Salvation Row (12 page)

“No,” Babineaux said.

It was a chump move, entirely predictable, but it annoyed him nonetheless. The message was obvious:
I
am in charge,
I
am the senior man, we will meet when
I
am good and ready. He had been waiting twenty minutes and was beginning to think that Morgan was going to stand him up entirely, and whether it might just be better to save what was left of his reputation and return to the helicopter and beat a retreat, when the door opened and Morgan bustled in.

“Sorry ’bout that,” the man said. He had a slow, deep southern drawl that Babineaux found particularly grating. “Heard you flew in?”

“That’s right.”

“You know, I used to be a flyer in the army. Vietnam? Hueys.”

Babineaux nodded amiably enough, but he knew that Morgan was blowing smoke up his ass. He had commissioned a two-hundred-page report on him, including his history and his family. The alcoholic daughter, the son who would have done time for statch rape without his old man paying the victim off. The investigator had looked for anything that might have been useful, any lever that he could have used, but he had struck empty. One benefit of the report, which he had studied again before taking off this evening, was that he didn’t believe that Morgan had ever flown a Huey. His war had been spent with the National Guard. By the time he deigned to go out to the front line, the shooting was practically over. Babineaux was proud of his service, and that kind of bullshit was the kind of thing that could make him hate a man.

But he smiled, took his hand, and said, “Thank you for seeing me, Pierce.”

“Always a pleasure. You want a drink?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, you won’t mind if I do? It’s cocktail hour around here.”

“How is Elizabeth?”

“She’s well. Sends her best wishes.”

Babineaux knew that was a lie, too. Elizabeth Morgan was a catty old bitch who had always made her disdain for him very obvious. The Morgans were the epitome of old money. The company had originally belonged to Pierce Morgan Senior and, before him, his father and then his father’s father. Four generations of Morgans had striven for nearly two hundred years to make the company what it was today. Elizabeth Morgan thought of Babineaux as a
parvenu
. New money. Distasteful, brash,
vulgar
. Babineaux was quite sure that her husband shared her opinion. It did not concern him. The opinions of others were irrelevant. The only score that was worth keeping was the size of your bank balance, and Babineaux knew that what he had planned would put the Pierce and Elizabeth Morgans of this world in his shadow once and for all.

There was another five minutes of inane small talk that Babineaux had to suffer through. Morgan was good at it, all that fancy chit-chat and hail-fellow-well-met, all that
shit
. It was a skill that Babineaux just did not have. He couldn’t butter people up, pretend to be their friend, when all he really wanted to do was take that glass, smash it, and grind the edge into his face. He did his best to conceal his impatience, nodded, said the right things, answered the pointless questions, but he couldn’t do it without giving himself away, and that made him even angrier. He was used to being in control and, here, he was not.

Finally, a member of the staff brought through a bottle of scotch and two glasses. Morgan sat down at one of the conference table chairs and indicated that Babineaux should do the same. He did. Morgan poured himself a large measure, offered the bottle to Babineaux, and shrugged with a gesture of helplessness when he turned it down again. He crossed his right leg over his left, and Babineaux’s eyes were drawn to the snakeskin cowboy boots that he was wearing beneath his suit. He had to stifle a snort of derision since he found it so ridiculous. All this southern bullshit. The man was a fool.

Morgan leant back in the chair and spread his hands. “So what can I do for you, partner, coming all this way at this time of night?”

“You can probably guess.”

“Well, then, yes, I probably could. You want to talk about the mall.”

“Yes. I was hoping we could put it all behind us.”

“Nothing to put behind us, Joel. Just a friendly bit of competition, that’s all it is.”

“Yes, of course, but it has the potential to become unpleasant. I’d much rather that was avoided.”

“Won’t get unpleasant on my account. May the best man win, that’s what my old man always used to say.”

He raised his glass and grinned at him, and Babineaux was suddenly fearful that Morgan had him at a disadvantage. Possibilities flashed through his mind. Was the mayor double-dealing? Playing one of them off against the other so that he could improve the terms of his own involvement? He felt his blood rise.

