by Mark Dawson
“And, yes, I know they’re Japanese,” he was saying, “and I know you’ll tell me I’m crazy, that they’ll turn out to be shit and expensive to maintain and I ought to get something American, a Polaris, maybe, but the price they’ve given me is so good I got to think about it, right?”
Lester grunted in response, fading him out again and watching the two agents. They had come to see him when they had arrived and had explained what they were here to do. It had been last week, the two of them pulling up in a big GMC Denali, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of luxury SUV about as useful up here on these roads as tits on a bull. They were based down in Detroit, and they had flaunted the big-city attitude that Lester had grown to resent from the tourists that had come up here to hunt and fish, that unsaid assumption that they could get Lester to do whatever they wanted him to do just by asking.
He was still thinking about those agents and how angry they made him when the door opened and John Milton stepped inside. He didn’t recognise him at first. He had cleaned himself up pretty good, shaved off his beard and changed his clothes. But there he was, right as rain. Those same blue eyes scanned the room and settled on him for just a moment before they flicked away again. Lester felt the roil of anger in his stomach. The man had ignored him. He was the sheriff, a man of the law, and this drifter had thumbed his nose at him. Maybe he hadn’t been explicit, laid it out clearly enough so that there was no possibility of him being misunderstood.
Or maybe the guy just had a hard time doing what he was told.
Didn’t matter either way. Lester knew that if you wanted to be an effective policeman, you couldn’t have a situation where your instructions were ignored. He didn’t know Milton, but he sure knew the type. A bad attitude, the kind of man who thought he could do whatever he wanted to do and damn what anyone else had to say. You give someone like that an inch and chances are they’ll end up taking a mile.
Lester couldn’t have that.
He was about to go over to have a word with him when one of the agents, the male one—Wilson? Carson?—came over and took the seat to Lester’s right.
“Evening, Sheriff.”
He sipped his beer and looked at him with wary regard. “Evening.”
“Just thought I’d let you know that we’re leaving in the morning.”
It was Clayton, he remembered. Special Agent Orville Clayton. Older, moustache that was greying a little around the edges, could stand with losing a few pounds here and there. “You had enough?”
“We’ve done all we can.”
“You finally agree those boys aren’t here, then?”
“It doesn’t look like it.”
“I won’t say I told you so.”
“We get a tip, Sheriff, we have to check it out.”
Lester looked over his shoulder. Milton had taken a stool in the area of the bar that was reserved for those who wanted something to eat and the waitress, a pretty thing called Clementine, was taking his order.
“I got to say something before we clear out,” the agent was saying.
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
“We never really felt all that comfortable up here, Sheriff. Seemed to us, to both of us, that you weren’t all that pleased to have us around.”
Lester took his eyes off Milton for a moment and, after finishing a sip from his beer, said, “Well, that’s because you didn’t listen to me when I said you were wasting your time. I don’t have a beef with you or your friend over there, but the way I see it, the way my men see it, too, the federal government getting involved in something like this is a waste of everyone’s time. If those boys were hiding out in the hills like you seemed to think they were, well, we’d have found them. We could have saved ourselves a whole lot of time and energy if you people had listened to me right from the outset.”
“That may be, but the bottom line as far as I’m concerned is we’re all on the same team. I think it’d do you well to remember that.”
Lester rolled his eyes. Jeez, the attitude on this prick. It would do him well to remember? He was half tempted to give the man a piece of his mind, unvarnished, but he fought against it. What was the point? Him and his pretty sidekick would get into that shiny car that had cost fifty grand of his tax dollars and scoot back down to the city tomorrow and that would be that. What would it achieve?
Nothing, that’s what.
It wouldn’t achieve a damned thing.
But it didn’t do anything for Lester’s mood and, as he turned his attention back to Milton, he felt like he would have to do something tonight to help people remember that, around these parts at least, Lester was in charge. That boy, dumb enough to ignore his clear and reasonable instructions, he was going to find that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong lawman.
MILTON KEPT his eyes off the bottles behind the bar as he ordered a steak and fries and took his orange juice over to the spare table in the eating area. He had seen the sheriff, and he knew that the sheriff had seen him, too. He wondered whether it might not be more prudent to turn around and find somewhere else. He wasn’t in the business of causing unnecessary trouble for himself. Indeed, for most of the recent past he had done everything that he could to stay off the grid: no fixed abode, no records, no credit cards. The risk to his safety had been mitigated by the death of Control and his replacement by Michael Pope as the new head of Group Fifteen, but old habits died hard, and Milton had made a successful career in operating beneath the surface. Antagonising the sheriff had all the hallmarks of being a really dumb move. A man like that, so obviously plumped up with the sense of his own authority, wouldn’t take very well to the feeling that Milton was thumbing his nose at him. There would be consequences.
