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

  It had been one hell of a demonstration.

  Mallory had decided she had to speak to him.

  She remembered what she was here for and found a little composure. “I need to talk to you.”

  “And so you followed me all the way here? What was wrong with the Sheriff’s Office?”

  “Grogan thinks I’m nuts. I can’t speak to you when he’s around.”

  “Did it cross your mind that I might think you were nuts?”

  She found herself smiling at that: the absurdity of the situation, despite the desperation that had driven her to it. “You don’t know what I want to talk to you about yet.”

  “No,” he said, removing his hand from her shoulder. “What’s your name?”

  “Mallory.”

  “Mallory?”

  “Mallory Stanton. Who are you?”

  “John Milton.”

  She put out a hand uncertainly. “Good to meet you, Mr. Milton.”

  He took it gently. “You mind me asking how old you are, Mallory?”

  “Nineteen,” she said, the forced categorical answer coming across as unconvincing.

  “How old really?”

  “Sixteen,” she said.

  He stared at her, hard.

  “Fifteen.”

  “And you’re driving this bucket?”

  “You can drive when you’re fourteen in Michigan,” she said indignantly.

  “With an adult.”

  “Yeah, well… like I said, I’m fifteen, okay? Have you finished questioning me? You’re not my father, Mr. Milton.”

  He regarded her again shrewdly, and then a little forbearance broke across the impassivity of his face. “Go on, then, Mallory. Why don’t you tell me what you want to speak to me about?”

  “Here? In the car?”

  “Where else?”

  “I bet they didn’t give you breakfast in jail, right? I thought maybe we could get breakfast. There’s this place down the road a ways… anyway, I thought we could do that. And, like, I’m paying.”

  “I’m not a vagrant, Mallory. I can pay my own way.”

  “So you’ll come? You’ll listen to me?”

  “Sure,” he said. “If you give me a ride back here afterwards, we can have breakfast.”

  THE CAFÉ was on Main Street and was famous locally for its grits. Mallory’s father had been friendly with the proprietor, and she gave her a nod as she led Milton inside. Mallory ducked her head, not because she was ill-mannered, but because she didn’t want to answer the inevitable questions about how she was doing. There had been sympathy in the aftermath of his death, but now, the questions and the comments just raked up the memories that she had tried so hard to bury with him when they laid him in the ground. Others were worse, the religious types who she knew were thinking that because he had done it himself that he had damned his soul to Hell, or purgatory, or wherever it was that people who killed themselves went to suffer. Mallory had no time for any of that nonsense. She was a practical girl, and there were practical things that she needed to deal with.

  The most pressing issue, the one that stopped her sleeping at nights, was Arthur.

  They went to a table in the window and sat down. Mallory took the menus and passed one to Milton.

  The waitress came across. “What can I get for you?”

  “Pancakes, eggs, sausage, potatoes and bacon, please.”

  “How’d you like your eggs?”

  “Over easy.”

  “And to drink?”

  “Coffee and orange juice.”

  She turned to Mallory. “What you want, sugar?”

  “A cup of coffee, please.”

  “You’re not going to eat?” he asked her.

  “Not really hungry,” she said, although that wasn’t true. Her stomach was empty, but the roiling sensation was more from nerves.

  The waitress went to the back with their order. Mallory knew why she was nervous: this man was likely her last chance, and she didn’t want him to think that she was crazy, like the sheriff and some of the others she had mentioned this to so clearly did. There was a lot riding on this conversation and on the first impression she gave him.

  She summoned up the courage to begin. “Thanks for this, Mr. Milton,” she said, waving her hand vaguely. “For coming, I mean.”

  “Call me John,” he said.

  “I’d rather call you Mr. Milton, if that’s okay?”

  “You can call me whatever you want.”

  “I know you probably think I’m weird, following you and all that, but I’m not. Weird, I mean. This, what I’m about to tell you, this is all straight up.”

  He nodded. He was paying attention, apparently taking her seriously. That was good.

  She took another breath. “I live out on the edge of town. We’ve got an RV. It’s me and my brother, Arthur. I call him Arty. He’s what you’d probably call simple. There were problems when he was born, the cord got wrapped around his throat, and he didn’t get enough oxygen until they were able to get it cut away. He got brain damage because of it. It’s not terrible, I’m not saying he’s a vegetable or anything like that, but he’s slow. He’s twenty years old, but he acts like he’s a big kid most of the time. But he’s sweet and honest and trusting, and he’s my brother, you know?” She swallowed. “Yeah, he’s my brother, so I love him.”

  Milton was still looking at her. “Okay,” he said, encouraging her on.

  “Last week he went out into the woods north of town, and he hasn’t come back. And I need someone to help me find him and bring him home. That’s why, well…” She gestured towards him. “That’s why I need your help.”

  “How many days has he been away?”

  “Four.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My mother died when I was little. The cancer got her. My daddy died six months ago. It’s just me and Arty now.”

  “The police?”

