The Driver (19 page)

He went into the kitchen. A man in grimy whites was working on a bowl of crab meat.

“I’m looking for Salvatore.”

The man shifted uncomfortably. “Say what?”

“Salvatore. The boss. Where is he?”

“Ain’t no-one called Salvatore here.”

Milton was in no mood to waste time. He stalked by the man and headed for the door at the end of the kitchen. He opened the door. It was a large office. He surveyed it carefully, all eyes. First, he looked for an exit. There was one on the far wall, propped open with a fire extinguisher. There was a window, too, with a view of the Wharf outside, but it was too small to be useful. There was a pool table in the middle of the room and a jukebox against the wall. There was a desk with a computer and a pile of papers. A man was sitting at the computer. He was middle-aged, burly, heavy shoulders, biceps that strained against the sleeves of his t-shirt, meaty forearms covered in hair. Both arms were decorated with lurid tattooed sleeves, the markings running all the way down to the backs of his hands and onto his fingers.

The man spun around on his chair. “The fuck you want?”

“Salvatore?”

He got up. “Who are you?”

“My name is Smith.”

“And?”

“I want to talk to you.”

“You think you can just bust into my office?”

“We need to talk.”

“Then make an appointment.”

“It’s about your other business.”

The man concealed the wary, nervous turn to his face behind a quick sneer.

“Yeah? What other business?”

Milton looked at him with dead eyes. He had always found that projecting a sense of perfect calm worked wonders in a situation like that. It wasn’t even a question of confidence. He knew he could take Salvatore, provided there were no firearms involved to even the odds. Milton couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost a fight against a single man. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost a fight against two men, either, come to that.

“Your escort business, Salvatore.”

“Nah.”

“Fallen Angelz.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It would be better to be honest.”

“I don’t know nothing about it, friend.”

Milton scanned for threats and opportunities. There were drawers in the desk that might easily contain a small revolver. No way of knowing that for sure, though, so he would just have to keep an eye on the man’s hands. There was a stack of cardboard trays with beer bottles inside, still covered by cellophane wrap, but Milton wasn’t worried about them. Bottles made for poor weapons unless you had the chance to smash them and it would take too long to tear through the plastic to get at these ones for them to be useful. No, he thought; the pool table was the best bet. There were the balls, hard balls made up of six ounces of phenolic resin that were good for throwing or for using as blunt weapons in an open fist. There were half a dozen cues held in a vertical rack on the nearest wall. A pool cue was a good weapon. Nice and light and easy to wield, balanced with lead shot in the fat end, long enough to offer plenty of range.

Milton watched the Italian carefully. He could see from the way that the veins were standing out in his neck and the clenching and unclenching of his fists that it would take very little for things to turn nasty.

So––let’s talk about it.”

“Don’t you listen? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So I wouldn’t find anything in those papers if I were to have a look?”

“Reckon that’d be a pretty dumb thing to go and try to do.”

Salvatore reached down slowly and carefully pulled up the bottom of his t-shirt, exposing six-inches of tattooed skin and the stippled grip of a Smith & Wesson Sigma 40F. He rested the tips of his fingers against it, lightly curling them around the grip.

“That’s not the first time I’ve seen a gun.”

“Could be your last.”

Milton ignored that. “Let me tell you some things I know, Salvatore. I know you run girls out of this office. I know you distribute drugs on the side. And I know you sent Madison Clarke to a party at the house in Pine Shore.”

“Yeah? What party was that?”

“Three months ago. The one where she went missing.”

He stared at him. A flicker of doubt. “Madison Clarke? No. I don’t know no-one by that name.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You think I care what you believe?” He stood up now, his right hand curled more tightly around the grip of the handgun. He pointed to the telephone on the desk with his left hand. “You know who I’m gonna call if you don’t start making tracks?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“I’m gonna call an ambulance. I’m telling you, man, straight up, you don’t get out of here right now, you won’t be leaving in one piece. I’m gonna fucking shoot your ass.”

“I tell you what––you tell me all about the escorting business and maybe I won’t break your arm. How’s that sound?”

He slapped his hand against the gun. “You miss this, man? Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?”

“Let’s say I’m someone you don’t want to annoy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m a concerned member of the public. And I don’t like the business you’re running.”

He assessed the distance between them––eight feet––and couldn’t say for sure that he would be able to get all the way across the room before the man could draw and shoot. And if he could get the gun up in time and shoot, it would be point blank and hard to miss.

That wasn’t going to work.

Plan B.

Milton stepped quickly to the table, snatched up the eight-ball and flung it. His aim was good and, as Salvatore turned his head away to avoid it, the ball struck him on the cheekbone, shattering it.

Milton already had the pool cue, his fingers finding it at the thin end.

Salvatore fumbled hopelessly for the gun.

Milton swung the cue in a wide arc that terminated in the side of his head. There was a loud crunch that was clearly audible over the ambient noise from the restaurant and a spray of blood flashed over the computer monitor. Salvatore slid off the chair and onto the floor. Milton stood over him and chopped down again three more times, fast and hard into his ribs and trunk and legs until he stayed down.

He discarded the cue and started to look through the papers on the desk.

TRIP WAS LISTENING to the radio when Milton reached the Explorer again. He opened the door and slid inside, moving quickly. He started the engine and pulled away from the kerb.

“You get anything?”

“Nothing useful.”

“So it wasn’t worth coming down here? We should’ve stayed in Belvedere?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I made an impression. There’ll be a follow-up.”

25

MILTON HEARD THE buzzer as he was cleaning his teeth. He wasn’t expecting a delivery and, since very few people knew where he lived, he was about as sure as he could be that whoever it was who had come calling on him at eight in the morning wasn’t there for the good of his health. He put the brush back in its holder and quietly opened the window just enough that he could look downwards. The window was directly above the entrance to the building and he could see the three men who were arrayed around the door. There was a car on the corner with another man in the front. It was a big Lexus, blacked-out windows, very expensive.

