Beep.
The patrolman said, “Damnit.”
Lucas said into the phone, “If you think there’s any chance that you can talk him down, give me a beep.”
Silence.
Then a man’s voice: “This is it, this is it. No way out. No way out now. They ain’t coming back for me, they ain’t comin’ back. Piece-of-shit car, piece of shit. You ain’t goin’ no place, don’t even think about it, bitch. I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains all over the car, that’s for sure.”
The guy with the binoculars said, “That’s him, I can read his lips when I hear the words, she’s holding the phone so we can hear him.”
A cop called, “The sheriff’s here.”
? ? ?
A MINUTE LATER, the sheriff scuttled up, half bent over, crouched next to the patrolman. He was a short, thick man with sandy hair, a brush mustache, and round, gold-rimmed glasses. “Are we talking to him?”
“We’re yelling at him, but we’re afraid to make a move any closer,” the patrolman said. “Says he’ll kill the girl if we do. We’re talking about having Phil take him out.”
The sheriff looked back three cars, where the shooter was sitting behind a patrol car, looking at the fugitive car through a scope. “If we have to.”
“I’d really like to talk to this guy—he could probably give us all the rest of them,” Lucas said.
The sheriff looked at him and asked, “Who are you?”
Lucas gave him the five-second version, and explained the phone connection with Skye, and the sheriff said, “Phil could probably actually shoot him in the shoulder of his gun arm. I mean, shooting normally, Phil could put three shots through a dime at that range. With the window, it’s more of a problem. But if he could take that shoulder out, we could rush him—”
The phone beeped, then beeped again and Lucas said, “If there’s a problem, beep me again.”
Beep.
Then the man’s voice again, “Say good-bye, bitch, ’cause you’re going first. They’re gonna shoot me, but I don’t give a shit no more, I don’t give a shit no more . . .”
The man sounded frantic, whipping himself up for it. The deputy with the binoculars said, his voice calm enough, “He’s turning around in the seat, he’s kneeling on the seat looking toward the back . . .” and the sheriff scrambled away, toward the car where the rifleman was set up.
From where Lucas was sitting with the phone, he couldn’t see the shooter, but the patrolman could, and Lucas called, “Is he—?”
BAM!
Lucas saw the sheriff bolt toward the target car, pistol in his hand, and Lucas followed, well back. The sheriff stumbled through the beans and almost went down, and Lucas worried that he’d shoot himself, or somebody else, but he didn’t, and a few seconds later, they were looking through the side window at a dead guy in the front seat of the car. The rifle round had struck him in the cheekbone and gone through his head, knocking him back into the front seat.
Lucas said, “The girl’s in the back,” and a deputy arriving at that moment yanked on the back hatch, but it was locked, and the sheriff pulled open the driver’s-side door and reached across the dead man’s legs to pull the keys out of the ignition, and they all went around to the back of the car and unlocked the hatch.
They could see the unmoving body in the back, covered with a green woolen blanket. Lucas pulled it off and Skye was looking up at him, eyes wide with fear.
Lucas said, “Skye: you’re okay.”
The sheriff said, “Don’t let her see that,” and tipped his head toward the front of the car. And, “Tom, get that tape off her.”
A deputy produced a switchblade and began cutting the tape off Skye’s legs and she said, “They were going to kill me. Last night Pilate told Bony to give me some water but he wouldn’t have to bother with feeding me, they were going to kill me today . . .”
“Gonna get you to the hospital, honey,” the sheriff said. “You gotta be pretty shook up.” To Lucas he said, “We called in an ambulance, they’re on the way, oughta be here . . .”
? ? ?
THE DEPUTY FINISHED taking the tape that bound her arms to her body, and Skye tried to get out of the car, but when she put her feet down, nearly collapsed. Lucas caught her under the arms and pushed her back until she was sitting on the edge of the trunk. He said, “Letty told me that you were a witness to a killing last night.”
“Who’s Letty?” the sheriff asked. Lucas gave him another five-second explanation, and then Skye said, “I heard it all, and saw the end of it. I was taped up in the back bedroom and the doors on that thing were about as thick as tinfoil. Pilate got connected to some dope dealer here and was going to buy some cocaine from him, but when the dope dealer got here, Pilate didn’t have the money. He was trying to buy on credit—”
“On credit?” the sheriff said. “Dope?”
“That’s what he tried, and the guy tried to get out, I guess he had a gun. Pilate said something about him having a gun, but then there was a fight and this guy came crashing through the bedroom door and there was blood gushing out of his neck, like they cut his throat or something, and Pilate told Kristen—Kristen got cut bad, they talked about that, they took her to a hospital, I think in St. Paul, last night. Anyway, Pilate said that the RV wouldn’t be safe anymore because there was no way they could clean up all the blood. I mean, there was blood everywhere, you wouldn’t believe it, so he decided to burn it . . .”
She told the story, sitting on the edge of the car, of how she got the phone, and how she called Letty, and how they took her off the street in Duluth. Then she turned her eyes up to Lucas and said, “I think they might have killed Henry. Have you heard?”