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.