“Good idea,” Turner said. “Load ’em up, boys. And girls. But don’t stay in the store more’n a minute or two. We gotta roll.”
One of the women had to pee and hurried into the sheriff’s office, and then one of the men had to, and everybody else headed down to the store, where Lucas loaded up on Diet Coke and crunchy-style Cheetos. Five minutes later, Turner did a head count, and everybody was set, and they took off.
? ? ?
LUCAS HAD ONCE BEEN a deer hunter, though he’d given it up about the time he married Weather—she didn’t particularly object to the idea of shooting deer, and rather liked venison spaghetti and meatballs, but she’d read a paper that said that lead bullets, especially of the expanding variety, contaminated much of the meat with lead particles.
No lead particles in the diet of her children . . . But over the years, Lucas had spent the equivalent of three or four months sitting in deer stands or still hunting, and had learned that at dawn, it was too dark to safely shoot; but within fifteen minutes, you could read the small print in a newspaper, and could plainly see two or three hundred yards out.
That transition happened as the cop convoy rolled down the road toward the lake. When they turned in, headlights were useful. By the time they all got parked, and got the exit road blocked, they were in full daylight.
Most of the members of the posse were carrying rifles, and most of the rifles were .223 black rifles. Carl had his M14, and another man carried a semiauto .30-06, both of which would be useful if they had to bust up an RV.
Laurent led the way out, followed by his reserve deputies, all of them in uniform now and all of them military veterans carrying black rifles. Lucas moved with them, with Carl and Turner following behind Lucas.
Everybody automatically shut up as they were walking along, strung out in a line with four or five yards between them; a few squirrels were chattering away in the woods, and a crow was complaining, but other than that, there was no sound but the crunch of their feet in gravel.
They detoured around a few wet spots in the trail and finally topped a low ridge and started down a gentle slope toward the end of the lake—they could see the curve of the shoreline, and as they got closer, Lucas could smell coffee.
A boat ramp was straight ahead of them, with three boats tied off to one side of the ramp. The road curved to the right, and as they walked down into the open, they saw a line of camping spaces along the lakeshore. Maybe half of them were occupied, mostly by pickups with campers. Three people, two men and a woman, were sitting around a fire on canvas camp stools at the first camping space, and they all stood up as the posse moved out of the woods with their guns. They called someone, and a second woman came down from a camper.
Lucas moved forward, caught up with Laurent, and told the guy behind him to “wait here, and pass the word to everyone to stop where they are.” The column stopped, still mostly back along the trail, and Lucas and Laurent walked up to the campers. One of the men, tall with a white beard, asked, “What the heck’s going on?”
Their trucks both had Michigan plates.
Lucas said, “We’re looking for a bunch of people with California plates on their vehicles. Have you seen anybody . . . ?”
One of the women said, “I was walking back from the clear-cut yesterday before dark, I was up there picking blueberries, and I saw a car with a California license plate. Only one, there was a man and a woman inside.”
“Where’d it go?”
She pointed down the line of camping spaces. “Down there somewhere. Everybody wants to get close to the ramp, but they were late in the day, and no boat, either, so I suppose they could be anywhere down there . . . but close to the end of the campers.”
The car, she said, was several years old, and probably a Honda or a Nissan, “or one of those, not American,” and dark blue or green. Because of the curve of the lake, Lucas couldn’t see more than two or three campsites, but no one in the camping areas could see them, either. He waved for the rest of the deputies to come down, and they gathered behind the pickups.
“We’ll go down as a group, not all together, but not all strung out, either. Stay as close to the edge of the trees as you can, they won’t see us coming until we’re right there.”
“How many are there?” Turner asked.
“Only saw one car, two people,” Lucas said.
? ? ?
THEY STARTED OUT AGAIN, but bunched up closer now, rifle muzzles up in the air like lances. They passed nine more camping sites, each with a pickup or a van parked in it, then an empty camping space, another SUV, then, past two more empty camping spaces, a dark green car. Lucas pulled his gun, and he, Laurent, and Laurent’s deputies crept toward it. California plates.
Behind the car, on the other side of a cold fire ring, they could see a blue tent, a self-supporting four-man version, with a rain fly. The front of the tent was zipped.
Lucas put a finger to his lips and Laurent nodded, and waved his deputies to a stop, and then Lucas and Laurent moved up to the car and peeked inside. It was empty. They moved on to the tent.
The problem with a tent was, you couldn’t see into it and the occupants couldn’t see out, but you could easily hear through the thin nylon fabric, and even more easily, shoot through it.