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

  Most people wouldn’t have considered getting into the ring with Cooke. But Claude Boon wasn’t most people. He wasn’t afraid. He was relishing it.

  Cooke glared down at Boon. “Gonna kill you,” he growled.

  Boon smiled, took his guard and pushed it into his mouth.

  “Ready?” the referee said.

  “Ready,” Cooke mumbled around his mouth guard.

  Boon nodded.

  “Get it on.”

  Boon held out his gloves and the man hammered his down, knocking his hands away, making a point.

  The bell rang and the audience held up their cellphones, cameras on.

  Boon danced back.

  The big man lumbered at him and threw a punch. It never connected. Boon hopped back, the man’s fist whistling harmlessly to the right of his ear. Cooke jabbed with his left, and Boon struck it away and to the side with his forearm while extending his leading leg. This brought him close enough to use the edge of his hand, as hard as a block of marble. He jabbed twice, the big man lurching backwards as the pain stung him.

  Cooke looked at him with sudden fear.

  Boon dropped his guard insolently, rolled his shoulders, and grinned around the mouthguard.

  Cooke looked to the referee.

  Boon danced after him on nimble feet, kicking him first in the torso and then, lowering his target just enough, he lashed up high, his foot thumping into the fleshy nub of the man’s nose. Cartilage and bone were mashed together, blood spurted from the wreckage and, as the starburst of pain disabled him, Boon slid around and latched on a Kimura lock. It was a submission move that had been appropriated from Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It was a staple in the arsenal of anyone who knew Krav Maga to a decent level, and Boon was a grand master. MMA fighters used it, too, but theirs were ugly and inelegant in comparison to the devastating lock that Boon applied. He wrestled Cooke to the ground and cinched the lock in even tighter.

  The crowd knew what was coming. A man near to them both, a can in his hand, beer spilling out of it, yelled, “Finish him!”

  Boon only had to ratchet the pressure a little for the man to tap. He pulled back a little more, feeling the tendons pop and the bones starting to bend. Cooke tapped more frantically, his hand slapping against Boon’s thigh. He pulled harder, waiting for the arm to crack and then snap, Cooke screaming like a baby. Boon released the lock and rolled away.

  The referee stepped in. Boon hopped to his feet and let him raise his hand.

  The crowd reacted with cheers from those smart enough to back him, and jeers from those who had lost their money by betting on his opponent.

  His wife, Lila, was standing at the front of the crowd. Boon went to her.

  “Nice, baby.”

  “Easy.”

  He held up his hands, and Lila undid the Velcro that fastened his gloves. She pulled them off, dropped them into his bag, and handed him a bottle of water. He drank half of it and stood it on the hood of the nearest car. Cooke was being dragged out of the ring. His arm hung uselessly at his side. Boon and Lila stepped aside, letting his cornermen haul him away. Cooke didn’t look at him. His aggression was spent. He was timid now, and in pain.

  Boon looked at his wife. Her eyes sparkled. She had something she wanted to tell him.

  “What is it, baby?”

  She smiled at him, his little coquette. “You know we said we could go to Hawaii?”

  “Yeah, I did. But I also remember there was a qualification.”

  “When we get the next job.”

  “That’s right. That look, what is it? You saying we got a job?”

  “We got it, baby. Came through tonight.”

  “Where?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “From the cop?”

  “Same as before.”

  “Who?”

  “Just some guy. Sounds like nothing. In and out, nice and easy.”

  Lila handed him his towel and Boon used it to mop the sweat, and Cooke’s blood, from his face and chest.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Then you can tell me about it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  BOON AND LILA flew from JFK. They were in coach, as was their habit, the better to stay under the radar. The stewardess in charge of the section was cute and quite happy to flirt with Boon, not that he was interested. He was a good-looking man. He was in his mid-forties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a mischievous sparkle in his blue eyes. He was in good shape, too, with not an ounce of fat on him. His build had been honed thanks to the fighting and the fitness regimen that he followed with near religious zeal. Boon cared about how he looked, but that last habit was not inspired by vanity. It was a prerequisite of his profession that he be fit and strong, able to defend himself should the need arise. Some of his rivals preferred to do their business from a distance, but that was not how he liked to work. He preferred to be close to take advantage of the greater engagement that proximity allowed. He enjoyed the sensation of death, the moment when you could see the spark of life extinguished in the eyes of a target. Shooting someone from fifty yards was sterile, especially with the gadgets that you could add to a rifle these days. Where was the skill in that? He wanted the flavour of it, and the flavour was more redolent when you pushed a dagger into a man’s heart, or snapped his neck, or put a loop of piano wire over his head and pulled until the blood was running through your fingers.

  He looked over at Lila. She was sleeping, her body angled in his direction, with her head resting softly against his shoulder.

  The plane rumbled down the taxiway and settled next to the gate. “Lila,” he said tenderly.

  She stirred, her eyes slowly opening. “We here?”

  “We’re here. Let’s go.”