Four men. An expensive car. He had a pretty good idea what this was.

Milton toggled the intercom. “Yes?”

“Police.”

“Police?”

“That’s right. Is that Mr. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Could we have a word?”

“What about?”

“Open the door please, sir.”

“What do you want to talk to me about?”

“There was an incident yesterday. Fisherman’s Wharf. Please, sir––we just need to have a word.”

“Fine. Just give me five minutes. I work nights. I was asleep. I just need to get changed.”

“Five minutes.”

He went back to the window and looked down at them again. There was no way on Earth that these men were cops. They were dressed too well in expensive overcoats and he saw the grey sunlight flickering across the caps of well polished shoes. And then there was the car; the San Francisco Police Department drove Crown Vics, not eighty thousand dollar saloons. He waited for the men to shift around a little and got a better look at them. Three of the men he had never seen before. The fourth, the guy waiting in the car, was familiar. Milton recognised him as he wound down the window and called out to the others. It was Salvatore. His face was partially obscured by a bandage that had been fixed over his shattered cheek. Milton waited a moment longer, watching as the men exchanged words, their postures tense and impatient. One of them stepped back and the wind caught his open overcoat, flipping his suit coat back, too, revealing a metallic glint in a shoulder holster.

That settled it.

The three guys at his door were made guys, that much was for sure. So what to do? If he let them in then the chances were they’d come up, subdue him, and Salvatore would be called in to put the final bullet in his head. Or if he went down to meet them maybe they would take him somewhere quiet, somewhere down by the dock, perhaps, and do it there. He had known exactly what he was doing when he beat Salvatore, and, the way he saw it, he hadn’t been given any other choice. There were always going to be consequences for what he’d done and here they were, right on cue. An angry Mafiosi bent on revenge could cause trouble. Lots of trouble.

So maybe discretion was the better part of valour this morning. He dropped his cellphone in his jacket pocket and went through into the corridor. There was a window at the end; he yanked it up. The building’s fire escape ran outside it. He wriggled out onto the sill, reached out with his right hand, grabbed the metal handrail and dropped down onto to the platform.

He climbed down the stairs and walked around the block until he had a clear view onto the frontage of the El Capitan. The Lexus was still there and the three hoodlums were still waiting by the door. One of them had his finger on the buzzer; it looked like he was pressing it non-stop.

He collected the Explorer. It was cold. He started the engine and then put the heater on max. He took out his cellphone and swiped his finger down, flipping through his contacts. He found the one he wanted, pressed call and waited for it to connect.

26

THE SIGN in the window said BAXTER BAIL BONDS. The three words were stacked on top of one other so that the three Bs, drawn so they were all interlocked, were the focus that caught the eye. The shop was in Escondido, north of San Diego, and Beau Baxter hardly ever visited it these days. He had started out here pretty much as soon as he had gotten out of the Border Patrol down south. He had put in a long stint, latterly patrolling the Reaper’s Line between Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales and, worse of them all, Juárez. Beau had run his business from the shop for eighteen months until he came to the realisation that it was going to take years to make any serious coin, and, seeing as he wasn’t getting any younger, he figured he needed to do something to accelerate things. He had developed contacts with a certain Italian family with interests all the way across the continental United States and he started to do work for them. It paid well, although their money was dirty and it needed to be laundered. That was where having a ready-made business, a business that often ran on cash and dealt in the provision of intangible services, sometimes anonymously, came in very handy indeed.

So Beau had kept the place on and had appointed an old friend from the B.P. to run it for him. Arthur “Hank” Culpepper was an hoary old goat, a real wiseacre they used to call “PR” back in the day because he was the least appropriate member of the crew to send to do anything that needed a diplomatic touch. He had always been vain, which was funny because he’d never been the prettiest to look at. That didn’t stop him developing a high opinion of himself; Beau joked that he shaved in a cracked mirror every morning because thought of himself as a real ladies’ man. His airs and graces might have been lacking but he had made up for that by being a shit hot agent with an almost supernatural ability to nose out the bad guys. He wasn’t interested in the big game that Beau went after nowadays; there was a lot of travel involved in that and there was the ever present risk of catching a bullet in some Bumblefuck town where the quarry had gone to ground. Hank was quite content to stick around San Diego, posting bond for the local scumbags and then going after them whenever they were foolish enough to abscond. He had his favourite bar, his hound and his dear old wife (in that order) and, anyways, he had a reputation that he liked to work on. Some people called him a local legend. He was known for bringing the runners back in with maximum prejudice, and stories of him roping redneck tweakers from out of the back of his battered old Jeep were well known among the Escondido bondsmen. It was, he said, just something that he enjoyed to do.

Beau pulled up and took a heavy black vinyl sports bag from the rear of his Cherokee. He slung it over his shoulder, blipped the lock on the car, crossed the pavement and stopped at the door. He unlocked it, pushed down the handle with his elbow and backed his way inside. The interior was simple. The front door opened into the office, with the desk, some pot plants, a standard lamp and a sofa that had been pushed back against the wall. There was a second door, opposite the street door, that led to a corridor that went all the way to the back of the building. There was a kitchenette, a bathroom and, at the end, a small cell that could be locked.

The safe was in the kitchen, the kettle and a couple of dirty mugs resting atop it. Beau spun the dial three times––four-nine-eight––and opened the heavy cast iron door. He unzipped the bag and spread it open. It was full of paper money.

Fifteen big ones.

The smell of it wafted into the stuffy room. Beau loved that smell.

He took out the cash, stacked the fifties in neat piles and locked the safe.

He locked the front door, got back into his Cherokee and headed for the hospital.