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

by Mark Dawson

  Her gun. It was on the chair, six feet away.

  Lundquist brought his arm up in a flash of desperate motion and fired.

  The room went quiet.

  Lester staggered back until he bumped up against the edge of the desk. His face was eloquent with surprise, a dawning realisation and then, finally, a wash of pain. He put his hands to his chest, holding them there for a moment as he settled down against the desk, and then, as he pulled them away and let them drop loosely at his side, Ellie saw that they were red with blood.

  Lundquist looked dismayed. “Lester,” he said. “I… Oh, shit. Why did you have to do that?”

  Lester slid down, his back slithering against the side of the desk until he was sitting on the floor, leaning against it. His shirt front was swamped with blood, and his face had been leeched of colour.

  “Why did you have to do that?” Lundquist repeated.

  Ellie pushed herself to the chair and her gun.

  “Don’t you move,” Lundquist said, swinging the pistol around in her direction. “This is your fault.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Your fault,” he shouted, nodding at Lester. “Yours. You should have gone home with your partner. None of this was necessary. He didn’t have to get shot.”

  “I’m a federal agent. You’re a cop. You know what that means, right?”

  “Like that means anything up here? You’re in my town now. You’re under my jurisdiction.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” She pointed down at Lester. His right hand was fluttering over his wound. “You need to call 911. He’s going to die if he doesn’t get help.”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  Her words seemed to have jarred him out of his shock. He aimed the gun at her, steady and true, and gestured for her to get up. She did, reluctantly, and allowed him to back her around against the far wall of the room. He went to the chair, took her pistol from its holster, and slid it into his own. He went across to the front door and turned the key in the lock.

  “He’s dying, Deputy.”

  “No,” he said. “You call me lieutenant colonel. And men die in war.” He pointed to the door. “Downstairs.”

  THE FOUR suspects were packed tightly in the cell. They must have heard the commotion from upstairs, and they were looking over at the door with a mixture of fear and expectation. Ellie came down the stairs, Lundquist directly behind her with the gun pressed tight into her spine.

  “Pops,” Michael Callow said. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I heard a shot.”

  “The sheriff.”

  Callow’s face twisted into a sneer of pleasure. “You shot him?”

  “That’s right,” Lundquist snapped.

  “He had it coming.”

  The others whooped.

  Lundquist reached through the bars and slapped the heel of his hand into Callow’s forehead. “Shut up, Michael. If you hadn’t been so stupid and got yourself caught, if this bitch hadn’t stuck her nose where her nose doesn’t belong, if that fucking Englishman had passed on through town, like he should’ve done, it wouldn’t have been necessary. But you fucked up, she did, he didn’t, and it was. The operation’s changed. We need to be getting out of here.”

  Callow stepped back, rubbing his head. The others settled down, Lundquist’s anger quelling their jubilation.

  “Are we clear, Privates?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said, in unison.

  Lundquist took the key for the cell and unlocked the door.

  Callow came out first. “Sorry, Pops,” he said quietly.

  “Get upstairs. We’ve got work to do.”

  The four men went up first, and they followed. Lundquist had his left hand on Ellie’s shoulder, the gun in his right still pressed into her back.

  They had only been out of the room for a few minutes, but the atmosphere had changed. Ellie looked down at Lester. He had died while they were downstairs. His body had slipped further down the desk, his legs were splayed, and his neck was at an angle. The blood had washed out of the wound all the way down his chest down to the line of his belt. His eyes were open, staring, eerie.

  Ellie felt a wave of nausea, but closed her eyes and forced it back down again.

  No weakness, she thought. Not in front of them.

  “Look at him,” Reggie Sturgess said. “Deader than disco.”

  “Shut up, Reggie,” Callow said, anticipating another blast of irritation from his father.

  Lundquist had gone over to the gun rack. Aside from Milton’s excellent rifle, there were three semiautomatics and two shotguns. “Arm yourselves,” he said.

  “What are we going to do with her?” Tom Chandler said, looking at Ellie.

  “I’ll take her to the farm. She can go in the barn.”

  Callow straightened out the kinks in his neck. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Tidy up that mess you made. Go get Leland. He knows Mallory Stanton. Maybe he can make this easier. Get over to the RV now, pick her and her idiot brother up, take them to the farm.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, Private,” Lundquist snapped. “Now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chandler pointed at Lester’s body. “And him?”

  “The Englishman did that. Lester arrested him the day before yesterday, before he went up to the lake and rounded you idiots up. We’ll say he came back, looking to settle the score.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “Olsen’s taking care of him. He won’t be a problem for much longer.”

  Chapter 19

  “THIS WEATHER,” Olsen said, gesturing through the windscreen. The rain was thundering onto the glass and drumming against the cruiser’s roof.

  They passed out of town and kept going west.

  Milton looked across at him. “So what did you say happened?”

  “They were in the taxi; the car didn’t stop and sideswiped them.”

  “The car?”

  “Yes. What?”

  “You said it was a pickup.”

  Olsen nodded, just a little too quickly. “Yeah, a pickup.”