“I tell you what,” Morgan said, pretending to be magnanimous. “When we win the bid, and we
will
win the bid, there’s going to be a lot of smaller jobs that we’ll be looking to sub out. You want, I could make sure that you get those jobs.”

Babineaux couldn’t stop the moment of detestation that rippled across his face. He smiled it away, trying to hide it with bluster as he said that he’d better be getting back, but when he stood, his false leg clattered against the chair with a metallic ring and he grimaced, suddenly sure that he had betrayed himself as out of his depth. That thought made him angrier still, and it took supreme effort to stop his fingers from curling into a fist and great strain to ward away the urge to drive that fist into Morgan’s fat, pendulous, gloating face.

“You going?”

“I think so.”

“Shame.” Morgan stood, too. “When this is done, put behind us, you come over to the house. Elizabeth said she’d really love to see you again. We’ll go do some shooting, if, you know, you can.” He nodded his head down to the false leg.

Babineaux’s smile was a rictus and, as he took Morgan’s proffered hand, he could no longer restrain himself. He squeezed his fleshy, sausage-like fingers in his iron grip, grinned into Morgan’s face as the pain flickered there, held it a moment too long and then relinquished it.

“That would be wonderful,” he said.

HE GOT out of the golf cart and stalked across the field to the helicopter. He performed a second inspection, too careful to dismiss the possibility, however remote, that Morgan might have stooped to having a flunky sabotage it. Finding nothing, he got back into the cockpit, took out his phone, and called Jackson Dubois.

“Where are you?”

“In the French Quarter.”

“What are you doing?”

“Meeting the two men we spoke about.”

“Good. I want them on this right away. I’m not getting delayed a minute longer by that bitch.”

“You got it. And Morgan?”

He gritted his teeth, the fury threatening to spill out. “No,” he managed. “He wants to go toe to toe with me. If that’s what he wants… No one’s standing in my way, not any longer. Especially not him.”

“You ready to go?”

“Right now. Call everyone we need. Have them come in at midnight. All of them, no excuses.”

“You got it.”

“I’m going to grind that motherfucker into the dust.”

THE BAR was just off the French Quarter. It was a small room, a pine bar along one side and stools pressed up close against it. There were three booths in the wider part of the room, farthest away from the door, and it was in one of those that Jackson Dubois waited for the two men. He had no intention of letting them anywhere near the offices of Babineaux Properties. That would be reckless, and he was scrupulously discreet and careful. It would still have been possible for them to join the dots and work out who stood to benefit from the task that they were to be assigned, but, Dubois reminded himself, that would require a modicum of ingenuity, curiosity, and intelligence. Those were not qualities of which either man could boast.

The two men who came into the bar were hoods, pure and simple. Hired muscle. They were blunt instruments, absent any kind of intelligence or subtlety. Dubois had no problem with that. A builder needed tools for every kind of work, and sometimes a sledgehammer was better than a knife. Their names were Melvin Fryatt and Chad Crossland. They were both ex-cons, recruited when they were so fresh out of Angola that it was a simple enough thing to buy their loyalty. He knew that they did crack and junk, and that didn’t concern him, either. If the police should ever look into him, and the two of them could be persuaded to be as foolish as to give evidence, any lawyer would be able to make them look very unreliable indeed. Of course, Dubois kept the amount of information that he provided them with to the bare minimum. Just enough for them to do what he wanted them to do. That usually meant names, addresses, and the numbers of bones he wanted them to break.

They sat down in the booth, their faces avid and expectant. Like dogs waiting to be thrown a bone.

Fryatt was the brightest of the two, and he usually did the talking for both of them. “Yes, Mr. Dubois?”

“I have something for you.”

“Music to my ears.”

“Have you heard of the Build It Up Foundation, Melvin?”

“Building them houses in the Lower Nine? Sure, I heard of them.”

“They’ve built a row of houses,” he specified. “But, unfortunately, they’ve built them on a piece of land that is inconvenient for my business. We’ve tried to buy the houses from the owners, at a very good price, but they don’t seem minded to sell. Can you see what I’d like you to do, boys?”

