The Driver

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 wa

“They’re ru

“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 a

“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, ru

“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, sca