The Sword of God

Chapter 11

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?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean? I’m coming, too.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I am.”

Milton stared squarely at her. “I don’t need you to come with me, Mallory.”

“I have to come.”

“No, you don’t. You’ll slow me down, and the slower I am in getting up to your brother, the slower I’ll be in bringing him back to you.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not negotiable.”

“Well, that’s lucky, because I’m not negotiating.”

“Then I’ll just follow you. What are you going to do about that?”

“I’ll tie you to a tree.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. I’m not going to put myself in front of four armed men while I look after a child at the same time.”

“I am not a child,” she said indignantly.

“You are, and you’re staying here.”

She pouted at him, unbowed.

“Have you thought about this, Mallory? There are no hotels between here and wherever they are. There won’t be any warm beds and, tasty though it was, there will be no bacon and eggs on the table. I’m going to travel quickly, eat light, and what little sleep I get is going to be on the ground. And,” he said, looking up at the sky, “I don’t think it’s going to stay dry for very long.”

“I’ve slept on the ground before, Mr. Milton. I told you: my father used to take me and Arty out when we were little.”

“It’s not really the same thing.”

“I’ve shot whitetail deer before.”

“This isn’t going to be like shooting deer, Mallory.”

She refused to give up. “You’ve never met my brother. You don’t know what he looks like.”

“You can describe him to me.”

“He doesn’t know you, though. I told you, he’s simple. He gets frightened easily, especially when he doesn’t know someone. And if things don’t go the way you think they will, he’ll run. If he sees me, he won’t. If I tell him to come back with us, he will.”

Milton looked at her hard face and the determined frown that was visible below the bottom of her beanie and sighed. It would probably be easier to concede. There was some truth in what she was saying, too, he supposed. It probably would be useful to have her around if the boy got spooked. He would just have to make sure she knew to stay a safe distance behind him if it did get difficult. He wouldn’t be swayed on that much, at least. He had made mistakes before and people had paid the price for them. He had sworn to himself that there would never be a repeat.

“Fine,” he said. “You can come. But there are some rules and these are not open to debate. First, you do as I say at all times. I don’t want any lip. Second, you stay with me. Third, if we find them, you let me handle getting your brother. Are those all clear?”

“Crystal.”

“What equipment do you have?”

“Sleeping bag in the trunk.”

“Anything else? Ground sheet? Compass? Water filter? Flashlight? First-aid kit?”

She frowned. “Not with me. Just the bag.”

Milton sighed, doubting himself afresh.

“Is there an outdoor store in town?”

“Morrisons.” She reached down and started the engine. “Shall we go there now?”

“Why not.” Milton sighed, settling back into the seat and closing his eyes.

The store was well stocked with everything they would need. Milton was already equipped, but he took the chance to replace some of his older gear and replenish his supplies. They took a shopping cart and worked through the aisles. Milton picked out a backpack and had Mallory try it on to make sure it fitted her comfortably. He dropped the things he thought they might need into the cart: water filter and purification tablets; a map and a compass; a headlamp; two fresh boxes of matches and a backup fire starter; a simple first-aid kit; sunscreen and insect repellent. Mallory already had decent boots that he thought would be up to the job, and she had a fleece jacket that looked like it would be warm enough. He picked out polypropylene underwear, a hooded rain jacket and pants, and a pair of Gore-Tex gloves.

He only had a one-man tent with him, but she was small, and he thought that there would be enough room for both of them. Her sleeping bag was old and primitive, so he bought a new one with a foam pad so that she would be as comfortable as possible.

He wheeled the cart to the checkout and waited as the clerk rang it all up. It cost three hundred dollars. He took out his money roll and counted it out. He had a thousand left. That ought to be enough to get him across the country if he was careful.

“I’ll pay for it,” Mallory said.

He doubted that she had the cash and, if she did, he guessed that she would need it more than he would. “Don’t worry. We can settle up when we get your brother back.”

Milton was arranging the gear in Mallory’s new pack when he noticed that the girl had walked away from him and had approached the woman who had just entered the store. He watched as the newcomer turned to her, the concentrated expression that Mallory had worn as she scouted the shelves changing into a smile that Milton thought bore a little awkwardness, too.

He hoisted the pack onto his shoulder and walked over to them.

“Ready?” he asked her. “We should get started.”

“Mr. Milton,” Mallory said, “this is Special Agent Flowers.”

The woman turned to him and extended a hand. “Ellie Flowers.”

She looked familiar.

“I’ve seen you in town, haven’t I?”

“In the bar last night.”

He remembered: she had been talking to Mallory. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

“John Milton.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Milton.”

“Likewise.”

“Mallory says you’re going to go up into the woods with her.”

“That’s right. She said the FBI wouldn’t.”

“My partner didn’t want to, no. There’s just the two of us and he’s not convinced that they’re out there.”

“But you are?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s your partner now?”

“Probably halfway back to Detroit by now.”

“And you’re staying here?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going into the woods.”

Milton fought the urge to let out a long, impatient sigh. “You know what you’re doing?”

“I’ve hiked before. Camped a few times when I was younger.”

“You got equipment?” He looked down at her feet, shod in plain leather flats.

She followed his gaze. “I’m not an idiot,” she said indignantly.

“I was just saying—”

“Well, don’t. I’m a federal agent. I know what I’m doing.”

He let it ride.

He had riled her up. “What’s your involvement in this, anyway?”

“Mallory asked me to go up north and look for her brother. I said that I would help.”

“I don’t know about that. This is a federal matter. I don’t need your help, and I’m not sure it’s even appropriate, especially after what you did last night.”

Milton snapped, “After what I did? You saw what happened just like everyone else. They went after me.”

She shrugged. “You have a temper. If Mallory’s right and those boys are up there, what’s to say you wouldn’t just make things worse?”

Milton started to snap back a retort, but caught himself, took a deep in-and-out breath, and managed a tight smile. “All right, then. Fair enough. Good luck.”

Mallory turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“Like she says, she’s a federal agent. You don’t need me. I’ll see you around. I’ve packed your gear for you. You’ve got everything you need.”

The girl’s face fell. “No. I want you to come.”

“I don’t think so.”

He started to leave, but the girl reached out and grabbed him by the wrist.

“Please,” she said. Still holding onto him, she turned back to Ellie. “Please, let’s all just relax and start over, okay? Agent Flowers, Mr. Milton is an experienced outdoorsman. You said to me yourself last night that’s not what you’re good at. Doesn’t it make more sense for him to come with us up there?”

“This is a federal—”

“Yes,” the girl said, interrupting her, “the thing with the men is a federal matter. But Mr. Milton is going to help me get my brother back. That’s a family thing. Totally different.”

The woman started to retort but stopped herself.

“And, Mr. Milton, if they are up there, isn’t it better that the FBI is involved?”

Milton drew another breath. He had already entertained doubts that this was a foolish idea, that agreeing to help the girl was pandering to his ego as much as thinking it was the right thing to do, but he relented. Grandiosity was not something that a drunk could afford. Humility was better. Healthier.

“I don’t take orders from anyone except myself,” he said. “And I’m not a tour guide.”

“I don’t need you to guide me, Milton.”

Humility was better. But not easy.

He picked up Mallory’s pack again and slung it across his shoulder. “Get the stuff you’re going to need and meet us outside. We’ve only got eight hours of daylight left before it starts to get dark. I want to get as far north as we can by the time we have to stop.”

Chapter 12

Special Agent Flowers had rented a Cadillac Escalade from the place in town, and Milton quickly decided that it made more sense for them to travel the short distance to the place where they would start to hike in that rather than in Mallory’s tired old Pontiac. He opened the rear door and found the button to fold down the third-row seats, the motors humming quietly as they doubled over into the floor. He transferred his gear into the SUV, laying his rifle down in the space between the pack and the back of the second-row seats, and then collected Mallory’s pack and slotted that alongside. Flowers was struggling with her own pack, catching the strap on the door as it closed behind her, and he crossed the sidewalk towards her with his hand out to help.

“I got it,” she said tetchily.

She freed the strap and hauled the pack to the back of the Cadillac. Milton watched her as she muscled the bag across a wide puddle. She was medium height and elfin, with brown shoulder-length hair and exquisitely delicate bones in her face. Her eyes were grey, and her lips, which were full, were set in a severe expression that matched her frown. She had bought more appropriate clothes in the store and had changed into them in the changing rooms out back. She had transferred her suit and work shoes into the car already. The waterproof jacket and leggings and the walking boots were much more suited to the terrain, although Milton was sure that her feet would blister as she broke the firm leather in. Knowing that, and not wanting her to slow them down, he had returned to the counter and bought zinc oxide tape, antibacterial ointment and a sterilised needle.

“This isn’t what I had in mind,” Milton said to Mallory when Flowers was out of earshot.

“Give her a break,” she said. “It makes most sense for us to go together, right?”

“We’ll see.”

The rear door slammed, and Flowers came around and opened the driver’s door.

“Ready?” she said.

Milton opened the rear door for Mallory and followed her inside.

Milton opened out the map that he had bought in the store and spread it across his knees. Ellie turned around in her seat, and Mallory leaned in closer.

“Where did your brother say they were hiding?” he asked her.

She studied the map, gaining her bearings, and then pointed to the Lake of the Clouds, right up on the southern shore of Lake Superior. She pointed to a spot on the southern shore.

“Where?” Milton said. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s not marked on the map,” she said.

“What isn’t?” Ellie said.

“There’s an old copper mine up there. It’s been abandoned for years. That’s where they are.”

“But you’re not sure where it is?”

“Not exactly. Up by the lake.”

“Mallory—” the agent began.

“It’s all right,” Milton interjected. “If they’re up there, I’ll find them.”

“You sure about that?” she said dubiously.

Milton ignored her. He studied the map. “It’s twenty miles from here. We follow this road out of town, go over the railroad, and then we can get into the forest from there. We’ll hike the rest of the way.”

Ellie turned back to the wheel and started the engine.

Milton leaned back in the comfortable leather seats and tried to dislodge the nagging doubt that this whole enterprise had the potential to be a big, expensive mistake.

The rains came again as they drove out of town. The clouds had rolled in with startling speed, and the patchy blue that had been overhead after lunchtime was replaced by an angry churn of inky blacks and greys. As they drove along the narrow blacktop, pressed between the shoulders of fir trees that loomed close on both sides, a tremendous boom of thunder ripped down from the sky, and the rain hammered down. The light vanished and it was quickly almost as dark as it would be at night. The automatic lights flickered on, but the rain was so heavy that Ellie had to drop her speed right down.

He wondered whether it might not make more sense to turn around and go back to Truth, take another night in the hotel, and then start again early tomorrow morning. He was about to broach the suggestion, but when he looked across at Mallory she was so intent and so buried in concentration that he changed his mind. She wouldn’t want to take anything that might be construed as a backward step. She would have seen a delay as an opportunity for Ellie and himself to reconsider their involvement. He was sure that she would resist if he tried and, after a moment’s thought, he allowed the thought to pass.

They might get a little wet, but at least they would be on their way.

They turned north and kept driving for another mile, passing tiny one-track service roads and fire breaks that branched out to the left and right. They passed two other vehicles during the short drive: a truck laden with logs, so wide on the narrow road that Ellie had to drive halfway onto the shoulder to let it pass them, and another SUV, its lights glowing like golden bowls in the seemingly solid wall of water.

The northern boundary of the town was delineated by the railroad that ran from east to west. They crossed the track and reached a narrow road on the other side that skirted the southern boundary of a farmer’s field. Corn was growing in the field, stalks as tall as a man swaying in the strengthening breeze. The four-wheel drive kicked in as the wheels slipped across the slick surface, and Ellie switched to high beams to paint light in the gloom as far ahead as she could. She stopped and switched off the engine, the courtesy lights shining warm and cosy as a perverse counterpoint to the torrential deluge drumming against the roof and cascading down the windshield.

Milton looked at the map again. The farmer’s field was perhaps a mile long and a mile wide. They would need to head north, crossing the field before getting to the start of the woods. He had no idea how fast Mallory and Ellie would be able to travel with their packs, but, assuming a decent pace, he figured they would be able to make a good start into the woods by the time they had to camp. Three or four miles ought to be possible today.

“This will be fine,” Milton said. “You might as well stay inside while I get the gear ready.”

Milton reached behind him for his pack and took out his waterproof trousers and jacket. He pulled them on.

He opened the door and stepped out into the rain. It was as heavy as he could ever remember, save the storms he had suffered through the Asian monsoon season, and he was grateful for his waterproofs. His boots sank down an inch into the quagmire and the mud sucked hungrily as he lifted his feet to step around to the back of the Cadillac. He opened the back and, after taking out what he needed from his pack, he attended to his rifle. He fitted the scope cap tightly to the sight and wrapped the muzzle with electrical tape, sealing it, so that it was reasonably watertight. He wasn’t keen on the rifle getting wet, but there was nothing that could be done about it in weather like this. As long as he maintained it carefully when they got under cover again later, he was happy enough that the gun would fire reliably when he needed it to.

He prepared the packs for Mallory and Ellie and called for them to come around.

“I’m just going to call the bureau,” Ellie called back. “Two minutes.”

Mallory struggled through the slop and came to stand beside him. Milton took her pack and worked it around so that she could easily slip her arms through the straps, but rather than do that, she paused. She opened the ties at the top and then reached into an inside pocket of her jacket. He watched dumbly as she withdrew a .45 calibre pistol from her pocket and slipped it into the mouth of her new pack.

“What is that?”

“What does it look like?”

It was a Ruger P90 with a custom grip, and it looked enormous in her small hand. “What are you doing with a pistol like that?”

“My father had lots.”

“You’re not taking it.”

“Mr. Milton, those boys are murdering dirt bags. What if I need to defend myself?”

“That’s what I’m for, Mallory. Me or your FBI friend. Give it to me. I won’t go out there with you if you’re taking a gun.”

“I’ll go with Ellie, then.”

“I’m pretty sure she’ll say the same thing. You want me to ask?”

She looked at the gun, then at Milton, and, seeing that he was not bluffing, she held it by the barrel and passed it to him. It was the stainless manual safety model. He popped the magazine and checked it, seeing the full seven-shot load. He pushed the magazine back into the gun, equipped the safety, and put it into his pack. He didn’t have a handgun with him. Maybe it would come in useful, but there was no way he was going to let her anywhere near it.

Ellie stepped out of the Cadillac and shut the door behind her. She grimaced up into the slanting rain as she came around to the back. “Everything all right?”

Mallory looked at him, her eyes expressive.

“We’re good,” he said. “Speak to them?”

“No signal,” she reported. “This weather, I guess.”

“We get storms like this,” Mallory said, struggling to make herself heard over the rain. “It’s not unusual that it takes the network down.”

“Is it important?” Milton called.

“It’ll keep.”

He held up her pack for her to slide her arms into the straps.

“Ready?” he asked them both.

“Yes,” Ellie said.

Mallory nodded, still a little sullen at the confiscation of her weapon.

“This way,” Milton said, pointing to the field. “I reckon we’ve got three hours before we need to stop.”

He led the way.

Chapter 13

Ellie followed at the rear of their small little convoy. Milton was at the head, setting a brisk but not hurried pace. Mallory was in the middle, bent over a little. She reached up to the straps of her pack with a frequency that suggested she was struggling. Ellie wasn’t surprised. Mallory was smaller than she was, and she was finding the pack difficult to carry.

They left the car behind them and started into the field. The crop reached well over her head, but there were narrow paths through it that had been left to allow access for the farm’s machinery. The path was rutted, the trenches filled with water and mud, and the ridges slick and treacherous underfoot. By the time they were halfway across the field, it felt as if they had been cut off from Truth and the rest of the world. The stalks bent down at them as the wind whistled around, and Ellie began to feel her mood change, an oppressive atmosphere taking hold. She thought of Orville, the way he would have driven back to Detroit in his Denali, listening to his god-awful country and western, drumming his fingertips on the wheel in that annoying way he had. She started to wonder. Had she done the right thing when she put the hammer down on him like that? He was still her supervising officer, after all. There would have been better ways to let him down. She could have stomached one more dinner with him.

The rain kept falling, and the thick clouds piled up overhead. Ellie’s boots were watertight, and she was thankful for that. But the leather was stiff, and she could feel it as the upper on her left foot began to abrade the skin. God, a blister, and they’d hardly started. That was going to be embarrassing. She pulled the peak of her hood as far over her face as she could, rubbed the water from her eyes, and continued on, following Mallory deeper into the field.

They reached the northern end, stepping out from between the high shoulders of the corn. The track at this end had been bolstered with a top layer of asphalt for the first few yards, but then, as that petered out, it became a sodden, waterlogged mire. They followed it for a hundred yards until they were at the start of the trees. Milton stopped in the limited shelter of an oak to consult his map. He seemed satisfied with their progress, considered his direction, and then shouted over the roar of the deluge that they needed to follow the animal trail that had been beaten into the undergrowth towards the northwest.

Ellie pressed on. This was not what she intended to do today. She thought of Orville again. He would already be back in Detroit, maybe even home with his wife. She could have been home, too, at the little apartment she was renting. She could have drawn a bath and submerged herself in it for an hour with a glass of wine and a book. A good long soak would help to drive away the chill that had seeped into her bones even before they had set off on this pursuit. Orville had confided in her that he couldn’t stand Truth or the Upper Peninsula, that he had no time for the people, and that the sooner he could get back to civilisation, the better. Ellie told him that she thought he was being condescending. That had started another argument, and he told her that she could do as she liked. He added that she had been gulled by a little girl, that the trip would be a wild goose chase, and that he was still going home.

Milton allowed them to stop at five o’clock, but only for five minutes. He had identified an area on the map that he wanted them to reach by sundown.

