The Driver (21 page)

“Sure did,” Beau said.

He had delivered the body of Adolpho González to the Lucianos three months ago. The job had been to bring him in dead or alive and yet there had been consternation that it was in the latter condition that Santa Muerta was delivered. Beau had explained what happened––that the girl journalist from Juárez had put a bullet in the Mexican’s head while he was outside their motel room getting ice––but his honesty had led to recriminations. The awkwardness had been underscored by the requirement, stipulated by Beau, that the girl was to be given a new identity and kept hidden from the cartels. There had been a moment when Beau had been unsure that they were going to let her leave in one piece but he had stuck to his guns and, eventually, they had conceded. Beau didn’t necessarily care about her either way––she wasn’t his problem, after all––but he had promised Smith that he would get her out of Mexico and set up in the States and Beau wasn’t the sort of man who went back on his word. Doing the right thing had eventually lightened his payment by fifteen grand: the Italians docked ten from his bounty for spoiling the fun they had planned for González and the other five went to pay the fee of the professional who made people disappear.

Fifteen thousand!

Beau hadn’t been happy with that, not at all.

“I appreciate it,” Smith said.

“No sweat, English. Least I could do, circumstances like they were.” He paused and lit up a smoke. “So––how’d you get out alive?”

“There was a lot of confusion. I took advantage of it.”

“Who were those dudes?”

“Best not to ask.”

“What about El Patrón?”

“What about him?”

“He got himself shot dead a couple of days later. That wouldn’t have been anything to do with you, would it?”

“Me? No,” Milton said. “Course not.”

Beau laughed and shook his head. The Englishman was something else. Quiet and unassuming for the most part but when he got all riled up there weren’t many people who would have concerned Beau more. He remembered the way he had strode through El Patrón’s burning mansion, offing gangsters just like he was shooting fish in a barrel. He had been ruthlessly efficient. Not a single wasted shot and not a moment of hesitation. The man was private, too, and Beau knew that there was no point in pushing him to speak if he didn’t want to. “You said you needed a favour,” he said instead. “What can I do for you?”

“The syndicate you’ve been working for––it’s the Lucianos?”

Beau paused and frowned a little. He hadn’t expected that. “Could be. Why?”

“I have a problem––you might be able to help.”

“With them? What kind of problem?”

“I put one of their men in the hospital.”

“Why would you want to do a crazy-assed thing like that?”

“He pulled a gun on me. I didn’t have much choice.”

“By ‘hospital’––what do you mean?”

“He’s not dead, Beau. Broken nose, broken ribs. I worked him over with a pool cue.”

“Jesus, English.”

Smith shrugged.

“You wanna tell me why he was going to pull a gun on you?”

“They’re running an escort business. This man fronted it for them. I had some questions about it and he didn’t like them.”

“What were they?”

“They sent a girl to a party. She hasn’t been seen since and I was one of the last people to see her. Apart from anything else, the police have got me down as a suspect.”

“For what?”

“You hear about those dead girls up north?”

“Sure.”

“The party was right around there. I’d say there’s a good chance her body’ll be the next body they find.”

“Murder, then.”

“I’m not concerned about me, I know I didn’t do it and I know they’re just going through the motions.”

“Kicking the tyres.”

He nodded. “Exactly. But I got talking to her before.”

“An escort?”

“I was driving her. I have a taxi.”

“Chef. Taxi driver. You’re full of surprises.”

Smith brushed over that. “She’s nice girl. And her boyfriend’s a good kid. When they realise I don’t have anything to do with it they’re going to go after him, and maybe he isn’t quite as single-minded as me, maybe they need a conviction and he looks like he could be their guy. Maybe they
make
him their guy. I’d like to get to the bottom of what happened, one way or another.”

Beau shook his head. “You’ve got yourself in a mess over another woman? You got a habit for that. What is it with you, English?”

“I need to talk to them, Beau, but, at the moment, I think they’d rather put a bullet between my eyes. I was hoping you might be able to straighten things out.”

“Put a good word in for you, you mean?”