But so what?
What had he done wrong?
Nothing.
He was just passing through town, and he wanted something to eat and a place to lay his head. That was all.
His table was next to another that accommodated four men. Milton gauged them automatically, like he did with everyone. They were dressed in expensive outdoor gear that would, he assessed, have been out of the reach of the local hunters and fishermen. Their hands looked clean and smooth and free of the calluses that he had noticed on the hands of the drinkers at the bar. Their table, away from the regulars, marked them as from out of town, too. Milton had seen an expensive Jeep in the parking lot adjacent to the bar, and he pegged it now as theirs. They were drinking heavily, finishing a round of beers before, one of them, a big blond man with a soft gut and mean eyes, called out to the bar that they wanted another. His voice was loud and unpleasant, slurred from all the drink that he had evidently consumed. The barman exchanged a look with one of his regulars and Milton wondered whether he would refuse to serve them. That might have been interesting. He didn’t, though, bringing over another four pints and taking away their money.
The blond man was sitting next to a redhead wearing a black and red chequered lumberjack shirt. The shirt was fresh and laundered, probably bought for a hundred bucks from Macy’s. He was skinny, his skin a brilliant white, and his skin was marked with a constellation of freckles. “I’ve got to piss,” Milton heard him say.
He watched as he slowly raised himself to his feet and began to negotiate the short distance from his table to the restroom. Milton’s table was between the man and his destination. The man rolled to the right and then to the left, as if he was on the deck of a ship in high seas, and then tripped, stumbling forwards two steps before falling onto Milton, bouncing off his shoulder and falling across the table.
“Are you all right?” Milton asked, reaching out a hand to help the man to his feet.
“You fucking tripped me,” the man drawled, his eyes unfocussed through slit-like lids.
“No,” Milton said. “You fell. And now I’m helping you up.”
He left his hand out. The man swept it away.
Milton told himself to be calm. “All right,” he said. “No problem.”
“No pro
blem?” The man pushed himself onto unsteady feet, swaying from side to side. “I haven’t got a problem, friend. You’ve got a problem.”
Milton stood and took a careful step back to give himself a full range of movement.
He saw, through the corner of his eye, that the sheriff was watching.
He raised his hands. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said. “All right? It was an accident. You’re fine. I’m fine. No harm done. Let’s just leave it at that.”
The man squared his shoulders, still rolling. “What if I don’t want to leave it at that?”
“It would be better if you did.”
“Is that a threat?”
Milton watched the man’s friends behind him. The blond man, the biggest, had pushed himself to his feet and had taken a step away from the table. He was even bigger than Milton had initially assumed: six foot six and surely three hundred pounds, as big as an offensive lineman, a little blubbery, but that cruel streak in his eyes was unmistakeable. A bully, used to dominating others because he was bigger than they were. The other two looked less interested in getting involved although they, too, had risen to their feet. One for all and all for one, Milton guessed, especially when they were drunk.
“I said, is that a threat?”
“No. It’s not a threat. I just don’t see why this needs to go any further.”
Milton knew there had been moments in his life where, when presented with a choice of direction, the other route would have led to an easier path.
A career in the law rather than in the army.
Staying in the infantry rather than applying to join the SAS.
Staying in the SAS rather than accepting the offer to join the Group.
Staying at the campsite down by the lake rather than coming into town.
He would have avoided the possibility of antagonising the sheriff and, more pertinently, he would never have been sitting at the table into which a drunken out-of-town hunter was to fall. Some of the consequences that followed his decisions could have been foreseen and avoided. Others could not. But Milton was a stubborn man, that was one of his many faults and, sometimes, knowing that one path was likely to be more difficult than another was all the reason he needed to follow it.
“You’re a supercilious prick, aren’t you?” the man asked.
He telegraphed his right handed punch so far in advance that it was a simple thing for Milton to step back and avoid it. It was a wild haymaker and, once it had missed, the momentum overbalanced him and turned him a quarter to his left. Milton allowed him to fall away and then dropped a little and drilled him in the kidneys. The man arched backwards, clutching at his back, and collapsed to his knees.
Milton turned back just in time to duck as the blond man fired out his own punch, his huge fist scraping against the top of his crown, but doing no damage. The man had been coming at Milton, his impetus impossible to arrest, and he blundered straight into his right knee, raised with sudden and vicious force, sinking into the man’s groin. His mouth gaped open as his diaphragm contracted, the air punched out of his lungs, and Milton put him down with a short left cross that connected flush on the side of his jaw. The man was unconscious before he hit the floor, his left leg pinned awkwardly beneath the bulk of his now starched body.
Milton opened his fist and flexed his fingers. That had been a harder shot than he had intended to throw. He wouldn’t have been surprised if, upon waking up, the blond man discovered that his jaw was broken.
