“If you were picked up by cops and they asked you to call Pilate directly . . . If I’d asked you to do that . . . would you have any way of warning Pilate that the cops had you?”
“Yes. You’d say that something was unreliable. That meant that everything you said on the phone call was unreliable and there was a cop with you.”
“Thanks.” Lucas rang off and groaned: “Sonofabitch.”
Frisell: “What happened?”
“That goddamn Alice McCarthy warned off both groups—she told them that she was with a cop. I knew something was wrong, the way she was talking. I knew it, and I let her talk to Pilate anyway. Fuck me. Fuck me. Now they know we’re coming.”
“That’s a bad thing,” Frisell said. “Better to know it, though, than not to.”
“Ah, man . . . I really screwed the pooch here. I really did.”
Pilate was moving early, and at eight o’clock was parked behind the RV at the Crossroads Citgo gas station and convenience store. The Upper Peninsula had been a mystery to him. He’d traveled through barren areas of the Southwest, but nothing like this. In the Southwestern deserts, long stretches of absolutely nothing were punctuated by fairly large towns. In the UP, there were some long stretches of nothing—usually marked as state or national forests—but there were also farms and logging businesses, back roads apparently leading to something, logging equipment being moved around.
But the towns: there was nothing in them. He didn’t really need anything they didn’t have—there was usually a gas pump and convenience store. They just weirded him out.
Brownsville got a prominent dot on their paper map, but when they arrived, they found a scattering of houses, a few empty buildings, and maybe a dozen active businesses: the Citgo station; Tom’s Skidoo Repair and Donuts, which also served coffee and weak soft drinks; Larabee Woodworking, which featured chainsaw sculptures of bears and fish, as well as a variety of cribbage boards; Pat’s Diner and Quilt Shop, which had four booths and four tables and six stools along a bar, plus quilting supplies in a side room; a beer joint called Magic’s, which was closed in the morning; and a large lot full of pine logs, but no sign of life.
There were a few more shops on the other side of the Citgo, but they hadn’t bothered to go look. They’d passed a compact redbrick elementary school on the way in, and next to that, a matching, but even smaller, redbrick government and law enforcement center.
Kristen and Laine were pumping gas into the Pontiac and diesel into the RV when the call from Alice McCarthy came in: she said “unreliable,” and Pilate said a few more words and rang off and said, “Shit. We got a big problem.”
Kristen said, “We got more than one. The gas is dribbling out of this pump.”
“Fuck the gas—we just got an ‘unreliable’ from Alice. The cops got her and they were making her call us.”
He looked at the phone in his hand and said, “I got to get rid of this.”
He was headed for a trash can when the phone rang again. Richie, who’d been north of them, up by the lake. Pilate answered, and blurted, “The cops might be listening to this.”
“We were calling to warn you. We stopped for food and drinks at this place, and got an ‘unreliable,’ from Alice, and were taking off, but my girlfriend bought this newspaper on the way out, and it says an unidentified California man was shot and killed at the Gathering in Sault Ste. Marie.”
“What!”
“They’re all over us, man. It’s the California plates that are doing it,” Richie said.
“You know that emergency place we talked about? To meet up?”
“Yeah.”
“Go there. And throw away your phone.”
“See you there.”
Pilate hung up and said to Kristen and Laine, “Some California guy got shot by the cops at the Gathering. Had to be one of us.”
“We got to get out of here,” Kristen said. “We still need the gas. And you gotta go get Michelle and Bell.”
Pilate looked around, got a paper towel out of the dispenser above the window-washing tub, put the towel on the ground and the phone on the towel, and stomped the phone to death. When he was satisfied that it would no longer work—and had separated the battery from the rest of the debris—he wrapped the pieces in the paper towel and threw it all in the trash can. “I’ll get Bell.”
Before he went to get him, he got his .45 out of the Pontiac and stuck it under his belt, and pulled out his T-shirt to cover it. Then he jogged across the street to the diner, where Michelle and Bell had ordered six cheeseburgers to go. The burgers were still cooking.
“Gotta go,” Pilate said, when he came through the door.
“Couple more minutes, we oughta get some—”
“Gotta go!”
A heavyset woman with long yellow-gray hair was cooking the burgers, while trying to keep her cigarette ash out of the meat, and said around the cigarette butt, “They’re not quite ready . . .”
Michelle was by the window, looking out, and said, “Oh, my God! Look at this.”
? ? ?
A SHERIFF’S PATROL CAR had stopped in the middle of the street and two cops had gotten out. They were walking toward Kristen and Laine, who were still standing at the fuel pumps, looking at the cops coming toward them.
Bell turned to Pilate, who’d frozen in place, and then Bell pulled his revolver, an old .38, and said, “Let’s do it.”
Pilate said, “Wait!”
Bell said, “Bullshit, it all ends right here, if they take the cars away from us.”
And in the next one second he was out the door with his gun, and then Pilate followed behind, pulling his .45, and Bell opened up with the .38 from forty feet, and then Pilate joined in, and the cops turned and tried to fire back but they went down in the street.