The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  “Sorry, Mallory,” he said, with that same awkwardness that she had always found so irritating.

  She had never quite gotten used to the idea of Leland Mulligan as a sheriff’s deputy. She was no expert on such matters, obviously, but she would have imagined that a man like him was about as useful for keeping the peace as lips on a duck. Leland was four years her senior, but Truth was a tiny town, and it was inevitable that their paths would cross. Mallory had been to high school with Leland’s younger brother, Kurt, and it had become something of a standing joke between her and her limited circle of friends that the older boy had a crush on her. From what she had been able to gather, Leland had been a poor student, disruptive, something of a bully and not particularly bright. He had graduated with no qualifications and had worked in his father’s autorepair shop for a year, spending his wages on booze, smokes, and a collection of the most awful tattoos that Mallory had ever seen. And then he had joined the police.

  He was wearing his uniform tonight, and it looked, as it always did, both ill-fitting and incongruous.

  “What do you want, Leland?”

  “I need you to come with me,” he said.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m serious. I need to ask you some questions.”

  “You need to?”

  “That’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “Your brother. What he saw, those fellas he was up there with. It’s him I really need to talk to, but, the way he is, you know, I guess I probably need you to come, too.”

  “The way he is?”

  He picked his words carefully. “You know. The retardation.”

  “Arty’s not the retard, Leland.”

  The barb flew right over his head. “I’m trying to be sensitive, Mallory. To his needs. I don’t want him to be frightened.”

  “He’s got nothing to be frightened of. And anyway, it’s irrelevant because he’s not going anywhere tonight. We just got back. I don’t know if you heard, Leland, but we just trekked down from the lake in this shitty weather. We’re both cold and hungry, and we just want to get something to eat and go to bed, all right? If you need to speak to him, we’ll come by the Sheriff’s Office tomorrow morning.”

  Irritation flickered across his face. “No, Mallory, not all right. You need to come right now. I’m not asking you, understand? I’m speaking as an officer of the law.”

  She laughed in his face. “Oh, fuck off, Leland. You can’t get us to come tonight, and you know it.”

  The colour in his face darkened, and she was reminded of the bully in him. He was ready to insist again when he was shouldered out of the way. He dropped the flashlight onto its end, and the light fired straight up for a moment, throwing a sick yellow glow up onto the face of Michael Callow. The batteries spilled out and the light went off. Callow reached up into the doorway, grabbed her wrist in a strong hand, and yanked her out and down to the ground. She caught her toe on the paving stone they had in front of the door and fell onto her hands and knees. Callow yanked on her arm again, throwing her behind him. Her face splashed through the mud, and when she looked up, she saw Callow climbing into the RV and the three other men in his gang coming towards her.

  “Arty!” she screamed.

  There was the sound of a scuffle inside the RV, something falling to the floor and shattering, and then raised voices.

  “Arty!”

  “Shut up,” Eric Sellar said, knotting his fist in the fabric at the back of her T-shirt and hauling her to her knees. He was tall and gangly, with a dramatically cleft chin; thin, slicked-back hair; and long sideburns.

  She heard Arty’s voice from the RV, angry, and then the sound of an impact and a heavy weight dropping to the floor, squeaking the suspension. Callow reappeared in the doorway, backing out, his arms wrapped around Arty’s chest. Callow dropped him outside into the muck and jumped down after him.

  “Arty!”

  He was dazed, his eyes swimming.

  “He hurt my fist,” Callow said, shaking out his fingers. “What’s he got in that spastic head of his? Sand?”

  Sellar put his hands under her shoulders and lifted her to her feet. She struggled, broke free for a moment, and cracked him in the jaw with a right cross. She stepped backwards, knowing she should run. Maybe, if she sprinted now, as fast as she could, she might even get away. But then she looked at her brother unconscious in the mud, and the strength faded from her legs. Sellar rubbed his jaw and then swarmed at her, wrapping both his arms around her, pinning her to his body. He smelled of sweat and cigarettes.

  “She’s feisty,” he called out to the others. “And she hit me, you see that? Right in the mouth! I say that puts me right at the front of the line. Teach her some fucking manners.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Reggie Sturgess said. “She ain’t my type, anyway. No meat on her. Too scrawny.”

  “What the fuck, Leland?” Callow was saying. “What the fuck? You said you could get them both to come outside without any of this nonsense.”

  “She ain’t rational,” he complained. “She never has been.”

  “Not rational because she don’t want anything to do with you? Sounds perfectly rational to me.”

  She screamed out, but Sellar clamped a hand across her mouth, picked her up so that her feet were off the ground, and carried her into the rain.

  Chapter 21

  MICHAEL CALLOW watched as Reggie and Eric dragged Mallory Stanton away from the RV into the deeper darkness behind it. Girl sure did have a lot of fight about her, kicking and screaming like that, and it took both of them hanging on tight to stop her from breaking free. She probably had an inkling about what was going to happen next. Michael would have struggled too, if it had been him in that particular predicament. He would have struggled for all he was worth.

  Leland Mulligan was covering Mallory’s brother with his pistol. Arthur Stanton might have been simple in the head, but he was a big brute, and he had realised what was about to happen, too.