Sundown, she thought. How would they tell? It was already dark with the thunderclouds overhead.

Milton forged on, picking a path that led them around the fallen boughs and the worst of the vast swathes of nettles and bracken and, very soon, the track was invisible behind them. All they could hear was the sound of the rain on the trees.

Ellie thought of Orville again and her mood began to curdle. She thought of the four boys that they had been chasing for the last six months. They were young and reckless, but they weren’t stupid. They had been the subject of a full-court press from the bureau after the security guard had been murdered in Marquette, but they had seemingly just melted into thin air. She knew that they had been in Truth, there was too much independent corroboration of that for it not to be true, but she had no idea where they were now. No one did, unless Mallory was right. She looked up, rain smearing into her eyes, and stared out into the gloom between the trunks of the trees. Was she right? Were they in these woods? It was possible, she supposed. Possible enough for her to have agreed to come and tramp out here in this godforsaken weather, anyway.

Ellie thought about Mallory’s story. It was possible, although they had looked into her brother’s history and discovered, with very little effort, that his was not the most reliable testimony they would ever hear. The locals they spoke to about him all said the same thing: sweet boy, simple and trusting, but prone to making things up. He was clearly something of a local institution, and Ellie had detected cruelty in the anecdotes about the things that he had done. Some of the locals had told them jokes, bitter little punch lines that said more about them than they did about him.

Orville had allowed himself to be swayed by the prevailing opinion, that he was not to be trusted, and had effectively drawn a line through the middle of his testimony.

Ellie had not been so hasty.

How had he been able to identify the picture of Tom Chandler if he was unable to read? Orville dismissed that, too, saying that someone must have told him who it was, but as she spoke with Mallory, Ellie couldn’t bring herself to do that. There were a lot of what-ifs that needed to be tested. If the only way to do that was to follow her up to the Lake of the Clouds, then that would be what she would have to do.

They trekked north through the trees for another two hours. The terrain sloped gently upwards, and Milton explained as they walked that they would need to ascend around a thousand feet to get up to the lake. The trail widened a little as they worked their way along it, thick banks of ferns on either side before the tightly packed trees. Ellie recognised beech, scrub oaks, and maples. They forded narrow streams of crystal clear water, and then they emerged from the bush just a little way downstream of a shallow collection of falls. It consisted of a half dozen chutes arrayed across a rocky ledge that spanned the width of the stream, sending the water crashing over a shallow drop into a wide pool at its foot.

“How much farther until we can stop?” Mallory complained.

“Another mile.”

They climbed the gentle face at the side of the falls and continued ahead, back into the dense foliage. The path drew in tight and then disappeared altogether. Milton retraced his steps, found a suitable alternative route, and followed that instead.

After another thirty minutes they broke through the wet ferns and stepped into a small clearing. The space was littered with discarded machinery and equipment: a coil of heavy cable, chains, pulleys, a large wood stove, assorted cast iron fixtures, and parallel runners for a horse-drawn sled. A huge eastern white pine stood sentry over the junk.

“What’s all this?” Ellie said.

Milton rapped his knuckles against the upturned stove. “My guess is that this is an old logging camp. I doubt any of this has been moved for fifty years.”

“Can we stop here?” Mallory asked. “I’m exhausted.”

Milton paused, took out his compass, and cut an azimuth up to another big tree a mile or two distant. He looked up into the dark sky.

“It’ll do,” Milton said. “We camp here for the night, get up early tomorrow and press on.”

“How have we done?” Mallory’s beanie was sodden with water, and she looked miserable, like a drowned rat.

“Not too bad. We’re about a quarter of the way there.”

Ellie looked around. She had no real experience, but it looked like a good place to bivouac. She removed her pack from her shoulders and stretched.

“How many miles?” Ellie asked Milton.

“About four.”

It felt like more. Ellie was fitter than most of the other agents that she worked with, and she was certainly fitter than Orville, but pounding a treadmill in an air-conditioned gym was one thing and struggling across rough terrain in weather like this was quite another. Moisture had seeped into her expensive boots, she had been bitten by chiggers, her legs were slathered with claggy mud, and she was cold.

Milton took out his tent and moved across to a patch of higher ground, avoiding the dips and depressions that would be more likely to gather water. He stretched out the flysheet and then fed the poles through the appropriate sleeves and bent them into the shape of the tent. He pinned them into place, pegged out the structure with tent pegs, attached the guy lines, working at one end and then moving quickly around to the other. He kept the tension as equal as he could as he battled the wind.

Ellie took out her own tent and got most of it up by the time Milton had finished with his. He came across and helped her to secure the inner skin and the attachable groundsheet, then went around and knocked the pegs more firmly into the wet earth.

It took twenty minutes to erect both tents.

“I’m just going to get some firewood,” he said when he was done.

Mallory frowned dubiously. “How are you going to make a fire when it’s as wet as this?”

“You’ll see.”

There was a fallen tree at the edge of the clearing. Milton took a small bag from his pack and walked across to it.

“Are you all right?” Ellie asked the girl.

“Wet and cold.”

“Me, too.”

Ellie’s tent was larger than Milton’s. “You want to crash with me?” she asked her.

“Sure.”

They hauled their packs inside and sat down, watched the rain as it dripped over the lip of the door and listened to it as it drummed against the outer skin. Milton was crouched next to the fallen tree and, using a utility knife that he had taken from his pocket, he started to scrape the blade up and down on the underside of the trunk.

“You think he knows what he’s doing?” Mallory asked.

“He knows about being outside.”

“What about when we find them?”

“You saw what happened last night. He knows how to handle himself. More than that? I don’t know.”

“What do you think he does?”

“I’ve no idea. Why don’t you ask him?”

They kept watching. Ellie could see that the tree had been infested with termites. Milton used the blade to dig out the sawdust that had been left behind, scooping it into the bag and then adding dry leaves and grass. He went back to the trunk, snapped off a thin branch, and then stripped off the wet bark. He cut thin grooves into the dry wood beneath and then pried them back until the stick was feathered.

The dead tree provided a little shelter from the rain, and Milton started to build the fire there. He created a pile of tinder and used the fire steel that he wore on a chain around his neck to strike sparks onto it. The tinder started to smoke, and then tiny pinpricks of heat could be seen. Milton crouched there in the rain for thirty minutes, nursing the sparks into a small flame until it was established, then carefully added larger pieces of kindling. He added strips of pine wood that were saturated with resin. The flames took hold, devouring the wood hungrily.

When he was done, the fire was crackling with a healthy zeal.

“You’ve done this before,” Ellie said.

He smiled. “A few times.”

When he was finished, he lashed three sticks together to form a tripod, took a small saucepan from his pack, and rested it over the flames. He took a packet of franks, sliced them, and fried them in the pan. He opened two cans of beans and emptied those into the pan, too, stirring until the mixture was hot. The smell was appetising, and Ellie found her stomach grumbling.

He brought the pan across to the tents. “Here. Sausage and beans.”

“Not over here, English,” Ellie said. “Dogs and beans.”

“You want some or not?”

“Give it here.”

“I don’t think so.” He smiled, took out a folding fork, handed it and the food to Mallory and then sheltered in his tent. The openings faced each other.

“Mmm,” she said after she had taken the first mouthful. “This is good.”

Milton shuffled back until he was sheltered from the rain. “Sausage and beans. I’ve been living off that for the last few weeks.”

“There’s something else in here, too, though.”

“Wild onions. I picked a few on the way. You snap off the stems and cook the bulbs. Wild garlic, too.”

“How do you know all this?” Ellie asked him.

“Just picked it up on the way.”

“Come on…”

He shrugged. “I used to be a soldier. I’ve been trained to live off the land.”

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “What kind of soldier?”

“Just a soldier. Infantry. A bullet catcher.”

Ellie’s curiosity was piqued, and she wondered whether she should press for more information, but he was gazing out at the fire with an abstracted look on his face, and she decided against it.

Ellie took the pan after Mallory and, when she had eaten her fill, she passed it across to Milton to finish off. When they were all done, Mallory opened her pack and took out a bag of marshmallows.

“When did you get those?” Milton asked.

“At the store.”

“I don’t remember buying them.”

“So you don’t want one?”

He smiled widely enough so that his white teeth shone, the first proper smile that Ellie had seen from him. “I didn’t say that.”

She skewered three of the marshmallows on a stick, hurried out into the rain, and held them in the flames.

“This the kind of thing you thought you’d be doing when you joined the bureau?” he asked her.

“It’s what I hoped it might be like.”

“Riding a desk more than you expected?”

“I guess. I was naïve when I signed up. I knew there’d be some, but it’s more than I expected. Sometimes it feels like all I’m doing is pushing paper from one place to another.”

Ellie started to feel comfortable in his presence. There was something about him that said he could be trusted. He was gruff and severe, and there was a restlessness that he did a poor job of hiding, but at the same time he projected a sense of complete proficiency. She would not have described him as reliable, for that was too staid a word, but she believed that if she invested a little faith in him, she would not be disappointed.

She thought back to what he had said earlier. “What kind of soldier were you?”

A moment of unease passed across his face. It would have been easy to miss, but Ellie was good at reading people. “All sorts,” he said.

“Did you fight?”

He smiled thinly. “I did.”

“Where?”

“Can’t really say,” he said, closing the conversation.

Special Forces, she wondered? She had met men from Delta in the bureau, and they had been reticent about what they had done before they joined. But those men wore suits and had jobs. They weren’t trekking across America on their own, spending weeks in their own company, with no obvious plan for the time ahead. Milton was different. There was something else with him.

He gazed over at her, maybe saw the inquisitive glint in her eyes, and changed the subject. “What about you? What’s your background?”

“Bachelor’s in Law and then a master’s in Criminology at Emory in Atlanta.”

“And why the bureau?”

“Why not?”

“You could make more money as a lawyer, right?”

“It’s not all about money.”

“So what is it about?”

“My father was an agent,” she said. “Down in the Tampa office.”

“Following in his footsteps?”

“Something like that.”

“What does he think about it?”

“I couldn’t tell you. He’s dead. He died fifteen years ago. Shot by a suspect as he came out of a bank in Jupiter.”

“Oh,” Milton said.

“I remember the stories he told me. Bank robbers, kidnappings, criminals that made the news before terrorists and cybercrime changed it all into something else. He wouldn’t have recognised it today.”

“If you don’t like it—”

“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s all right. But I’ve been thinking about it lately, why I did what I did. You’re right. I could’ve earned a hell of a lot more if I’d taken a job as a prosecutor.”

“So?”

“That felt like selling out to me. And my father always said to me that I should do what I wanted to do. And I wanted to do this. I was just a little naïve, is all.”

The rain kept coming down, rattling against the canvas. Mallory came back with the marshmallows.

“What about your partner?” Milton asked her.

It was her turn to feel a little defensive. “What about him?”

“Well, he’s not out here with us, is he? Why? He didn’t think this was a good idea?”

“He wouldn’t even listen to me,” Mallory interjected bitterly.

“He did, Mallory,” Ellie said, immediately annoyed with herself for defending him; why did she still feel the urge to do that?

“He wasn’t interested.”

“He just doesn’t think that the men are in the woods.”

“But you do?” Milton asked her.

“I think it’s worth a look.”

“Yes,” Milton said, smiling with gentle sarcasm. “And you thought it would be fun to see what a lawman’s job used to be like in the old days.”

Ellie raised her middle finger, but she wasn’t offended. He was right. There had been an element of that. Even so, the mention of Orville made her feel uncomfortable. She tried, once again, to forget about him.

Mallory used her fingers to carefully pull the marshmallows off the stick. She handed one to Milton and one to Ellie, and they ate them.

Milton sucked his fingers. “You bring anything else in that bag you didn’t tell me about?”

“No,” she said, grinning. “Just that.”

Milton leaned all the way back, supporting himself on his elbows. He stayed like that for five minutes, just staring out into the rain, and then he sat up and told them to give him their boots. He took off his own, and his socks, collected the two other pairs, and hurried back to the fire. He lashed together a screen of leaves and left them beneath it to dry, not too close to the flames so as not to crack the leather but near enough to warm.

Ellie breathed out contentedly, enjoying the sensation of a full belly and the residual taste of their meal in her mouth.

She found that she was pleased that she was here.

Ellie zipped her sleeping bag up to her neck and stretched out. The rain had eased off, and Milton had gone outside to build up the fire again. The flames were rising high, crackling as they consumed the wood that he had found. The mouth of her tent was still open and she could see him sitting by the fire on a waterproof sheet, his knees drawn up to his chest, lost in thought as he looked into the orange and red flicker of the flames. He had taken an MP3 player and a pair of headphones from his pack, and he was listening to music now, the faint beat of a drum audible over the snicker of the flames.

She was a good judge of people, but there were layers to John Milton’s personality that she could only hazard a guess at. He was quiet and brooding, and obviously most happy in his own company. Something had happened in his life that had made him that way. She wondered if she would ever find out what that was.

She sighed and arranged herself so that she was more comfortably spread out across her sleeping mat. Mallory was beside her, her eyes closed, maybe asleep already. She looked up at the roof of the tent, the flames casting dancing shadows across it.

She heard the raucous chatter of coyotes and then the sound of cracking twigs and looked outside as Milton got to his feet. She watched him as he laid more firewood across the fire. He took the pack with the food in it, looped a rope through the straps, tossed the rope over a branch, and then hauled the pack up so that it was fifteen feet above the ground. Bears, she thought. He was putting their food out of reach.

He tied off the rope around the trunk of another tree and turned back to camp.

“Milton,” she called out quietly so as not to wake Mallory.

He crouched down at the entrance to her tent. “Yes?”

“You think those boys are out here?”

He looked down at Mallory and mouthed, “Asleep?”

She nodded.

“Probably not,” he said quietly. “But she does, and I don’t mind going out to take a look.”

“Why are you helping her? You never said.”

“It’s the right thing to do.”

The fire burned on brightly behind him, casting him in shadow.

“You warm enough?”

She felt a surprising burn of attraction for him. It caught her off guard.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Stay in the tent. I’ve cleaned the camp, but there are bears in the woods. I saw one earlier.”

“Where?”

“Just inside the tree line. Half an hour before we stopped.”

“You didn’t say.”

“Didn’t want to panic you.”

“Who said I’d panic?”

“No, you probably wouldn’t have. But it’s best not to meet one at night.”

“I’m staying right here.”

“That would be best,” he said. “Night.”

“Goodnight, Milton.”

Chapter 14

It took Ellie a moment to remember where she was when she awoke the next morning. She had expected to have a difficult night’s sleep, but she had been wrong about that. She hadn’t stirred once, and now she felt refreshed and reinvigorated. She opened her eyes and turned her head. Mallory was still asleep beside her, breathing gently through her mouth.

She unzipped the tent and looked out. The rain had stopped overnight. A ghostly fog had rolled in, and now it lay on top of the underbrush, thicker the further away it was from the campsite.

Milton was already outside. He had built the fire up into a warming blaze, and he was kneeling before it, topless, his shirt warming on a makeshift clothes line that he had fashioned with a length of string. He had boiled water in the saucepan and was washing his face with a small sliver of soap. He had his back to her, and Ellie saw the tattoo of the angel with the wings that stretched across his shoulders and torso that went all the way down his back. He wasn’t big, but he was muscular, without an ounce of fat on his body. Ellie saw scars beneath the ink. She recognised the puckered lips of stab wounds and the circular discolouration where bullets had punched through the skin.

A soldier?

No, she thought. Not just.

There was definitely more to him than just that.

She made a little extra noise as she clambered out of the tent.

Milton turned, soapsuds on his face. “Morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

He took a straight razor and started to shave, drawing the blade down his cheeks and throat in a long, even stroke. He flicked the knife to clear away the suds and whiskers and then repeated the action.

“You sleep well?”

“Like a baby.”

He took a double handful of the warm water and dunked his face in it, scrubbing with his fingers until the suds had all been washed away. He stood, revealing yet more scars on his torso.

“Fresh air,” he said, his chest rising as he took a deep lungful. “I never sleep as well indoors.”

She looked down at his torso, at the tightly packed abdominal muscles, and quickly looked away, colour flooding her cheeks. Milton noticed her discomfort and smiled at it. He reached up to collect his checkered shirt, and dressed.

Ellie smelled cooked bacon and saw the frying pan sizzling happily on its tripod, the flames licking beneath it. She was about to comment on it when Mallory put her head outside the tent. She was still bleary eyed, her hand absently rubbing her scalp.

“Morning,” Ellie said to her.

“Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Last night. Grunting. There was something out here.”

“It was a deer,” Milton said. “It was snorting. I heard it, too.”

“Didn’t sound like a deer.”

Milton flicked his eyes at Ellie. What? A bear?

He was completely unperturbed. “Hungry?”

They sat around the fire and ate the bacon with bread rolls that Milton took out of his pack. It was surprisingly tasty, and Ellie found that she was hungrier than she expected. Milton boiled more water and used it to make coffee, the three of them sharing his tin mug. Ellie held it in her hands before setting it to her lips, letting the warmth permeate her skin. It was a cold, damp start to the day, and the fog that had fallen like a shroud over the woods did not look like it was ready to shift. Mallory was quiet, almost as if she was feeling trepidation at what the day might deliver. She would find her brother, or she would not. There would be issues either way.

Milton took his map from his pack and unfolded it, spreading it out across his groundsheet so that they could see where they were and where they needed to go.

