Salvation Row - John Milton #6 (John Milton Thrillers) Page 5

  Milton watched as an upside-down houseboat floated right down the street by the house, turning in the confluence of competing currents at the intersection, jerking, and then finally wedging against the lattice of two bent street lamps.

  #

  THE CLOUDS parted just after midday and a hot sun shone down. The heat was powerful, and there was nowhere for them to shelter. It baked the roof and soon it wasn’t possible to touch the shingles without burning your hands. The humidity made the air thick and soupy, and Milton was soon covered with sweat. The heat had other, even less pleasant consequences. There were plenty of things in the water that were liable to decompose, and the stench of it was quickly all that he could smell. Dead animals that had been swept inland from the wetlands to the northeast, rotting food, and, over all of it, the dead bodies of people still trapped in their houses. Corpses, too, floating free. Milton saw evidence of several: the top of a shoulder, a hand, a leg, the rest of the body dragged down beneath the surface. The others saw them, he knew, but no one passed comment.

  The first boat arrived just after two in the afternoon. They heard the motor first, a steady chug as it glided around the corner where a strip mall had once stood. It sent out a gentle bow wave, the water freighted now with raw feces and toilet paper from shattered sewer mains. The boat was packed to the gunwales with first aid kits, food and bottled water. The cargo was lashed down to the bottom of the boat, a tarp spread over it.

  The people on the roofs of the houses started to yell and holler for help.

  There was a blare of electrical distortion, and then the voice of the second man in the boat was amplified through a bullhorn. “Stay where you are. Help is on the way.”

  “Help is on the way now? What about three hours ago when my daddy died?”

  “Stay in place,” the man repeated.

  “You gotta get us down from here!”

  “We don’t have room in the boat right now, but, when we’ve unloaded, we’ll come back and take as many as we can.”

  The atmosphere became more hostile as it was obvious that the boat was not going to stop.

  It chugged alongside the Bartholomew house.

  “We got a badly injured man up here!” Alexander called down.

  “‘Fraid that don’t make him special,” the pilot called back up. “Look around. We got a whole parish like that.”

  “No, this is different. He was in a car crash last night. He’ll die if he doesn’t get proper care and shelter. He can’t stay here.”

  There was a pause as the man conferred with his colleague. “All right,” he called back. “We can’t get him in here, but I’ll put a call in to the Coast Guard. They’ll send a chopper. Hold tight.”

  #

  THE HELICOPTER was a big Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk. It was another two hours later before it clattered low over the rooftops, the downdraft sending frothing waves to roll against the sides of the houses. The pilot nudged up the nose and bled away the speed, hovering carefully and then sliding across so that it was just above and to the right of the house. Milton looked up and saw that the side door was slid all the way open and a hoist was in place, with a man strapped into a harness.

  Milton was on one side of Ziggy and Isadora was on the other.

  It might have been the noise of the chopper or the force of the downdraft, or it might just have been a coincidence, but Milton felt Ziggy’s fingers drift across the back of his hand. They slipped around his wrist and squeezed, very gently. Milton looked down at him. His eyes were open.

  “Where…?”

  The helicopter was much too loud for Milton to make out what he had said. He had to lean down so that his ear was next to his mouth, and then he made him repeat it.

  “Where… am… I?”

  Milton put his mouth next to Ziggy’s ear. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

  “I feel like a horse just kicked me in the chest.”

  “You need to take it easy.”

  “What happened?”

  “You were in a car crash.”

  “Shit,” he said, sudden recognition blooming across his face. “Shit, Six.”

  “Quiet,” he hissed.

  Ziggy tried to sit, gasping from the sudden pain.

  “Relax,” Milton urged, his hands on Ziggy’s shoulders.

  He spoke with sudden vehemence. “Did you get them? Maguire? Did you get him?”

  It was loud, too. Isadora looked across at him, her forehead crinkling with confusion.

  Milton very carefully put his spare hand around Ziggy’s and squeezed. “Don’t talk,” he said. “We’re getting you out of here.”

  Milton looked up at the underside of the helicopter. The crew member had activated the winch and had started to descend, his legs dangling thirty feet above them. Milton looked down at Ziggy, worried that he wouldn’t know what he was saying. What would happen then? The Group didn’t announce itself to the local authorities when it went about its business. It was not in the business of cooperation or prior approval. What if they asked him questions and he wasn’t switched on enough to deflect them? What if they shot him up with morphine. What would happen then?

  Ziggy had closed his eyes again.

  All Milton could do was hope that he remembered his cover story when he awoke. There would be questions about why he had been in the Lower Ninth, questions that would not fit neatly with the story that had been concocted for them back in London, before they had set off, but there was nothing that Milton could do about that. He had no choice but to hope that the confusion and disruption of what had happened and was happening to the city would be a good enough distraction. An unusual story from one man, soon to be pumped full of sedatives, could be forgotten in that mad, bewildering mêlée.