“If you like.”

Beau couldn’t help but chuckle. “You’re unbelievable. Really––you’re something else.”

“Can you do it?”

“Can I ask them not to shoot you? Sure I can. Will they listen? I have absolutely no idea.”

“Just get me in a room with whoever it is I need to speak to. It might not look like it, but we both have a stake in this. If she’s dead, I’m going to find out who killed her. It’s in their best interests that I do. Because if I don’t, there’s going to be a whole lot of heat coming their way. You’d be doing them a favour.”

“Well,” Beau said. “You put it like that, how can I possibly refuse?”

28

“I KNOW YOU’VE GOT A TEMPER,” Beau said to him as he reversed parked his Jeep into a space next to the bowling alley, “but you’ll want to keep it under wraps today, alright? Apart from the fact that I vouched for you, which means it’ll be me who gets his ass kicked if you start getting rambunctious, these aren’t the kind of dudes you want to be annoying if you catch my drift.” He paused. “You
do
catch my drift, John, don’t you?”

“Don’t worry, Beau,” Milton said. “I’m not an idiot.”

“One other thing: let me do the talking to start with. Introduce you and such like. Then you can take the conversation whichever way you want. If you get off on the wrong foot with them you’ll get nowhere––you might as well just pound sand up your ass. This has to be done right.”

The car park was half full, mostly with cheap cars with a few dings and dents in the bodywork, nothing too showy, the kind of first cars that kids new to the business of driving would buy with the money they had managed to scrape together. Beau had parked next to the most expensive car in the lot. It was a Mercedes sedan, darkened windows and gleaming paintwork. There was a driver behind the wheel. Milton could only just make him out through the smoked glass but there he was; it looked like he was wearing a uniform, the cap of which he had taken off and rested against the dash. He had reclined the seat and he was leaning back, taking a nap.

Milton followed Beau inside.

He looked around. It was a scruffy dive, dirty around the edges and showing its age, staffed by kids in mismatched uniforms trying to make beer money. There were two exits. One was the door they had just come through, the other was at the end of a long dark restroom corridor all the way in back. An air conditioner over the door was on its last legs, running so hard that it was trembling and rattling, but it wasn't making much difference to the humidity in the air. Seven bowling lanes had been fitted into what might once have been a large warehouse. It was a generous space, the roof sloping down towards the end of the lanes with dusty skylights at the other end. There was a bar at the back with ESPN playing on muted TVs, then some upholstered benches, then a cluster of freestanding tables, and then the lanes. There were computerised scoring machines suspended from the roof. All sorts of bottled beers behind the bar. The place was loud: music from a glowing jukebox was pumped through large speakers but that was drowned out by the sound of balls dropped onto wood, falling into the gully, smashing into the pins. The machinery rattled as it replaced the pins and the balls rumbled as they rolled back to the players.

“What is this place?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Looks like a bowling alley.”

“There you go.”

“The family owns it?”

“Sure they do. They own lots of things: pizza parlours, nail bars, couple of hotels.”

“All useful if you’ve got money you need to wash.”

“Yours words, John,” he said with a big smile that said it was all the way true.

Milton checked the clientele: counting people, scanning faces, watching body language. Kids, mostly, but there were a few others that caught his eye. At a table in a darkened corner away from the bar were two guys talking earnestly, their hands disappearing beneath the table, touching, then coming back up again. A dealer and his buyer. There were two guys further back in the room, sat around a table with a couple of bottles of beer. Big guys, gorillas in sharp suits. The first was a tall, wide man with collar-length hair and a black T-shirt under a black suit. The second was a little smaller, with a face that twitched as he watched the action on the nearest lane. They were a pair. Milton pegged them as bodyguards. Operators. Made men, most likely. He’d seen plenty of guys like that all around the world. They’d be decent, dangerous up to a point, but easy enough to take care of if you knew how to do it. There would be a point beyond which they were not willing to go. Milton had their advantage when it came to that; he didn’t have a cut-off. The men were sitting apart from each other but their twin gazes were now trained on the table in a private VIP area that was raised up on a small platform accessed by a flight of three steps and fenced off from the rest of the room.

