The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (7 page)

He somehow managed to look shocked, like this wasn’t a conversation he had already seen coming for days. “This about last night?”

“No. Yes, partly, but no.”

“Because last night, maybe I went a little far. Throwing my weight around a bit, like you said, and maybe you were right. I been thinking, too. You want to stay up here and nose around a little more, you go for it. Knock yourself out. I can give you a couple days. You speak to that girl again, and if you think it’s worth it, you can go up in those woods and have a look. A couple days, three days, maybe, no problem.”

“Orville,” she said, “it’s not just about last night, and anyway, I already spoke to Dillard and told him I was going to stay.”

His mouth gaped. “You spoke to Dillard?”

“Yes.”

“You went over my head?”

“You and I were never going to agree.”

“But that—”

“Let’s not get sidetracked by what we said last night. That was a symptom of the problem, and treating the symptom isn’t going to cure the sickness. Fact of the matter is, I’ve made up my mind, and there’s nothing that’s going to change it. We’ve come to the end of the road. That’s just all there is to it.”

“All right,” he said. “I hear you. This is what we’re going to do. You go up into the woods and do what you’ve got to do. I’ll go back to Detroit this morning. When you’re finished, you come back, and we’ll go out and talk about this properly, like adults. I’m not going to talk about it here.” He waved a dismissive hand at the shabby room, the peeling wallpaper, the folding table with the breakfast things.

His voice was firm and patriarchal, as if he was addressing a rebellious teen who was insistent that she was going to leave the house in
that
dress. It was as if his way of dealing with it was to try to ignore everything that she had said. It made her grit her teeth with frustration, but there were other people in the breakfast room now, and she didn’t want to cause a scene.

“All right?”

She really couldn’t be bothered with it. She didn’t have the energy, and as far as she was concerned, what was done was done. He could continue on with his own deluded version of the truth if he wanted to. It made no difference to her.

“Ellie?”

“Fine, Orville. That’s what we’ll do.”

MALLORY STANTON kept to a careful distance. She knew Lester Grogan just like everyone in town knew him. He wasn’t a bad man, but he could get so that he was intoxicated with the idea of being sheriff, drunk with the notion of his authority, thinking that everyone else ought to have respect for his office. Mallory didn’t hold all of those views. Truth be told, she didn’t believe in any of them, especially not since Arty had disappeared into the woods and Sheriff Lester Grogan and all of his cronies in the Sheriff’s Office had been about as useful as lips on a chicken.

No
, she thought.
You boys aren’t going to help me out one bit.

The cruiser’s brake lights shone bright red through the misty morning, and it turned off into the parking lot of the Village Inn. Mallory wasn’t sure what the protocol was to follow someone, but she figured that it wouldn’t do to turn into the parking lot too, so she drove on another quarter mile, turned in the forecourt of Pizza Place on Truth Road and came back up on them again.

The cruiser was pulling away, headed back into town, and, for a moment, Mallory wondered if she had lost her chance. She followed, driving past the inn and staring hard at the Ford Taurus until she was as sure as she could be that the passenger side was empty. She turned around again in Woodland Road and, as she approached the Inn for the third time, she slowed and drove into the lot.

She had just reached down to turn the ignition when the passenger door opened and a man slipped into the seat next to her.

She mishandled the door handle in her panicked attempt to get out.

He reached across and fastened a strong hand around her right shoulder.

“Easy,” he said.

Her heart thumped as she turned her head and looked over at him. It was the man from the bar, the man Lester Grogan had arrested.

The man she wanted to speak to.

“Why are you following me?”

He had clear blue eyes, and there was steel in them. She had noticed that at the bar last night. Those two men, especially the big one, would have given most people pause for thought. But he had been implacable, steady, as if possessed of an unshakeable confidence that this was nothing that he couldn’t handle.

Turned out he had been right about that.

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 Canada. 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.”