“All right,” he said. “We’re here.” He pointed at a spot on the map four miles to the north from the spot where they had entered the woods. He traced his finger up the map and settled on a spot three inches up and to the right. “This is where Mallory thinks they are. That’s a little over fourteen miles. The terrain is level for the first three, and then it’ll be hilly before it levels off again up by the lake. The climb is going to be hard work because I don’t want to follow a settled trail once we start to get closer. If there’s anyone there, we have to assume that they’ll keep an eye on the obvious ways in and out.”

“They’d be that careful?” Mallory asked.

“They haven’t been found this far.”

“We don’t use the trails, then,” Ellie said. “That’s fine.”

“Once we get within a couple of miles of the lake, we’re going to move more slowly. I’d like to arrive as the sun is going down, so I’m thinking of stopping here”—he indicated a spot halfway between their start and finish points—“for an hour or two in the early afternoon.”

“Fine.”

“One other thing. If we come across anyone while we’re out here, we’re a family out on a hike up to Lake Superior. Father, mother and daughter. All okay with that?”

They nodded that they were.

Milton started to break camp, packing away the tents and then burning their rubbish. Ellie and Mallory went a little way into the woods to relieve themselves, and when they came back, the clearing had been returned to the state it had been in when they had found it. The only sign that they had been there were the smouldering remains of the fire and the blackening scorch marks on the underside of the fallen trunk that had nurtured and then sheltered the flame.

Milton was at the highest point of the clearing, his compass in his hand. He double-checked the azimuth that he had cut last night to the next landmark on the trail north.

Ellie picked up Mallory’s pack and helped her to settle it on her shoulders. The girl returned the favour, and they waited for Milton to join them. He reached a hand down and heaved up his pack, the heaviest of the three, and slipped his arms through the straps.

“Ready?” he said.

They nodded.

“We’ll stop for lunch at one. But we push hard until then.”

They set off in the same formation as yesterday: Milton led the way, then came Mallory, with Ellie bringing up the rear. They had only been on the move for ten minutes when they came across what was left of a pine tree. The trunk had been badly clawed; great scrapes covered it from nine feet above the ground all the way down to the bottom. Clumps of black hair were stuck in the gobs of pitch that were still oozing from the tree.

“See that?” Milton said.

“Bears?” Mallory said.

He nodded. “A big one, too.”

He looked at Ellie and winked.

They bushwhacked for two hours straight, following the same animal tracks as yesterday. They passed a beaver pond, with two rusting steel leg traps that must have been left behind by a trapper years ago. They forded the main branch of a creek, climbing up an extremely steep razorback ridge that split the two branches of the watercourse. Milton led the way along the top of the ridge. It was precipitous, and Ellie’s boots slipped more than once, sending little avalanches of loose pebbles and scree down into the water below. They were up above the tree line now and the views were clear all the way to the taller peaks of the Porcupine Mountains. Nevertheless, she was pleased when Milton saw a suitable path down below and indicated that they could descend.

After an hour they came across the remnants of an old railroad grade and spurs.

“What is this?” Ellie asked.

“Railroad,” Milton said. “An old one.”

“There are railroads all the way through here,” Mallory said. “All the mines, they had to get their silver and copper out.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“My father. He was out here a lot.”

They kept going north, following a muddy, practically overgrown two-track, and passed into the foothills of the Porcupine Mountains Escarpment.

Eventually they crossed another railroad that would, at one time, have run east to west. Milton looked at the map and decided that they should turn to the northeast, and they followed the overgrown track until it ran up against a river. They could see where the rail line must have crossed the river on both banks. On their side of the water was an elevated earthen grade that led up to a large eroded pile of fieldstone that apparently served as an abutment. Next to it were the remains of a trestle, with several huge, vertically arranged timbers that would have supported the elevated line until it reached the earthen grade visible some distance away.

They followed the river upstream until they reached Mirror Lake. It was a wide body of water, perhaps half a mile long at its widest point. The waters were perfectly clear, reflecting the fringe of pine and spruce on the far bank and the scuds of clouds blowing overhead.

“We’ll stop here,” Milton said, pointing to a pleasant spot beneath two huge eastern hemlocks.

The sun had burnt through the mist and, as it reached its zenith, it was strong enough to make for a warm day. It had been a hard morning, and Ellie was grateful for the chance to rest. She unslung her pack, propped it up against the roots of a tree, and then lay down against it. Mallory did the same, dropping to her knees beneath two shade trees leaning over the shore.

Milton took off his pack, dropped it behind him, and removed his shirt and trousers.

Mallory stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What are you doing?”

“I’m hot. Going to freshen up.”

She pointed to the lake. “You’re going in there?”

“Just for a quick swim.”

“It’ll be freezing!”

“Suits me.”

Ellie watched through the slits of her half closed eyes as Milton launched himself into the water, cutting beneath the surface and then striking out to the middle.

“You don’t feel like joining him?” Mallory said.

She did, but she shook her head. “I think I’ll stay here.”

The sun was warm on Ellie’s face. She was slowly drifting into sleep when she heard a strange call and, opening her eyes, she saw a mature bald eagle cruising above the lake. Its sharp beak twisted left and right as it stared down into the water for trout.

As it turned out, Milton allowed them to rest on the lakeshore for two hours. He examined his map again as he lay drying in the sun. He concluded that they would reach the mine in three or four hours, perhaps five if the terrain was more difficult to ascend than the contour lines suggested.

He disappeared for ten minutes and came back with a big double handful of enormous blueberries. They gorged on them, wiping the juice from their lips.

They set off to the north again, following the eastern edge of the lake and then fording the Little Carp River where it fed into it. They discovered another old railway grade that ran north. It was lined with pine trees and overgrown with weeds, but it was as smooth as the day it was graded, and they made good time. Milton surmised that it might be the line that had serviced the mine that they were looking for and made a corresponding reduction in the time he thought it would take them to reach their destination, presuming the track continued.

They passed a vertical mineshaft in a ravine at the base of a ridge and quickly glanced into it to see that it had collapsed and was now stuffed full of rocky debris. After that they came across an ancient, wrecked car that had been left to rot. It was upside down on its roof beneath a canopy of hemlocks, the trunk of a paper birch shoved up through the space where the windshield would have been.

“Look at that,” Milton said.

“What is it?”

“That’s a Model A Ford. You ask me to guess, I’d say that was left there when Teddy Roosevelt was president.”

The track ended as it ran up against a tall ridge. They climbed, using their hands to secure themselves as the gradient grew steeper and steeper. Milton reached down to clasp Mallory’s hand and dragged her up as they neared the crest. Then he reached down and hauled Ellie upwards. His grip was strong, and he managed her extra weight without trouble.

“All right?” he asked her.

“Fine.”

There was a logging road along the top of the ridge. Milton crouched down next to a large pile of timber wolf scat and looked out over undulating terrain. The views were long from the overlook of bedrock, and they could clearly see the vastness of Lake Superior beyond Cloud Peak and Cuyahoga Peak. The leafy canopy in the valley below them was a multicoloured array of sugar maple, eastern hemlock, yellow birch, and patches of eastern white pine, red maple, basswood, oak and cedar. Two miles away, in a wide depression, they could see a large body of water glistening in the late afternoon sunlight.

“That’s where we’re headed,” Milton said. “The Lake of the Clouds.”

“How far?”

“An hour from here.”

Ellie squinted into the sunlight. “You see that?”

Milton nodded. He took out a pair of binoculars and pressed them to his eyes for a moment. He nodded again and handed the glasses to Ellie. She gazed out through them.

“What is it?” Mallory asked impatiently.

Ellie handed her the glasses. The girl put them to her face and stared out. “Is that smoke?”

Milton nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

“A campfire?”

“Maybe.”

They scrambled down the ridge, and Milton picked up an almost invisible trail that cut through the trees to the northwest. They walked in silence. For Mallory, at least, Ellie guessed it was a combination of anxiety and anticipation. Their trail led down to the banks of Scott Creek. They discovered a single cable that had been strung across the water with a rotten plank seat attached to it with a pulley. A thick retrieval rope was still fastened to the plank.

Mallory stopped and looked up at it.

“Is that—?”

“No,” Milton said. “That’s been there for years, probably for the miners to get across. If they’re up at the lake, they didn’t make that.”

They set off again, listening to the plaintive bleating of an animal in the brush. Milton said that it was a bear cub, and that they should keep moving. They did and, after another ten minutes, they came upon the entrance to an active underground den. Milton kept them fifty yards away from it and upwind, pointing out the freshly harvested vegetation and the recent bear tracks that led away down the slope. Ellie was not of a mind to dawdle and she was relieved that Milton was of the same mind.

As they set off again, he dropped back so that he could talk to Ellie privately. Mallory, who was struggling with the weight of her pack, walked on ahead of them.

“Do you have a weapon?”

“Sure I do,” she said, opening her jacket to show him the .40 Glock 22 that she wore clipped onto her belt. “FBI standard issue.”

“You any good with it?”

She bristled at the perceived slight. “Top of my class.”

“Top?”

“Top half.”

“Okay,” he said. “Top half.”

The expression on his face told her that he was only pretending to be impressed.

“You won’t need to worry about me if they start to shoot at us.”

“I’m not worried.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve got my rifle,” he said, indicating the long gun that was slung over his shoulder.

“You any good?”

“Not too bad.”

They walked on a few paces.

“Why do you ask?”

“I like to know everything before I get myself into something. The capabilities of the people on my side especially.”

“So you think they are up here?”

“I didn’t say that. But fail to prepare—”

“—and prepare to fail. Yes, I know, I’ve heard that before.”

Milton looked ahead, checking that Mallory was still trudging along a few paces ahead of them. “Before we set off, I found a gun in her gear. For all I know, she might be the state sharpshooting champion, but I do know that she’s fourteen or fifteen years old, and I am not comfortable with a teenager running around with a loaded semiautomatic. Do you agree?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I had a little chat with her about it, and I think I persuaded her that it wasn’t a good idea. It’s in my pack now in case we need another weapon. But I also know that she’s more cunning than a lot of people have been giving her credit for, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have managed to smuggle something else with her that I haven’t seen. What I’m trying to say is, if you see her with a piece, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to take it away from her. Yes?”

She nodded. “Sure.”

“Hey!” Mallory called out. “What are you talking about?”

“You, Mallory,” Milton said. “Who do you think we were talking about?”

“Well, don’t. I’m right here.”

Ellie looked the girl over. She was working hard with her pack, an expression of discomfort on her face that she quickly hid when she realised that she was being assessed. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine.”

“You want to stop for ten minutes?” Milton asked.

“Only if you do.”

“I do,” he said.

They were atop a beautiful knoll that prickled with huge eastern hemlocks. Milton helped them both to take off their packs. Milton shucked off his own pack and then rather absently stooped down to pick up a three-foot-long snakeskin. He tossed it into the trees.

“We’re nearly there,” he said. “No more talking when we set off again. If they’re down by the lake, we don’t want them to know we’re coming.”

“Agreed,” Ellie said.

“And keep your eyes open. It’s not impossible they’ve set something up to warn them if someone is coming. A tripwire, maybe. Something like that. Watch where you put your feet and you’ll be fine. It doesn’t matter if this last bit takes twice as long. We’ve still got plenty of daylight. We’re not in any rush.”

Chapter 15

Milton led the way down the descent as quietly and carefully as he could. The hillside was rugged and densely forested, and his warning that they should be on their guard had slowed them all down.

The sight of the campfire had persuaded Ellie that Mallory now stood a very good chance of being right. It was possible that the smoke was from a legitimate source, a party of hunters, perhaps, but that suddenly seemed like a long shot. It would be a big coincidence. She was operating on the assumption that they were going to come upon the fugitives. She had already decided what she was going to do. She was going to call for help. She knew that Mallory would be impatient and determined to continue, but Ellie didn’t think that would be the most sensible course of action. Mallory was a girl, strong willed, but very young, and Ellie was confident that she would be able to bring her around to her way of thinking.

Milton, though? She didn’t have the same confidence. She found him very difficult to read.

Milton stopped. There was a vertical shaft, flooded and rimmed by square berms of fractured rock. He suggested that the shaft had been constructed to access the same seams of copper as the ones on the shore of the lake.

“We’re close,” he said.

They carried on, slowly descending through the tree line until the hardwoods started to thin out and Lake of the Clouds became visible. It was a large expanse of water situated in a valley between two ridges. It was fed at its eastern end by the Carp River Inlet and the outflow, to the west, was the Carp River. It was staggeringly beautiful, a wide sheet of blue that glimmered in the early evening sunlight. The slope that they were descending would deposit them on the southern shore of the lake if they followed it to its end. The land rose up on all sides, with a narrow shoulder of flat terrain to the northwest. There was perhaps two hundred feet of gentle slope before them until the water’s edge. To the left the cliff reared up sharply, too steep to climb or descend. Milton took out his binoculars and glassed the cliff face and the flat ground from left to right.

There was a collection of tumbledown shacks at the side of the cliff. The huts were heavily screened by ferns and dug into the side of the rocks that overlooked the water. One of them was in the water itself, the gentle flow lapping around its foundations. Behind them, set into the rock itself, was the darkened maw of an adit that must once have entered the mine. The entrance was open, accessed by a flight of stairs that had been carved out of the stone.

“See it?” Milton said, passing the binoculars to Ellie.

“It’s the mine,” she said.

Milton said that he had come across a few similar places as he had trekked across the Upper Peninsula. The mines had been sunk to bring out copper, for the most part, although some had accessed veins of silver and gold. Almost all of them had been abandoned after the easier seams had been stripped; the ones that were left could not be reached economically. This one must have been the same.

“Look!” Ellie hissed.

Milton took the glasses from her and gazed down at the shore again. There were three men emerging from behind one of the ramshackle huts. As he watched, another two emerged from the tree line, each of them carrying an armful of firewood. They took the wood to a cleared spot that looked as if it had been furnished with a fire pit, and dropped the timber onto a woodpile.

Mallory grabbed the glasses from him and stared. “It’s Arthur,” she said in an urgent whisper. “You see? At the back.”

Ellie focussed on the man to the rear. He was laden with the most wood, so much that it looked as if he was struggling to carry it. He was a few steps behind the lead man and, as the others joined them, he stayed on the periphery.

“We need to call the bureau,” she said.

“No,” Mallory said. “We can’t.”

“Mallory, there are four of them down there. There’s only three of us.”

“Two of us,” Milton corrected. “Mallory’s not getting involved.”

“You knew that before we started,” the girl protested.

“I didn’t know they’d be here,” Ellie said.

Milton asked, “How are you going to call them? There’s no signal.”

“We go back to Truth. I’ll call my partner and he’ll bring reinforcements with him.”

“No—”

“It’ll be a delay of two days, Mallory. Maybe three.”

“And where do you think they’ll be in three days?” she argued.

“Here.”

“No, they won’t. They already think the FBI’s given up on them. Someone in town knows they’re here, and I guess they’ve already told them you’ve gone. Maybe they feel safe. It’s been a month since they robbed a bank. Why wouldn’t they go and do another one tomorrow?”

“Or maybe they don’t.”

“What if they do? They’ve already shot one man. What if they kill someone else? Are you okay with that on your conscience?”

The girl had a quick temper and it had tripped.

“Quiet,” Milton said sternly, his finger to his lips.

“We can’t go,” Mallory went on in an angry whisper. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“No,” Milton said. “The deal was I bring you out to see whether your brother was here—”

“I can’t just leave—”

“—and now that I see that he is here, I’m not happy leaving him any more than you are.”

Her anger drained away as she realised that he was on her side. “You’ll help?”

“Come on, Milton,” Ellie protested. “You can’t be serious?”

“I am. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”

“What do you mean? There are four of them. They’re armed. They’ve already killed a man. They’re not going to put their hands up and surrender.”

“Yes,” he said. “They will.”

Ellie turned away from Mallory, putting herself between the girl and Milton. “I can’t let you do anything stupid,” she said to him. “You might be good in the woods, you look like you know how to look after yourself, but that does not mean I think you’re capable of going down there and making four fugitives, men with a very good reason not to be caught, surrender to you.”

“You should have more faith in me. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Ellie argued against Milton’s proposal for another five minutes until she realised that he had made up his mind and there was nothing she could do to dissuade him. Her options were limited: she could leave and make her way back to town, but Milton made it clear to her that he wouldn’t wait to collect the fugitives. It took a little effort to persuade her that he was serious, but once he had succeeded in that, she couldn’t very well abandon him to do it alone. That was her second option: to help. She frowned her disapproval, but signalled her acquiescence.

Milton handed her his rifle. “What are you like at medium range?”

She looked at it a little reluctantly. “I can fire it.”

“Top half of your class?”

“Not with a rifle,” she admitted.

“It’s all right. I don’t want you to hit anyone. We’re going to bring them back alive. I just want you to give them something to think about.”

“How?”

“Distract them. You need to watch me get down there. My guess is as soon as they think they’re in trouble, they’re going to make a run for their bikes. I can’t see them, but there’s a track at the back of the huts and, I expect that’s where they are, hidden by the trees. If they run, I want you to shoot at them without hitting them.”

“So you want me to miss?”

He smiled. “Well, yes, if you put it like that, I do. Can you?”

“Of course I can,” she said indignantly.

“Good.”

“What about you?”

“They’ve got no idea what they’re doing,” he said. “Look at them. They’ve got no security, no lookout, they don’t have their weapons with them. My guess, they’ve left them in the hut. I’m going to walk into camp and suggest that it is in their best interests to give up. If they have a different opinion, I’ll persuade them otherwise.”

“And if you can’t?”

“It’s not going to be difficult, Ellie.”

“What if it is?”

“If it is, then you go back to Truth. Take Mallory with you and head south. You’ll want to trek through the night; don’t stop. You’ll be back there tomorrow. Then you call in the cavalry. I should think I’ll still be around by then.”