  “They won’t do a thing. They say he’s a full-grown man and that means he can come and go as he pleases. But he’s not an adult, least not in his head. He can barely look after himself most times. He’s not fit to be out there in the woods.” She felt the tears come and furiously fought them back; she had promised herself that she wouldn’t cry in front of him. “It’s on me, Mr. Milton. I have to look after him.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, smiling at her.

  She stiffened her lip, determined not to show weakness in front of him.

  The waitress came back with Milton’s food and her coffee, and the pause gave her a moment to compose herself again. Milton sprinkled salt and pepper over his eggs and cut his bacon into smaller pieces. He put one of them into his mouth and chewed.

  “You know where he is?” he asked between mouthfuls.

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “And the sheriff won’t go up there and get him back?”

  “If he’s in the woods, he’s right out in the woods. You’d have to trek to go find him. It’s not as simple as driving up there.”

  “So why me?”

  “You’re an outdoorsman, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  She shrugged. “So that’s what I need.”

  “There are others, though, right? There are dozens of people here who know what they’re doing out in the woods. People who know these woods. I don’t know them at all. Why don’t you ask one of them?”

  “I didn’t tell you all of it yet. Not the worst part.”

  He started on his eggs. She found that she was clenching her fists, her fingers curled in so tightly that her knuckles were raised and red.

  “About six months ago, after my daddy died, these four young men came into town. I hadn’t seen them before, and none of the kids I went to school with had, either. Then, maybe a week after they showed up, they vanished just as fast as they arrived. Then we started hearing the rumours. People were saying that they were part of the gang who’ve been robbing banks around here, Michigan and Wisconsin, and over in Canad
a. Do you read the newspapers, Mr. Milton?”

  “Not for a few weeks.”

  “There was a robbery three months ago; a gang of four men went after a bank in Marquette. Took fifty thousand dollars, they were saying, but, this time, instead of getting away on motorbikes like they usually did, they had a problem. This security guard came out of the bank with a shotgun and told them to stop except they didn’t stop, they shot and killed him stone dead.”

  “And you think the men in town were the same as the men who’ve been carrying out these robberies?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it.” She paused to make sure it all came out right. “Arty has a job in the gas station. Well, he had one, before he went off up there, I doubt he’s got it now. There’s a store, a little one that sells things for cars, drinks and candy and stuff like that, and he’s in the booth serving people. One day he came home, and he told me that these four guys had come into the place to get gas for the car they were driving. He said that they started to talk to him and, the way he said it, they treated him like he was their best friend in the whole world. The thing with my brother, people normally just make jokes about him, try to make him look stupid, and so if anyone is even halfway decent to him, then he thinks that they’re going to end up best friends. He’s trusting, Mr. Milton. He doesn’t see the bad in people even when it’s obvious to everyone else.”

  “What does that have to do with them being the robbers?”

  “The day after he first started out with this, he came home again, and I swear, he was drunk. He doesn’t ever drink because he says he doesn’t like the way it makes him feel, but when you lived with someone like my daddy, then I promise you that you get to know the signs when someone’s drunk pretty quick. He was slurring his words, and he couldn’t hardly stand straight, so I got him into bed and told him we’d talk about it in the morning. But before I could get him straightened out, he told me that he had a secret and that he’d tell me if I swore to keep it between us. He said that one of them said his name was Tom Chandler. He told Arty that him and his friends were the robbers. Arty said he told him that they’d been hiding out in the woods, up at one of the empty copper mines near the lake where no one goes nowadays.”

  “He was drunk, like you said. People say all sorts of things when they’re drunk.”

  She felt her anger flash. “I know that,” she snapped. “My daddy was a drunk, I told you. I know you can’t trust drunks for shit.” She stared down at her mug until she composed herself and then, frowning, looked back at him again and said, “I got him to sit down and talk to me about it the next morning. He denied it at first, denied even telling me it, but I wouldn’t let him out of the door until he said it all again. And he did. Every word and then he told me some more. He said that they had a trailer on the back of the truck that they brought to the gas station, and they had a couple of motorbikes on it.”

  “So they were four boys out riding their bikes in the woods. I expect that happens a lot around here.”

  She felt a knot of frustration in her gut. He was going to disbelieve her, just like everyone else had disbelieved her. She shoved her hand into her pocket and pulled out the crumpled page of newsprint that she had torn from the Truth News. She smoothed it out and spread it on the table. It was a police mugshot of Thomas R. Chandler Jr., taken by the state police in Wisconsin, after he had been arrested for assault six months earlier.

  “This was in the paper,” she said. “I showed it to Arty and asked him who it was. He said it was the man called Tom he had met.”

  “That doesn’t say very much, Mallory. Maybe he said it because he wanted you to believe his story.”

  “He can’t read, Mr. Milton. How would he know who it was?”

  Milton paused, looking at the picture, thinking. She found that she was holding her breath.

  “All right. Let’s assume that he did see them. Why is that relevant?”

