Saint Death - John Milton #3 (14 page)

“You were good at it?”

“Very good,” he said.

“Have you’ve killed people before?”

“I have.”

She fell silent.

He found the TV remote and tossed it across to the bed. “Try and get some sleep,” he said. “And I know you’re not stupid, but lock and chain the door and don’t open it to anybody but me. Alright?”

“You’re going now?”

“There are some things I need to get, too. I might be back late. Maybe this evening. Alright?”

She said that she was.

“Don’t open the door.”

27.

MILTON TOOK a taxi to the border and then got out and walked. The Paso del Norte bridge spanned the Rio Bravo, and he took his place in the queue of people waiting to cross. He paid three pesos at the kiosk and pushed through the turnstile. A couple of hundred strides to reach the middle, where Mexico ended and the United States began. He paused there and looked down. The floodplain stretched beneath him, the Rio Bravo a pathetic trickle, slithering between stands of Carrizo cane. A chain link fence on either side, tall guard-posts with guards toting rifles, spotlights and CCTV.

The American gatepost was worse, bristling with security. He walked towards it and joined the queue. Well-to-do housewives chatted about the shopping they were going to do. Bored children bounced. Kids slung book bags over their shoulders, waiting to pass through to their Methodist schools. Vendors hawked hamburgers, cones of fried nuts and bottles of water. A woman in a white dress with a guitar sang folk songs, a handful of change scattered in the torn-off cardboard box at her feet.

It took an hour for Milton to get to the front.

“Hello, sir,” the wary border guard said. “Your passport, please.”

Milton took out the fake American passport that he had been using since he arrived in South America. He handed it to her.

“Mr. Smith,” she said, comparing him with the photograph. “You’ve been away for a while, sir.”

“Travelling.”

She stamped the passport. “Welcome home, sir.”

He walked through into America. There was a McDonalds near the border, a hub of customs agents, girls laden with huge packets of diapers, Mexican businessmen and Mexican ladies on their way to clean American toilets. The mumbling homeless gathered outside, pushing their belongings in supermarket carts.

Milton had a fifteen minute cab ride to get to where he was going. He fished out his phone from his pocket and took the scrap of paper that the man in the hospital had given to him from out of his wallet. He dialled the number and put the phone to his ear.

“Baxter?”

“Who’s this.”

“John Smith.”

“Mr. Smith. How are you, sir?”

“Our friend––how much is he worth to you?”

“He’s worth plenty––why? You ready to help?”

“If you help me––then perhaps.”

“How much do you want?”

“Nothing. No money. I need you to do me a favour.”

“I’m listening.”

“Those Italians you work for––I’m guessing it’s a reasonably simple thing for them to bring someone across the border?”

“Sure. I’ve got to get our mutual friend across, and I’m damn sure I ain’t taking him over the bridge. I don’t reckon it’d be any great shakes to add another to the trip. Who do you got in mind?”

“The girl.”

“Makes sense. Yeah––I reckon I could do that. Anything else?”

“A new life for her on the other side. Legitimate papers in a different name. Away from El Paso. Somewhere where they’ll never find her.”

“That’s a bit more demanding. But maybe.”

“What would you have to do?”

“Make a couple of calls. You on this number all day?”

Milton said that he was.

“I’ll call you later.”

The taxi had arrived. Milton put the telephone away, paid the driver, and got out.

The El Paso gun show was held every Saturday at the El Maida Shrine Centre at 6331 Alabama Street. A sign outside the venue advertised roller derbies, pet adoption fairs and home and garden shows, but it was obvious that guns were the big draw. He paid sixteen bucks at the entrance and went inside, passing a row of ATMs, an NRA information booth where two bored teenagers were smoking and lazily handing out leaflets, ice cream and Mexican food stands and two emphatic sandwich boards requiring visitors to unload their weapons. A banner above the entrance to the hall said that YOUR SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS GUARANTEE ALL THE OTHERS.

Milton passed beneath it and went inside.