  “Cuff him,” Michael said to Leland.

  Leland nodded as Tom forced Stanton to the ground, wrapping his arms around his chest and wrestling him down. Leland unhooked his cuffs from his belt, fastened one bracelet around his right wrist, then had to sit down with his knee in the boy’s back and use both hands to pin his left arm close enough to his right so that he could cuff that wrist, too.

  “Bring him over here,” Michael said. “I want him to see this.”

  Michael smoked his cigarette down to the nub and flicked it into the wet grass. All that time they had spent up in the woods, there hadn’t been the chance to get with any female company. There were women in the militia, a few of them, and he knew from the way that they looked at him that they thought he was fine. He was fine, too, he reminded himself. He was tall and good looking, with powerful arms that he spent hours pumping up, the best sleeve of tattoos that he had ever seen, and the confidence that came with being good with the girls all the way through school. He’d quarterbacked the school team, was good at it, too. There’d been word of him getting a scholarship to Michigan until he’d run into trouble with the police for smoking dope, and that had been the end of that. He’d been bitter about it, bitter and twisted about his dumb luck for years afterwards, but now he was older and wiser, he could see that God had just chosen a different path for him.

  He moved in mysterious ways, after all.

  Michael had enlisted into the army just as soon as his old man had decided that was the right thing to do. His momma had no time for him, and there wasn’t anything else for him to do. They shipped him out to Iraq, and that was where he had met Tom, Eric, and Reggie. They saw things out there, things that brought focus and clarity to thoughts they had all been having. They shared the same view of their country: government was interfering with things it had no right to interfere with, chipping away at their God-given constitutional rights. Being so far away made it all so obvious. Fuck, they had a Muslim as their commander-in-chief, and
how could that be anything but a calamity for their country? Michael had worked on them for hours, preaching the word of the Lord until they were converted. They had talked about it for hours as they dodged bombs and bullets in Baghdad, and when they got back, they had taken the decision to desert together. Michael had brought them back to Truth with him. They had all leapt at the chance to join the militia.

  Four soldiers ready to sign up to the only army that could do anything to stop the country from going all the way to Hell.

  He adjusted his hat, hooked his thumbs into his belt, and followed the others behind the RV.

  MILTON MADE two wrong turns, cursing as he had to reverse out of dead-end streets, but eventually he found the trailer park. Mallory had explained that the Stanton RV was all the way out the back, so he sped along the access road, cut through the park at fifty and rushed out the other side, following the half mile of extra track to the secluded spot where their RV was parked. There was an open gate in a fringe of wood and then a slope down into a hollow. Milton could see the lights from the Winnebago right down at the bottom.

  He killed the engine, and the lights, and rolled up to the gate.

  He saw a pickup truck, both doors open, its lights shining out onto the RV.

  Milton gritted his teeth.

  Too late?

  He opened the door, stepped down onto the sodden earth, and keeping low, he hurried towards the pickup.

  The vehicle was empty.

  The rain lashed into him. He shielded his eyes from the streaming water and looked out beyond the truck. Mallory’s Pontiac was parked next to the Winnebago. The door to the RV was open, and there was a light glowing from the inside. The old vehicle hadn’t moved for months. The wheels were on chocks, and there was bindweed all the way up to the axles.

  He clenched and unclenched his fists. He wished he had taken ten minutes to search for Olsen’s weapon.

  He heard the sound of angry voices from somewhere behind the Winnebago. He sprinted ahead, reached the vehicle, and pressed himself against the side. He heard another shout, and then the sound of a punch or a slap, and then a male voice shouting out, “Leave her alone!”

  He edged around, itching to run, but unable to shake off his instinctive caution. Size up the situation and then act. That had saved his life more times than he cared to remember.

  He reached the corner of the RV and peered around it.

  A faint glow was leaking out from the window at the back, just enough to cast a parcel of yellow light out towards the woods at the bottom of the slope that marked the boundary of the hollow.

  Milton saw seven people.

  Reggie Sturgess, Eric Sellar, and a uniformed cop he didn’t recognise were restraining Arthur Stanton. The boy had been cuffed, but even so, it was taking all three of them to hold him back. Sturgess, Sellar, and the cop were armed.

  Ten feet ahead of them, where the light from the window was almost swallowed by the darkness of the wood, were Michael Callow, Tom Chandler, and Mallory Stanton. Chandler was straddling her, his knees pressing down onto her arms at the elbows. Callow was crouched down behind them, trying to grab hold of her flailing legs. He was laughing, telling her to take it easy, that it would be better if she relaxed and just took what was coming to her. “Hell,” Milton heard him call out, “you might even enjoy it.”

  Milton felt a sensation, like a switch flicking in his head.

  Old memories opened up, a past life that he had tried to bury but couldn’t.

  He went back to the RV and went inside.

  The light he had seen from the window was in the main living area, a small standard lamp on the table that was bright enough for him to see all the way to the driver’s seat to his right and then a little way to his left, to the back. The toilet door was closed. The main bedroom was at the rear, and that door was closed, too, with a crack of light visible beneath the door. He went to the galley. A pan of scrambled eggs was burning on the stove. Two slices of toast poked out of the toaster.

