The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (28 page)

He turned and saw Leland Mulligan approaching through the field. He had sent him back into town earlier to check that everything was in hand.

“About time,” he said impatiently when the deputy had reached the fire.

Leland spread his hands helplessly. He was another youngster who had been easy for Lundquist to recruit. His late parents had been God-fearing folk, and they had brought their son up the right way.

“Well? How did it go?”

“Good. The kids and the agent are locked up tighter than a duck’s ass. Magrethe and Morris will keep an eye on them. They ain’t going nowhere.”

“The state police?”

“Just like you said. The men they had available, they sent them out right away last night. They’re getting in position right now, stationed just like you said, boxed him right in. They’ve promised to double the men, gonna bring the late shift in early. He’s not going to find it easy to get through the line.”

“Good.” Lundquist finished his roll-up and flicked it into the fire. “What about Olsen?”

Leland winced. “That was one nasty crash, Lundquist. The fire department had to cut the car in half to get him out. Flipped over five, six times. I’m surprised Milton got out of it in one piece.”

“George?”

“Coming to bring his body back to the morgue. You ask me, that there was a broken neck. Whoever this dude is, he ain’t interested in love taps. I think he’s serious.”

“That so?” Lundquist said sarcastically as he rolled another cigarette. “Leave the thinking to me, Leland, all right? It’s not what you’re good at. What else?”

He indicated the hounds with a sullen shrug. “I found Milton’s pack like you said.” He held up a large plastic evidence bag into which clothes had been stuffed.

Walker Price brought the dogs over. They strained hard on the leash, barking avidly.

Lundquist took the bag and opened it, pulling out a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. Neither of them had been washed. He tossed them to Walker, who knelt down as his dogs bounded around him, nudging him with their muzzles, their tails wagging furiously. They buried their noses into the clothes, breathing in Milton’s scent, and then turned towards the woods. The lead dog was a bitch that Walker called Blue. She lifted her head, holding the point, her tail held out behind her.

“She got it?”

“She does,” Walker said. The other dogs picked up the trail, too, one of them starting to howl. “Look at them. They’re practically begging to be let off the leash. I don’t think this is going to be difficult, Morten.”

Lundquist nodded his satisfaction.

Leland took another large bag and opened it up. Inside were a dozen bacon rolls. The men took one each and ate hungrily. There were two flasks of coffee, too, and cups for them to share. Lundquist ate and drank, the nourishment giving him a jolt of energy.

He looked around at the posse that they had assembled: him, Leland Mulligan, Walker Price, Michael, Thomas Chandler, Larry Maddocks, Harley Ward, Dylan Fox, Randy Watts, and Archie McClennan. Ten of them. That ought to be more than enough. If Milton was still in the forest, and he was sure that he was, there would be no easy way for him to get out. They would pick up his scent and track him down. And there would be no arrest. They would bring him back in a body bag. Milton was a cop killer, after all. They would come back into Truth as heroes.

They would do God’s will.

Lundquist felt a buzz of excitement.

This was an old-fashioned manhunt.

Milton was the prey, and he was the hunter.

There was nowhere to hide.

I’m coming for you, you son of a bitch. I’m coming for you, and I’m going to shoot you dead.

MILTON WOKE. It was dark, he thought, and then he saw that it wasn’t, that light was edging in through the gaps in the thatched screen propped against the overhang, obscuring the sun. He closed his eyes for a moment, uncertain where he was and how he had come to be here, and tried to stitch together the fragments of memories that he could recall. The sound of water from the rushing river was audible, a steady musical tinkle, and it all came back to him in a rush. He surged upright, cracking his head against the rocky overhang. He lowered himself again, touching his scalp, blood staining his fingertips.

Wonderful
.

The fire had worked its way through the logs and branches and had reduced them to a blackened pile of ash, just a few embers left. Milton swung his legs around and pressed up with his arm. The rush of pain was sudden and shocking, and he remembered the gunshot wound.

He remembered. The crazy rush of last night, the flight in the RV, the train, hiding out in the crop as the police searched for him, the man whose neck he had snapped, the sprint into the woods.

He crouched down next to the pit and blew on the embers to nurse them, gently sprinkling the rest of the tinder across them and then nurturing the flames that resulted, adding the rest of his store of dry vegetation and, when that was alight, the smaller twigs. He had thought that the thatch was thick enough to offer shelter, but he had either miscalculated or the wind had shifted overnight, because now the rocky wall was damp with moisture, and his clothes were wet again. He laid a thicker log onto the merry fire, nursed it alight, and then took off his jacket and trousers and draped them across the branch again to try to dry out the worst of the damp.

He sat back down on his bed and gingerly raised his left arm so that he could look at the damage in the light. He carefully removed the dressings. The entry wound hadn’t become infected. The exit wound, though, was different. The jagged gash was unpleasant to look at, and it smelled bad, too. The flesh at the edges was black and rotting, most likely already dead. He would have to do something about it before it got too much worse.

And then he remembered.

Ellie.

Mallory and Arthur.

Shit,
he thought.
Shit.

What had he blundered into?

What should he do?

His instincts told him to get going right now, to flee, to set his back to the sun and just head west. He had the benefit of a decent head start and a detailed training in just this sort of warfare. He would be able to live off the land until he was far enough away to find a town and work out, as discreetly as he could, what had happened back in Truth.

But he couldn’t do that.

He couldn’t leave them behind.

It wasn’t difficult to put it all together. Lundquist had released the four men, for a reason Milton couldn’t yet discern, and then he had started to collect the people who knew the fugitives had been caught.

Mallory, Arthur, Ellie, and him.

Lester?

There was a chance that the others were dead already.

But he couldn’t leave without knowing.

And he had given them his word.

He would go back for them.