  “Did you speak to them?”

  “A little. He was in a lot of pain. Mallory was better.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Just wanted to know her brother was all right.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I’m sorry, Milton. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  Milton looked at him again. He was trying to behave normally, but there was something about him that Milton noticed, something vague and indefinable, but something that nagged at his awareness like a torn fingernail.

  And then he saw it. Olsen’s shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow and, inscribed on the inside of his wrist, was a tattoo.

  1:3.

  Milton’s stomach flipped.

  “So,” Olsen said. “You went and got those boys down from the lake?”

  He hid it. “That’s right.”

  “You got a history in law enforcement?”

  “Army.”

  “Army. Right.”

  They drove on, passing the campsite where Lester had dropped him the day before yesterday.

  Milton watched Olsen in the dim reflection of the windshield. He had his left hand on the wheel. His right was in his lap, fidgeting, fingers twitching, and he was casting furtive looks across the cabin at him when he thought he wouldn’t notice.

  “What does the tattoo mean?”

  Olsen brought his arm up a little so that Milton could look at it, and then, as if suddenly aware that he had done something unwise, he hurriedly put his hand back on the wheel and turned his wrist so that it was facing down, putting the tattoo out of sight.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t mean anything.”

  ”It must mean something.”

  His brow puckered as he worked out which of his meagre, unimpressive selection of lies he
should use before he said, “Got it when I got out of high school.”

  “What is it? A Bible verse?”

  He shrugged.

  “The four men we brought down from the lake today all have the same tattoo.”

  Olsen swallowed, his larynx bobbing in his throat. ”You pay an awful lot of attention to the way a man looks,” he said, trying to sound flippant, but the words were undercut by anxiety, aggression, and fear.

  “The business I used to be in,” Milton said, “it paid to be observant.”

  “The army.”

  “No. Something I did after that.”

  “Yeah? I was going to say, you get a man paying that much attention to how another man looks, you get to fixing that other man might be a homosexual.”

  He turned his head and looked at Milton as he delivered that riposte, his lip curling in ugly pleasure, the barb a decoy to try to deflect attention from his hand as it drifted down to his holster, the retention strap already loose and the .45 calibre semi-auto ready to be pulled out and used.

  Milton jabbed his left elbow into Olsen’s gut, hard. The officer grunted in surprise as he pulled the gun, catching the bump of the pistol’s rear sight on the holster, yanking it again and freeing it just as Milton swept his hand sideways into Olsen’s face. The man might have been stupid, but he was cunning, full of adrenaline and primed for action. He brought his right hand up to block the blow, their wrists clashing, and then, just barely managing to keep the car on the road, he drove the point of his elbow into Milton’s face. The bony joint connected with Milton’s cheekbone, sending a coruscation of pain into his brain, distracting him just long enough for Olsen to jerk his hand again and bring the gun out of its holster.

  He tried to aim.

  Milton blocked Olsen’s gun arm, but then his seat belt caught, restraining him. Olsen had leverage on him.

  There was no time for anything else.

  With his left hand, Milton stabbed down at the base of Olsen’s seat, his fingers jabbing into the seat-belt mechanism and releasing it, and then he pulled down as hard as he could on the wheel, clockwise, turning the cruiser against the direction of travel.

  The rubber bit on the wet road even as the momentum of the big car continued along the road. There was more than enough force to skid the back end out, and then, the wheels now perpendicular to the direction of travel, the rubber bit again and the cruiser flipped over onto its side and rolled.

  Milton braced his arms and legs as his seat belt pulled for a second time. His head smashed into the side window as the airbags deployed, the car striking down onto its roof and then rolling over a second, third, and fourth time. His knees were crushed against the dashboard, and shards of glass cast over him as the front and side windows crashed over him.

  The car rolled again, the momentum draining away, finally coming to rest on Milton’s side.

  Milton found that he had closed his eyes. He felt a heavy weight against his shoulder, and when he opened them, he saw that Olsen had been thrown out of his seat and, eventually, on top of him. His face was a bloodied pulp, with tiny fragments of glass peppering his wounds. His head, when Milton worked his shoulder away from underneath it, flopped loosely on a snapped neck.

  He braced Olsen’s body and looked around. The interior of the cruiser had been badly damaged and was covered in glass, but he had known that a modern car like this would have been built around a steel alloy safety cage with crumple zones that would absorb the impetus of the roll. All seven airbags had deployed, and the talcum powder that kept them pliable was drifting down, coating the dented chassis and flattened roof in a soft white snow.

  Milton reached his right hand down through the remains of the window and braced it on the asphalt as he released his seat belt. He took his weight on his arm and right leg and worked his way to a crouching position. He dragged Olsen’s body down with him until his shoulders were square to the road and his legs pointed back up towards the sky. Milton kicked out the rest of the front windshield and slithered clear.

  He looked back for Olsen’s gun, but it wasn’t obvious where it had fallen, and he knew he didn’t have the time to make a careful search for it. It might even have been thrown clear of the car. Probing his body with his fingers, scouring it for pain that might signal a problem, he started to jog back to town. When all he felt were the aches and pains of incipient contusions, he picked up speed.