She sighed and shook her head, ready to try to persuade him again that this was foolish.

“But it won’t be necessary.” He took off his jacket and laid it out across a branch. “I tell you what: if I can get them to surrender before”—he looked at his watch—“eight o’clock, you can buy me dinner when we get back into town.”

“What time is it now?”

He smiled at her. “A quarter to.”

“All right,” she relented, shaking her head with exasperation, but unable to suppress her smile. “But you don’t have to do anything crazy to ask me out.”

“No?”

“You could’ve, you know, just asked me.”

Milton took Ellie’s Glock and ejected the magazine. He nodded in satisfaction as he slotted it back home.

“You have any restraints?”

“Just these,” she said, reaching down into her bag for a collection of cable ties.

He took them. “They’ll do.” He checked his watch. “Better get a move on.” He crept through the brush to the camp. Their fire was brighter against the approaching gloom. “Keep your eyes on me.”

And, with that, he was gone.

Chapter 16

Milton stayed in the cover of the trees and the scrub that provided a thick fringe around the perimeter of the camp. The area was ringed with wetlands and, as darkness fell, the lake and its chain of smaller ponds erupted in a din of peeps and croaks. Milton didn’t mind at all. Anything that helped to mask his approach was welcome.

He thought about Ellie. He had surprised himself back there. He hadn’t thought too hard about women ever since he had left San Francisco, deciding once again that he wasn’t in the business of making attachments. He liked to stay on the move, flitting from place to place, and a relationship would make that kind of flexible lifestyle impossible. Normal people wanted normal lives. They wanted mortgages, regular jobs, fifty-inch televisions, and big washing machines. They wanted a dog, holidays, health insurance. They wanted kids. Milton didn’t want any of those things, and he couldn’t imagine circumstances where he would. He had been on his own long enough so that the logic that said those items — those things—were desirable was beyond him.

It made much more sense for him to be alone. He was fine with that. He didn’t want pity, nor did he pity himself. Solitude was an acceptable substitute for the program, at least it was for him, and the possibility of long stretches of time where the only person he had to speak to was himself was a form of meditation that had allowed him to understand himself better.

So why had he asked her out?

Because she was cute and sassy?

He had been thinking about her all day. He kept seeing her in different ways: lying in the tent last night, the firelight dancing in her eyes; her face up close, the freckles that you couldn’t see unless you were really looking hard; the way she eyeballed him when he hauled himself out of the lake; the way her chest filled her shirt when she worked the straps of her pack over her shoulders; and watching her from behind as they were climbing the ridge. Those images kept popping into his head, one after another, distracting him, when he needed to keep his focus clear. He dismissed them, but then he would remember the way that her hand had felt in his, the warmth of her body as he had reached down to drag her up the slippery scree. He heard her voice, too, the confident tone, the attitude that almost dared him to argue with her. The way she had said, “I’m staying right here,” as he prepared the camp for the night yesterday, the way she’d said it and the way she’d looked at him, making him think that she was inviting him to take her to his tent. He heard that again and again and wondered what would have happened if he had made a pass at her.

An FBI agent.

With his history?

What was he, crazy?

Never mind. No sense thinking about any of that now. He needed a clear head. He would address it all later, once he had taken care of business.

He stayed low, hurrying from cover to cover, breaking into the spaces between the trees and brush only when he was sure that he wasn’t observed. As he got closer, he could begin to make out scraps of conversation floating to him on the breeze. He was still too far away to pick out the words, but he could tell from the raucous, bawdy atmosphere that the four of them were drunk. Arthur Stanton was sitting on the edge of the fire, his knees hugged against his chest. They would occasionally gesture in his direction. He would smile or say something, but Milton could tell that all they had for him was ridicule. He was nothing more than their entertainment. A court jester.

He crept closer, sliding into the cover of an oak and then peering around the trunk. He was twenty feet away now. There was a large jug on the ground, and they passed it between them regularly. Milton guessed that they had a still somewhere close, and that they were passing the hours by brewing their own hooch and then getting drunk on it.

Amateurs.

They had no idea what they were doing.

That was good.

He hunkered down behind the trunk of the last large pine before the clearing. The four fugitives obviously felt comfortable enough to set a large fire, and they were gathered around it, passing around the jug of moonshine. Arthur Stanton looked miserable. He was closest to Milton. He would pass him first. He didn’t expect that to be a problem and, if there was any shooting, he was far enough away that he ought to be safe.

Milton held Ellie’s Glock in a loose grip, composing himself, running through his plan one final time so that it was clear in his mind.

First impressions were going to be crucially important. He needed those boys to be in no doubt that he would shoot them if they didn’t do what he told them to do.

He took a deep breath. He looked back up the slope, into the tree line. Ellie and Mallory were hidden amidst the foliage and he couldn’t see them. He hoped that Ellie could shoot the rifle, but, if she couldn’t, it was too late to worry about now.

He took another breath, stood, stepped around the tree trunk, and walked to the campfire with a confident, authoritative gait.

Three of them had their backs to him. The other one, a weasily, buck-toothed man who looked like he was a hundred and fifty pounds dripping wet, saw him coming. His face changed from drunken confusion to fear. “Hey, hey,” he called out to the others, stabbing his finger at Milton even as he tried to scramble backwards. “Look!”

The others turned.

Milton raised the pistol and aimed it right at them.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said, his voice level and even.

One of the young men had bleached blond hair and tattoos down both arms. “What you say?” he said.

“Lie face down on the ground, hands behind your head.”

The man got to his feet, opening and closing his fists. “Ain’t gonna happen, partner. There’s four of us and one of you. How you think that’s going to play out?”

Milton aimed a fraction above the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The pistol barked and the sound of the shot reverberated back at them from the cliff face. The round whistled a few inches above his bleached hair. He jumped from the shock of it.

“There might be four of you, but you’ve been foolish and left your weapons inside.”

“You ain’t going to shoot us,” he said, although his tone did not suggest much confidence.

One of the others, pasty white with a shock of red hair, had started to get to his feet. Milton slowed the pace of his advance, keeping all of them within easy range.

Milton switched his aim, going low, and squeezed the trigger again.

The bullet thudded into the ground in front of the man’s feet.

He jumped back, stumbling into the fire.

The one with the red hair bolted for the hut.

There came a loud crack from up the slope as Ellie fired the rifle. The round landed between the man and the door of the hut, sending up a small detonation of pebbles and rocky shards. He stopped suddenly, losing his balance and skidding down onto his behind.

“Let me set this out for you so you know what’s going on. There’s a sniper up the hill. Probably has one of you in her sights right now. You try to run again and you might find your head gets blown clean off your shoulders. And I’ll shoot you, too. I can take all four of you before you get ten feet in my direction. The game’s up, boys. It’d be better for you if you figure it out now.”

Milton heard the scramble behind him and caught the flash of motion in the corner of his eye. It was Arthur. He spared him a quick glance, his gun arm held steady and aimed at the bleached blond man’s head. The boy ran for the entrance to the mine, his feet sliding on the loose scree.

“Who are you?” the blond man asked.

“My name is Milton,” he said. “And you’re all coming with me.”

The blond man did as Milton instructed, lying flat on the ground, face down, and lacing his fingers behind his head. It was obvious that he was in charge because the other three quickly followed his example. Milton took Ellie’s cable ties from his pocket and fastened their wrists behind their backs, one at a time.

There came the sound of a frantic descent down the slope, and Milton paused cautiously, his pistol waiting, until he saw Mallory crash through the underbrush, a small avalanche of pebbles and scree following down after her. Ellie came behind her, the rifle held muzzle down.

“Good shot,” Milton said.

“They give you any trouble?”

“Not really. They’re drunk. They just needed to see we were serious.”

“She’s desperate,” she said, gesturing at Mallory. “She saw him run. It was all I could do to get her to wait until you had them cuffed.”

The girl was halfway to the entrance of the mine.

“Keep the rifle on them. All right?”

“I’ve got it. Go.”

Milton jogged after the girl. “Mallory,” he called out. “Wait.”

She ignored him, slipping and sliding down the wet steps and into the dark mouth of the mine.

Milton followed. The opening was rough-hewn and dripping with moisture. He descended carefully, feeling the slickness through the soles of his shoes.

The tunnel was about six feet square, cut into a reddish brown rock. Along the ground was a shallow river of water, running from somewhere in the interior of the mine and draining into a natural vent behind the entrance. It was unlit, and Milton saw Mallory’s back just as she disappeared into the darkness.

“Arty,” he heard her call out. “It’s me.”

He stepped out carefully. If he tripped and turned an ankle, broke something…

“Arty!”

“Mall?”

There was a flash of sudden light as a flashlight was snapped on. The beam swung across the walls of the corridor, sparking against his eyes. He blinked to clear them, and when he did, he saw that Arthur Stanton was holding the flashlight, aiming it straight up at the roof. He was at the far end of the tunnel, up against a thick concrete block wall that was topped with a grated opening. Moisture seeped through the cracks in the concrete, and Milton presumed that it had been placed there to hold back a body of water.

Mallory hurried forwards to her brother.

“Jeez,” he said. “Jeez, Mallory. It’s sure good to see you.”

He bundled her into his arms, the beam of light swinging around. Milton walked another two paces and paused, aware that the boy was liable to be frightened by someone he didn’t know, especially since that someone had a pistol.

Arthur saw him and recoiled. “Who’s that, Mall?”

“It’s Mr. Milton,” she said. “He’s a friend.”

“Hello, Arthur,” Milton said, smiling.

“It’s Arty,” he said, still dubious. “No one calls me Arthur no more.”

“All right then, Arty. Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” he said, looking back at his sister for confirmation.

“You’re better now,” she said. “Why don’t you give Mr. Milton your flashlight?”

“Okay.”

He did. Milton took it and flashed it around the tunnel. The water was deeper here, running around the uppers of his boots, and the block wall behind them had been defaced with graffiti. There was nothing else of interest.

Milton led the way outside again, Mallory following with her brother’s hand holding hers tightly. The sun was low in the sky, the fading light shining into their eyes as they emerged. Milton let them pass him. They started in the direction of the camp as he shoved Ellie’s pistol into the waistband of his trousers. Two shots fired, that was all, three if you counted the rifle. No one hurt. It had been a simple enough thing to subdue them. But Milton couldn’t relax. He was experienced enough to know that when things were too good to be true, they usually were. He would only be comfortable when he had delivered them to Lester Grogan back in Truth.

And they had a long day ahead of them tomorrow before he could do that.

Milton told Mallory and Arty to stay with Ellie and then left them to conduct a careful survey of the camp.

He found four dirt bikes just inside the woods, propped up one against the other. The tracks suggested that they got in and out of the camp by riding along the beach to the east. Milton supposed that there was an easier path in that direction that would allow them to climb the ridge and then give access to the old railroad tracks that crisscrossed the terrain beyond. It would be a reasonable ride to reach civilisation from here, but that was to their advantage. They would be able to traverse the ridges and valleys a lot more quickly than a pursuer in a jeep.

Milton returned to the camp and approached the larger of the two cabins. It was the one that the lake had surrounded, water gently lapping up against the wooden piles that had been sunk into the ground. He splashed through the water and went inside. One wall abutted the rock of the cliff face that stretched overhead. The other three walls were constructed from corner-notched logs, and the roof, panels of corrugated steel, was supported by log rafters. It was dry inside, the water below the raised level of the floor. There were four bedrolls, and an array of empty beer bottles lined the north wall. Milton moved inside and idly flicked the nearest bedroll with the toe of his boot. This was their accommodation, then. He noted that there were only four bedrolls. It didn’t look like Arthur Stanton shared the hut with them. That didn’t surprise him at all.

He went back outside and approached the second cabin. It was dilapidated and looked like it had been constructed years before. A bank of sand had gathered up to the height of his knee against the walls, and there was evidence that it had been shovelled away from the door. A network of roots had also been cleared away, the remnants still bearing the jagged edges from the serrated blade that had been used for the task. He went inside. Milton saw a ripped canvas cot along the south wall, a fifty-year-old military stove along the east wall, and a folding chair along the north wall. An assortment of cooking utensils and pots were arranged around the stove. There was trap-rigging wire, ammunition, firewood, cans and tools scattered about the floor.

There were three shotguns propped against the wall, and, hanging from a single nail, was a lightweight compound bow and a quiver of arrows. Two handleless shovels were near the entrance. A small shelf held more boxes of ammunition and a combat knife.

The carcass of a big roe deer had been hung from a hook that was screwed into a roof beam. Milton inspected it, rotating it left and right. It looked fresh. Tins of beans and dried food were stacked up across two shelves. Large paper bags were full of vegetables and other groceries.

Milton went over and looked at the cot. It was in bad shape, the tear almost all the way across. If Arthur had been sleeping here, in what was obviously the food and gear store, then it couldn’t possibly have been comfortable. And, he thought, if that deer wasn’t dressed soon, it was going to start to smell pretty awful.

He went outside, turned, and looked back at the lake and the huts. The sun was dipping down to the horizon. Milton did not wear a watch, so he held up his hand before his face, testing how many fingers he could fit beneath the edge of the sun and the start of the horizon. Each finger meant fifteen minutes until sunset, and he could manage three. Forty-five minutes left.

Mallory and Arty were sitting near the water’s edge. Ellie was standing over the four men, the rifle steady in her cradled arms.

“How are they?”

“Plenty of threats,” she said, “but nothing to back it up.”

“Who’s who?”

She pointed at them one after the other. “Blondie is Michael Callow. Red is Tom Chandler. The skinny one is Eric Sellar. Black hair, Reggie Sturgess. They’ve given the bureau a lot of trouble.”

“And you can claim the credit for bringing them in,” he said.

“Hardly.”

“It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s all on you.”

“We’ll see,” she said, handing him his rifle. He returned her Glock to her.

Milton was about to say that as soon as they got back to Truth he would be off again, headed west, a job well done. But then he remembered that they were going to have dinner, and he allowed himself a moment to reflect upon whether he might be able to change his plans, just a little, to see what happened. He had no itinerary. He was as flexible as he wanted to be. What harm was there in a little delay?

“What are we going to do now?” she asked him.

“We’ll camp here tonight,” Milton said. “It’ll be dark soon. I don’t want to be out in the woods then.”

“Fine,” she said.

“If we get up early enough and the weather holds, we should be able to make it back to Truth by the time it’s dark tomorrow. You’ll take them to the sheriff?”

“I need to get them to the marshals in Lansing, really, but I’m already so far from official policy on this I doubt it makes too much difference. Nearest law enforcement official I can find.”

“Okay,” he said. “It won’t be a problem.”

“What do we do now?”

“You hungry?”

“Very.”

“I’m hungry,” Arty called out.

“You like venison?”

He got up and came over to them; Mallory followed. “I sure do.”

“Then why don’t you build up that fire? Nice and big, Arty. I’ll fix us something to eat.”

Milton went to his pack and collected his big hunting knife.

“The deer in the shed,” he said to Arty. “When did they kill it?”

“Today. Michael and Tom went out hunting this afternoon. Shot it with an arrow.”

“Two hours ago? Three hours?”

“Just before you got here.”

“Alright. Good. Can you build the fire up for me? Nice and hot.”

“Sure.”

Ellie followed Milton as he returned to the second hut.

“We’re going to eat that?” she said, pointing at the carcass. The upside-down buck was slowly rotating on its hook.

“We’re lucky. It’s still fresh, although they should have taken the offal out by now. You had venison stew before?”

She looked a little incredulous. “In a restaurant. Not like this.”

“Trust me, it’s good. You got a strong stomach?”

“I guess…”

He took his knife and found the joint of each elbow, working around it with the flat of the blade until he had removed the hooves. He cut through the skin at the base of the animal’s skull and around the neck towards the breastbone, then cut down to the stomach, pelvis and forelegs. He pulled the skin from the shoulders and neck, working downwards towards the chest. It came away clean. He cut the ligaments above the shoulders and twisted the head sharply to break the neck and remove it. Ellie groaned but she didn’t turn away. He broke down the carcass, separating the chuck meat from the round, and then ran his knife along the inside of the backbone until he had removed all the tenderloins.

Ellie was pale and wan when he was done. “Jesus.”

He grinned. “Trust me, it’ll taste amazing.” He nodded over at the supplies. “You see what they’ve got over there?”

She wandered over. “Potatoes, mushrooms, garlic, peppers…”

“Bread, too. And I doubt any of it is more than two days old.”

“So they either went down to Truth and picked it all up, or someone’s been keeping them well stocked.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve been in Truth for longer than two days. We would’ve seen them.”

“I think they’ve been getting help. Look at them. They’re idiots. They would’ve been caught weeks ago if they were up here on their own.”

“So we’re careful when we go back down with them, then.”

“Yes. Very careful.”

There was a blackened Dutch oven in the shed, and Milton took that and the tenderloins outside. The fire was burning brightly. Milton spread the logs out and pushed the pot into a pile of glowing embers. He poured in a good lug of vegetable oil and, when it was hot, he dropped the meat inside. It hissed and fizzed and spat. He covered the pot with the lid and went back to the shed to chop the vegetables for the gravy.

After three hours the meat was blackened and practically falling apart. Milton had wrapped baked potatoes in tin foil and dropped them into the ashes an hour before and then he had warmed the bread, rubbing it with garlic for extra flavour. All of that, together with the meat and the thick gravy, was enough for a hearty meal. The smell was delicious, wafting over the dark camp, and it grew even stronger the moment he removed the lid from the pot.

He took the plates he had found in the shed, doled out generous portions for Ellie, Mallory, and Arty, and then served himself.

“This is really good,” Ellie said between hungry mouthfuls. “Where’d you learn to cook like this?”

“The army.”

