by Mark Dawson
He found room twelve, although the “1” had dropped off, and he could only be sure it was the right door because it was between “11” and “13.” He unlocked the door and went inside. The room beyond was tired. There were holes in the plaster, and in one corner a leak from the roof had discoloured the paint in a wide downward splash. The carpet was damp, with mould clinging to the skirting board in places, and the curtains had a tear all the way down the centre. The bureau was propped up by a folded cardboard coaster beneath one of the legs and the bed felt lumpy and uneven. The sheets were clean, though, and there were no signs of bugs. That would be good enough.
He had to fight another old urge, to sweep for cameras and bugs. That, too, was old thinking. No one was looking for him now. He was just another drifter, hardly worthy of a second glance. That, at least, was what he was aiming for, although the fuss with the sheriff suggested that he needed to work on that a little.
Milton dumped the pack and his rifle and stripped off his wet clothes. He would take them to the Laundromat to be cleaned tomorrow. There was a shower attachment fixed to the taps, but the bracket that would have supported the head had been snapped off, and there was no curtain to stop the water splashing onto the dirty tiles. Milton stepped into the bath, turned the faucet, and directed the lukewarm spray onto his body. It grew warmer the longer the tap was running and, within two minutes, it was piping hot. Milton emptied the complimentary bottle of soap into his hands and rubbed himself all over before taking the shampoo and washing his hair and beard.
He turned off the tap, stepped out of the bath, and dried himself in front of the mirror. He felt cleaner and fresher than he had for days. He reached up and stroked his whiskers. They were already thick, two inches of growth that was soft to the touch now that they had been washed. He had worn a beard before, when he was in the regiment. Most of the men had grown one. He didn’t mind it, but he knew that it was his appearance that contributed to his treatment from the sheriff earlier.
No sense in courting trouble.
He went to his pack and took out his straight razor and then worked the soap into his beard until he had a decent lather. Then, using careful downward scrapes, he cut off the first patch of whiskers. He rinsed the razor and repeated, again and again, until he had removed most of the hair. He was right handed, so the place he was most likely to cut himself was beneath his left ear because it was awkward to see. He saved that until last, applying the blade with just enough pressure and scraping it down. He left a small cut, a shallow trench that quickly filled with blood, but it would coagulate quickly, and since he kept the blade clean, there would be no chance of infection.
He examined his handiwork. It was a half decent job, and it would suffice for now. Maybe he would find a barber’s shop, have a professional do it properly, and have his wild hair tamed at the same time.
Perhaps.
He had a change of clothes in his pack. The bag was expensive, the waterproofing was good, and Milton’s experience had made him fastidious when it came to packing carefully. The fresh T-shirt, jeans and socks were dry, and, as he dressed, he felt his mood improve. Only his boots were dirty, but he spread out the copy of the complimentary newspaper that had been left on the bureau and cleaned away the worst of the mud.
He pulled them on, laced them up, and started to think about what he would have to eat. A steak and all the trimmings. His mouth watered at the thought of it.
THE BORED clerk was watching The Simpsons on a blurry portable TV that looked like it was a survivor from the eighties.
“Where can I get a decent meal?” Milton asked her.
She pointed out the door. “Johnny’s. East Helen Street, five minutes that way.”
“Thank you.”
Milton set off. The rain had stopped, although the clouds overhead were thick and disinviting, promising more to come. He followed the girl’s directions into a district that looked like it had, years ago, been the home to Truth’s light industry. There were several derelict warehouses, most of them empty with hopeful Realtors’ signs that had been etiolated by long exposure to the elements. One lot had been cleared entirely, the old foundations a ghostly tracing visible beneath the street’s single streetlamp.
Milton knew a little about the area. It had been the seat of the region’s mining community. The deposits of tin and copper in the mountains had invigorated the local economy for years until the seams had grown too expensive to mine and foreign imports had undercut the price so that it had become uneconomic to continue. The area had fallen back on tourism as its main industry, but that was seasonal, fluctuating and, ultimately, unreliable.
He walked until he found the place that the girl had recommended. It was a one-storey structure with wooden siding, a slate roof and leaded windows. A sign above the door, a halved rectangle, white over red, announced that it was Johnny’s Bar.
He paused on the threshold. He had known, of course, that there would be alcohol involved. He had decided that he could handle a restaurant. He would concentrate on the food, eat it, and then get out. But he had expected that it would be a restaurant rather than a bar in which food was obviously an afterthought. All the old adages he had heard in the Rooms now came back to him, the ones about temptation and why an alcoholic couldn’t prosper if he kept putting it in his way.
Unless you’re a lion tamer, you’ve got no business in the lion’s den.
He thought back to what had happened in Ohio. About how close he had been to taking a drink. He had found himself in a bar, and it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to order a whiskey. He remembered, with vivid clarity like it was yesterday, the tumbler on the bar, the ice revolving in the warm brown liquid and clinking up against the glass. It had been almost impossible to resist.
You go into a hairdresser’s, eventually you’ll get a haircut.
