out, the only phones the store had were of the cheap, prepaid ‘burner’ variety. No names, no contracts, no frills. That suited Ben fine, and the untraceable anonymity of such a device appealed to the rebellious streak in him that objected to government surveillance agencies prying into the personal affairs of innocent citizens. The burner even had decent web access. He shelled out two ten-dollar bills for the phone itself, two more for credits, and was back in business.
By now it was early evening and Ben’s hunger was sharpened to the point where he couldn’t ignore it any longer. Remembering the Cajun Steakhouse he’d passed earlier, he set off at a leisurely pace in the direction of Villeneuve town square. The Moutons had given him a front door key to let himself in with, so he was free to take all the time he wanted and return as late as he pleased.
It felt strange to be so relaxed and at a loose end. He could get used to it, maybe, with a little practice.
The Cajun Steakhouse offered a baffling range of local fare like filé gumbo, eggs with shrimp and grits, Creole jambalaya and something called Louisiana-style crawfish boil. Ben decided to play it safe and ordered a T-bone with fries and a Dixie beer.
‘You jes’ sit tight, handsome, and I’ll bring you the best steak you ever tasted in your life,’ promised his teased-blond hostess called Destiny, who kept flashing eyes at him. But she probably treated every tall, fair-haired stranger who walked into the bar and grill just the same way.
Destiny’s promise was no empty claim. The T-bone was the biggest and most delicious he’d ever had, thick and succulent. After two more Dixie beers, Ben was definitely feeling at home. So much so, that he suddenly had a hankering for a glass of good malt scotch, the kind he’d occasionally – or more than occasionally – enjoy during quiet evenings at Le Val, sometimes over a game of chess with Jeff, or in front of the fire with his German shepherd dog, Storm, curled at his feet. At the bar, he asked Destiny what she had, and with an alluring smile she produced a bottle.
‘What is it?’ he asked. It was the colour of stewed tea.
‘This here is Louisiana Whiskey, hon. Or else, we got Riz.’
‘Riz?’
‘Uh-huh. Made from rice.’
Ben shook his head. ‘Not exactly what I had in mind.’
‘How about rum?’ Destiny suggested. ‘Folks round here drink a lot of rum. But you ain’t from around here, are you, sugah?’
‘Is it really that obvious?’
Ben settled for a tot of local rum, which was probably made at one of the cane distilleries he’d passed on the drive up from New Orleans. It wasn’t single malt scotch, but he was in a forgiving mood, and the Cajun Steakhouse was definitely growing on him. He spent the whole evening there, watching the place fill up with local colour and listening to the diet of rock and country music that streamed constantly from the jukebox. He might even get used to that, too.
Two more tots of rum, and he sat thinking about Jude, about life, about a lot of stuff. Such as his hesitant, awkward relationship with a woman called Sandrine Lacombe, who was a doctor at the hospital in Cherbourg a few kilometres from Le Val. Ben was drawn to her, and she to him, but it was as though neither of them could bring themselves to take the plunge. Like one of the stalemates that so many of his chess matches with Jeff ended in.
The truth was that, however much they liked each other, Ben was never going to be the love of Sandrine’s life, nor she of his. No, he’d already had that, and lost it, and there was seldom a day when he didn’t reflect on it with regret and guilt.
It was late when Ben finally left the bar and grill. He went walking through the warmth of the night, a little cooler and less sultry and far more pleasant. The stars were twinkling in an ink-black sky and the scent of magnolia trees was in the air. The streets of Villeneuve were quiet and peaceful. He didn’t feel like returning to the hotel just yet.
And that, as he strolled around exploring the small town, was when Ben spotted the lit-up store front with the sign above the door that said ELMO’S LIQUOR LOCKER, and decided to take a look inside. Just in case. You never knew what you might find.
Nine minutes to midnight.
Of all the late-night liquor stores in all the sleepy little towns of rural Louisiana, he’d had to walk into the one where a couple of morons were intent on sticking the place up. And on all the nights the pair of armed robbers could have chosen to do the deed, they had to pick the very moment when someone like Ben Hope was lurking just around the corner, fifteen feet away out of sight in the far aisle behind a stack of Dixie beer.
It had to be fate.
On the count of three, Ben stepped out where they could see him, and said, ‘Hello, boys.’
Ben was still clutching the bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask that he’d been about to carry over to the counter to buy. But at this moment, in his mind it ceased to be a vessel for seventy-five centilitres of one of the most venerable liquids ever crafted by human artistry, and became a usefully hefty club-shaped weapon weighing in at just under three pounds, perfectly balanced to inflict all kinds of damage to the human body. Ben’s mind often worked that way, especially at times like these. In the instant it took for the two robbers to lock eyes on the unexpected newcomer, before they could even begin to react, his brain was already calculating factors of distance, velocity, spin and drop.
Most important of all, though, was picking the right target to aim for. The big guy might have been just a trigger pull of a sawn-off shotgun away from blowing the storekeeper’s heart and lungs out his back, but Ben made him for the slower mover. If the big guy was a bear, then his partner in crime was a fox, nervier, whippier and more twitchy, hence more potentially volatile. Though he stood a couple of steps further away on the other side of the counter where he’d been rifling through the cash register, and thus presented a more distant target, Ben knew the foxy guy posed the greater immediate threat and needed taking down as a matter of priority.
True to Ben’s prediction, the foxy guy moved first. His lean right hand, marked by a faded blue star tattoo on the web between forefinger and thumb, let go of the bunch of mixed-denomination dollar bills he’d yanked from the cash register. The money fell like confetti as his hand dived down to close on the butt of the cocked revolver protruding from the front of his jeans.
By then, the whisky bottle was already in the air. It completed a full 360-degree spin from leaving Ben’s hand to flying past the storekeeper’s nose, over the counter and impacting the foxy guy smack in the middle of the forehead with its heavy glass bottom.
Being no kind of a physicist, Ben was dimly aware that the force of a thrown object was based on some complex formula involving vectors of mass and velocity, acceleration and momentum. Newton’s Second Law, if he remembered rightly. But however it measured up in scientific terms, it was plenty forceful enough to have a significant effect on its target.
And yet, it wasn’t so much the high-speed collision between a full bottle of whisky and his cranial frontal bone that would forever change the foxy guy’s life. It was the reflex nerve contraction that ran through his whole body at the moment of impact and caused his index finger to jerk against the trigger of his .357 Magnum while still tucked pointing vertically downwards inside the front of his jeans.
With
