The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (8 page)

“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.”

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 making 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.

My name is John Milton, and I am an alcoholic. I am also an assassin. I killed one hundred and thirty-six men and women in the service of my country.

It meant that the meetings would only ever be able to offer him partial solace.

The program had been good for him, but there were moments when the deep well of his shame had risen up and overflowed, breaching his makeshift defences. It had been that way in Ohio, only this time his defences had failed. He didn’t feel the guilt when he was drunk. He could drown the reproachful voices with booze, obliterate them for as long as he had a bottle in his hand and, like a sailor hearing the beauty of the siren’s song, he had almost submitted.

He had gone into a bar, ordered a whisky and stared at it for what felt like hours. He watched it for so long that the cubes of ice had dissolved into slivers, and then the slivers had dissolved into nothing.
What harm could it do?
he asked himself. What harm? Just one, that would be all it was.

But it wouldn’t be just one. Never was. Never would be.

He had tossed his money on the bar and left, taken a bus to a mountain sports shop, bought everything he thought he would need, and had set off that same day.

The journey had brought him here.

He thought about Mallory.

He began to worry that she might have been brought to him for a reason. Drunks in the program were urged to believe in a Higher Power, but Milton had seen too much death to believe in God or Buddha or Mohammed or anything else. Those men and women with no time for religion interpreted GOD as Group Of Drunks and used the Rooms as their Higher Power, but that needed absolute honesty, and Milton couldn’t do that. He had tried to fill the void in his soul with a spiritual outlook, and there had been moments where Providence had seemed to play a role in bringing him to a certain place at a certain time to take advantage of an opportunity that, eventually, brought him peace. Coincidence, probably, for he would always fall back on the rational, but a part of him couldn’t discount the possibility entirely.

Maybe Providence was at play here.

He had been too hasty. The chances were that Mallory’s brother had just gone out to camp in the woods. Kids ran off all the time, it would be something as simple and innocent as that. It was no skin off his nose to divert north for a day or two. He had plenty of time to get to Walker. And if he missed Morrissey, so what? There would be other gigs. He had no itinerary. He would go wherever the wind blew him.

He finished cleaning the firing pin, replaced the spring with a new one, and put the rifle back together again. He slung it over his left shoulder, swung the heavy pack across his right, and went to check out.

He stepped out into the damp morning. The sunlight sparkled off the pools of water that had gathered across the pocked asphalt of the parking lot.

The Pontiac Catalina was still waiting in the same space. He saw the wide blue and white stripes of Mallory’s woollen beanie through the dappled glare on the windshield.

Yes, Milton thought.
Providence
.

Tenacity and determination, too.

He would help her.

ELLIE WENT back to reception.

“Yes?” the girl asked, her eyes flicking up from the show she was watching.

“I need the room longer.”

“How many nights?”

She thought about that. How many would she need? Two? That would be enough. How long would it take to hike up north where the girl thought the men were hiding out, check out the area, then come back again? Maybe it would be better to get three, just in case it took longer. Three would be plenty.

“Three,” she said.

The girl clicked her mouse, tapped on the keyboard and said, “Done,” before she looked back down to the TV.

Ellie heard the sound of a wheeled suitcase approach from around the corner and, before she could take evasive action, Orville came out of the corridor, tugging his little Samsonite behind him.

“Ellie,” he said awkwardly.

“Orville.”

“Just checking out.”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you still want to stay up here? Last chance. You want, I could wait for you. You could—”

“No, I’m staying.”

“There’s this thing,” he said distractedly, tapping his finger against his cellphone, “just heard about it. Dillard just called. The VP’s due in Minneapolis in three days, right, campaigning through the state this week? The bureau office picked up a threat against him. Probably wack-jobs, probably nothing, but he’s sending resources over there. You don’t fancy a trip to Minneapolis?”

“No, Orville. I’ll see you in Detroit.”

He nodded, just once, and pulled his case around her so that he could get to the desk. Ellie felt a little shiver of revulsion, the sheer ludicrousness of the affair coming home to her like a slap in the face. Ryan had been right.
What
had she been thinking? It was the most childish—no, the most
infantile
—thing she had ever done. She made her way out of the lobby and into the foyer. She needed to rent a car, and then she needed to go and get the equipment that she would need for the trip into the woods.

MILTON APPROACHED the car.

Mallory saw him and cranked the window down.

“I can stay here all day,” she said, and he could see that she meant it. He had been right about her tenacity, but wrong to underestimate just
how
dogged she was prepared to be. He could see that she was possessed of a single-minded focus so absolute that it allowed her to simply ignore anything that conflicted with her plans. She would badger him until he either relented or fled the town, possibly with her in pursuit.

“You think that’ll make a difference?”

“I can be persuasive.”

“It’s okay. There’s no need to wait.”

“You’ll do it?”

He nodded. “Against my better judgment.”

Her face broke into a childish grin, and Milton was reminded of how young she really was. “Thank you.” She beamed at him. “When?”

“This afternoon.”

“Great. I can do that.”

Milton frowned. “What do you mean?”