He stopped to assess himself. He certainly felt stronger. He had been vulnerable before, but the time he had spent alone had repaired and reinforced the buttresses that he had erected against his compulsions. It had, for a while at least, allowed him to smother his ten years of guilt without the help of the bottle to do it.
And he was hungry.
If he wanted a proper meal, there was no other choice.
The thunder boomed again, directly overhead and powerful enough to tremble the light fitting in the porch of the building. That was all the encouragement Milton needed. He took the final three paces, reached for the door, pushed it open, and went inside.
Chapter 3
LESTER GROGAN pulled away from the school forecourt with Billy, his oldest son, in the passenger seat next to him. They were in the scarlet Chevrolet Silverado that he drove when he was off the clock. The boy slouched down, poker faced, looking for all the world like his problem was his father’s fault. It wasn’t, Lester knew, although there were moments when he wondered whether it was.
Lester had received the call an hour ago. Billy and some of his friends had been caught breaking into the high school science lab. Lester’s deputy, Morten Lundquist, had been called out. He would have dealt with things discreetly, ensured that he could deal with disciplining the boy at home rather than something public that would go on his record and stain his character.
That wasn’t going to be possible.
Problem was, the principal at the school had been the one to find the boys and call the police.
He was called Peter Lyle and he was in the habit of beating his wife. Lester had been called to a disturbance at their house six months earlier. He found the woman with a bloodied nose in the back garden. A case with her half packed clothes flew out of the back door as he checked that she was okay. If there was one thing that Lester couldn’t stand, it was a bully. He could not abide bullies. Lester kicked the door down and hauled the man out. There might have been a couple of punches to the side of the head when he had cuffed him. And his report might have mentioned that he had resisted arrest when, in all truth, he had been pretty compliant. But the w
ay Lester read the situation, a thick lip was the least a douchebag like Peter Lyle deserved.
Lester had been disappointed when the wife had refused to press charges.
He had been more disappointed when the local school board had refused to give the man his pink slip.
Because, as his wife quickly pointed out, his oldest boy was about to start at the school.
It had turned out exactly as she had predicted. Principal Lyle was doing everything he could to settle the score with Lester. Billy’s grades had suddenly dropped off, and there had been detentions for what had seemed to be the smallest transgressions. Lester had been ready to visit Lyle, either to try to make peace with him or to explain how difficult he could make his life, he hadn’t decided which, but now Billy had presented his adversary with his best chance yet to drive his advantage home.
“What were you doing there?” Lester started when he couldn’t stand the silence any more.
“Nothing,” the boy muttered.
“You broke the window.”
“Wasn’t me.”
“Someone did.”
“Joey.”
“You know he’ll say that you are all responsible, though, right? That you just being there is enough?”
The boy gave a tiny shake of his head and kept staring straight ahead.
“What about the joint? Was that you?”
“Not mine.”
Lester sighed. “Whose was it, then?”
“Come on, Dad, have a wild guess how it got there.”
He took his eyes off the road and turned to look at the boy. “You’re kidding?”
Billy met his eyes and raised his eyebrows in an expression of ineffable cynicism.
Lester gripped the wheel tight.
“Fuck!” he shouted, crashing his fist against the dash.
Billy flinched and turned his face back to the windshield.
“You know you’ve given him the chance he’s been waiting for. How could you do something so stupid?”
They drove the rest of the way in awkward silence. The problem had been on his mind all afternoon. He knew that it had made him crabby and short tempered.
He pulled up outside their modest two-storey house.
“Tell your mother I’m going out.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Go and get drunk. Solves everything.”
Lester started to berate him, but the boy slammed the door, turned his back on him, and stalked up the drive to the front door.
Lester put the car into gear and drove back into town, angry.
LESTER MET Leland Mulligan, one of his deputies, at Johnny’s Bar. They took stools at the bar, drinking from bottles of Budweiser and watching football. Leland was trying to get him to talk about the new quad bike that he was thinking of buying. The bar was busier than usual tonight: there were the regular drinkers, the old-timers who had nothing better to do than to gradually pickle their livers and bemoan how the country was turning to shit. One table was occupied by the four hunters he had noticed when they had driven into Truth that morning. Another held three people: the two FBI agents who had been nosing around for leads on the bank robbers who had been busy hereabouts, and Mallory Stanton, the sister of the half-witted boy he’d had so much trouble with five years earlier. That table, in particular, was distracting his attention from Leland’s attempts to have him weigh in on the respective merits of the Kawasaki and Suzuki ATVs that he was considering.
“And, yes, I know they’re Japanese,” he was saying, “and I know you’ll tell me I’m crazy, that they’ll turn out to be shit and expensive to maintain and I ought to get something American, a Polaris, maybe, but the price they’ve given me is so good I got to think about it, right?”
Lester grunted in response, fading him out again and watching the two agents. They had come to see him when they had arrived and had explained what they were here to do. It had been last week, the two of them pulling up in a big GMC Denali, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of luxury SUV about as useful up here on these roads as tits on a bull. They were based down in Detroit, and they had flaunted the big-city attitude that Lester had grown to resent from the tourists that had come up here to hunt and fish, that unsaid assumption that they could get Lester to do whatever they wanted him to do just by asking.
