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

about the joint? Was that you?”
    “Not mine.”
    Lester sighed. “Whose was it, then?”
    “Come on, Dad, have a wild guess how it got there.”
    He took his eyes off the road and turned to look at the boy. “You’re kidding?”
    Billy met his eyes and raised his eyebrows in an expression of ineffable cynicism.
    Lester gripped the wheel tight.
    “Fuck!” he shouted, crashing his fist against the dash.
    Billy flinched and turned his face back to the windshield.
    “You know you’ve given him the chance he’s been waiting for. How could you do something so stupid?”
    They drove the rest of the way in awkward silence. The problem had been on his mind all afternoon. He knew that it had made him crabby and short tempered.
    He pulled up outside their modest two-storey house.
    “Tell your mother I’m going out.”
    “That’s right,” he said. “Go and get drunk. Solves everything.”
    Lester started to berate him, but the boy slammed the door, turned his back on him, and stalked up the drive to the front door.
    Lester put the car into gear and drove back into town, angry.
     
    LESTER MET Leland Mulligan, one of his deputies, at Johnny’s Bar. They took stools at the bar, drinking from bottles of Budweiser and watching football. Leland was trying to get him to talk about the new quad bike that he was thinking of buying. The bar was busier than usual tonight: there were the regular drinkers, the old-timers who had nothing better to do than to gradually pickle their livers and bemoan how the country was turning to shit. One table was occupied by the four hunters he had noticed when they had driven into Truth that morning. Another held three people: the two FBI agents who had been nosing around for leads on the bank robbers who had been busy hereabouts, and Mallory Stanton, the sister of the half-witted boy he’d had so much trouble with five years earlier. That table, in particular, was distracting his attention from Leland’s attempts to have him weigh in on the respective merits of the Kawasaki and Suzuki ATVs that he was considering.
    “And, yes, I know they’re Japanese,” he was saying, “and I know you’ll tell me I’m crazy, that they’ll turn out to be shit and expensive to maintain and I ought to get something American, a Polaris, maybe, but the price they’ve given me is so good I got to think about it, right?”
    Lester grunted in response, fading him out again and watching the two agents. They had come to see him when they had arrived and had explained what they were here to do. It had been last week, the two of them pulling up in a big GMC Denali, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of luxury SUV about as useful up here on these roads as tits on a bull. They were based down in Detroit, and they had flaunted the big-city attitude that Lester had grown to resent from the tourists that had come up here to hunt and fish, that unsaid assumption that they could get Lester to do whatever they wanted him to do just by asking.
    He was still thinking about those agents and how angry they made him when the door opened and John Milton stepped inside. He didn’t recognise him at first. He had cleaned himself up pretty good, shaved off his beard and changed his clothes. But there he was, right as rain. Those same blue eyes scanned the room and settled on him for just a moment before they flicked away again. Lester felt the roil of anger in his stomach. The man had ignored him. He was the sheriff, a man of the law, and this drifter had thumbed his nose at him. Maybe he hadn’t been explicit, laid it out clearly enough so that there was no possibility of him being misunderstood.
    Or maybe the guy just had a hard time doing what he was told.
    Didn’t matter either way. Lester knew that if you wanted to be an effective policeman, you couldn’t have a situation where your instructions were ignored. He didn’t know Milton, but he sure knew the type. A bad attitude, the kind of man who thought he could do whatever