Bright Lights Read online

  Bright Lights

  A John Milton Thriller

  Mark Dawson

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Part III

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Part IV

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Part V

  Chapter 85

  Part VI

  Chapter 86

  Afterword

  Get Exclusive John Milton Material

  Also By Mark Dawson

  In the John Milton Series

  In the Beatrix Rose Series

  In the Isabella Rose Series

  About Mark Dawson

  This one’s for Team Milton.

  Part I

  1

  John Milton settled himself into the black bucket seat. The vinyl had cooked in the California sunlight and was warm through the already damp cloth of his shirt. He put the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine rumbled to life.

  The owner of the lot opened the passenger door and leaned in. “Well?”

  Milton ignored him, listening to the growl, the burble and pop from the exhaust.

  “Well?” the man repeated. “What you think?”

  Milton allowed himself a smile. He could feel the rumble of the engine through the chassis and the bucket seat. “She sounds good.”

  “‘Good?’ You been smoking, man? Please—just listen to it. That’s the original in there. Ram Air III cam, roller rockers, Edelbrock intake with Holley carb…”

  The man went on, listing the improvements that he had made. Electric choke. Dual snorkel air cleaner with chrome lid. Milton tuned him out, dabbed his foot on the gas and felt and heard the engine respond. It felt alive—primal—and Milton couldn’t help but think how much fun it would be to take the car out onto a quiet desert road and bury the pedal. Fun? The prospect was intoxicating.

  “So,” the man was saying, “when you say she sounds good, what you meant to say was…?”

  “All right,” Milton conceded. “Better than good.”

  Milton assumed that the man’s name was Sam. A vinyl banner with SAM’S CUSTOM MUSCLE CARS had been draped over the lot’s entrance, and the man’s denim overall bore a patch with HI – I’M SAM across his left breast. Milton couldn’t decide whether that was ironic or authentic. The man was short, with a head of unruly black curls and a stocky build. His overalls were stained and, somewhat incongruously, he wore rubber flip-flops on his feet and had a half-smoked cigarette tucked behind his right ear.

  The lot, in Oakland, was as scruffy as its owner. Milton would not usually have chosen a place like this to make a significant purchase, but he had something special in mind, and the Craigslist ad had suggested—a little dishonestly, as it had turned out—that this would be a private sale. Never mind. He was here now, and the car was exactly what he had in mind. At least that part of the ad was correct: it had described the car as a prime 1969 GTO, and it was.

  Sam smiled as Milton ran his fingers against the rough stitching of the leather-trimmed steering wheel. “Want to take her for a quick spin?”

  Milton said that he did. He waited for Sam to get in next to him before releasing the emergency brake and nudging down on the gas, rolling the car out of the lot and onto the street.

  “She’s not perfect,” Sam said, “but she’s solid. Won’t let you down.”

  Milton smiled, thinking that sounded like a description that he might put on himself.

  The lot was on Twenty-Sixth Street. Sam directed him until he was on the John B. Williams Freeway, heading north towards the interchange with the 580. He turned to the east and followed the MacArthur Freeway.

  “Go on,” Sam said. “Give her a little juice.”

  Milton pressed down on the gas and pushed the speed up to forty and then fifty. The steering wheel was tight, the Cooper radials stuck to the road, and the rumble beneath the hood did indeed sound new.

  “You said you did the rebuild yourself?” Milton asked.

  “Yeah. Took me six months.” Sam shrugged. “Took the engine apart, replaced what needed to be replaced, then put it back together again. You got—”

  Milton sensed he was about to start listing components again, and cut in. “It’ll get me to Las Vegas? Across the desert?”

  “It’ll get you to New York if you want, man. Guaranteed. Something goes wrong, bring it back. I’ll be here.”

  Sam pointed to an exit ramp and Milton took it, following Broadway to the south and then hooking back onto Twenty-Sixth. Milton drove back to the lot and reversed the car back into its space. He got out and walked around it again. The paint was Cortez Silver that had been sanded and wheeled until it was as slick as glass. The vinyl top was in good condition; there was a Judge rear spoiler, new weatherstripping and window felts; and the tinted windshield was free of chips or any other imperfections.