“What were you,” Mallory asked, “a chef?”

Milton laughed. He was sitting with his shoulders propped up against a large rock, gazing out over the surface of the lake. He loaded his fork and put it into his mouth, enjoying the smoky flavour of the meat and the rich taste of the gravy. He felt relaxed and contented and, because of that, less reticent than he would usually have been.

“What are you laughing at?”

“I wasn’t a chef.”

“What were you, then?”

He searched for the right words. “A problem solver. The government would find that there was a situation that couldn’t be handled through the normal channels, so me or a colleague of mine would be sent in to try another way.”

“Another way?” Ellie said, teasing. “Mysterious.”

“That’s all you’re getting out of me.”

It was more than he had told anyone for a long time. He felt a shudder of discomfort, for it was only a skip and a jump from that bland little euphemism to what he had done in the Group, and there were no circumstances where he would have been prepared to discuss that, especially not with civilians who couldn’t possibly understand.

And certainly not with civilians of whom he was growing fond.

How did you tell someone you drew a salary for being a killer?

“Is it all right, Arty?” Mallory asked.

“Mmmm,” he said, tearing off a hunk of bread and dragging it through the remnants of his gravy.

The girl turned to Milton. “What about them?” She nodded in the direction of the four men watching them with baleful eyes from down by the shore.

“What about them?”

“You going to give them anything to eat?”

“I made enough for everyone.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said indignantly. “Not after what they’ve done.”

“We need to be practical, Mallory. They’re going to need fuel for tomorrow. It’s going to be a long day. Hard work. If they’re hungry, it’ll take us longer.”

“He’s right,” Ellie said.

Mallory shrugged, reluctant to admit that he was right even though she knew that he was.

The robbers were unable to feed themselves with their hands tied, so Milton released them, one by one, directed each to help himself to the food from the pot, and then allowed five minutes to chow down. It was almost midnight by the time that Sellar, who was last, had cleared his plate. The pot, too, had been scraped clean.

Milton was covering them with his rifle. Ellie came alongside him.

“What do we do with them now?”

“In the shed.”

“And then?”

“I’ll stay up and keep an eye on them.”

“All night?”

“It’s fine.”

“Don’t be crazy. We’ll split it. You go first; I’ll do second shift. You need sleep as much as the rest of us.”

“I can manage.” He could see from her face that he was wasting his time. “Fine. We’ll split it. But I’ll go first.”

She agreed, heading away to set up the tents with Mallory and Arthur. Milton gestured for the four robbers to get up, and he led them to the hut where they had their bedrolls. They went inside, one after the other, Michael Callow at the rear.

“You’re going to regret this,” he said.

“I doubt it.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. My name is Milton.”

“But you’re not with the FBI.”

“No, I’m just a concerned citizen.”

“Bullshit.”

“Go to sleep. You’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

“You here because of Arty, ain’t you? How’d it go down? His kid sister ask you to help her come get him?”

“Get inside,” Milton said, shoving him firmly in the back.

“I knew I should never have allowed that retard out here.”

“So why did you?”

“For the laughs. That boy’s entertaining, the things you can get him to do. Still, I know I fucked up. I should have shot him, been done with it. He ain’t good for nothing else. I should’ve done him like a rabid dog. Maybe that’s what I’ll do, right after I do you.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Callow.”

“You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, you know that? You fucked up more than I have. Just remember that. You’ll see I was right.”

Milton let the invective wash over him, ignoring it, and closed the door. There was no lock, but he took out the rest of his rope, looped it around the handle, and then knotted it around a tree to the rear. It was taut, and although it would be possible to force it, it would not be possible to do that without making noise.

Milton went back to the shore. It was a clear night and a little cool, so he built the fire up with the logs and branches that he had seen them bring back into the camp earlier. It wasn’t as dry as he would have liked, and it hissed and spat for a few minutes, but the fire was established enough to cope, and the flames were soon leaping high into the air, a wall of radiant heat washing out.

He went around the fire, on the side next to the shore, and sat with his back against the blackened stump of a tree. He could see the hut and the door from here. He had his rifle laid across his lap. There was no way for them to get out.

Ellie and Mallory had erected both tents. The Stantons had gone into one of them and zipped up the door.

Ellie came over to him.

“Are they okay?” he asked.

“Fine. She’s relieved.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“And he’s pretty oblivious to the fuss.”

“He’s a nice lad.”

Milton got up, took a long branch and stirred up the fire. He sat down again next to her, closer than before.

She looked over to the hut. “What about them?”

“They’re not getting out, if that’s what you mean.”

“Turned out easy, didn’t it?”

“I told you it would be.”

“You did.” She shifted, just a little, so that her shoulder touched his shoulder and her thigh brushed his thigh.

“Was that the dinner you were talking about?” she asked.

“I was thinking of something a little different.”

“I don’t know. That was pretty good. You’re versatile.”

“Don’t know if I’ve been called that before.”

He stretched out his legs, flexing his aching muscles, and then he found himself reaching across to her, brushing the hair away from her forehead. Ellie leaned up close against him, her legs tucked beneath her.

“You’re very mysterious,” she said. “I don’t really know anything about you, do I?”

He let his fingers fall down her face, touching the line of her cheekbone and then her jaw, saying, “There’s not much to tell.”

She said, “I don’t believe you,” touching his cheek with her hand, then kissed him, very gently, and said, laughing, “You taste of venison.”

He felt her fingers brush through his hair and reach around to the back of his head as she kissed him again, a little more firmly, and he had to tell himself to wait. Her lips tasted sweet and her small, slim body felt good against him. He put his arms around her, drawing her even closer, feeling her body in his hands, and she brushed his mouth with hers, saying, “What’s the big secret, John? What happened to you?”

He pulled away a little, reflexively, and she looked at him with concern.

She laid her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Ellie.” He looked for the words, setting aside the reticence that was so practiced it was almost automatic, looking for something more real, more honest. “There are some things in my past that I don’t like to talk about.”

“You don’t—”

“I did some things, after the army, some work for my government. Ten years’ worth of it. I regret all of it, every day I spent working for them. It’s not something I can talk about, for a lot of different reasons. Shame is one of them.”

“John—” she began.

He cut her off gently. “It doesn’t matter.”

“—you have the saddest eyes.”

She took off her jacket and then her sweater, just a bra beneath, and then she took that off, too. Her body was lit by the flicker from the fire, oranges and yellows and reds, and he felt a catch in his throat. She had the most perfect skin, and as he reached across, it felt as smooth as silk. She reached for his jacket, pushing it off, and worked her hands beneath his sweater. They made love on the shore, in the firelight, both of them quiet because they weren’t alone, but neither of them able to stop. She remained silent when they were done, just the in and out of her breathing, until she said “John?” and he asked her what. But she didn’t say anything else, and Milton covered her with his jacket and lay down with her on the grass until she was asleep.

Chapter 17

Dawn broke at a little before five. Milton had carried Ellie to the empty tent and laid her gently inside. She hadn’t come to relieve him and, when he took a slow tour of the camp to reassure himself that all was well, he saw that she was still inside, breathing deeply and with a peaceful expression on her face. Mallory and her brother were sound asleep in the other tent. The four men were sleeping too, the sound of their snoring audible over the crackle of the fire. Milton had been the only one left awake. He could have woken Ellie, but he didn’t have the heart. He knew he would be fine to make the walk back into Truth without sleep and, besides, he would be able to catch up back at the hotel.

It had been a beautiful, peaceful night. He had heard the sound of trout splashing in the lake, a beaver’s tail slapping against the water, and owls hooting in the trees. The stars were spread out above him in a breathtakingly beautiful celestial display that had reminded him of his walk into Texas across the Mexican border, not so long ago. He sat back against the stump with his rifle laid out across his knees, taking it all in. He let his thoughts wander, thinking on all of the big skies he had slept beneath since he had fled from London, the corrupt members of Group Fifteen hard on his tail. That situation had been resolved now, but he had no desire to return. He wanted to see more skies like this one.

He thought of Ellie.

Milton went to the camp store, collected breakfast, and set about making it. They had bacon, tins of beans and a jar of coffee, so he built up the fire again and started to work. When he returned to the fire, she was standing there.

“Morning,” she said, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Morning.”

“I didn’t wake up.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“You should’ve woken me.”

“No,” he said. “It was quiet. And I thought you needed the sleep more than I did.”

There were spare baked potatoes from last night, and Milton turned those into hash browns.

“About last night,” she said.

He stopped what he was doing and looked at her, aware that he cared very much about what she was about to say.

Mallory and Arty emerged from their tent.

He felt his stomach turn over.

“It was good,” she said, rubbing her hand up and down his arm.

He dished up a plate of bacon and beans and gave it to Ellie. He smiled at her.

The Stantons approached before he could say anything. Arty was a big man, a good deal taller than him and significantly heavier, too. Mallory, never far from his side, was a wispy little thing in comparison. Yet, where he had an expression of peaceful simplicity in his large eyes, hers burned with sharp intelligence. She might have been triumphant to have been proved right, and Milton wouldn’t have begrudged her that, but it appeared that she was more concerned to make sure her brother was content.

“You hungry?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Mallory said. “Arty?”

“Very,” he said.

“Like beans and bacon?”

“Sure I do.”

“Hash browns?”

He nodded, hungrily.

“Sit down, then. I’ll bring it over.”

There came a banging against the side of the log cabin. It started with one man, and then the others joined in.

Arthur shrank back against Mallory.

“It’s all right,” Milton said. “They’re locked up tight.”

He dished out two generous portions and handed over the plates. They wandered down to the shore, sat down and started to eat.

Ellie brought her empty plate over to him. “You think we can get the men back into town?” she asked quietly when she was sure that the Stantons couldn’t hear.

Milton looked over at the cabin. The banging was louder and angrier now. He picked up his rifle. “We can.”

“You’ve got more confidence than I do.”

“It won’t be a problem.”

He splashed through the water to the cabin and unknotted the rope, letting the span fall loose. He stepped back and raised the rifle, aiming at the door. “Out you come,” he called. “One at a time.”

The four of them came out in single file, the morning sun bright in their eyes after ten hours in the gloom of the windowless cabin. Their hands were still trussed up, and any thoughts of escaping into the tree line would have been squashed by the sight of the rifle, aimed dead ahead, close range, a shot that would be impossible to miss. That was before they looked into the face of the man wielding the rifle, saw his implacable blue eyes, and realised that he wouldn’t hesitate to take the shot. Even Callow, who came out last, swallowed down the abuse that he was ready to deliver.

Milton directed them down to the fire. He unfastened them, one by one, allowing each of them to eat breakfast, drink a mug of coffee, and then relieve himself in the underbrush before he secured him again and moved on to the next man. The routine was laborious, and it took half an hour, but he knew that it would be a lot easier to transport the prisoners south if they had full bellies and empty bladders.

He observed them carefully, assessing them, trying to work out the hierarchy that existed within their group. Callow was obviously in charge, with Chandler his deputy. The other two were just lackeys.

He noticed one curious thing as he undid and then refastened the cable ties: they each had a tattoo inscribed on the inside of their wrists.

The tattoos were identical. Two numbers separated by a colon, “1” and “3.”

“What does that mean?” he asked Chandler, the last to be attended to.

He turned his wrist over so that the tattoo was hidden and said nothing. Milton didn’t press.

Milton had the men sit back down in front of the embers of the fire and then called Arty to come over to him.

“Could I have a word with you, Arty?”

“Sure, Mr. Milton.”

Michael Callow stared at Arty with unveiled hatred, and Milton saw how badly it frightened him. His hands were shaking as he took him by the arm and led him away from the fire.

“I found their shotguns last night,” Milton said to him. “In the shack. The FBI will need them for evidence, but I don’t want to bring them all with us, and I don’t want to leave them here, ready to be fired. It’s not safe. Could you get them for me?”

“I sure can.”

“I saw three. Do you know if there are any more?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Could you have a look?”

“Sure.”

He hurried away, and Milton walked across to where Ellie and Mallory were finishing their coffees.

“Are you ready?” he asked them.

“I think so,” Ellie said.

Mallory nodded, her mouth full.

“Mallory, you’ll need to keep an eye on your brother. Those boys have scared him.”

“I know,” she said, her eyes flinty. “You don’t need to worry about him.”

“I don’t want them talking to him. If they start, we’ll get them to stop.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“It’s difficult to speak with a rag in your mouth.”

She grinned at the thought of that, and Milton was almost tempted to gag them anyway, just to keep her happy.

“They’re going to go up front, and I’ll come behind them. I’ll have a shotgun on them. They’ll know not to do anything rash. If I fire, it’ll make a mess of all of them.”

“What about me?” Ellie asked.

“You’re with me. Let them know that you’ve got your pistol and you’ll use it if you have to.”

They turned as Arty came out of the store with the three shotguns clasped to his chest.

“Is that it?”

“There’s no more.”

“Good work.”

One of the shotguns was double-barrelled. He wanted that one for himself, far better for suppressing a group of men than his rifle. It was loaded with two shells. That was all he wanted. Two shells ought to be enough for him to put down any attempt to escape but, if it wasn’t, if he was overpowered and they confiscated the gun, then they would have two trigger pulls and that would be that. He wouldn’t have to face an enemy with an even more serious advantage.

He set the other two down on the ground and, taking out his Swiss Army knife, opened one of the smaller blades and took up the first gun. It was a Mossberg 500 Series, nice and new, certainly not cheap. He checked the magazine tube and the chamber and removed the ammunition, then opened the action halfway, using the blade to turn the takedown screw counterclockwise. He pulled forward on the barrel, separating it from the receiver. He removed the barrel from the other shotgun just the same and slipped both of them into his pack. He gave the receivers back to Arty and asked him to take them back to the store.

He went back to the fire and used a long stick to break it apart.

The four young men looked up at him with hatred in their eyes.

“Ready, boys?” he said. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”

Milton cut an azimuth to a tree on the top of the ridge, intending to pick up the old railroads that they had used to traverse the back country as they headed up to the lake yesterday. The weather was clear and bright, and looked set to stay that way for the rest of the morning, although Milton looked at the high, scudding clouds borne along by strong winds, and he wondered how long it would take for the rain to return. They left the campsite much as they had found it. Ellie would return with the FBI in due course. The motorbikes and the shotguns would yield useful evidence in the proceedings that would be brought against the four suspects.

Milton took his rope and looped it around the waist of each man. He refastened the cable ties so that their hands were in front of them rather than behind their backs. The first couple of hours would involve a challenging climb up steep terrain, and if one of them lost his balance he might bring the others down with him.

“All right,” Milton said. “Let’s get started. Up to the ridge.”

They set off in formation: Eric Sellar, Reggie Sturgess, Michael Callow, and Tom Chandler, then Milton with the shotgun and Ellie with her pistol, then Mallory, and Arthur. Milton had slung his rifle across his shoulder, beneath his pack, and held the shotgun in a loose and easy grip, his finger just outside the trigger guard, two cartridges loaded and ready to fire.

They started the climb up to the top of the ridge. The four young men tramped up the slope with sullen dispositions. Sellar tripped halfway up, his right foot sliding through a patch of loose gravel, and he dropped to one knee, cursing as the sharp stones cut through his trousers. Milton held out an arm, holding Ellie, Mallory, and Arthur behind him, wary of a ruse to bring him in close enough so that the others could try to overpower him. There was no attempt, though, and, as Sellar clambered back to his feet, Callow cursed at him for nearly bringing him down, too.

They crested the rise after an hour and found the remnants of a gravelled road that they had missed on the way to the lake yesterday. It was heavily overgrown with evergreens and tangles of alder, and Milton was glad that the moose and bear had preserved something of a trail through it. Eventually, the gravel petered out, and they bisected the ancient railroad. Milton told the men to follow it, their course changing by twenty degrees, as they headed southwest to Mirror Lake.

The railroad descended at a gentle slope, passing through pleasant meadows full of lacy ferns and long grasses. They stopped for ten minutes, and Milton cut a fresh azimuth to bring them right up to the southeastern edge of the lake. They reached the water’s edge at lunchtime and stopped for thirty minutes to refill their canteens. Milton took out the PowerBars that he had bought in Truth and handed them around. They all devoured them hungrily. Milton had enough for them to have another bar each, and that would have to be enough. He had no intention of stopping again if he could avoid it.

Ellie, Mallory, and Arthur sat away from the others, talking quietly amongst themselves and staring out at the pair of loons that were floating quietly on the lake, the birds stabbing down into the water with their sharp beaks to catch the minnows that were drifting in the clear waters beneath them.

Milton looked down at his map and cut a fresh azimuth. They had made good time. It was twelve miles back to Truth from the lake. He would have been able to make that at a forced march pace in three hours. He figured that the others would slow him down by half, perhaps even three quarters. Even if it took them twice as long, they would still be in Truth by nightfall.

“Everyone up,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The prisoners began to complain soon afterwards. It started as grumbling and bickering between the four of them, with Callow making dark suggestions that Chandler was responsible for what had happened to them by persuading him that it would be entertaining to bring Arty Stanton up to the lake. Chandler was defensive, responding tetchily that Callow had needed little persuasion.

Milton listened to them argue and wondered how they managed to stay out of sight for so long. They were unprofessional and unprepared, and it had been child’s play to apprehend them. If the roles had been reversed, Milton would have established a permanent watch up on the ridge, he would never have allowed a campfire during the day, there would have been no alcohol, and he most certainly would not have allowed an outsider to be brought into the camp for something so trivial as a means to alleviate the boredom. And yet, with all their inexperience and immaturity, they had managed to hide out from the local police and the FBI for weeks. Milton could barely credit it.

They were skirting the boundary of an old cedar swamp festooned with ferns, skunk cabbage, and a carpet of viridescent moss, when Callow turned his head.