  “Because we had a big argument about it. I told him he mustn’t speak to them if he saw them again. He was to call the sheriff as soon as he could. He said I was a stooge, that what they were doing was right, that they were taking money from the people who could afford to lose it and giving it to those who needed it more. He loves myths and legends, see? DVDs and books and games, he loves it. They’ve got it into his stupid head that they’re something like a modern-day Robin fucking Hood!”

  The curse was fast and unbidden and it even surprised her.

  “You think he’s gone to find them?”

  When she spoke, it was with quiet abashment. “I said he wasn’t to leave the RV. We argued about that, too, but then he went to bed, and I thought the worst was over. But then I heard him talking to someone on his cell, and he wouldn’t tell me who it was. Then, an hour or so after that, I heard a motorcycle engine from outside. He was on the back of a bike as it drove away. And that was four days ago. I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

  Milton placed his knife and fork neatly on the table.

  “Those people I was talking to last night, at the bar, you see them?” she said.

  “I did.”

  “They’re FBI. They’ve been in town a week because they heard that the four boys were up here. I explained to them what happened, but they didn’t really believe me, either. They won’t help me. I’ve struck out. That’s why I need someone like you.”

  “You still didn’t tell me why you think I can help you.”

  “I’d go out there on my own, Mr. Milton. I know the woods a little. My daddy used to take me up there. But I know you need to know what you’re doing. I mean, really know. People go missing up there all the time, and there’s no point pretending, I can’t follow a map. You can get lost if you go five minutes off the trail.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “And these boys are murderers, Mr. Milton. They know the FBI is after them. Let’s say I could find them. What would I do then? It’s just me. How am I going to do anything? But I saw what you did last night to those two men. You know how to look after yourself. You could handle them, I know it.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Please.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t help you, Mallory. You need to persuade the police or the FBI to listen to you. If those are the four men up there, and maybe they are, and they know they’re wanted for murder, the odds are that they’re not going to be well disposed to people going out and sticking their noses in their business. But the agents can send an armed team up there and round them up. And if Arthur is up there, they’ll bring him home.”

  “You haven’t been listening to me. Sheriff Grogan thinks I’m a troublemaker. He said he doesn’t want to hear another word about it from me.”

  “I could talk to him?”

  “He arrested you last night. Why would he believe you any more than me?”

  “The FBI, then.”

  “They’re going home today. That’s what they were telling me last night. You, or someone like you, you’re my last chance.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not something I can help you with. I’m sorry.”

  She took a crumpled ten-dollar bill from her jeans pocket and dropped it on the table.

  “I told you…” he started to protest.

  She stood up with a suddenness that put surprise on his face.

  “Come on, then,” she said in a flat and emotionless voice.

  “What?”

  “I said I’d take you back to the hotel. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 10

  MILTON WENT to his room. He collected his razor from the bathroom and took the bottles of shampoo and soap that he hadn’t used in the shower, putting them into the toilet bag and shoving that into his pack.

  He was troubled.

  He needed the comfort of an old routine.

  He took his rifle, laid it on the bed, and then found his cleaning kit from the pack. It had gotten wet yesterday and, besides, he hadn’t cleaned it properly for a couple of days. Milton was fastidious about m
aking sure his weapons were always clean. That was another habit he had learned in the regiment and, after that, while he had worked in the Group. A misfire when you didn’t need it could very easily turn out to be fatal. Milton had always considered himself a craftsman, and any good craftsman treated his tools with respect. He was no different.

  He put a cotton ball on the end of his chamber rod and slid it into the chamber. He rotated it left and then right, working methodically to remove any brush bristles that had been left behind and excess solvent that had gathered between the rod guide snout and the end of the chamber. He made sure that the chamber was dry, and then he moved on to the lug recess area, usually the place on a bolt-action rifle that was the dirtiest. He took out a recess tool, wet both ends with solvent, and rotated it in the recess area, moving it in and out, so that he cleaned the breech face, too.

  The process was habitual and, over the years, it had almost become meditative. As he worked on the bolt and the action of the rifle, he thought about the things he had done since he had fled from England, the people he had met along the way. He thought of Caterina and Beau in Mexico, and Eva in San Francisco, and then what had happened with Michael Pope and Beatrix Rose in Russia. He thought of the hours he had spent in the Rooms, listening to other drunks baring their souls, scouring their testimonies for a palliative that would ease the clamour of the voices in his head. Something that would ease his guilt, the never-ending, brutal, discordant blare of his guilt. He thought about the meetings and the people who had offered to be his sponsor and how he had declined them all. He knew that they would eventually press him on his Fifth Step.

  We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

  That was something he would never be able to do. He heard the others, about how they had cheated on their husbands and wives, ignored their children, hid bottles of booze around the house, soiled themselves or wet their beds, and he knew with the perfect grandiosity of the inveterate drunk that his sins were of a different magnitude altogether. But the thing was, they were. He had mentioned some of it to some of them, but only in the vaguest terms. The classified, horrific details he had bottled up and stored away. And that was how it would have to stay.