  He stood, reached up to the overhead bin and took down his carry-on bag. It was the only luggage he had with him: a change of clothes, two books, a spare pair of shoes. Lila’s case was similarly austere.

  “Thanks for flying with us,” the stewardess said as he wheeled the case down the aisle to the air gate.

  “Thank you,” he said, flashing the puckish smile that he knew put people in mind of Matthew McConaughey.

  Their work demanded that he be in and out of a place as quickly as he could. He liked to imagine himself as a businessman, flying in for a conference or a meeting. They flew in, stayed for a day or two, did what they had been paid to do, and then flew out again. Boon was too professional to allow for a distraction. He never allowed anything that might mean that he took his eye off the ball.

  He stepped onto the airbridge, the humid wash of the air slapping at him.

  “Jesus,” Lila said. “Hot.”

  “This is nothing.”

  “I know. It’s not Gaza.”

  “It is not.”

  Lila hadn’t been to the south before. Boon had, several times. There had been jobs here. First with the Mossad and then, latterly, on his own account. It wasn’t his type of place. The climate was brutal, the city—especially since the hurricane—was ugly, and he found the people brash and vulgar. Not much reason to be down here save for the fact that he had a name on his docket and work to be done.

  Lila was right, though. It was nothing like Gaza. But there were very few places that were.

  Boon looked at the other travellers around him, the other businessmen in town for meetings or conferences or whatever it was that had drawn them here. Business. His was very different from theirs. He didn’t advertise what he did. Secrecy and discretion were his watchwords. Publicity was to be avoided at all costs. It could be fatal. When certain people had a problem, a mess that needed to be cleaned up, and if those people knew who to call—or if they knew people who knew—then maybe, for the right price, Claude Boon could be persuaded to come and do it.

  #

  BOON HIRED a Chevrolet from Avis and drove to the Hilton. They checked in and showered, and Boon left Lila to relax in front of the big TV while he went down to conduct business in the bar. He had taken a table a f
ull ten minutes before the time he had scheduled for the meeting. Boon liked to be at a rendezvous early. It gave him time to check the place out, get a feel for the lay of the land. If he got a sniff that something was wrong, he would leave. His instincts had been honed to a fine edge from years of use. He had learned to trust them, implicitly, without question. He had cleared out before, many times, but today felt acceptable.

  The bar was busy, but not so busy that it would have been easy for someone to observe him without his noticing. It was well lit, lots of space, there were three potential exits to get out onto the street if he needed to make a quick getaway. He knew this part of town reasonably well, and he knew he would be able to disappear if that became necessary. He didn’t relax—he never really relaxed—but he allowed himself the luxury of ordering a coffee and a Danish and then took them to a booth where he could watch everyone in the room.

  He recognised Detective Peacock from before. There had been a job for him, two hoods who had raided a poker game that was supposed to be under police protection. He located the men and made an example out of them. Peacock had said that he was impressed. He should have been. It was a clean and efficient job. Not particularly difficult, but Boon treated them all the same. The ones where you relaxed, those were the ones where you ended up with a bullet in your head.

  Peacock was with a man in a smart suit, suave, well groomed.

  “Detective,” he said.

  “Hello, Boon.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “The man I told you about.”

  “Dubois.”

  “That’s right.”

  Peacock sat down and slid around in the booth so that Dubois could sit, too. Peacock was a louse of a man, no morals, bad hygiene, not impressive in any sense, but he had proven to be trustworthy enough, and he had promised that this job would pay enough for it to be worth Boon and Lila’s time. Dubois was a different prospect, assured, confident, even in a situation like this. Often the men who were referred to him were nervous and twitchy, knowing that what they were doing made them, at the very least, accessories to murder. The jobs he had done in some states had been enough for a trip to Death Row. Those guys were thinking about execution, the needle, things that kept them up at night, but this guy was different. He was cool and collected, ordering a coffee in a strong, clear voice, not even the hint of a tremor in his hand as he took the cup and put it to his lip. Solid, in good shape, stiff backed. Tidy, with a neat crew cut. It said ex-military all day long.

  Boon was impressed.

  Dubois leant forwards, indicating Peacock. “He said that you’d be here, that this was where you wanted to meet. We didn’t see anyone else coming in. Are you careful?”

  “I’ve been doing this for years, Mr. Dubois. What do you think?”

  “I think I’m not going to get into a business like this with someone I’m not sure I can trust. Peacock vouched for you, but, with all due respect, I hardly know Peacock and he doesn’t strike me as the sort of man in whom I would place the greatest confidence—”

  “Hey,” Peacock protested. “Fuck you.”

  “—and so you need to persuade me of your bona fides.”

  Boon sipped his coffee and replaced the cup, very deliberately, in the saucer. “My bona fides.”

  “That you can do what he says you can do.”

  “I know what it means, Mr. Dubois. What did he tell you?”

  “That you can make problems go away.”

  He smiled. “Indeed.”

  “You made any problems go away recently?”