Milton’s word meant something to him.

He had made Lundquist a promise, too.

He would kill him and the others who had allied themselves with him.

ONCE HE was satisfied that the fire was properly alight again, he collected the pistol he had taken from the body of the dead cop, and checked the magazine. Empty. He had hoped that he had been dreaming that part, the part where he used his last bullet to start a fire, but clearly not. Practically unarmed, then. All he had was the kitchen knife.

Fair enough.

He stepped around the thatched screen.

He paused for a moment and listened: nothing, save the rustle of the wind through the leaves at the foot of the ravine below him.

He looked up, noticing, with discomfort, that the thin column of smoke rising from the chimney was already visible. Never mind. He wouldn’t be staying here for very long. He looked at his surroundings with the benefit of daylight. The rise through the ravine was gentle up until this point, but it became steeper the further it climbed, several spots angling towards the vertical with the water splashing down in small falls and goat trails picking a path upwards. The trees and underbrush on either side thinned out a little, too, but larger trees remained all the way to the top of the ridge.

Milton reached for the overhang and hauled himself onto it, then climbed up another fifteen feet until he was near to the top of the ravine wall.

He crouched down, his eyes fixed to the south, the direction that the police would come from.

He estimated that he had covered two miles last night even though it had felt like more. He tried to put himself into the shoes of his pursuers. They would have discovered the dead man’s body, and that would have frightened them. They knew that he was armed, and that, too, would have given them cause for circumspection. If he had been in charge of the pursuit, with the benefit of that limited information, he would have set up a cordon as far along the south side of the forest as he could and then called for reinforcements.

The state police, perhaps.

He would have painted himself as a dangerous fugitive, a cop killer, and flooded the forest with as many men as he could find.

He would have waited until daybreak to start into the trees.

And now he would be coming.

Right now.

The way he saw it, he had two options.

He could run.

Or he could fight.

There was something to be said for running. He had enough of a head start that if he went now and moved as quickly as he could, he would stand a decent chance of getting clear. He expected that Lundquist would have divided the forest into grid squares and then set up a quarantine to contain him within the squares that he could realistically have reached last night. There would be police there already, but the longer he waited, the more there would be. If he went now, he was confident he would be able to break through the cordon and get away.

But Milton knew himself too well for that, and he had already discounted it. There was no point pretending that running was ever going to be an option.

Lundquist had killed the sheriff. The boys he was sheltering had killed a guard during a raid. They had very nearly killed him. They had beaten Ellie. They had taken Mallory and Arthur. There was no telling what they would do to them, and that was assuming that they were still alive. Milton couldn’t leave until he had either rescued them or taken revenge in their names.

No. Milton couldn’t run.

He looked out to the south, to the wide swathe of green and to the town just visible in the distance. Ellie, Mallory, and Arthur were out there.

Lundquist was out there, too, in the trees, raising a posse and coming after him.

No. He couldn’t run.

But he could fight.

Milton clambered carefully down the slope, loose scree skittering ahead of him, and slipped back behind the screen again. He dressed, his clothes still damp. He collected the first-aid kit and pushed it back into the bag. He broke the fire apart, kicking dirt and stones over it until the flames died, and then stepped back outside and started to climb.

He would head north and find somewhere to make a stand. He would take out his pursuers, one by one, and he would get the information that he needed.

What was happening in Truth?

Where were Ellie and the Stantons?

And then he would go and get them.

THEY BROKE camp and left soon after the dogs had arrived. There was no sense in waiting any longer. Lundquist thought there was a decent prospect that they might be able to run Milton down by the end of the day, and he wanted to get started as soon as possible to put this whole sorry mess behind them.

The terrain sloped gently up, heading to the hills and modest mountains that provided a natural margin between the land and the shores of the Lake of the Clouds. It was still reasonably level down here, and Walker Price guided the dogs onto a path that Lundquist knew would be easily passable for the next mile. It was clear enough to jog, and he found that he was quickly covered in a sheen of sweat.

“You remember the last time we chased someone out here?” said Walker between breaths.

“Sure do.”

“Not that different to this, was it?”

“Same thing.”

That set him to thinking. It had been half a dozen years ago. The man, Lundquist remembered he was called Gus, he had a trailer in the park next to where the Stantons had parked their RV, and the word was that he was into little girls. When the Lattimers’ daughter didn’t come home from school one afternoon, Lester had gone around to Gus’s trailer to talk to him, hopefully to cross him off his list. He had driven off, followed pretty much the same route as Milton had, and had gotten into the woods before they could stop him. Lester had raised a posse, all of the deputies plus Walker and his dogs and another ten local men, and they had gone after him. They had tracked him six miles north to the lake. They had found his body slumped against the trunk of a tree, his shotgun in his mouth.

The little girl had come home two days later. Turned out that Gus had nothing to do with it. Lundquist hadn’t wasted too much time thinking about it. He had been running from something.

Guilty conscience.

That was good enough for him.

“How far do you think he’s managed to get?”

“Not far,” he said.

It
couldn’t
be far. Milton was wounded. He would have had to find somewhere to stop if only to treat the wound to his arm. How far would he have been able to travel? Say he kept going until midnight. That would have been a two-hour head start. Lundquist added another hour onto that to be charitable. Give him three. A man who didn’t know these woods would struggle to head in a consistent direction. There were ravines and draws you could go into that couldn’t be exited at the other end. There would be dead ends and double backs that would neutralise some of that advantage. He had no food and no drink, so that would slow him down. And then there was the gunshot wound. Lundquist figured that a healthy man with a knowledge of the paths and trails around here would have been able to move at two miles an hour. But Milton, with all those disadvantages, he would have struggled to keep half of that pace. If he was right, the maximum Milton would have been able to travel before he stopped for the night was two miles.