The other two men had backed right away, no longer interested in him after they had watched what two of his punches had done to their friends.
Milton picked up his overturned glass and, intending to have it refilled at the bar, turned straight into the raised barrel of Lester Grogan’s gun.
“Get your hands up,” the sheriff said.
“Come on,” Milton began.
“Hands up now.”
The sheriff was toting a Sig Sauer P226 .40 calibre semiautomatic, and from his easy, balanced stance, it looked like he knew how to use it.
“That’s not necessary,” he said, indicating the gun.
“I won’t tell you again.”
He raised his hands. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Turn around.”
Milton did as he was told, lowering his arms and extending them behind his back.
The sheriff fastened cuffs around his wrists. “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent and anything you say can be used against you in court. You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, I’ll see that one is appointed for you. You understand your rights, Mr. Milton?”
“You’re overreacting,” he said. “They both attacked me. Everyone saw what happened.”
He leaned closer to him. “You should’ve listened to me earlier. I knew you had the look of a troublemaker, and my gut’s usually right. Turns out it was right this time, too.”
Chapter 4
LESTER HOLSTERED his weapon and pushed John Milton in the back, impelling him to start walking to the exit of the bar. The rain was crashing down outside, and Lester cursed at it. He was going to get wet. He reached down for his keys and blipped the lock of the Silverado. He opened the rear door and helped Milton to slide inside.
He opened the door to the front and climbed into the cabin. He looked back at the bar. A small audience had gathered to watch the show. Both FBI agents were there. Mallory Stanton was standing alongside and slightly behind the female agent, frowning at the scene with an inscrutable expression on her face. The regulars from the bar were there, too, although they quickly went inside when they realised it was wet and that the show was over. It wasn’t as if a brawl was an uncommon event in the bar, after all. It happened most every Saturday.
He heard the siren of the paramedics and saw the blue flash against the buildings at the end of the road as the truck approached.
“That was one hell of a punch,” Grogan said.
“Yeah, well.”
“You broke his jaw, I’m guessing.”
“A bit harder than I intended.”
“You could’ve picked someone better to hit. Those four are lawyers, up from Detroit. They come every year, hunting and fishing. Can’t say I think too highly of them, the attitudes they’ve got on them. Dollars to doughnuts they’ll press charges, especially if you did break his jaw.”
“Come on, Sheriff,” he said. “I wasn’t in there for trouble. I just wanted something to eat. You saw it the same as I did. They threw the first punches. I was defending myself.”
“Maybe,” Lester allowed as he started the engine and put the car into drive.
Milton sat quietly in the back, and Lester shot the occasional glance into the mirror to check him out. He didn’t seem particularly perturbed, his demeanour just as blank and inscrutable as when he was in the back of his cruiser earlier that afternoon. He had his right leg crossed over his left, and his hands were behind his back as if it was a perfectly natural thing to sit like that. Milton was a strange one, that much was for sure. Lester thought he was pretty good at reading human nature, but he was striking out here.
He couldn’t work out Milton at all.
THE SHERIFF’S Office was on West Harrie Street, a five-minute drive from the bar. Lester slotted the Silverado into the lot, crammed his cap down on his head in the vain hope that it might offer a measure of protection from the rain, got out and went around to the back. Milton was compliant, shuffling across the seat, stepping out and then hurrying ahead of Lester, as he directed him to the rear entrance at the back of the building. Lester took the keys from his pocket, unlocked the door, and gently nudged Milton to step inside. He followed, reaching out for the light switch. Then he took off his sodden jacket, shaking it out and draping it off the back of the nearest chair.
It was a small building with four rooms. There was a central reception area with a desk and a row of metal folding chairs against the wall. A picture of the president hung on the wall next to poster
s with home security tips and outdated mugshots of wanted fugitives, some of whom had been captured months ago. A door off this room led to a short flight of stairs and down there, in the basement, was the facility’s single cell. A third room was fitted out as a unisex toilet, and the fourth was Lester’s office.
“In here,” he said, leading the way.
He switched on the light. It was a simple, almost ascetic room. Lester was a plain-spoken and tough man, like the long line of hard men who had kept the peace before him. Photographs of his dour predecessors covered the walls of his office, along with the double-barrelled shotgun one of them had felt it prudent to carry. Lester liked there to be a clear distinction between his home and his office, so he hadn’t bothered to do very much to imprint it with his own personality. There was a picture of his wife and another of his kids on his desk, but that was the only concession to family that he made.
Lester went behind Milton and unfastened the cuffs.
“You know, if you looked the way you do now when I saw you on the road, chances are I wouldn’t have given you a second thought.”
Milton stretched his arms and then massaged his wrists. “That’s not particularly helpful now, is it?”
“No. I suppose it isn’t.”