  Boon wondered how much it would be safe to reveal. He didn’t like to talk about his jobs, and he was certainly not the sort of man who gloated about past glories. Showing off, like all the other bad habits, would get you killed. “My last work was a month ago. There was a union man, in Newark. This man was causing problems for his employer. Provocative statements to the press. Suggestions that he was going to blow the whistle on some dubious business practices. You might have heard of him?”

  “I think I read something.”

  “He had a heart attack.”

  “That was you?”

  Boon gave a shallow shrug. “Who knows? But I handle things like that.”

  Dubois leant over the table again. “I’m going to be completely honest with you, Mr. Boon. I’m here against my better judgment. With reservations. The last time we hired someone to ‘handle’ something for us, it was against my better judgment, too. And as soon as we were finished with this guy, he went straight to the FBI and started to tell lies like you wouldn’t believe. It’s just a good thing the fellow got cold feet when they brought him before the grand jury. And it cost us a lot of money to make sure his feet got cold, too, I can tell you.”

  “There’s handled and then there’s handled,” Boon said. “When I handle something, no one goes to the FBI or to anyone else. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I do.”

  “And that’s what you want?”

  “It is.”

  “Alright, then. Just so we’re all copacetic, being careful works both ways. Anyone know where you are?”

  “I didn’t see nobody else around here who knows who I am,” Peacock said, keen to reassert himself in the conversation. “We’re fine. No one knows that you’re here.”

  Boon sipped his coffee again, turned his attention back to Dubois, put the cup back in the saucer, and said, “Go on. Tell me what you need.”

  “My employer has a problem. A person we need to have removed. Peacock has his picture.”

  “This is him,” the cop said, laying a mugshot out on the table.

  Boon looked.

  He frowned.

  He looked again, checking, questioning his first reaction.

  He struggled to contain his surprise.

  The first thing he noticed was that the man looked relaxed and at ease, even though he had been put in front of a police camera in—he checked on the back of the print—the town of Victoria, Texas, and charged with assault. People not in the life would typically look a little perturbed by the experience, but this guy was relaxed and looked right into the camera as if it was nothing. He was in his forties, short dark hair, icy blue eyes. The mugshot was clipped to a printout, and he scanned it quickly.

  “John Smith,” Boon said, reading the details.

  “That’s not his name,” Peacock said.

  “No,” Boon said. “I know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His name is John Milton.”

  “How’d you know that?” Dubois frowned. “You know him?”

  “I’m afraid that I do.”

  Peacock gestured at the printout. “We couldn’t find—”

  “This will be more expensive,” Boon interrupted him. “The price I quoted was for chumps. John Milton isn’t a chump.”

  “Who is he?” Dubois said.

  “What do you know?”

  Peacock took over again. He slid the mugshot back into the envelope. “He’s British. An old soldier, ex-Special Forces. SAS.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  The detective leant back in the chair. “You say you know him. Why don’t you tell us?”

  Boon laced his fingers on the table as he thought about how much to reveal. He couldn’t give them everything because that would give them too much about him, too. He would have to be selective. “Milton used to work for the British government. There’s a clandestine group, completely off the books. They neutralise those who offer a threat to British interests.”

  “‘Neutralise?’”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Peacock was troubled. “So, what? You’re saying that he’s some sort of assassin?”

  “The last time I met him, that was exactly what he was. But I haven’t seen him for years.”

  “But you recognise him?”

  “Milton isn’t the sort of person you forget.”

  Dubois was listening with an inscrutable expression on his
face.

  Boon sipped his coffee. “As I said, it’s going to cost more.”

  “How much more?”

  Boon’s usual tariff was fifty per job, with a twenty per cent discount for multiples. That was pretty good cash for what was usually a day’s work, but Milton had nothing in common with the patsies and putzes whom Boon and Lila assisted on their way off this mortal coil.

  “One hundred.”

  Dubois didn’t flinch. “Half now, half on completion.”

  “That works.” He finished his coffee and replaced the cup in the saucer. “So why do you want Milton gone? What’s he doing over here?”

  “Mr. Dubois’s boss don’t want him around no more.”

  Boon frowned. “Mr. Dubois isn’t the patron here?”

  Dubois looked over at Peacock, but didn’t answer.

  “I have a few rules, Mr. Dubois. The first is that I need to know who I’m working for. If I don’t, I’m getting up and going back to Jersey.”

  “He’s—” Peacock started.

  “I speak for him.” Dubois spoke over him. “You’ll deal with me.”

  “Not good enough. You speak for who?”

  He looked reluctant.

  “You tell me or I’m out of here. I’m serious.”

  “His name is Joel Babineaux.”

  Boon had heard of him, or, rather, he had heard of Babineaux Properties. It was a big, respectable construction company listed on the Chicago exchange. It wasn’t a surprise that a company like that had a need for his particular services. It happened often, more than people would have expected. He had worked for bigger companies, internationally known brands. Business could be dirty and unpleasant, even the business conducted by the shinier, brighter Fortune 500 corporations.

  “There are some houses being built down in the Lower Ninth,” Peacock said. “After Katrina. This charity—”