He was still thinking about those agents and how angry they made him when the door opened and John Milton stepped inside. He didn’t recognise him at first. He had cleaned himself up pretty good, shaved off his beard and changed his clothes. But there he was, right as rain. Those same blue eyes scanned the room and settled on him for just a moment before they flicked away again. Lester felt the roil of anger in his stomach. The man had ignored him. He was the sheriff, a man of the law, and this drifter had thumbed his nose at him. Maybe he hadn’t been explicit, laid it out clearly enough so that there was no possibility of him being misunderstood.
Or maybe the guy just had a hard time doing what he was told.
Didn’t matter either way. Lester knew that if you wanted to be an effective policeman, you couldn’t have a situation where your instructions were ignored. He didn’t know Milton, but he sure knew the type. A bad attitude, the kind of man who thought he could do whatever he wanted to do and damn what anyone else had to say. You give someone like that an inch and chances are they’ll end up taking a mile.
Lester couldn’t have that.
He was about to go over to have a word with him when one of the agents, the male one—Wilson? Carson?—came over and took the seat to Lester’s right.
“Evening, Sheriff.”
He sipped his beer and looked at him with wary regard. “Evening.”
“Just thought I’d let you know that we’re leaving in the morning.”
It was Clayton, he remembered. Special Agent Orville Clayton. Older, moustache that was greying a little around the edges, could stand with losing a few pounds here and there. “You had enough?”
“We’ve done all we can.”
“You finally agree those boys aren’t here, then?”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“I won’t say I told you so.”
“We get a tip, Sheriff, we have to check it out.”
Lester looked over his shoulder. Milton had taken a stool in the area of the bar that was reserved for those who wanted something to eat and the waitress, a pretty thing called Clementine, was taking his order.
“I got to say something before we clear out,” the agent was saying.
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
“We never really felt all that comfortable up here, Sheriff. Seemed to us, to both of us, that you weren’t all that pleased to have us around.”
Lester took his eyes off Milton for a moment and, after finishing a sip from his beer, said, “Well, that’s because you didn’t listen to me when I said you were wasting your time. I don’t have a beef with you or your friend over there, but the way I see it, the way my men see it, too, the federal government getting involved in something like this is a waste of everyone’s time. If those boys were hiding out in the hills like you seemed to think they were, well, we’d have found them. We could have saved ourselves a whole lot of time and energy if you people had listened to me right from the outset.”
“That may be, but the bottom line as far as I’m concerned is we’re all on the same team. I think it’d do you well to remember that.”
Lester rolled his eyes. Jeez, the attitude on this prick. It would do him well to remember? He was half tempted to give the man a piece of his mind, unvarnished, but he fought against it. What was the point? Him and his pretty sidekick would get into that shiny car that had cost fifty grand of his tax dollars and scoot back down to the city tomorrow and that would be that. What would it achieve?
Nothing, that’s what.
It wouldn’t achieve a damned thing.
But it didn’t do anything for Lester’s mood and, as he turned his attention back to Milton, he felt like he would have to do something ton
ight to help people remember that, around these parts at least, Lester was in charge. That boy, dumb enough to ignore his clear and reasonable instructions, he was going to find that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong lawman.
MILTON KEPT his eyes off the bottles behind the bar as he ordered a steak and fries and took his orange juice over to the spare table in the eating area. He had seen the sheriff, and he knew that the sheriff had seen him, too. He wondered whether it might not be more prudent to turn around and find somewhere else. He wasn’t in the business of causing unnecessary trouble for himself. Indeed, for most of the recent past he had done everything that he could to stay off the grid: no fixed abode, no records, no credit cards. The risk to his safety had been mitigated by the death of Control and his replacement by Michael Pope as the new head of Group Fifteen, but old habits died hard, and Milton had made a successful career in operating beneath the surface. Antagonising the sheriff had all the hallmarks of being a really dumb move. A man like that, so obviously plumped up with the sense of his own authority, wouldn’t take very well to the feeling that Milton was thumbing his nose at him. There would be consequences.
But so what?
What had he done wrong?
Nothing.
He was just passing through town, and he wanted something to eat and a place to lay his head. That was all.
His table was next to another that accommodated four men. Milton gauged them automatically, like he did with everyone. They were dressed in expensive outdoor gear that would, he assessed, have been out of the reach of the local hunters and fishermen. Their hands looked clean and smooth and free of the calluses that he had noticed on the hands of the drinkers at the bar. Their table, away from the regulars, marked them as from out of town, too. Milton had seen an expensive Jeep in the parking lot adjacent to the bar, and he pegged it now as theirs. They were drinking heavily, finishing a round of beers before, one of them, a big blond man with a soft gut and mean eyes, called out to the bar that they wanted another. His voice was loud and unpleasant, slurred from all the drink that he had evidently consumed. The barman exchanged a look with one of his regulars and Milton wondered whether he would refuse to serve them. That might have been interesting. He didn’t, though, bringing over another four pints and taking away their money.