He had seen the show advertised in
El Diario
, a whole page advert that promised that every gun that he could imagine would be available to buy. Milton could imagine a lot of guns but, after just five minutes, he saw the claim wasn’t fanciful. The place was like a bazaar. Several long aisles had been formed by tables arranged swap-meet style, dozens of vendors on one side of them and several hundred people on the other. Milton recognised the hunters, but there were plenty of people buying for other reasons, too. He watched with a detached sense of professional interest as a rotund and cheerful white-bearded man, easily in his seventies, walked past with an ArmaLite and attached bayonet slung casually over his shoulder. A blue-rinsed lady of similar age negotiated hard for extra ammunition for the Smith & Wesson she was purchasing. Other shoppers were pushing hand carts of ammunition out to their trucks. Apart from the guns and ammo, there was surplus military apparel; first aid supplies; kippered beef in flavours like Whiskey BBQ and Dragon Breath; war movies; badger pelts; replica uniforms and flags from the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and Nazi Germany; knives, brass knuckles and katana swords; cougar skulls; crates of canned meat with expiration dates years into the future, ‘perfect for bunkers’; remote-controlled helicopters.

Milton sauntered along the aisle, looking for the right kind of seller. It didn’t take long to find one: the man had a table, covered in blue felt, with a selection of weapons sitting on their carry cases, a handwritten sign on the table reading PRIVATE SELLER/NO PAPER. The slogan on the man’s black wifebeater read “When All Else Fails, Vote From the Rooftops!” and revealed sleeves of tattoos up both arms. He wore a baseball cap with a camouflage design.

“Afternoon, sir,” he said.

“What do I need to buy from you?”

“Cash and carry. No background check, I don’t need no address––don’t really need nothing, no sir. This is a private party sale. What are you looking for?”

“What have you got?”

The man cast his hand across the heaving table. “I keep a nice selection. All the way from these little stainless steel Derringers, good for concealment, to the long guns. I got the Ruger .22––extremely popular gun. I got weapons with pink grips, for the lady, engraved pieces with inlaid handles and decorative stocks. Walthers, Smith & Wessons. A lot of people are shooting .40 calibres. Those are pretty vicious. I got revolvers––”

“No, automatic.”

“I have nice automatics. I got modern plastic guns. I got the Glock, I got the Springfield. And then, over here, I got the Mac semi-autos all the way up to the rifles: the .208s, the .223s, I got an AK-47 and an AR-15, a .50 calibre with fluted barrel and sniper green finish.”

Milton looked down at the metalware lined up across the table. They were all expertly made, although he found it easier to feel affection and admiration for the collector’s items with the wooden butts than for the coldly efficient and inorganic weapons that made sense only in combat. The cold grey foreboding of an AR-15. The leaden heaviness of the Czech MFP, modelled on the Kalashnikov.

He picked up a Springfield Tactical .45 auto.

“How much?”

“$480, cash money and it’s all yours, out the door you go.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You want ammo with that, too?”

The Springfield boxed thirteen rounds per magazine; Milton bought four, mixed factory hardball and jacketed hollow points from Federal and Remington, for a straight hundred.

He paid the man, thanked him and went back outside. It was seven in the evening by now and the winds had picked up. The faint orange dust that had hung in the windless morning had been whipped up into a storm and now it was rolling in off the desert. He took a taxi back to the border and was halfway across the span of the bridge when the storm swept over Juárez. Sand and dust stung his face and visibility was immediately reduced: first the mountains disappeared, then the belching smokestacks on the edge of town, and then, as the storm hunkered down properly over the city, details of the immediate landscape began to fade and blur. The streetlights that ran along the centre of the bridge shone as fuzzy penumbras in the sudden darkness.

Milton’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and pressed it to his ear.

“It’s Beau Baxter.”

“And?”

“Smith, are you outside in
this
?”

Milton ignored the question. “Get to it. Can you help?”

“Yeah, it can be done. You help me with our mutual friend, I’ll help get the girl where she wants to get and set her up with a nice new identity. Job, place to live, everything she needs. Want to talk about it?”

“We should.”

“Alright, buddy––tomorrow evening. There’s a joint here, does the best huaraches you’ve ever tasted, and I’m not kidding. I always visit whenever I’m in Juárez, compensation for having to come to this godforsaken fucking town in the first place. It’s at the Plaza Insurgents, on Avenue de los Insurgents. Get a taxi, they’ll know. Eight o’clock, alright?”

