you have a talent for trouble. He should have been used to it by now.
It was nine minutes to midnight when Ben walked into the liquor store. It was as warm and humid inside as it was outside, with a lazy ceiling fan doing little more than stir the thick air around. An unseen radio was blaring country music, a stomping up-tempo bluegrass instrumental that was alive with fiddles and banjos and loud enough to hear from half a block away.
The sign on the door said they were open till 2 a.m. Ben soon saw he was the only customer in the place, which didn’t surprise him given the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the street. Maybe they got a rush of business just before closing time.
The entire store could have fitted inside Ben’s farmhouse kitchen back home in Normandy, but was crammed from floor to ceiling across four aisles with enough booze to float a battleship. A glance up and down the heaving displays revealed a bewildering proliferation of beer and bourbon varieties, lots of rum, a smattering of local Muscadine wines and possibly not much else. He was resigned to not finding what he was looking for, but it had to be worth a shot.
Alone behind the counter sat an old guy in a frayed check shirt and a John Deere cap, with crêpey skin and lank grey hair, who was so absorbed in the pages of the fishing magazine he was reading that he didn’t seem to have noticed Ben come in.
‘How’re they biting?’ Ben said with a smile over the blare of the music, pointing at the magazine. The friendly traveller making conversation with the locals.
The old timer suddenly registered his customer’s presence and gazed up with watery, pale eyes. ‘Say what, sonny?’ He didn’t appear to possess a single tooth in his mouth.
It had to be thirty years since the last time anyone had called Ben ‘sonny’. Abandoning the fishing talk, which wasn’t his best conversation topic anyway, he asked the old timer what kinds of proper scotch he had for sale. Whisky with a ‘y’ and not an ‘ey’. Ben had never quite managed to develop a taste for bourbon, though in truth he’d drink pretty much anything if pushed. He had to repeat himself twice, as it was now becoming clear that the storekeeper was stone deaf as well as toothless, which probably accounted for the volume of the music.
Finally the old timer got it and directed him to a section of an aisle on the far end of the store. ‘Third aisle right there, walk on down to the bottom. Hope you find what you’re lookin’ for.’ The Cajun accent was more noticeable on him, sounding less Americanised than the younger locals. A sign of the times, no doubt, as the traditional ways and cultures eroded as gradually and surely as Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.
Ben said thanks. The old man frowned and peered at him with the utmost curiosity, as though this blond-haired foreigner were the strangest creature who’d ever stepped inside his store. ‘Say, where you from, podnuh? Ain’t from aroun’ here, that’s for damn sure.’ Ben couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called ‘partner’, either.
‘Long way from home,’ Ben replied.
The old timer cupped a hand behind his ear and craned his wrinkly neck. ‘Whassat?’ They could still be having this conversation come closing time. Hearing aids obviously hadn’t found their way this far south yet. Or maybe the oldster was afraid they’d cramp his style with the girls. Ben just smiled and walked off in search of the section he wanted. The storekeeper gazed after him for a moment and then shrugged and fell back into squinting at his magazine.
Following the directions, Ben soon found the range of scotches at the bottom of the last aisle, tucked away in what seemed a forgotten, seldom-frequented corner of the store judging by the layers of dust on the shelf. He began browsing along the rows of bottles, recognising with pleasure the names of some old friends among them. Knockando, Johnny Walker, Cutty Sark, Glenmorangie and a dozen others – it wasn’t a bad selection, all things considered. Then he spotted the solitary bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask single malt, one of his personal favourites for its dark, peaty, smokey flavour.
It had been sitting there so long that the bottle label was flecked with mildew. He took it down from the shelf, wiped off the dust and weighed his discovery appreciatively in his hand, savouring the prospect of taking it back to his hotel room for a couple of hours’ enjoyment before bed. The precious liquid had come a long way from its birthplace on rugged, windswept Islay in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, for him to stumble across here in Southern Louisiana of all places. Maybe this was something more profound and meaningful than mere serendipity. Enough to make a man of lapsed religious faith start believing again, or almost.
Ben was carrying the bottle back up the aisle as though it were holy water when, over the blare of the music, he heard raised voices coming from the direction of the counter. As he reached the top of the aisle he saw a pair of guys who had just walked in.
One was big and ox-like in a studded motorcycle jacket with a patch on the back showing a gothic-helmeted grinning skull and the legend IRON SPARTANS MC, LOUISIANA. He was slow-moving and wore a calm smile. The other was a foot shorter, wiry and wasted in a denim vest cut-off that bared long, skinny arms with faded blue ink. He was agitated and angry, eyes darting as if he’d snorted a tugrope-sized line of cocaine.
The pair might have been regular customers, but Ben guessed not. Because he was fairly sure that, even in the Deep South, regular customers didn’t generally come storming into a place toting sawn-off pump shotguns and magnum revolvers.
Great.
The armed robbers were too intent on threatening the storekeeper to have noticed that the three of them weren’t alone. Ben retreated quickly out of sight behind the corner of the aisle and peeked through a gap between stacks of Dixie beer cans.
The hefty ox-like guy had the old timer by the throat with one large hand and the muzzle of the sawn-off jammed against his chest in the other. The storekeeper was pale and terrified and looked about to drop dead from heart failure. Meanwhile the small ratty guy tucked his loaded and cocked .357 Smith & Wesson down the front of his jeans, perhaps not the wisest gunhandling move Ben had ever seen, and vaulted over the counter to start rifling through the cash register. He was yelling furiously, ‘Is this all ya got, y’old fuckin’ coot? Where’s the rest of it?’
The old man’s eyes boggled and he seemed unable to speak. The disconcertingly calm guy with the shotgun looked as if he couldn’t wait to blow his victim’s internal organs all over the shop wall. It was hard to tell who was more dangerous, the little angry psycho or the big laid-back one.
Ben puffed his cheeks, thought fuck it, counted to three.
Then he sprang into action.
Six minutes to midnight, but the evening was only just getting started.
Fourteen hours earlier
It had been Ben’s first visit to Chicago. Now he was sitting in the departure lounge at O’Hare International, counting down the minutes to his flight while gazing through the window at the planes coming and going, and sipping coffee from a paper cup. As machine coffee went, not too terrible. It almost quelled his urge to light up a cigarette from the pack of Gauloises in his leather jacket pocket.
It was a rare thing for Ben to leave his base in rural northern France for anything other than work-related travel, whether to do with running the Le Val Tactical Training Centre that he co-owned with his business partner Jeff Dekker
