Laurent waved his deputies forward, to spots behind the car. Then he and Lucas eased up to the tent, not quite tiptoeing. From five feet away, they could hear a delicate snoring, like a woman’s snoring, and when they were right outside it, the heavy breathing of a man.
Again, Lucas put a finger to his lips, Laurent nodded, and with his left hand, Lucas delicately grasped the zipper pull on the front flap of the tent and quietly pulled it down. He got it all the way down, then put two fingers through the flap and spread them, and peeked inside. Two people in sleeping bags, their feet toward the flap, on air mattresses, with packs at the back of the tent. There were two horizontal zippers at the bottom of the flap, and Lucas and Laurent slowly pulled them sideways, until the flap was fully open.
When they’d pulled the flaps all the way back, Lucas looked at Laurent, then clenched both fists and made a pulling motion—if they did it right, they could yank both sleepers right out of the tent, still cocooned in their bags.
Laurent smiled and nodded. The woman stirred and said a word, in her sleep, like she might be coming up. Lucas slipped his pistol back in its holster, jabbed a finger at the sleeping bags, and they both took hold of the ends of the bags, and Lucas said, “Now!”
They yanked the bags out of the tent and the woman began screaming and the man said, “What the fuck! What the fuck!”
Laurent shouted, “You’re under arrest, don’t move your hands! Don’t move your hands!”
Both of them had been sleeping on their backs, and with their eyes open, were looking into the muzzles of four guns. Laurent said to Bennett, the post office guy, “Pull the zip down on that sleeping bag.”
The woman was screaming, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Bennett pulled the zip down. The guy was wearing a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, and they pulled the zip on the woman, who was wearing a T-shirt and underpants, and then Turner, who’d looked into the tent, said, “We’ve got a gun here, and what looks like a bag of marijuana—yep, it is—and some telephones. Three telephones.”
? ? ?
LUCAS ASKED THE MAN, who was still on his back, “Where’s Pilate?”
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” but the woman said to the guy, “I told you. I told you. He punked you, you dummy. He did it on purpose to see what would happen.”
The guy said, “Shut up!”
Lucas said to the woman, “How did he punk you? Is he right here? Where is he?”
The guy said again, “Shut up!”
But the woman started to cry, and Lucas said to the deputies, “Let’s get the cuffs on them, get some pants on them, get them ID’d.”
He pulled Turner aside and said, “As soon as they’ve got some shoes on, separate them. I want to talk to the woman without the guy getting on her case.”
Turner nodded.
Lucas got the guy’s wallet before the deputies helped him pull his pants on: Kelly Bland, of Los Angeles. The woman had a black tote with a silver sun-face on the side. Inside were a cheap Phoenix .22 automatic, a clasp wallet, a plastic bag with a wad of weed, and all the rest of the crap that women usually carry in totes. Her ID said that she was Alice McCarthy of Torrance, California.
When Bland and McCarthy had their shoes on, Turner’s deputies hustled Bland to the other side of the car so that they could open the trunk. They did it smoothly, keeping Bland’s attention, and by the time they had him there, asking about drugs and Pilate, Lucas, Laurent, Bennett, and Frisell had moved the woman down a path that led from the campsite to the water.
She was a tall, thin woman with protruding brown eyes, and fingernails that had been bitten to the quick. Bennett read her rights to her, and arrested her on marijuana charges, and then Lucas said, “I think you know the charges on the weed are a little bogus. You could go to jail on them, but what we really need to know about is Pilate. If you go to jail on Pilate, you’ll never get out. Never. When this goes to court, you’ll need all the help you can get, and we can give you some, if you start cooperating right now.”
“I don’t know where he is, but I’ll cooperate,” she said.
Lucas shook his head. “That’s not good enough. You can’t just say you’ll cooperate, you’ve got to deliver something. What were all those phones for?”
“Pilate said Kelly would be our switchboard and everybody could call in to him and then he could tell everybody where to go, and then throw the phone away and nobody would ever catch us that way. The phones only cost like twenty dollars apiece. Pilate said that’s the way all the drug dealers do it.”
“Where’s Pilate?” Laurent demanded. “You’ve got to know something about that.”
“He’s around here somewhere. We have some people at the Gathering who were supposed to call us last night at midnight, and they didn’t, and Pilate was afraid to call them. But the rest of us talked at midnight, and we’re gonna try calling the Gathering people at eight o’clock this morning. If they still don’t answer, we’re supposed to call Pilate and the rest of the people, and decide what to do. Like, Pilate’s thinking that if something happened at the Gathering, we ought to scatter down into Michigan or back to Wisconsin, and then just keep going until we’re back in California.”
“What if you do get a call at eight o’clock from the people at the Gathering?” Lucas asked.
“Well, if everything is okay, then we meet there today.”
“How many more people are there? We know there were five at the Gathering yesterday, and you and Kelly make seven . . .”
“Maybe ten more,” she said. “You knew about the people already at the Gathering?”
“Yes. They’ve been arrested,” Lucas said. He didn’t mention that one had been shot and killed. “How reliable would you say that Melody Walker and Linda Petrelli are? Can we trust what they say?”