  There was a dirty kitchen knife in the sink. Milton took it.

  MORRIS FINCH led the way to the spot where old man Stanton had parked his Winnebago before he had drunk himself into his early grave. A Ford Explorer was in the road before the gate, blocking the way ahead.

  Finch pulled up and stepped out of the van.

  “What the hell?” he said, gesturing to the Explorer. “That’s not their car.”

  Lundquist lowered his window. “No.”

  “Want me to go around it?”

  “No.”

  He opened the door and stepped outside, the rain swamping across him. He reached back inside and grabbed his rifle. Finch looked across at him expectantly. Lundquist pointed back to the rear of the van. “Get her out and bring her down there with you.”

  He skirted the Explorer and descended the hollow. He went around Leland Mulligan’s pickup, the lights still on, shining down onto the Winnebago and Mallory Stanton’s Pontiac. There was enough illumination for him to see Michael and the others around the back of the RV, standing in two loose groups between it and the front of the trees. The first group, nearest to Lundquist, had four people in it. He recognised Leland from his uniform and Arthur Stanton from his bulk. Stanton’s wrists were cuffed.

  Michael and Tom Chandler were twenty feet farther on, nearly at the fringe of the wood, dim in the faint glow from the lights. He saw Mallory Stanton on the ground, pinned down beneath Chandler, and Michael struggling to hold her legs still.

  An angry rebuke came to his lips. He had known they were not to be trusted. He had given them something simple to do, collect two kids, take them to the farm, and they did this. He should never have trusted them. Was this the discipline the army taught its soldiers these days? No wonder the country was in the state it was in. It wouldn’t stand, not for men under his command.

  He tightened his grip on the wet barrel of the rifle and was about to start down towards them when he looked back at the RV and saw the figure of a man emerging stealthily from the open door.

  He dropped to a crouch.

  The man pressed up tight against the side of the RV and edged along to the corner.

  Milton.

  He had a knife in his hand.

  MILTON STEPPED back into the rain. He made his way along the side of the RV to the corner. He peeked out again. The group of four nearest to him were still turned away. They were watching the second group. Sellar and Sturgess were holding Arty up, forcing him to watch what was about to happen to his sister. Milton heard a whoop of excitement and then the sound of encouragement.

  Milton lost himself in red mist. It fell over him, deep and blinding. He worked hard to keep it away, tied it down somewhere at the back of his brain where he could try to forget about it. He never could forget it, though, not properly, and it didn’t take very much for him to summon it again.

  Like now.

  He held the knife loosely in his fist, left the cover of the RV, and made straight for the larger group.

  Arty Stanton bucked hard and forced Sturgess to let go of him. The man was spun around, just enough to see Milton walking straight at him through the pouring rain.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  Milton kept coming.

  “Michael!”

  Callow had secured Mallory’s ankles, his shoulders braced as he pressed her feet down onto the ground, and he didn’t turn around.

  Sturgess took a half step back, unsure whether he should stand his ground or run.

  “Michael!”

  Sturgess looked down and saw the knife.

  Milton drove it all the way up to the hilt, the blade buried in the soft folds of flesh above the boy’s belt buckle, and then tore it up to his ribcage and left it there.

  The young cop who Milton didn’t recognise had seen what had just happened.

  His fingers fumbled for his pistol.

  Milton closed the distance between them in three paces, took him by the shoulders, and swept his legs. The man went down, land
ing square on his shoulder blades, and Milton drove his left fist into his gut, winding him.

  Down by the trees, Callow grasped Mallory’s legs and turned his head to the abrupt commotion.

  Milton reached down to the cop’s belt and tore his pistol from his holster.

  Callow saw what was happening, fear replacing the cruelty in his face.

  He let go of Mallory’s legs, and she gave an almighty buck, Tom Chandler barely able to hold her down.

  Eric Sellar let go of Arty and took a step towards Milton, raising his fist.

  Milton shot him in the face.

  Sellar toppled backwards and thumped down onto the grass.

  Sturgess stumbled over to him, his hand fixed around the hilt of the knife.

  Milton fired again, the shot blasting a gory void in Sturgess’ face. He tripped over Sellar and fell down onto his backside, dead before he hit the ground.

  “Drop your weapon!”

  Milton turned to look across the hollow at Michael Callow. The boy had drawn a pistol, yanked Mallory to her feet, and jammed the muzzle up against her temple.

  Milton breathed in and out, regulating his pulse. “Are you all right, Mallory?”

  She nodded, her larynx bobbing up and down in her throat. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  “She ain’t fine!” Callow called back. “You look here, son. She’s far from fucking fine. Put that gun down now. Right now.”

  Milton ignored him. “Arty, are you all right?”

  “They want to hurt Mallory,” he said, still struggling with the cuffs.

  “They’re not going to hurt her,” he said, loud enough for Callow and Chandler to hear him. “No one is going to hurt either of you.”

  “You’re not listening!” Callow shouted. “You don’t put that gun down and I’ll blow her brains out.”

  “And what will you do then, Michael?”