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 or for the other, more risky kinds of business that sometimes called him away. But when the chance had come to snatch a few free days out of Le Val’s hectic schedule and with no other pressing matters or life-threatening emergencies to attend to, Ben had seized the opportunity to jump on a plane and cross the Atlantic. His mission: to pay a visit to his son, plus one more objective he was yet to meet.
They hadn’t seen each other in a few months, since Jude’s somewhat rootless and meandering life path had led him to relocate from England to the US to be with his new girlfriend, Rae Lee. Ben knew all about rootless and meandering from past personal experience, and while he accepted that it was fairly normal for a young guy in his early twenties to take a few years before finding his feet in life, he worried that Jude had too much of his father’s restless ways about him.
It was Ben’s greatest wish that Jude could instead have taken more after the saintly, patient and selflessly loving man who raised him as his own son all those years when the kid’s real dad was off merrily raising hell in some or other war-ravaged corner of the globe.
Every time Ben reflected on that complicated history, he felt the same pangs of heartache. Years after the event, the deaths of Jude’s mother and stepfather, Michaela and Simeon Arundel, were a wound that would always remain raw. The subject was never discussed between them, but Ben knew the young man felt the pain just as keenly as he did.
Rae was a couple of years older than Jude, the only daughter of a wealthy Taiwanese-American family, and occupied a nice apartment in Chicago’s Far North Side overlooking Sheridan Park, where Ben had stayed with them for only one day before feeling it was time to move on. The brevity of his visit might have seemed unusual to more family-orientated folks, but Ben’s and Jude’s was not a normal father–son relationship and Ben was anxious not to overstay his welcome.
Ben got on cordially with Rae and liked her well enough, but wasn’t completely sure that she was right for Jude. Jeff Dekker, never one to mince words, regarded her as a busybody and a do-gooder – and there was some truth in that. She was a freelance investigative journalist with multiple axes to grind over anything she considered worth protesting about, and seemed to be pulling Jude deeper into her world of political activism despite the fact that he’d never hitherto expressed the slightest interest in politics or causes of any kind. They’d met during one of her trips to Africa to expose the human rights abuses of the coltan mining industry. A trip that had achieved nothing except very nearly lead her to a gruesome end, and Jude with her.
Having had to come to the rescue on that memorable occasion, Ben worried that the next idealistic crusade might turn out to be one from which nobody, not even a crew of ex-Special Forces and regular army veterans ready to do whatever it took, could save them.
Still, if Jude was happy, which he seemed to be, Ben could wish for no more; and even if Jude weren’t happy it was none of Ben’s business to interfere in his grown-up son’s personal affairs. He had said his goodbyes and left with mixed emotions, sorry that he wouldn’t see Jude again for a while, yet quietly relieved to get away. Now here he sat, waiting for another plane – but he wasn’t planning on heading home to France just yet.
At last, Ben’s flight was called, and a couple of hours later they were touching down at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans. Which struck Ben as tying in very well with his other reason for being in the States.
As a dedicated jazz enthusiast, albeit one who was incapable of producing a single note on any instrument yet invented, Ben had for many years been a fan of the venerable tenor saxophonist Woody McCoy. Now pushing eighty-seven, McCoy was one of the last of the greats. He’d never achieved the stardom he deserved in his own right, but had played with some of the most iconic names in the business: Bird, Monk, ’Trane, Miles, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, to list but a few.
Now at long last, after a career spanning six decades, the man, the legend, was hanging up his spurs. But doing it in fine style, taking his Woody McCoy Quintet on a farewell tour all up and down the country. A few weeks earlier, Ben had seen the announcement that Woody was due to perform his last-ever gig in his home town of Villeneuve, deep in the rural heart of South Louisiana, in mid-September.
When the opportunity had arisen to free up the date in his work schedule, and with Jeff’s insistent ‘Go on, mate, you know you want to’ in his ear, Ben had decided that this last-ever chance to hear Woody McCoy play live was not to be missed. He almost never allowed himself such indulgences. But he’d allow himself this one, as a special treat.
Now that he’d cut his stay in Chicago a little shorter than planned, it meant he had a couple of days to explore Woody McCoy’s birthplace, sample the local culture, relax and take it easy.
Ben stepped off the plane in New Orleans and found himself in a different world. Welcome to Planet Louisiana. Though over the years he’d visited more places than he could easily count, his past travels around the US had been limited. He’d been to New York City, toured the coastline of Martha’s Vineyard, spent some time in the rugged hills of Montana, and had a brief sojourn in the wide open spaces of Oklahoma. But he’d never ventured this far south, and had only a vague idea of what to expect.
The first thing that hit him was the humidity. It was so thick and cloying that for a moment he thought he must have fallen down a wormhole in the space-time continuum and found himself back in the tropical furnace of Brunei redoing his SAS jungle training.
He cleared security, strolled through the hellish heat over to the nearest car rental place with his new green canvas haversack on his shoulder and was happy to find that the near-blanket blacklist that bugged him in many other countries didn’t seem to apply here. For some reason, the likes of Europcar, Hertz and Avis objected to his custom on the grounds that their vehicles never came back in one piece, occasionally