  #

  THEY WERE finally taken down from the roof as the night was drawing in. They had been perched there all day. Milton’s skin had been burned, and they were all subdued and woozy from the weight of the broiling heat. Milton and Alexander helped Solomon and Elsie, holding onto their hands and lowering them down to the NOPD officers in the boat below. Isadora went down next and then Alexander. Milton held onto the edge of the roof, taking one last look at the expanse of water that had swamped the neighbourhood, and then clambered down onto the deck of the boat.

  “Anyone else up there?” the cop said.

  “No,” Milton said. “I’m the last.”

  The boat had collected the people who had been sheltering on several nearby houses, and it was cramped. The pilot fired up the outboard and steered the boat out into the middle of the street, away from submerged obstructions that might otherwise snag it. The atmosphere was muted, depressed, as the residents were given a new perspective of a street that was simply unrecognisable from the one that they remembered.

  Izzy worked her way around until she was next to him.

  “Look at this,” she said. “Look at it all.”

  “It’s incredible,” Milton said.

  “How are they going to fix it all? These people have no money.”

  He shook his head, unsure what to say.

  “You know what’s funny? The mayor, the city, they’ve been wanting to clean up the Ninth for years. God just went and did it for them. Wiped the whole slate clean, just like that.”

  The boat chugged along quiet streets to the higher ground to the west. The people aboard were silent, gaping at the buildings that had been wrecked and the spaces that had appeared where other buildings had been destroyed and swept away. They came upon the houseboat that Milton had seen earlier. It had been pushed upwards so that it was on its side, propped against the wall of a 7-Eleven. The scale of the cleanup was incomprehensible.

  “What are you going to do now, John?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  “You’ll go home? Back to London?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t know when, though. I doubt the airport is open.”

  She smiled, but didn’t say anything. Milton felt a sh
udder of shame. He was complaining about a little inconvenience. What was that? He might have to wait a little, but he could just leave. He could board a jet, either here or somewhere else, and he could put all of this behind him. Isadora and her family did not have that luxury. They were stranded, their house destroyed, their things ruined. Where would they live? How could they even begin to put things right? Milton felt foolish, but he didn’t know what to say to apologise without making himself feel even worse.

  Izzy sensed his discomfort. “We’ll be all right.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’ve got an uncle in Shreveport. There, I guess, until this gets fixed.”

  “I feel bad. Just being able to leave.”

  “It’s not your fault. What are you going to do? Stay here? I expect you’ve got a family to go to.”

  “No,” he said. “No family.”

  “But friends. A job, things you have to do?”

  Milton was about to say that he didn’t have any friends, either, but he held his tongue. The mention of a job had made him think of Control and the report that he was going to have to file about the events of the last two days. He realised, and not for the first time, that he would have given almost everything to be absolved of his responsibilities, the necessity of going back to London, the debrief, the training, and the wait for another file to be allotted to him. A red-fringed file, stamped SECRET and EYES ONLY, the subject of the file marked for death at his hand. He realised, miserable because it was utterly out of the question, that he would have liked to have been able to stay here. He would have liked to have been able to help in whatever small way that he could.

  The boat edged onwards.

  “Thank you,” Milton said. “You didn’t have to help us last night.”

  “Sure we did.”

  “I don’t think everyone would have been so kind. I appreciate it. If I’m ever back in town and I can help you, you’d only have to ask.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, resting a hand on his elbow. “I’d like to see you again. But it’s not very likely, is it? I mean, really? You have a life to lead. Why would you come back to this? I’m not sure that I would.”

  She left her hand on his arm as the boat slowed, edging along to a spur of land that poked up from the glassy surface of the floodwaters. It had been turned into a makeshift jetty, with boats jostling for position as they sought the spaces to unload the people that they had rescued. Milton reached down for a mooring line and tossed it over so it could be looped around a baulk. The boat was hauled alongside. Milton climbed onto the gunwale, hopped across, and then reached back to help the others off. Izzy and Alexander waited until everyone else had been removed and then clambered across themselves.

  The boat was untethered. It reversed away and chugged softly back into the flooded streets again.

  “This is it, then,” Izzy said.

  Milton extended his hand. Alexander, who had been subdued all afternoon, took it, his grip loose. “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my friend’s life.”

  He shrugged. The afternoon seemed to have bled all the attitude out of him.

  “And thanks again, Izzy.”

  She took his hand and reached up to kiss him on the cheek. “Stay safe, John.”

  #

  MILTON CALLED for help and a Group Fifteen sleeper agent was activated, arriving in New Orleans past midnight and driving him to the airport at Baton Rouge. As they drove out of the city, Milton looked again at the damage that the hurricane had wrought. The miles of buildings that had been stripped of their shingles, the windows that had all been stove in, the whole stands of trees that had been flattened, the evidence of the storm’s contemptuous power. The smell was everywhere, too, even away from the flood: the smell of raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and the sweet underpinning of decomposition. The driver, a man whom Milton had never seen before, said nothing, but he could see that they were thinking the same thing. How it was that a twenty-first-century American city had been reduced to this, degraded, cast back a thousand years in the span of a few short hours?