  “New,” Sam noted, rapping his knuckles against the glass. “I was gonna restore the interior, maybe put in a new radio, trick it out a little more. But here you are.”

  Milton didn’t care about the interior or the radio. “I like it.”

  “You can drive her away today,” Sam said, rubbing his chin.

  “How much?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  Milton stared at him.

  “Twenty-five.”

  Milton stared at him some more. “Fifteen.”

  “Twenty-three, and that’s as low as I’m going.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I can’t do sixteen, man.”

  Milton
said nothing.

  “Can you think of a better way to get to Vegas?”

  Milton shrugged. “I was going to get a Greyhound.”

  “The fucking Greyhound,” Sam repeated with mock incredulity. “You’re killing me. Twenty.”

  “Seventeen.” Milton stared at Sam for a long moment until the man had to look away.

  The air went out of him. “Fine,” Sam said. “You got it. Seventeen.”

  “Excellent. Cash all right with you?”

  “Cash would be perfect.”

  Milton opened his satchel and took out the money. He decided not to mention that it was dirty. He had liberated it from a dealer in LA who had been foolish enough to try to sell his goods to the son of a woman Milton had met at the early morning AA meeting in Pasadena. The woman had shared about how her inability to save her boy from his addictions was leading her back to the bottle. Milton had listened quietly, not saying a word, but had taken her aside when they went to the café on Fremont for breakfast afterwards. He’d asked her for the bare minimum—the dealer’s name and where he did his business—and then had gone to fix the problem.

  The dealer was an emaciated crackhead, foul-smelling but with a vermin cunning that glinted in his eyes. Milton delivered a stern rebuke and, when the dealer had called his bluff—had actually threatened him—Milton had underlined his warning by breaking three of the man’s fingers and putting enough torque on his wrist to very nearly break that, too. They had reached an accommodation after that, but Milton had still taken his stash.

  He counted out the seventeen grand and handed it over. Sam took it into his office and returned with a receipt.

  “You decide to do the interior, bring it back to me,” Sam told him. “Give you a discount and I promise no one will make it look better.”

  Milton nodded. “I will. Keys?”

  “Seventeen. Jesus, man. You’re killing me.” He made a show of his reluctance to hand them over, but, as Milton readied another icy glare, he tossed them across.

  Milton caught them. “Thanks,” he said. “One more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a cassette deck in the car, right?”

  “A Kraco. Would’ve been an eight-track out of the factory, but whoever owned it before must’ve got it fitted.”

  “Don’t suppose you got any tapes?”

  “Wait there.”

  Sam went back into the office and came out again with a small cardboard shoebox.

  “Haven’t played these in years,” he said.

  Milton took the box and removed the lid. He saw a selection of cassettes. There were albums by the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, Dionne Warwick, The Foundations, The Animals and others.

  “How much for the box?”

  “You think I want to negotiate with you again?” he said. “You can have ’em.”

  2

  Milton headed under the freeway on Fourteenth and turned onto Market, the engine of the GTO rumbling as if in remonstration that it was not being given the proper workout that it deserved. Milton thought of the long drive ahead of him and smiled; it had suddenly become a lot more interesting than might otherwise have been the case. He would have taken a Greyhound, but driving himself in a car like this would be a pleasure.

  This trip was a little last minute, but perhaps more exciting because of that. He had been in London for a month when he had seen a news story on the BBC website. The talented young boxer Mustafa Muhammad had attracted the attention of promoters in the United States, and, when a fighter on the undercard of the upcoming world championship fight at Mandalay Bay had pulled out due to injury, Muhammad had been installed as his replacement. Milton knew Muhammad as Elijah Warriner, a youngster whom he had tried to help in the immediate aftermath of his renunciation of his government work.

  Milton was a fan of boxing and had realised that he could combine a trip to see the bout with his long-cherished dream of taking a classic American muscle car on a cross-country road trip. He had persuaded himself that this was the perfect occasion to do that. He would start in San Francisco and buy a car, and then he would drive to the east coast, stopping in Vegas along the way.