“So, who are you?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

“Why? Frightened what I might do to you when I get out?”

Milton allowed himself a chuckle. “Do I look frightened?”

“No. You look like you’re hiding behind that shotgun. Why don’t you put that down, untie my hands, and see how tough you are then.”

Milton smiled at him, easy and confident. “You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that.”

“Yeah, bitch? You think?”

Milton jerked his head forwards. “Keep walking.”

“You think I’m going to get locked up?”

“I know you are.”

“Fuck that shit. I ain’t getting locked up for nothing, brother.”

“You killed a man. You’re going away for a long time. I think you’re lucky that they don’t execute their prisoners in Wisconsin.”

Callow hawked up a ball of phlegm and spat it noisily at the side of the road.

“He don’t know shit,” Eric Sellar said, with confidence he shouldn’t have felt, a smile curling his lip. “He’s got no idea.”

“Shut up, Eric,” Callow warned.

“I was just saying—”

“You were just saying nothing. You just keep walking, that’s all, all right?”

Sellar glowered at Callow, but did as he was told.

“You sure you don’t want to show me how tough you really are?”

Milton jabbed him in the shoulder blades with the muzzle of the shotgun.

Milton stretched his fingers and then curled them back around the stock and the fore-end. Something was making him unsettled, and he knew what it was: Callow was full of piss and vinegar when he really ought to have been anxious. He was trussed up and forced to march at gunpoint back into town, where he would be handed over to the FBI and swallowed up by the legal process. Milton could tell that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and that he was young and dumb enough to think that making threats in front of his friends equated to leadership in testing circumstances. But there was something about it that didn’t chime for him. Something wasn’t right.

“I need a piss,” Callow said. “I need to stop.”

“Going to have to hold it in. We’re going to stop in an hour.”

“An hour? You’re fucking kidding me, right?”

Milton jabbed him in the back again with the shotgun.

“Shut up, Callow. Keep walking.”

Milton led them off the track as the sun showed three in the afternoon. There was a quiet hollow with a small lake in the middle, sandhills calling in the distance. Milton distributed the remaining energy bars and said that everyone should refill their canteens for the last push into Truth. Then he released them, one at a time, and accompanied them into the underbrush so that they could relieve themselves. Ellie covered the others while he was away.

“Stop looking at me,” Callow said when it was his turn. “What, you some kind of faggot, getting your kicks looking at me going about my business?”

“That’s right, Callow. I find you very attractive.”

“You sound like a faggot, that faggoty accent you got.”

“Have you finished?”

“No.”

“Yes, you have. Zip it up. Back to the others.”

He prodded him between the shoulders, and he set off to where Ellie was standing guard over the others. They had been ragging on her, and she wore an expression of ineffable irritation as Milton nudged Callow into the circle with his friends.

“You all right?” he asked her after they backed out of earshot.

“They’re full of it,” she said quietly. “I’m going to enjoy watching their faces when they get dropped into Jackson.”

“What will happen to them?”

“I’ll call my partner, and he’ll send a team up. They’ll be taken to Detroit, processed, and then they’ll be looking at a cell for the next few months while we finish up the case against them.”

“No bail?”

“For them? No chance.”

Milton heard the sound of an engine as he stood and cut another azimuth, and as he looked for the source he saw an ATV laden with fishing gear race along the old railroad on the embankment above them. He paused, listening for a variation in the sound of the engine that might suggest that the driver had seen them and was slowing down to come around for another look, but the noise stayed constant. The chug became a whine, and after five minutes, everything was quiet again save for the peaceful chatter of the wildlife.

Milton looked back to the group, his attention snagged by the thick, angry margin of black clouds that were massing on the horizon.

Mallory and Arty made their way alongside them.

“Storm’s coming,” Mallory said.

“Again?” Ellie said. “I’ve never seen so much rain.”

“Time of the year.”

Ellie shielded her eyes and looked out at the growing darkness. “Think we can beat it?”

Milton looked at it, looked down at his map, tried to assess the speed the storm would likely close on their position and the distance they had still to travel. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think we might get wet again.”

The rain came when they were still an hour out of town. It fell lightly at first, a drizzle that seeped into Milton’s clothes, but it gradually gained strength until it was a powerful downpour. The heavy cover from the canopy overhead kept them reasonably dry, but, as they picked their way farther south, the big trees became less frequent and then their shelter disappeared completely. The deluge sluiced across his face. The others bent their heads to it, each step a trudge through fresh mud.

Milton brought them out of the wilderness at the same point where they had started, the tall field of corn swaying angrily in the strong, wet wind. They marched in single file through the gap between the crops, thunder rumbling overhead.

Ellie’s Escalade was where they had left it.

“We won’t get them all in the car,” she said.

“Me and Arty could go into town and get the sheriff?” Mallory said.

Milton shook his head. “I’d rather we stay together until it’s done. We might as well just keep walking.”

He stayed at the back of the formation as they finally trekked back into Truth. He was tired, and his feet were sore, but he was used to feeling like that, and in a perverse sort of way, it was reassuring.

They crossed the railroad track and entered the outskirts of town. The weather was awful, but there were plenty of people around. Milton had told Mallory to lead them to the Sheriff’s Office along the quietest route possible, but even so, they had to pass along the main street for a stretch. Johnny’s Bar was busy, and after they were seen approaching by a customer who was outside smoking a cigarette, the bar emptied out, and the drinkers gaped as they walked by.

Milton had known that this would be the most difficult part of the journey. The four fugitives were well known from their mugshots, and it didn’t take long for a small crowd to gather, following just a few steps behind them. Some of the crowd had joined from the bar, and some of those were drunk. Ellie dropped back so that she could speak to him without being overheard.

She looked anxious. “I don’t like this.”

Milton looked back at the crowd. “Neither do I.”

“Some of the people we spoke to up here, they saw those boys as modern-day Robin Hoods. Taking from the rich, giving to the poor, all that nonsense. They don’t seem to remember that guard they shot and killed, the family he left behind.”

“Doesn’t fit in with the story,” Milton said.

“Hey,” someone shouted out. “You let them boys go. They ain’t done nothing wrong.”

“Who deputised you?” another called. “That ain’t right, marching them in like that.”

Milton felt an itchy sensation between his shoulder blades. He tightened his grip on the shotgun.

“It’s not far,” Ellie said. “Five more minutes.”

“We’ll be okay.”

They had turned off Main Street when Milton saw Lester Grogan running towards them. He had a rifle clasped in both hands, the gun swinging left and right and bouncing up and down as he pumped his legs. His cuffs jangled on his belt. He slowed to a walk as he approached, his mouth dropping open.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

Mallory spoke first. “I told you,” she said with a faint hint of accusation. “I told you they were up there with my brother.”

“You did,” he said. “Looks like I owe you an apology. Where were they?”

“The old mine up by the Lake of the Clouds.”

“Jesus,” he breathed out. “How…?”

“Can we get them in a cell, please, Sheriff?” Ellie said. “I’d feel much better with them locked up.”

Lester nodded. “All right, folks,” he called out to the crowd. “There’s nothing to see here. Go about your business.”

“Come on, Lester. That ain’t right, bringing them in like that. Man’s innocent until he’s proved guilty, ain’t that right?”

Lester looked over at the speaker, a big man in a check shirt, and nodded his agreement. “That’s right, Morris, and these boys haven’t been convicted of anything yet. That’s a matter for the FBI now.”

“Sheriff?” Ellie pressed.

The sheriff rested his rifle against his shoulder and pointed down the road. “Let’s get going.”

Chapter 18

Lester unlocked the door at the back of the Sheriff’s Office and went inside. Milton waited in the yard, the shotgun aimed ahead, his finger settled loosely around the trigger. Callow, Chandler, Sellar, and Sturgess followed the sheriff inside. The crowd had disbanded a little, but there were still a handful of hotheads who had followed them, and Milton was pleased to go into the building himself. He shut and locked the door behind him.

Lester looked at him with an expression that said he wanted to know everything that had happened, but knew that his questions would have to wait. He opened the door to the corridor and went inside, leading the way down into the basement and the single cell. The four men followed him down, Ellie bringing up the rear.

Mallory waited. She still held her brother’s hand.

“Are you all right?” Milton asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

“You don’t have to do that. I’m happy to help.”

“You were the only person who listened to me.”

“You caught me in a good mood.” He nodded down in the direction of the basement. “I’d had a good night’s sleep in there. I’m not normally so friendly.”

She looked up at him and smiled. Happiness seemed to be a rare emotion for her, and he was pleased to see it.

“I’m going to get a taxi and take Arty home,” she said. “It’s been a long day. It’s been longer for him, being stuck up there, and he’s tired. I’m tired. Is that all right, do you think?”

“Yes,” he said. “I expect so. Ellie will want to speak to you, though. And Arty, too.”

“That’s fine.”

“Where can she find you?”

There was a stack of flyers on the shelf next to Mallory. She licked her finger and separated one from the pile, took a pen from the desk, and wrote her address down. “We’ve got an RV,” she explained. “There’s a trailer park west of town, you drive through there and we’re right out back, next to the woods.”

“I’m sure she’ll find it.”

She paused there awkwardly for a long moment.

Milton put his hand on her arm, leaned down, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mallory. Get a good night’s sleep.”

She smiled at him again, the bobbing of her larynx betraying the fact that her throat was choked with emotion. Milton went across to open the door so that they could get outside. The crowd had gone, the show over for the day. Milton watched as they stepped through the yard and walked to the town’s only taxi office. He shut and locked the door and went downstairs.

Lester had unlocked the door to the cell and stood aside as the four men filed through.

“It’s going to be a little squashed,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

Callow was the last one in. He paused at the door and turned back. He ignored Lester and looked straight across the room to Milton. “You just made the biggest mistake in your life,” he goaded. “You’re going to pay for it in full, you’ll see. All of you, you’re all going to pay.”

“That’s enough, son,” Lester said, putting his hand on the young man’s shoulder and gently pushing him inside.

“You know your scripture, Milton?”

Milton turned his back.

“Let’s leave these boys to stew,” Lester said, ushering Milton out.

“‘If you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain.’” Lester shut the door, but Callow raised his voice, shouting the words so that they were still audible. “‘For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.’”

“You’ve got more patience than me,” Lester said. “If he kept talking like that long enough, I would’ve knocked some sense into him before we were halfway home.”

Milton frowned. For all Callow’s bluster, there was something about him now that he hadn’t noticed before. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he knew it was important.

Lester locked the door, pocketed the key, and indicated the stairs back up to the ground floor. “Let’s go,” he said. “You’ve got a story to tell, and I’m practically dying to hear it.”

Lester boiled the kettle and made coffee for Milton, Ellie, and himself. They took their mugs into his office and sat down. He reached up to his shelf and took down a bottle of whisky that Milton hadn’t noticed there. He brought it around the desk to where they were sitting.

“Want a little something extra?” he asked.

Milton held his hand over the mug. “Not for me.”

“You sure? Something to warm you up?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

He shrugged. “What about you?” he said to Ellie. “You going to join me for a pick-me-up?”

She held her mug up for him. “If you insist.”

Lester poured a generous measure and then poured another into his own mug. Milton looked away and tried to ignore the sharp, acrid smell of the alcohol.

“You want to tell me what happened up there?”

“We brought them in,” Milton said. “Not much more to say.”

“Two of you, four of them. How’d that play out?”

“They were a little lazy. They weren’t expecting us.”

“They were just camping out?”

“That’s right.”

“Come on, Milton. Throw me a bone. How’d it go down?”

Milton told the story quickly and efficiently. He had no interest in the limelight. Ellie filled in the gaps.

Lester leaned back in his chair and rested his boots on the desk. He looked at Ellie and nodded in Milton’s direction. “He ever tell you what he used to do back before whatever it is he’s doing these days, all the wandering and shit?”

“Vaguely. He’s very coy about it.”

“SAS,” he said with an appreciative nod. “Special Air Service. I served with those boys before, when I was in the service myself. Hard as nails.”

“That was a long time ago,” Milton said, waving it off. “Another lifetime.”

“You don’t forget it, though, do you? Those lessons are for a lifetime.”

“Evidently,” Ellie said.

Milton took off his wet jacket and hooked it over the back of the chair.

Lester shook his head. “Four young men like that, barely more than boys. What a waste.”

Milton slotted his rifle into the rack on the wall and sat down. He would go back to the hotel and take another night. He was getting too old to sleep out in the open without feeling the consequences the following day. It was ridiculous. He’d slept under the stars for weeks on end when he was in the army, and the younger him would never have credited the aches and pains he was feeling now. It was embarrassing. He was getting old and slow and soft.

Milton was brought back from his reverie by a knock on the door. Lester took the shotgun from his desk and went outside to the main room. Milton and Ellie followed.

“Yes?”

A muffled voice answered, “It’s Morten and Lars.”

The sheriff turned back to Ellie and nodded. “It’s all right,” he said. “Two of my men.”

Ellie nodded her approval and Lester unlocked the door. The two men came inside, rain dripping off the brims of their hats. They took them off, the water running down onto the floor. Milton recognised Morten Lundquist from before. The other man, thick set and with a soft, blubbery face, was introduced as Deputy Lars Olsen.

“What is it?” Lester asked.

“The Stantons,” Lundquist said.

Milton stepped forwards anxiously. “What’s happened?”

“There’s been an accident.”

“What?”

Olsen took over. “They were in Joe’s taxi, got blindsided by a pickup, smashed up pretty good. I was first on the scene.”

“Are they all right?”

“They were lucky. She’s got cuts and bruises. Looks like he broke his arm. Could’ve been worse.”

“Where are they?”

“On the way to the hospital.”

“But they just left here,” Milton said.

“It was just outside Joe’s office. Road’s wet, slippery, the pickup skidded, couldn’t stop… like I say, they were lucky.”

“Where’s the hospital?”

“Wakewood.”

“Twenty miles.”

“Give or take,” Lester said. “You want to see them?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll get a cab.”

“That won’t be easy,” Lester said. “Joe’s taxi is the only one in town and he’s not going anywhere. You’ll have to call Wakewood and have them send one to get you. Hell, I’d take you myself, but I’ve got to stay here until those boys are taken care of. You want me to get you a number?”

Olsen pointed back to the door. “You want, I could take you?”

Milton looked over questioningly at Ellie. “I’m all right,” she said. “You should go.”

“Yes,” Lester said. “Go. I’m not going anywhere.”

“It’s no problem,” Olsen said. “Got my car outside.”

Milton took his jacket from the back of the chair and put it on. “Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate that.”

“No problem at all.”

“Lester — can I leave my pack and my rifle here?”

“Course. Hope they’re all right.”

Olsen opened the door, tilted his hat against the rain, and stepped outside. Milton followed him.

Ellie took off her wet jacket and went through into the restroom to get some towels so that she could mop the water from her face. Her hair was sodden, plastered against her forehead and down the back of her neck. All she wanted was a shower, to let the hot water run across her skin and get rid of the chill.

No, she thought, strike that. I want a long, indulgent bath.

She scraped her hair back with her fingers and stared into the mirror. She looked a terrible mess. She thought of Milton. What did he mean, dinner? In Truth? Or was he going to come back to Detroit with them? He hadn’t mentioned it today, but, she reminded herself, today hadn’t been the occasion for small talk. He had been focused on the four prisoners, following behind them, alert and vigilant from the first minute until the last. She had been nervous before they had started, but that feeling had not lasted very long. There was something reassuring about being with him. He was, she decided, relentlessly able.

And then she thought of Orville. He would have complained about the weather, about the chiggers and the insects that had buzzed around them, the mud on his clothes and the sheer inconvenience of being out of town, so far from his car and cellphone coverage and—

Shit.

Orville.

She should have called him. She had broken a bunch of rules already, and she had allowed the fact that she was off the reservation to blind her to proper procedure. First up, she needed to clear out the civilians. At least the Stantons had gone home, but there was Milton to think about, too. He would need to go back to the hotel.

And then they would need to speak with the marshals. It was their responsibility for moving the prisoners, getting them back down to the city. They would send a truck to pick them up. Orville could sort all that out.

She could be in trouble for what had happened. A stickler for the rules, someone like Orville, they could go to town on her for what she’d done. A single agent going after four armed fugitives was stupid to the point of being reckless. She should have insisted that they come back down from the lake to call for backup. She should have gotten the civilians out of harm’s way. But, she knew, she would only have gotten into hot water if something bad had happened. There was a big difference in breaking the rules and coming up empty and breaking the rules and bringing the bad guys back. She figured that she would be okay.

She patted her pockets for her phone. It was in her jacket. She took another handful of tissue paper and wiped it against the back of her neck, mopping up the last of the moisture, dumped it in the trash, and went back into the office.

Lundquist and the sheriff were talking.

“You feeling more human?” the sheriff asked.

“Better.”

“Pretty fierce out there,” Lundquist offered.

“Tell me about it.”

“We get all sorts of weather up here, right, Lester? And it changes, blink of an eye. The number of times we’ve had to go up there and help folk out who got surprised when it dropped twenty degrees in six hours, you wouldn’t believe it.”

She went across to her jacket. ”I need to make a call.”

“The bureau?” Lester said.

She nodded.

Lundquist uncrossed his legs. “You haven’t called this in yet?”

“No. No signal up there, and then I forgot.” She took out the phone and switched it on. “It’s okay. I can do it now. They won’t get up here until tomorrow now, anyway.”

She turned her back on him and scrolled through the address book for Orville’s number.

“Don’t.”

“Sorry?”

“Put it down.”

It was Lundquist. His voice was quiet and firm.

“Morten?” came Lester Grogan’s surprised voice.

