“Yeah. Not a good situation,” Lucas said.
“I called around for mutual aid, we’ll have twenty deputies and reserve deputies from the surrounding counties here at five-thirty, including the guys from Barron County. How many people are we looking at?”
“I’m not sure. We think they started out with nineteen or twenty. We’ve taken down six of them, which would leave twelve or thirteen, but they’re not all at the park. We’ve got locations for at least three more cell phones, not at the park. If there are two people per cell phone, that would mean six people are out in the woods yet, so maybe . . . six or seven at the park? But we really don’t know.”
“Well, twenty deputies ought to be enough. Mostly got to be careful not to shoot each other. The lake’s the best part of a mile off the highway, but there’s some logging roads that come off the park road. There’s one about two-thirds of the way in that leads back to a clear-cut. We put the cars in there, block the road out, and walk in.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lucas said. “Where are we hooking everybody up?”
“Right here. Don’t have a motel, but I got a couch if you want to try to catch a couple hours of sleep.”
“I’m okay,” Lucas said. “How many of those logging roads come off the main park road?”
“Four or five, I guess,” Turner said.
“I think I’ll go back over there and park off the road. Watch for anybody going out.”
Turner nodded. “Okay. I could send Carl over there with you, he’s not doing anything anyway, except driving around. We could stick him in a driveway off the highway, you see California plates going out, you could tag the car until we got far enough from the park that we could run him down without waking anybody else up.”
“Can Carl . . . I mean, is he . . .”
“Competent? Yeah, sure. He’s okay. And he has an M14 we got from the feds with twenty-round magazines. He can punch holes in cars all day.”
“I don’t want any cops killed,” Lucas said.
“Neither do I—but if these guys are as bad as you said they were, I don’t want them driving away, either.”
“All right. If you’re good with Carl backing me up, I’m good with it, too,” Lucas said.
? ? ?
CARL SHOWED UP a minute later and they decided that he’d park in a driveway a mile or so west of the park turnoff. After a few more words, they loaded up and headed back toward the park. Carl dropped off a mile out, did a two-point turn, and backed into the driveway.
Lucas continued on in the dark, found the lake turnoff, drove a hundred yards down the narrow gravel track, found a narrower dirt track going off to the left. He turned in, drove fifty feet down the track, checking it out in his headlights, then backed out to the main road, turned around, and backed into the side track. When he was thirty feet off, he moved the front seat back as far as it would go, killed his lights and engine, and settled in to wait.
He’d had a long day and let himself doze. He never went completely asleep, he thought, not deep enough that he wouldn’t wake up if a car went by; but he wasn’t disturbed until his iPhone alarm went off at five o’clock. His mouth tasted like a chicken had been roosting in it, and his back hurt. He took care of the mouth with a stick of gum, stepped out of the car to do a few toe touches, and called Carl. “Time to go in.”
“I think. I was about to give you a call. Didn’t see anything on my end.”
“Meet you back at the sheriff’s office.”
? ? ?
TWELVE DEPUTIES FROM three counties were waiting for him at the sheriff’s office in Winter. Then Turner, the sheriff, showed up, got out of the car, and said, “Roman and his guys are ten minutes out. They got six guys, two regular deputies and three reserves. One more reserve guy might be coming a little later, he had a kid got hurt last night late and had to take him to the emergency room in Sault Ste. Marie.”
“Hope it’s not bad.”
“Nah. Might have a broken fibula in his leg, he was shooting baskets with some friends, got a little rough. Anyway, he walked around on it, but about the time he was supposed to go to bed, the pain got bad. They took him over to the doctor, who sent them up to Sault.”
“All right: so we got twenty.” Lucas looked over the crowd in the parking lot. There were patrol cars from three counties, and a varied collection of trucks and SUVs. All but two of the deputies were men, and about half were wearing uniforms, the rest a motley of camo, canvas, and denim. Subtract the uniforms, and they might have been setting up a deer drive.
Laurent and the Barron County crew arrived a few minutes later; Laurent came over and said, “Doug Sellers’s kid broke his leg.”
“I heard. I think we should be okay.”
Laurent nodded: “Let’s get the show on the road.”
? ? ?
THEY GATHERED THE DEPUTIES around a pole light outside the sheriff’s office and outlined the plan: go in, quietly, park about four hundred yards from the campground, with two of the cars blocking the road.
Once they were all parked, they’d go single file down the road until they got close enough to see the park: “It should be light enough to see by the time we get there,” Lucas said, waving off to the east, where the night sky was beginning to lighten. “You guys with rifles, keep the muzzles up in the air. I don’t want to see anybody pointing a muzzle at somebody else’s back. Guys with sidearms, keep them holstered. When we get in there, we want to nail down every tent, car, RV, whatever. Nobody comes out. If somebody gets aggressive . . .”
They talked it out, and when everybody agreed that they knew what would happen, a guy in camo pants and a CAT shirt suggested that they stop down at the store for snacks and coffee.