  He was suddenly, and certainly, very afraid indeed.

  THE CAR had crashed a mile out of Truth. Milton ran back, eventually coming up on the big houses that were set in spacious plots on the outskirts of town. The first house he reached had a pair of metal gates and then, behind them, a wide driveway with a Ford Explorer parked next to a closed garage. Milton tested the gates, noted that they felt secure, and so, rather than trying to force them, reached up to the top bar and hauled himself up and over. He dropped down onto the gravel and triggered a security light, the bright white flooding the driveway and the fringes of the garden.

  The Explorer was locked, so he took a stone from the garden and used it to punch through the window. He opened the door, swept glass off the seat, and slid inside. Working as quickly as he could, he pulled off the plastic housing and hot-wired the engine.

  Lights flicked on in the downstairs windows, and then the owner of the house threw open the door and rushed out into the driveway, his dressing gown flapping behind him.

  There was a remote control stuck to the dash, and Milton pressed it, the gates splitting apart. He spun the wheel, sliding the car onto the road and punching the gas. He saw in the mirror that the homeowner had followed him out into the road. The man disappeared behind him as he raced away into town.

  Milton tried to guess what must have happened. Olsen had intended to take him out, that much was clear. Why? He thought of the tattoo that he shared with the men in the jail. They must all be connected. He had been right: they were getting support from the town.

  Did it stop with Olsen or were the local police complicit, too?

  Lundquist?

  That seemed likely.

  Lester?

  He would have to assume that they were all swept up in it until he knew better.

  And that would mean that the young men were free or were about to be freed.

  So, choices.

  He could go back to the Sheriff’s Office.

  But they would be armed, and he had left his rifle behind.

  Ellie?

  What about her?

  It might be too late to help.

  And then he thought of Mallory and Arthur, alone and oblivious to what was happening.

  If the conspirators were intent on taking him out, the Stantons would be next on their list. If there was a conspiracy, Mallory and Arty were witnesses to it. They would need to be put out of the way.

  He fumbled in his jeans pocket for the address that Mallory had given him.

  The field out back of a trailer park.

  Milton pressed the pedal all the way to the floor, the dial touching sixty and still climbing.

  Ellie.

  She was tough and smart. She wouldn’t do anything stupid.

  He would go back for her as soon as he had brought the Stantons to safety.

  And if they had hurt her, he would make them pay.

  He prayed he wasn’t too late.

  MORRIS FINCH arrived in his van five minutes after Lars had taken Milton away to dispose of him. Finch opened the door and Lundquist pushed Ellie Flowers into the back. They had cuffed her in the office and taken her out the rear exit, out of sight, just in case someone was walking by. He considered himself a quick thinker, but people in town knew that Flowers was an FBI agent, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to come up with a good reason why he had her in custody. Much better to keep it all on the Down Low.

  Finch was a big man, red faced, and heavy around the waist. Checkered suspenders strained to hold up his jeans. A huge scar zigzagged across his bald head. The pockets of his plai
d western shirt bulged with pens, his spectacles, and packets of More cigars.

  “You ready, Lieutenant Colonel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Up to the farm?”

  “No,” Lundquist said. “Change of plan.”

  “Where to?”

  “The Stanton RV. Head over there. Don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t trust Michael as far as I can throw him. He gets excited, and then he’s not liable to think straight. Same thing goes for his boys. I should have gone there in the first place, got those kids my good self.”

  “Right you are. You coming in the van?”

  “I’ll take my cruiser.”

  Lundquist looked back at the office as he pulled out into the street. He thought of Lester’s body laid out on his back, his eyes still open. That was that. He loved the History Channel and he especially loved their shows on old battles. He thought of how Caesar led his army across the Rubicon, leading them beyond the point of no return.

  No retreat for him and the militia now, either.

  Whatever came next, they were committed.

  No turning back.

  Chapter 20

  MALLORY STANTON cracked four eggs into a bowl, added milk and cheese, and whisked them together. She hadn’t eaten properly since the morning, and she was hungry. Arthur said that he was hungry, too, that the boys only fed him now and again when they felt like it. She was in the galley, and she turned to look down into the RV’s salon. Her brother was sitting on the bench, staring intently at the Packers game on the small TV that sat on the table. She felt a sudden blast of love and affection for him. He had no one apart from her. She had no one, either.

  She would do anything for him.

  She took a loaf of bread from the cupboard. It was stale, only barely edible, but she figured it would be better once it was toasted. She dropped two slices into the toaster and pulled down the slider when there was a knock on the door.

  “Mallory?” Arthur said nervously.

  “You expecting anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps it’s Mr. Milton.”

  She wiped her hands on a dishcloth and went to the door. She opened it. Leland Mulligan was standing there. He was holding a large flashlight, and his first movement was to bring it up and point it at her. She shielded her eyes and looked away. “Fuck’s sake, Leland, point that thing somewhere else.”