  The driver told him that Ziggy Penn had been taken to a medical facility and that the initial assessment was that he was out of danger. Alexander Bartholomew’s work had saved his leg and, most probably, his life.

  The driver stopped in the drop-off area at the airport and Milton got out. The heat, even at this late hour, felt like stepping into the damp warmth of a commercial laundry. Milton walked through the terminal, passing the thousands of people begging for seats on the next planes out and the thousands who had given up. They were now camping on the floor in the vain hope that they might be able to leave tomorrow. A Group Fifteen contact had arranged a seat for him on a packed flight to Atlanta and, from there, a seat on the Delta transatlantic flight to London. He stopped at a Starbucks for a coffee and made his way to check in.

  He felt guilty, again, that he was able to wash his hands of everything he had seen, board a jet and fly away. He thought of the Bartholomews, and all the others who didn’t have that luxury. They were good people, and their lives had been torn up. He was, by any measure, a bad person: a professional murderer, inured to ordeals like this by the power of his employer. Life was unfair. It bothered him more than usual as he shuffled into the queue, waiting for security.

  Part Two

  Present Day

  Chapter Seven

  JOHN MILTON trudged into the parking lot of the restaurant. It had been raining for the last three hours, and the weather had slowed him down. He had hoped to travel twelve miles before stopping for breakfast, but he had only managed ten. Spokane was still another eighty miles to the west. The sight of the diner, a warm and bright oasis on the edge of the road, was too tempting for him to pass by. He was hungry and cold, and the prospect of resting his weary feet for an hour while he filled his belly was very attractive.

  He stepped into the lobby and unslung his rifle and his pack. He took off his coat and draped it on a hook, drops of run-off water splishing and splashing onto the tiled floor. He visited the restroom and dried himself as best he could with a combination of the paper towels and the hand dryer and, when that was done, he took his gear and went through into the diner.

  The waitress looked at him: unshaven, soaked, dirty. “You can’t just sit in here, buddy. I know it’s raining, but this ain’t a shelter. You got to eat something.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got money.”

  “You want to show me?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your money, you want to show me you got some money?”

  She stopped, her scepticism very evident. Milton reached into his waterproof money pouch and took out his roll of notes. He peeled off a twenty and laid it on the table. “There. All right?”

  Her disapproval was ameliorated by the sight of the cash. “Sorry, honey. We get people here, no money, think this is a shelter.” She took a copy of the large laminated menu and handed it to him. He ordered ham and eggs and hash browns, a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, a large glass of orange juice and a pot of coffee.

  He stretched out his legs and let the warmth seep into his bones.

  Milton had been on the road for a month since the trouble in the Upper Peninsula. The bullet wound in his bicep had healed nicely, just a puckered little scar that joined the collection of other scars that decorated his body. Just another story to tell, although, he admitted, that was a particularly good one. He had tramped west from Truth, making it to Minneapolis with two days to spare for the concert that he had been intending to attend. The Arctic Monkeys were good and well worth the trek to get there.

  He ended up staying for a week, hiring a car and driving up to Mille Lacs Lake, and then, when he was ready to move again, he loaded up his pack and went on his way. He walked for ten hours a day, usually managing four miles an hour if the weather was good. He had covered a thousand miles and had seen Bismarck and Billings and Missoula. He had camped along the route, tarrying for a little longe
r near Kalispell to explore the Flathead National Forest. It had been a pleasant trip, with perfect solitude for days at a time, and Milton felt renewed, the bulwarks against his drinking reinforced and sturdier than they had been for months. Doing it alone was against everything that the Fellowship ordained, and his sponsors wouldn’t have approved, but Milton had decided that since his way worked, why change it?

  Being able to spend time in one place, without the urgent necessity of exfiltration, was a luxury that he had never expected and one of which he didn’t think he would ever tire. He had travelled to dozens of countries during his career with Group Fifteen, but those stays had all been brief. A quick in-and-out was necessary for his safety and the integrity of the operation. As soon as the job was done, he had hurried away again lest he find himself a person of interest in the inevitable investigations that followed in his wake. His resignation from the Group had opened up a whole world of possibilities, and he intended to savour them as much as he could. Even a day like this, wearing cold and clammy clothes in a second-rate diner in the middle of nowhere, had its own peculiar attractions.

  The waitress returned with his food. He took up the cutlery and set about it hungrily. He cleared the plate in five minutes and ordered another stack of pancakes and a refill of the coffee pot.

  The short order cook aimed a remote at the old TV that had been positioned on a ledge above the door and flicked over to the news. It was near the end of the bulletin. The screen showed the footage from a helicopter: a grid of flooded streets, houses swept away, cars propped upside down, debris bobbing through fast-flowing currents. Archive footage. He recognised New Orleans and what Katrina had done to it.

  The report cut to an outside broadcast. A reporter, blinking in the bright sun, inky shadows painted on the street behind him, was interviewing a young woman. She was black, had thick, lustrous hair, a bright smile, and steel in her lively eyes.

  Milton sat up as if he had been prodded.

  “Turn it up?” he called over.