the darkness whole once again. The rounds left vapour trails through the humid air and sliced inside, right where he had been standing.

  #

  ALEXANDER SHRIEKED.

  Milton turned to look. “You hit?”

  He shook his head, then jerked a hand in the direction of the woman. Her skull had been caved in. One of the rounds had ricocheted off the metal roof and drilled her from the back of the head all the way to the front. It had made a mess, with blood splashes thrown all around and gouts of brain matter splattered against the wall.