Milton said that he would be there and ended the call.

The lights of Juárez faded in and out through the eddies of dust and grit. The Hotel Coahuila’s neon throbbed on and off, the huge sign with a girl wearing
bandolero
belts and brandishing Kalashnikov machine-guns. He passed a police recruitment poster with a ninja-cop in a balaclava and the slogan
‘Juárez te necesita!’
––Juárez Needs You. There was no-one in the gate shack on the Mexican side of the river. No passport control, no customs checks, no-one to notice the Springfield that was tucked into the back of his jeans or the clips of ammunition that he had stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. There was no queue, either, and he pushed his way through the creaking turnstile and crossed back into Juárez.

28.

THE STORM gathered strength. Milton took a taxi to the address that Caterina had given him. He told the driver to stop two blocks earlier and, paying him with a twenty dollar bill, told him to stay and wait if he wanted another. He got out, the sand and grit swirling around him, lashing into his exposed skin, and walked the rest of the way. It was a cheap, dingy area, rows of houses that had been sliced up to make apartments. He passed one house, the road outside filled with SUVs with tinted windows. The cars were occupied, the open door of one revealing a thickset man in the uniform of the federales. The man turned as Milton passed, cupping his hand around a match as he lit a cigarette, the glow of the flame flickering in unfriendly eyes. Milton kept going.

Caterina’s apartment was just a few doors down the street. Milton felt eyes on his back and turned; two of the SUVs were parked alongside one another, their headlights burrowing a golden trough through the snarling, swirling dust. He turned back to the house, walking slowly so that he could squint through the sand at the third floor. There was light in one of the windows; a shadow passed across it. A quick, fleeting silhouette, barely visible through the darkness and the grit in the air.

Her window?

He wasn’t sure.

A narrow alleyway cut through the terrace between one address and its neighbour and Milton turned into it, gambling that there was another way inside around the back. The roiling abated as he passed inside the passageway but it wasn’t lit, the darkness deepening until he could barely see the way ahead. He reached around for the Springfield and pulled it out, aiming it down low, his finger resting gently on the trigger.

The passageway opened into a narrow garden, fenced on both sides, most of the wooden panels missing, the ones that were left creaking on rotting staves as the wind piled against them. The ground was scrub, knee high weeds and grasses, scorched clear in places from where a dog had pissed. There was a back extension attached to the ground floor property, no lights visible anywhere. He looked up: there was a narrow Juliet balcony on the third floor. There was his way inside. Milton climbed onto a water butt and then boosted himself onto the flat roof, scraping his palms against the rough bitumen. He stuffed the Springfield back into his trousers and shinned up the drainpipe until he was high enough to reach out for the bottom of the balcony, shimmied along a little and then hauled himself up so that he could wedge his feet between the railings.

He leaned across and risked a look inside.

There was no light now.

He took the gun and pushed the barrel gently against the doors. They were unlocked, and they parted with a dry groan. He hauled his legs over the railings and, aware that even in the dim light of the storm he would still be offering an easy target to anyone inside, he crouched low and shuffled forwards.

He heard movement in the adjacent room: feet shuffling across linoleum.

Milton rose and made towards the sound. He edged carefully through the dark room, avoiding the faint outlines of the furniture.

He reached the door. It was open, showing into the kitchen. The digital clock set into the cooker gave out enough dim light to illuminate the room: it was small, with the cooker, a fridge, a narrow work surface on two sides and cupboards above. A man was working his way through the cupboards, opening them one by one and going through them. Looking for something.

Milton took a step towards him, clipping his foot on the waste bin.

The man swivelled, a kitchen knife in his hand. He slashed out with it.

Milton blocked the man’s swipe with his right forearm, taking the impact just above his wrist and turning his hand over so that he could grip the edge of the man’s jacket. The man grunted, trying to free himself, but Milton plunged in with his left hand, digging the fingers into the fleshy pressure point behind the thumb, pinching so hard that the knife dropped out of his hand. It had taken less than three seconds to disarm him; maintaining his grip, Milton dragged the man’s arm around behind his back and yanked it up towards his shoulders, pushing down at the same time. The man’s head slammed against the work surface.