  He had arrived a few days earlier and had taken a room at El Capitan in San Francisco. He had stayed there before, months ago, when he had foolishly thought that he might be able to make a life for himself in the Bay area. He had been holding down two jobs—delivering ice and driving a cab—and had even found himself a woman before he had been embroiled in a series of murders after a girl whom he had driven to a party had disappeared. He had been on the run from the Group then, but the events of the succeeding months—most notably the death of Control—had removed the threat to his future prosperity that his discovery would have entailed.

  He had enjoyed his time in the city. He had visited the tourist sights, walking for miles up and down the hills until his legs burned. He had attended a meeting every day, subconsciously hoping that he might bump into Eva, the woman with whom he had spent time before. He’d asked around, eventually discovering that she had taken a job with Netflix in New York. That was probably for the best; the last time they had met, she had been kidnapped in an attempt to put pressure on him. He told himself that there was no reason why she would want to see him again, and had put the notion out of his head.

  His wandering had been interrupted while he had taken care of the errant son and the drug dealer, but now he had nothing else to do. The fight was in two days. He would go to the hotel and check out and then start the long drive and see where it took him.

  Milton had just crossed the Bay Bridge and was driving southwest towards the Mission District when he saw an elevated billboard at the side of the highway. It was bright red with a picture of an old man in a Stetson standing next to a steer, his hand resting between the beast’s horns. The headline proclaimed THIS IS NO BULL.

  Milton couldn’t stop looking at it and, as the sign rushed at him, he noticed a glare of red out of the corner of his eye. He turned back to the road and saw that the cars in front had slowed down to a crawl. He stamped on the brakes and brought the car to a stop with just a few feet to spare.

  The billboard was immediately to his right. The rest of the text announced that Baxter’s Bail Bonds had just opened a new office on Bryant Street, in SoMa. Milton remembered the geography of the city from his previous visit and knew that Bryant Street was close, near the Hall of Justice.

  The driver behind him sounded his horn. Milton turned back to the road and saw that the traffic was moving again. He held up his hand in apology and pushed down on the gas, sending the GTO ahead. He saw an exit sign up ahead for Ninth Street/Civic Center and, without really thinking about what he was doing, he flicked the indicator and turned off.

  3

  The newly opened branch of Baxter’s Bail Bonds enjoyed a spectacularly good location. Bryant Street was nothing special, with auto shops and industrial units on one side of the road and cheap cars parked nose-to-tail as their owners conducted their business. The other side of the road, however, was taken up by the vast Thomas J. Cahill Hall of Justice. Police vehicles were slotted amongst the civilian cars that were parked on that side of the road, and clutches of people—many of whom were clearly unhappy that they were here—filtered in and out of the double doors that were set back from the street and accessed by way of flights of concrete stairs.

  There were a number of bail businesses opposite the municipal building, and with good reason. The men and women who had just been processed were often unable to find the money that the court had set in order for them to be bailed. The bondsmen up and down this stretch of road would offer that money, often at ten per cent interest. Business was clearly brisk.

  Milton parked the GTO a little way down the road from his destination and then walked back toward it. The building was not much more than a storefront that had been erected on the corner of Bryant and Boardman. It was single storey, with white-painted walls and a steeply pitched shingled roof. The si
gns on the walls announced that it was open twenty-four hours and that Spanish was spoken. The name of the business—Baxter’s Bail Bonds—was arranged so that the three words were stacked on top of one another. The three Bs were drawn so that they were all interlocked.

  The office was accessed from the pavement by way of a flight of four steps. Milton climbed them and paused at the door. He hadn’t seen Beau Baxter since he had last been in San Francisco. The old man had introduced him to a mafia family that had helped him to solve part of the problem that Milton had been facing. Their first meeting had been some time before that, when Baxter had been sent over the border to Juárez in an attempt to track down a man named Santa Muerta, the psychotic cartel sicario who had massacred members of that same Italian family. Milton had been impressed with Baxter’s dry sense of humour, his toughness, and his very obvious capability.