Ellie turned back to them.

Lundquist had drawn his pistol, and he was aiming it square at her.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re not calling anyone. Put it on the chair.”

She stared at the gun. “What are you doing, Deputy?”

“Morten! Have you gone mad?”

“Put the phone down right now.”

Ellie looked into his eyes and saw grim certainty there. He wasn’t playing. This wasn’t a prank. She looked down at the round opening at the end of the barrel, the narrow black hole ringed with chrome, and raised her hands slowly and carefully in front of her chest.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m putting it down. Relax.”

“Take off your gun.”

She unhooked her holster and draped it over the back of the chair.

Lundquist waved at the wall, away from the gun rack. “Get over there.”

She did as she was told.

Lundquist’s sleeve had ridden up a little, and Ellie saw a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. The sleeve fell back down again and obscured it before she could look at it properly.

“What are you doing, Morten?”

“Get up, Lester.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Up. Now.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

Lundquist jabbed the gun at them and his sleeve rode up again. Ellie saw the tattoo.

1:3.

She remembered.

The four robbers in the cell downstairs all had the same tattoo.

What?

The sheriff did as he was told.

Lundquist moved around, stepping between them and the gun rack and the door. “That fucking guy. Why didn’t you make sure he stayed out of town? None of this would’ve happened if he wasn’t here.”

Lester’s face switched through confusion to a slow, and shocked, realisation. “Please don’t say you’re involved with those boys?”

He chuckled bitterly, without humour. “Yeah, you could say that. You’ve got my son downstairs, Lester.”

“What?”

“Michael. He’s my blood.”

“You never—”

“It was a long time ago. You and me, that time we went to Green Bay, remember?”

“The girl behind the bar?”

“I’m not proud of it, but he’s my boy. My son. That means something to me, having a boy, you know it does.”

“So don’t do something stupid that’ll get both of you arrested.”

“It’s not just that. Those boys you’ve got downstairs are soldiers. They’re patriots, Lester. They’re fighting against the tyranny,” he spat the word, “that people like that bitch over there represent.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m their commanding officer, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to sit here and let the federal government get hold of them, swallow them up, and make them disappear for fifty years.”

“They killed a man, Morten.”

“This is a war, Lester. You make an omelette, got to break a few eggs.”

Lester’s face darkened with anger.

“Take it easy,” Ellie warned him, but his anger just kept deepening, and he didn’t hear her. She looked at Lundquist. “Put the gun down, Officer. Nothing has happened yet that can’t be straightened out.”

“Listen to the agent,” Lester said.

That was a mistake, and his eyes flashed with fury. “The day I listen to an agent of the federal government is the day I die.”

Lester moved fast, before Ellie could stop him. He rushed across the room, closing the gap between him and Lundquist so quickly that the older man didn’t have time to react. They slammed into one another, Lester’s momentum carrying them both across to the far wall, crashing together, his hands going for Lundquist’s right wrist and the pistol. They wrestled, evenly matched, until Lester’s youth started to show, and he pushed Lundquist’s arm down towards the floor. The older man grunted with exertion, but his arm was straightened out and then pinioned against the wall. Lester reached his fingers down to the pistol, trying to prise it loose. Lundquist bucked off the wall, sending the two of them stumbling in Ellie’s direction.

She stepped into them both, wrapped an arm around Lundquist’s chest, and tried to restrict his range of movement. He shifted his stance, and Ellie lost her balance, stumbling into Lester and breaking the hold that he still had on Lundquist’s wrist. She fell to the floor.

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 plaid 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.”

“Sorry, Mallory,” he said, with that same awkwardness that she had always found so irritating.

She had never quite gotten used to the idea of Leland Mulligan as a sheriff’s deputy. She was no expert on such matters, obviously, but she would have imagined that a man like him was about as useful for keeping the peace as lips on a duck. Leland was four years her senior, but Truth was a tiny town, and it was inevitable that their paths would cross. Mallory had been to high school with Leland’s younger brother, Kurt, and it had become something of a standing joke between her and her limited circle of friends that the older boy had a crush on her. From what she had been able to gather, Leland had been a poor student, disruptive, something of a bully and not particularly bright. He had graduated with no qualifications and had worked in his father’s autorepair shop for a year, spending his wages on booze, smokes, and a collection of the most awful tattoos that Mallory had ever seen. And then he had joined the police.

He was wearing his uniform tonight, and it looked, as it always did, both ill-fitting and incongruous.

“What do you want, Leland?”

“I need you to come with me,” he said.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m serious. I need to ask you some questions.”

“You need to?”

“That’s right.”

“About what?”

“Your brother. What he saw, those fellas he was up there with. It’s him I really need to talk to, but, the way he is, you know, I guess I probably need you to come, too.”

“The way he is?”

He picked his words carefully. “You know. The retardation.”

“Arty’s not the retard, Leland.”

The barb flew right over his head. “I’m trying to be sensitive, Mallory. To his needs. I don’t want him to be frightened.”

“He’s got nothing to be frightened of. And anyway, it’s irrelevant because he’s not going anywhere tonight. We just got back. I don’t know if you heard, Leland, but we just trekked down from the lake in this shitty weather. We’re both cold and hungry, and we just want to get something to eat and go to bed, all right? If you need to speak to him, we’ll come by the Sheriff’s Office tomorrow morning.”

Irritation flickered across his face. “No, Mallory, not all right. You need to come right now. I’m not asking you, understand? I’m speaking as an officer of the law.”

She laughed in his face. “Oh, fuck off, Leland. You can’t get us to come tonight, and you know it.”

The colour in his face darkened, and she was reminded of the bully in him. He was ready to insist again when he was shouldered out of the way. He dropped the flashlight onto its end, and the light fired straight up for a moment, throwing a sick yellow glow up onto the face of Michael Callow. The batteries spilled out and the light went off. Callow reached up into the doorway, grabbed her wrist in a strong hand, and yanked her out and down to the ground. She caught her toe on the paving stone they had in front of the door and fell onto her hands and knees. Callow yanked on her arm again, throwing her behind him. Her face splashed through the mud, and when she looked up, she saw Callow climbing into the RV and the three other men in his gang coming towards her.

“Arty!” she screamed.

There was the sound of a scuffle inside the RV, something falling to the floor and shattering, and then raised voices.

“Arty!”

“Shut up,” Eric Sellar said, knotting his fist in the fabric at the back of her T-shirt and hauling her to her knees. He was tall and gangly, with a dramatically cleft chin; thin, slicked-back hair; and long sideburns.

She heard Arty’s voice from the RV, angry, and then the sound of an impact and a heavy weight dropping to the floor, squeaking the suspension. Callow reappeared in the doorway, backing out, his arms wrapped around Arty’s chest. Callow dropped him outside into the muck and jumped down after him.

“Arty!”

He was dazed, his eyes swimming.

“He hurt my fist,” Callow said, shaking out his fingers. “What’s he got in that spastic head of his? Sand?”

Sellar put his hands under her shoulders and lifted her to her feet. She struggled, broke free for a moment, and cracked him in the jaw with a right cross. She stepped backwards, knowing she should run. Maybe, if she sprinted now, as fast as she could, she might even get away. But then she looked at her brother unconscious in the mud, and the strength faded from her legs. Sellar rubbed his jaw and then swarmed at her, wrapping both his arms around her, pinning her to his body. He smelled of sweat and cigarettes.

“She’s feisty,” he called out to the others. “And she hit me, you see that? Right in the mouth! I say that puts me right at the front of the line. Teach her some fucking manners.”

“Seems reasonable,” Reggie Sturgess said. “She ain’t my type, anyway. No meat on her. Too scrawny.”

“What the fuck, Leland?” Callow was saying. “What the fuck? You said you could get them both to come outside without any of this nonsense.”

“She ain’t rational,” he complained. “She never has been.”

“Not rational because she don’t want anything to do with you? Sounds perfectly rational to me.”

She screamed out, but Sellar clamped a hand across her mouth, picked her up so that her feet were off the ground, and carried her into the rain.

Chapter 21

Michael Callow watched as Reggie and Eric dragged Mallory Stanton away from the RV into the deeper darkness behind it. Girl sure did have a lot of fight about her, kicking and screaming like that, and it took both of them hanging on tight to stop her from breaking free. She probably had an inkling about what was going to happen next. Michael would have struggled too, if it had been him in that particular predicament. He would have struggled for all he was worth.

Leland Mulligan was covering Mallory’s brother with his pistol. Arthur Stanton might have been simple in the head, but he was a big brute, and he had realised what was about to happen, too.

“Cuff him,” Michael said to Leland.

Leland nodded as Tom forced Stanton to the ground, wrapping his arms around his chest and wrestling him down. Leland unhooked his cuffs from his belt, fastened one bracelet around his right wrist, then had to sit down with his knee in the boy’s back and use both hands to pin his left arm close enough to his right so that he could cuff that wrist, too.

“Bring him over here,” Michael said. “I want him to see this.”

Michael smoked his cigarette down to the nub and flicked it into the wet grass. All that time they had spent up in the woods, there hadn’t been the chance to get with any female company. There were women in the militia, a few of them, and he knew from the way that they looked at him that they thought he was fine. He was fine, too, he reminded himself. He was tall and good looking, with powerful arms that he spent hours pumping up, the best sleeve of tattoos that he had ever seen, and the confidence that came with being good with the girls all the way through school. He’d quarterbacked the school team, was good at it, too. There’d been word of him getting a scholarship to Michigan until he’d run into trouble with the police for smoking dope, and that had been the end of that. He’d been bitter about it, bitter and twisted about his dumb luck for years afterwards, but now he was older and wiser, he could see that God had just chosen a different path for him.

He moved in mysterious ways, after all.

Michael had enlisted into the army just as soon as his old man had decided that was the right thing to do. His momma had no time for him, and there wasn’t anything else for him to do. They shipped him out to Iraq, and that was where he had met Tom, Eric, and Reggie. They saw things out there, things that brought focus and clarity to thoughts they had all been having. They shared the same view of their country: government was interfering with things it had no right to interfere with, chipping away at their God-given constitutional rights. Being so far away made it all so obvious. Fuck, they had a Muslim as their commander-in-chief, and how could that be anything but a calamity for their country? Michael had worked on them for hours, preaching the word of the Lord until they were converted. They had talked about it for hours as they dodged bombs and bullets in Baghdad, and when they got back, they had taken the decision to desert together. Michael had brought them back to Truth with him. They had all leapt at the chance to join the militia.

Four soldiers ready to sign up to the only army that could do anything to stop the country from going all the way to Hell.

He adjusted his hat, hooked his thumbs into his belt, and followed the others behind the RV.

Milton made two wrong turns, cursing as he had to reverse out of dead-end streets, but eventually he found the trailer park. Mallory had explained that the Stanton RV was all the way out the back, so he sped along the access road, cut through the park at fifty and rushed out the other side, following the half mile of extra track to the secluded spot where their RV was parked. There was an open gate in a fringe of wood and then a slope down into a hollow. Milton could see the lights from the Winnebago right down at the bottom.

He killed the engine, and the lights, and rolled up to the gate.

He saw a pickup truck, both doors open, its lights shining out onto the RV.

Milton gritted his teeth.

Too late?

He opened the door, stepped down onto the sodden earth, and keeping low, he hurried towards the pickup.

The vehicle was empty.

The rain lashed into him. He shielded his eyes from the streaming water and looked out beyond the truck. Mallory’s Pontiac was parked next to the Winnebago. The door to the RV was open, and there was a light glowing from the inside. The old vehicle hadn’t moved for months. The wheels were on chocks, and there was bindweed all the way up to the axles.

He clenched and unclenched his fists. He wished he had taken ten minutes to search for Olsen’s weapon.

He heard the sound of angry voices from somewhere behind the Winnebago. He sprinted ahead, reached the vehicle, and pressed himself against the side. He heard another shout, and then the sound of a punch or a slap, and then a male voice shouting out, “Leave her alone!”

He edged around, itching to run, but unable to shake off his instinctive caution. Size up the situation and then act. That had saved his life more times than he cared to remember.

He reached the corner of the RV and peered around it.

A faint glow was leaking out from the window at the back, just enough to cast a parcel of yellow light out towards the woods at the bottom of the slope that marked the boundary of the hollow.

Milton saw seven people.

Reggie Sturgess, Eric Sellar, and a uniformed cop he didn’t recognise were restraining Arthur Stanton. The boy had been cuffed, but even so, it was taking all three of them to hold him back. Sturgess, Sellar, and the cop were armed.

Ten feet ahead of them, where the light from the window was almost swallowed by the darkness of the wood, were Michael Callow, Tom Chandler, and Mallory Stanton. Chandler was straddling her, his knees pressing down onto her arms at the elbows. Callow was crouched down behind them, trying to grab hold of her flailing legs. He was laughing, telling her to take it easy, that it would be better if she relaxed and just took what was coming to her. “Hell,” Milton heard him call out, “you might even enjoy it.”

Milton felt a sensation, like a switch flicking in his head.

Old memories opened up, a past life that he had tried to bury but couldn’t.

He went back to the RV and went inside.

The light he had seen from the window was in the main living area, a small standard lamp on the table that was bright enough for him to see all the way to the driver’s seat to his right and then a little way to his left, to the back. The toilet door was closed. The main bedroom was at the rear, and that door was closed, too, with a crack of light visible beneath the door. He went to the galley. A pan of scrambled eggs was burning on the stove. Two slices of toast poked out of the toaster.

There was a dirty kitchen knife in the sink. Milton took it.

Morris Finch led the way to the spot where old man Stanton had parked his Winnebago before he had drunk himself into his early grave. A Ford Explorer was in the road before the gate, blocking the way ahead.

Finch pulled up and stepped out of the van.

“What the hell?” he said, gesturing to the Explorer. “That’s not their car.”

Lundquist lowered his window. “No.”

“Want me to go around it?”

“No.”

He opened the door and stepped outside, the rain swamping across him. He reached back inside and grabbed his rifle. Finch looked across at him expectantly. Lundquist pointed back to the rear of the van. “Get her out and bring her down there with you.”

He skirted the Explorer and descended the hollow. He went around Leland Mulligan’s pickup, the lights still on, shining down onto the Winnebago and Mallory Stanton’s Pontiac. There was enough illumination for him to see Michael and the others around the back of the RV, standing in two loose groups between it and the front of the trees. The first group, nearest to Lundquist, had four people in it. He recognised Leland from his uniform and Arthur Stanton from his bulk. Stanton’s wrists were cuffed.

Michael and Tom Chandler were twenty feet farther on, nearly at the fringe of the wood, dim in the faint glow from the lights. He saw Mallory Stanton on the ground, pinned down beneath Chandler, and Michael struggling to hold her legs still.

An angry rebuke came to his lips. He had known they were not to be trusted. He had given them something simple to do, collect two kids, take them to the farm, and they did this. He should never have trusted them. Was this the discipline the army taught its soldiers these days? No wonder the country was in the state it was in. It wouldn’t stand, not for men under his command.

He tightened his grip on the wet barrel of the rifle and was about to start down towards them when he looked back at the RV and saw the figure of a man emerging stealthily from the open door.

He dropped to a crouch.

The man pressed up tight against the side of the RV and edged along to the corner.

Milton.

He had a knife in his hand.

Milton stepped back into the rain. He made his way along the side of the RV to the corner. He peeked out again. The group of four nearest to him were still turned away. They were watching the second group. Sellar and Sturgess were holding Arty up, forcing him to watch what was about to happen to his sister. Milton heard a whoop of excitement and then the sound of encouragement.

Milton lost himself in red mist. It fell over him, deep and blinding. He worked hard to keep it away, tied it down somewhere at the back of his brain where he could try to forget about it. He never could forget it, though, not properly, and it didn’t take very much for him to summon it again.

Like now.

He held the knife loosely in his fist, left the cover of the RV, and made straight for the larger group.

Arty Stanton bucked hard and forced Sturgess to let go of him. The man was spun around, just enough to see Milton walking straight at him through the pouring rain.

“Fuck,” he said.

Milton kept coming.

“Michael!”

Callow had secured Mallory’s ankles, his shoulders braced as he pressed her feet down onto the ground, and he didn’t turn around.

Sturgess took a half step back, unsure whether he should stand his ground or run.

“Michael!”

Sturgess looked down and saw the knife.

Milton drove it all the way up to the hilt, the blade buried in the soft folds of flesh above the boy’s belt buckle, and then tore it up to his ribcage and left it there.

The young cop who Milton didn’t recognise had seen what had just happened.

His fingers fumbled for his pistol.

Milton closed the distance between them in three paces, took him by the shoulders, and swept his legs. The man went down, landing square on his shoulder blades, and Milton drove his left fist into his gut, winding him.

Down by the trees, Callow grasped Mallory’s legs and turned his head to the abrupt commotion.

Milton reached down to the cop’s belt and tore his pistol from his holster.

Callow saw what was happening, fear replacing the cruelty in his face.

He let go of Mallory’s legs, and she gave an almighty buck, Tom Chandler barely able to hold her down.

Eric Sellar let go of Arty and took a step towards Milton, raising his fist.

Milton shot him in the face.

Sellar toppled backwards and thumped down onto the grass.

Sturgess stumbled over to him, his hand fixed around the hilt of the knife.

Milton fired again, the shot blasting a gory void in Sturgess’ face. He tripped over Sellar and fell down onto his backside, dead before he hit the ground.

“Drop your weapon!”

Milton turned to look across the hollow at Michael Callow. The boy had drawn a pistol, yanked Mallory to her feet, and jammed the muzzle up against her temple.

Milton breathed in and out, regulating his pulse. “Are you all right, Mallory?”