A further pair of men were sitting there.

“Is that them?”

Beau nodded. “Remember––I’ll do the introductions and, for God’s sake, show them a little respect. You’re not on home territory here and I don’t care how tough you think you are, they won’t give two shits about that. Wait here. I’ll go and speak to them.”

Milton sat down at the bar. One of the televisions was tuned to CNN. They had a reporter out at Headland Lookout, ghostly in the thick shroud of fog that alternated between absorbing and reflecting the lights for the camera. The man was explaining how the police had charted out a search area, breaking it down into eight four-foot sections of maps they kept in a mobile command centre. The item cut to footage of the search. The narrow road he had driven down four days ago was marked with bright orange arrows, pointing south to the two spots where remains had been found. Fluorescent orange flags were planted in the scrub and sand on each of the sites. Officers were weeding through the bramble, fanning outward from the flags.

Beau came back across. “Alright,” he said. “They’ll see you. Remember: play nice.”

“I always do.”

Milton approached. One was older, wrinkled around the eyes and nose. He had a full head of hair, pure black, the colour obviously out of a packet. There was a beauty spot on his right cheek and his right eyelid seemed to be a little lazy, hooding the eye more than the other. He was wearing a shirt with a couple of buttons undone, no tie, a jacket slung over the back of the chair. The second man was younger. He had a pronounced nose with flared nostrils, heavy eyebrows and beady eyes that never stayed still.

Beau sat down on one of the two empty seats.

Milton sat down, too.

“This is Mr. Smith,” Beau said.

“How are you doing?” the older man said, nodding solemnly at him. “My name is Tommy Luciano.”

He extended his hand across the table. Milton took it. His skin was soft, almost feminine, and his grip was loose. He could have crushed it.

“And my friend here is Carlo Lucchese.”

Lucchese did not show the same hospitality. He glowered at him across the table and Milton recognised him; he was the one who had been on the intercom to him, one of the four who had come to kill him.

He didn’t let that phase him. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“Beau said it was important. That wouldn’t normally have been enough to interrupt my afternoon but he told us that you were very helpful with a small problem we had in Juárez.”

“That’s good of him to say.”

“And so that’s why we’re sitting here. Normally, with what you’ve done, you’d be dead.”

Lucchese looked on venomously.

“Perhaps,” Milton said.

“You had an argument with one of my men.”

“I’m afraid I did.”

“Want to tell me why?”

“I have some questions that I need to have answered. I asked him, and they seemed to make him uncomfortable. He threatened me with a gun. Not very civil. I wasn’t prepared to stand for that.”

“Self-defense on your part, then?”

“If you like.”

Beau put a hand down on the table and intervened: “John’s sorry, though––right, John?”

Milton didn’t respond. He just kept his eye on the older man.

“He don’t look sorry,” Lucchese said.

“Carlo…”

“This douche broke Salvatore’s face. Three ribs. Messed up his knee real good. And we’re talking to him? I don’t know, Tommy, I don’t, but what the goddamn fuck?”

“Take it easy,” the old man said, and Milton knew from the way that he said it that he was about to be judged. The next five minutes would determine what came after: he was either going to get the information he wanted or he was going to get shot. “These questions––you wanna tell me what are they?”

He didn’t take his eyes away from the older man. “There was a party in Pine Shore three months ago. September. I drove a girl up there.”

“You drove her?”

“I’m a taxi driver.”

Luciano laughed. “This gets better and better.”

Milton held his eye. “Something happened at the party and she freaked out. She ran and she’s never been seen since.”

“Pine Shore?”

“That’s right. Near where the two dead girls turned up.”

“I know it. And you think this girl is dead?”

“I think it’s possible.”

“And what’s any of it got to do with us?”

“Fallen Angelz. She was on the books.”

He looked at him with an amused turn to his mouth. “Fallen Angelz? That supposed to mean anything to me?”

Milton didn’t take his eyes away. “You really want to waste my time like that?”