“Persuade ’em to sell,” Melvin said. “Sure. I get it.”

“Go down there, look like you’ve got a bit of authority behind you, and go and see the Bartholomews. They’re the rabble rousers. The girl can get the others to do what she tells them to do. Tell them that it would be in their best interests to sell. Tell them the offer on the table is a fair offer, and that it will be withdrawn in three days, and, if they want to take advantage of it, they need to accept it before then. Tell them the offer that will replace it will be much less generous. Tell them that they, and everyone else, are going to be moving out. One way or another. Tell them there’s a hard way and an easy way. The easy way is where they get paid a good price for their shacks. That’s much easier than the alternative. I don’t mind if you use your imagination there, fill in the blanks a little. Elaborate on that as you see fit.”

He looked at Melvin and Chad and concluded that if they couldn’t get this job done—this simple, straightforward job—then he was going to have to dispense with their services and look to trade up. Decisiveness was another of the qualities that made Joel Babineaux such a successful businessman. And Dubois knew that if he didn’t show it, then he, too, would be dispensed with, despite their long friendship. There was no time for sentiment, not that Dubois held any affection for either of these two men. If they couldn’t do the job that he was paying them for, then they had no business being employed by him.

They were still sitting there, staring at him expectantly.

“What are you looking at?” he said impatiently.

“Is that all, Mr. Dubois?”

“That’s all. Go and get it done.”

THE MORNING was hot, even at six, when Milton arose. He took a cold shower and dressed in a T-shirt. He took his spare jeans from his pack, took out his combat knife and sheared off the fabric from halfway below the knee. He had emergency funds and fake ID in his pack and he used a twenty to take a cab back down to the Lower Ninth, stopping at a Walmart en route so that he could buy a big bottle of water and a pair of steel-capped work boots. The cab’s air conditioner was broken, and the thermometer on the dash soon showed ninety. Milton had finished half of the bottle by the time they reached Salvation Row.

He got out and paid the driver. When he turned, Izzy Bartholomew was standing with her hands on her hips, staring at him with a smile on her face.

“What are you looking at?” he said.

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t think I meant it?”

“It’s easy to say it.”

“But?”

“But coming out here, a day like this, a hundred degrees, hundred and ten, the humidity… well, doing it is a lot harder than saying it.”

“Well, you can eat your words. Here I am.”

She grinned. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly. What needs doing?”

She shook her head with bemusement, then turned and gestured at a particularly dense patch of overgrown vegetation that had swept across a path of land that would once have accommodated two lots.

“We’ve pretty much finished the houses we were working on,” she said. “So we’re concentrating on clearing that.”

THE CHARITY was paying twelve local ex-cons to work on clearance, their number swollen whenever the builders and other staff could be spared. They drew up in two pickup trucks. They were wearing sunglasses, jeans, boots and bright yellow T-shirts. The front of the shirt was decorated with the city’s fleur-de-lis. The back had BUILD IT UP and, beneath that, “Fight the Blight.”

The foreman of the crew was a gruff Mexican. Izzy took Milton over to meet him.

“This is Pedro,” she said. “Pedro, this is John. He’s here to help.”

The man assessed him with a studied air. Milton suddenly felt a little foolish. He had been up in the north of the country for long enough that his usual tan had faded. Pedro had the leathery, weather-beaten skin of a man used to working outside. The other men were the same. He took the dog-end of the roll-up cigarette that he had clasped between his lips and flicked it into the bushes.

He looked down at his bare legs. “You gonna wear shorts,
Esé
?”

“Not a good idea?”

Pedro chuckled. “A lot of plants in there, they sting your legs to shit.”

“Too late to change now. I’ll take my chances.”

Pedro shrugged and went off to organise the men.

Milton turned to Izzy to say goodbye, only to find that she had pulled one of the yellow T-shirts over her head and was arranging her sunglasses on her face.

“You’re coming too?”

“Team effort. We’re all in it together.”