She nodded, her larynx bobbing up and down in her throat. Her eyes were wide with terror.

“She ain’t fine!” Callow called back. “You look here, son. She’s far from fucking fine. Put that gun down now. Right now.”

Milton ignored him. “Arty, are you all right?”

“They want to hurt Mallory,” he said, still struggling with the cuffs.

“They’re not going to hurt her,” he said, loud enough for Callow and Chandler to hear him. “No one is going to hurt either of you.”

“You’re not listening!” Callow shouted. “You don’t put that gun down and I’ll blow her brains out.”

“And what will you do then, Michael?”

Milton started to walk across to them.

“Stay where you are!”

“What are you going to do when you’ve shot her?”

Milton held his aim steady. He had two choices: Chandler was standing in the open, an easy shot, but taking him out now would probably spook Callow into firing. He couldn’t risk it. The second choice, the harder choice, was to take the shot at Callow.

Mallory was slight, much smaller than the man behind her, and she only offered a partial shield for him to hide behind. Milton had a good view of part of his head, his right shoulder, and his right leg. He was fifteen feet away, the light was poor, and the rain was in his eyes.

None of those factors helped his accuracy.

He assessed.

Sixty percent. He would make the shot more times than he missed it.

He held his arm steady and adjusted his aim.

Callow was panicking now. He pulled Mallory closer to his chest and started to back away to the trees.

“I’m not bluffing.”

Milton breathed: in and out, in and out.

“Drop that fucking gun!”

Milton’s finger tightened around the trigger.

CRACK.

The bullet struck him in the left arm just as he heard the report of the rifle from behind him. The impact sent him stumbling forward two paces, his gun arm jerking up for balance and his right hand opening involuntarily, dropping the gun. Pain raced up his arm and into his shoulder, a great bellow of it that dropped him down to the ground just as a second shot whistled above his head. His instincts took over and, ignoring the shriek of agony, he rolled away to his right. A third shot slammed into the earth just ahead of him, throwing muddy sod into his face. He scrambled for grip, his boots sliding on wet grass as he pushed off and threw himself behind the RV, out of sight of whoever it was who had shot at him from the other side of the hollow.

Callow was on the same side of the RV as he was, though.

He shoved Mallory away from him, took aim, and fired.

Milton ducked.

The window above him shattered, glass falling down onto him.

He ran to the driver’s door, praying it was unlocked.

If it wasn’t, Callow was going to have a clear shot at him.

Michael Callow aimed and fired, but he was too hyped up, and the shot went high again, popping the window of the door as Milton yanked it open. He forced himself to draw a deep breath and took aim for a third time, but Milton hurled himself inside the open driver’s door and shut it again before he could get the shot off.

“Fuck!”

He looked back up the slope beyond their pickup and saw a figure jogging down the hill at them. He passed through the headlights, and Callow saw that it was his father, a rifle in his arms, the muzzle pointing forwards.

Mallory was on the grass, trying to get to her feet. Chandler intercepted her, wrapped her in his arms, and hauled her off the ground and away to the side.

Michael’s eyes were drawn to the two bodies on the ground. Eric was still. Reggie’s leg twitched, up and down, up and down. They were dead or as good as dead. Milton had taken them out.

Milton.

He swung the gun back to the RV, trying to remember how many times he had fired and how many shots were left in the magazine.

“Where is he?” his father yelled out over the drumbeat of the rain. Michael realised that the old man wouldn’t have been able to see as Milton had thrown himself inside.

“In there.”

“Did I hit him?”

“In the arm.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Dammit, Michael.”

Callow grit his teeth in frustration. “I was—”

“Keep him penned in,” Lundquist shouted out. “I’ve got this side.”

Callow pounded his fist against his thigh. All he wanted to do was impress the old man, but whatever he did, it seemed he always fell short.

“Leland, Morris is parked at the top. Go and help him bring Flowers down here and get a rifle from the van while you’re at it.”

“What about him?” he said, pointing at Arthur.

“Chandler, if that boy moves, you shoot his sister and then you shoot him.”

“Mallory!” Arthur cried out.

“Don’t move, Arty,” the girl called back. “Do as they say, you understand?”

Michael flicked his eyes to the side again and watched as his father walked slowly down the final slope into the bowl of the hollow. He had the rifle raised now, pointing at the RV.

“Milton,” he yelled out. “You’ve got nowhere to go. You hear me? Come out and get this over with. Maybe the girl and her brother don’t need to get hurt.”

Michael gripped his pistol tight. He took a step forwards and took dead aim at the open doorway. If Milton came out that way, he was going to plug him.

“Milton!” his father called out again.

The voice that answered from inside the RV was muffled, but still distinct enough. “I’ve got a shotgun. You touch either of them, and I swear to God, I’ll do to all of you what I just did to Sellar and Sturgess.”

“He’s bluffing!” Michael yelled. “He ain’t got shit in there.”

“You sure about that?” his father said.

“I didn’t see no shotgun.”

“But are you sure?”

“I’m not sure—”

“Christ, Michael.”

Callow saw Morris Finch and Leland Mulligan coming down the slope. There was a third figure between them, head lolling between her shoulder blades and her legs dragging behind her as they hauled her along. Looked like the FBI bitch had taken a bit of a beating. Michael grinned at the thought of that, remembering her attitude as she and Milton had shepherded them through the forest and back to Truth. She didn’t have that same attitude right now, did she? Her and Milton, both of them, they were going to be sorry that they had put their noses into the militia’s affairs.

Chapter 22

Milton pressed himself against the foot of the sofa bed that took up one wall of the RV’s salon.

There was no shotgun. He didn’t even have the cop’s pistol.

He had heard Michael Callow, and he was right: he was bluffing.

He was breathing heavily, and every beat of his heart sent a fresh pulse of pain through his body. He took off his jacket, biting his lip as he withdrew his left arm from the sleeve. He looked down at the wound. The sleeve of his sweater was already soaked through with blood, and he could feel the warm stickiness of it as it slid down his ribs to his belt. He had been lucky: his arm had been at his side and, if the bullet had hit just ten inches to the right, it would have punched through his lung. That would have been that.

“Milton,” Morten Lundquist barked out again, “you’re done for, and you know it. Come out, or we’ll shoot that RV up so bad it’ll look like Swiss fucking cheese, you hear me?”

Milton reached up and back until his fingers had wrapped around the curtain. He yanked hard, dragging it off its hooks and gathering it in his lap. He tore the fabric down the middle, wrapped it around his arm, and knotted it as hard as he could. The beige material spotted with blood at once. He held his arm up above his head and reached around with his right hand, his fingers settling on the pressure point and squeezing, trying to restrict the flow of blood. He wouldn’t be able to staunch the bleeding, but maybe he could slow it down until he could treat it properly.

“Milton! I’m going to count to five.”

“You can count to a hundred if you like, Lundquist, it’d make no difference.”

“You’re hit, and you don’t have a weapon.”

“You sure about that?”

“Aw, shit. Take him out!”

Milton covered his head with his right arm as the sound of concentrated gunfire tore up the night. Rounds sliced through the flimsy walls of the RV, perforating the metal and passing through into the night beyond.

He heard Lundquist bark out, and the barrage ceased. Milton scrambled forwards, grabbed the flex that led to the lamp and yanked it out of the wall, plunging the salon into darkness. He knew of two sure ways into and out of the RV: the open door to the side, facing where Lundquist must be, and the closed driver’s door that he had used to get inside. He added the closed passenger side door, hoping it was locked, and, perhaps, another one at the back. He had to cover all of them.

“Fire!”

The gunfire started up again, a roaring blaze of noise.

“That’s enough.”

Someone kept firing.

“I said hold your fire!”

It stopped.

How many shooters?

Milton thought he could detect four different weapons: two rifles and two pistols, but that was little more than a guess. He could be wrong about that.

Lundquist called out again. “You’re outnumbered.”

“Why don’t you come in here and we’ll see about that.”

“There are five of us out here, friend. You’re not going anywhere.”

Five: useful information.

Michael Callow, Tom Chandler, Lundquist, and the cop. Who was the fifth?

“And you’re hit, right? I winged you in the arm. I’ll bet you’re losing blood right now. How long you think it’ll take for you to bleed out?”

The light of a flashlight glared through the window and up onto the ceiling of the Winnebago, swinging left and right above his head. Another beam joined it, sweeping in through the open doorway in the side of the Winnebago. Milton shuffled away from it.

“We’ve got your friend from the FBI.”

“She’s not my friend.”

“You want to see her get shot?”

Milton pressed himself against the wall and scoured the inside of the RV for something, anything, that he could use.

A gun, he thought. Mallory said that her father was into guns.

“That’s not clever,” Milton said, stalling them. “If she doesn’t check in with her partner, you’ll bring the whole bureau up here. What are you going to do then?”

Where would she have put them?

“We’re going to pin it all on you, friend. You came into town, and you caused trouble right from the start. The sheriff sent you on your way, and you didn’t like it. You came back and had a brawl in the bar. Plenty of witnesses to that. You got arrested; the sheriff let you out after you cooled off, only you hadn’t cooled off, you came back with a gun and took out the sheriff, the FBI lady when she tried to help him, and those two poor kids who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Where were they?

There were slide-out drawers beneath the seats in the salon, and he could get to them without getting to his feet. He kept one eye on the open door and slid across to them, opening them, yanking them off their runners, upturning them. Papers, magazines, clothes, shoes, but no weapon.

“Come on, Pops,” Callow said.

“Easy,” Lundquist said.

“The fuck are we waiting for?”

Pops? He was Lundquist’s son?

“Stand down, Private.”

Milton prodded. “I warned you not to cross me, Callow. This isn’t going to end well for you. Any of you.”

He heard the familiar sear of anger as he replied, “You forget where you are and where we are? You’re finished.”

“Don’t let him rile you up. All he’s got left are words.”

Milton looked down the darkened corridor to the bedroom door. She must keep them in there, he thought. A lockbox beneath the bed or hidden at the back of the wardrobe. Somewhere Arty wouldn’t find them. There was no way he could get down there to look. He would have to pass the open door, and he was prepared to bet everything he had on the fact that they had at least a couple of their guns trained on the dark space. As soon as they saw any sort of movement, they’d empty their magazines at it. He was trapped in this half of the RV.

“Come out, friend. We’ll do you quick and easy if you play nice.”

“I don’t think so. First person who puts his head in that door gets it shot off.”

He looked up. There were cupboards attached to the walls, but they were above the wide, open window and there was no way he could get to them without presenting them with an open invitation to pump a dozen rounds into his chest.

“Get your ass out here right now,” Lundquist said, his voice hardening.

“We’ve got a stalemate, Lundquist.”

“We ain’t got shit. Show him, Private Chandler.”

There came the deeper, more powerful boom of a shotgun, the echo of the blast, the sound of it being pumped, and then a second boom. The spread was fired at reasonably close range, and the buckshot peppered the thin metal walls, dozens of tiny piercings that appeared just a few inches above his head. The openings admitted tiny splinters of light from the flashlights outside.

If the next shot was aimed lower, he’d catch the buckshot in his head and shoulders.

Lundquist looked at the coil of smoke that was unwinding from the muzzle of the rifle. He had been in a situation like this, years ago, in Vietnam. Another world. Another war about nothing, the government sending poor boys to die. Boys without an earthly idea what they were doing. They were doing it again, now, just the same. Gooks then, ragheads now. He remembered all the way back, damned near forty years, and how it had been raining then, too, the monsoon, raining for a week on end with no let up.

He remembered.

The foxhole, the VC outside.

He couldn’t forget.

That was where it had started. His hatred of the government, it had fomented there.

Damned if he was going to let this godforsaken Limey throw a wrench into what God had told him to do.

“The girl,” Lundquist called. “Bring her over here.”

Morris Finch and Leland Mulligan dragged her across until she was in front of him.

“On the ground.”

Lundquist watched as the two men dumped Flowers in the mud before him. She pushed herself out of the muck and onto her knees. He looked down at her. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, and maybe she was even younger than that. Scrawny. She had put up a fight, and there had been no choice but to knock her around pretty good. Her right eye was puffed up, and blood was crusting beneath her nose. It had been a bad day for her already.

About to get worse.

“Milton!”

Lundquist looked back at the RV, its flanks peppered with bullet holes and studded with buckshot.

No reply.

“You got until I count to five, and then Agent Flowers is going to get badly hurt.”

Nothing.

“One.”

Just the sound of the rain.

“Two.”

The rain, beating on the roof of the Winnebago, drumming on the brim of his hat.

“Three.”

Morris Finch looked over at him with sudden concern.

“Four.”

He reversed the rifle, holding it by the muzzle and the receiver.

“Five.”

He swung the rifle like a bat, the stock catching her on the side of the temple and knocking her out cold. She was unconscious before she fell sideways, landing with a wet slap.

“You did that, Milton,” he called out. “I didn’t want to hurt her. That was your doing. It’s on you.”

Nothing.

“You don’t come out of there with your hands up, Milton, the next thing I do, I promise you, someone’s not waking up.”

When Milton called back, his voice was cool and even. “I’m going to kill you, Lundquist. I’m going to kill you and every one of you out there. No one escapes. That’s a promise. You can take it to the bank.”

Lundquist felt a shiver pass up his spine, but he knew the others were watching him, taking their lead from his example. He was their commanding officer, and he dare not show any weakness. Instead, he set his jaw and looked over at Leland. “Bring him over here,” he said, pointing at Arthur Stanton.

Mallory screamed out.

Leland hauled him across, kicking him in the back of the legs so that he fell to his knees.

Lundquist held the muzzle against the boy’s head.

“Your call, Milton. You want this on your conscience? It’s up to you.”

Milton closed his eyes and tried to think around the pain. He had heard Lundquist strike Ellie, and he knew that he wasn’t bluffing about what he was going to do next.

No doubt about it: Lundquist was in it up to his neck now. He had started to kill, and the only way to see himself clear was to keep on killing. He had nothing to lose. Milton didn’t doubt that he had hit her. He didn’t doubt that he would kill her, too, if he thought that was what needed to be done. He didn’t doubt that he would kill all of them.

Milton opened his eyes, looked down at the bloody fabric knotted around his bicep, and knew that he had to get out.

There was nothing he could do for Ellie, Mallory, or Arty.

He was trapped.

He had no weapon, and he was surrounded by men who did. The second they saw him, they would put a dozen rounds into him.

He couldn’t help anyone if he was dead.

Maybe there would be nothing he could do for them.

Maybe they had just struck a rich seam of bad luck.

But if he could get away himself, maybe they would take them somewhere.

Maybe he could come back and help them.

A lot of maybes.

One certainty.

One thing for definite.

He would keep to his word.

He would murder every last one of them.

He grimaced from the effort of propping himself back against the seat. He looked around with fresh eyes, not searching for a weapon, but for a means to escape.

And then he saw it and knew what he had to do.

“Ellie,” he yelled out. “Mallory! Keep it together. I won’t forget about you.”

“Milton!” the girl called out.

“Get out of the RV,” Lundquist ordered, his voice tight with tension.

Milton crawled on his belly to the front of the RV as another fusillade stitched across the panel to his right, the bullets passing through it easily, leaving jagged blooms of metal in their wake. Rounds ricocheted, pots and pans were struck, ringing out as they toppled from their shelves and thudded against the carpeted floor. A digital clock on the wall was blown off its hook, spinning to the floor and smashing into pieces. A framed picture of Mallory and Arty fell onto him.

He kept slithering, arm over arm, until he reached the driver’s seat. A flight of four steps led down to the door at the front of the cabin, but only half of it was panelled with glass. He wouldn’t be seen.

The keys had been left in the ignition. Milton had no idea whether the engine would still work. He thought of the bindweed wrapped around the wheels. When had it last been fired up? Had it been cared for? Was there any gas in the tank? If it hadn’t, or there wasn’t, he was dead. He slithered another half foot, reached his left hand to the gas pedal and then snaked his right up above his head, finding the key and twisting it as he pumped down on the gas.

The engine croaked and spluttered.

Come on.

Now Lundquist knew what he was trying to do.

“Fire!”

A parabola of glass fell onto him as the windshield was blown inwards.

Milton twisted the key a second time.

Come on.

The engine coughed and barked and then fired, a thin rumble that he could feel through the floor. The RV had been left in gear, and it jerked forwards. He reached down with his right hand and yanked up on the handbrake, then punched down on the gas. The RV bumped as the wheels rolled over the chocks and then picked up speed. The firing continued from all sides, rounds lancing in through the denuded window and punching out again through the roof, another shotgun spread blowing out the windows at the rear.

He remembered which way the Winnebago had been left, its nose pointing back up the rough track to the entrance to the hollow. Milton hauled himself to his haunches, bracing himself against the seat to mitigate the lurching roll as the RV struggled out of the hollow. He reached up to sweep the fragments of glass from his scalp and dared to raise his head above the lip of the window. The road into the trailer park ahead was blocked by the Explorer and, behind that, a van and a police cruiser that hadn’t been there when he arrived. He swung himself up onto the seat, jagged flakes of glass scratching at his legs, the wind from the open window rushing around him. The engine was screeching in first, and he took the stick and crunched down into second, wrenching the stiff steering wheel just in time to avoid slamming the RV into the gatepost.

He looked in the big side mirrors: the one to his left had been destroyed, but the other one was intact, the men left in the Winnebago’s wake following after it on foot. He saw muzzle flashes as two guns fired, the bullets winging into the RV and ricocheting off with metallic pings. Milton crashed into the rear of the Explorer, bouncing it out of the way. He would have preferred to have been in something like that, something with a little more power than this old heap, but there was no time to change vehicles.

He gave himself a thirty-second head start.

He had to make it count.