“Where’s Mellon?”
“Straight on through Brownsville for ten miles or so, then there’s a branch highway headed northwest to Marquette. More of a back road than a highway, though it’s paved and they can move right along. A couple miles on the other side of Mellon, there’s a three-way intersection, an east-west road cuts across the one they’re on. If they get to that intersection, finding them is going to get tougher, if we don’t know which way they went.”
“Gotta hurry,” Lucas returned.
A minute later, he got another call from Laurent: “There’s a state patrolman on his way to Mellon. If he gets there first, he can block the road at a bridge. There’s only the highway, and if he jams them up, he should be able to hold them off. There were at least four of them, maybe five, but one of them may have been shot by a woman who owns the local café . . . and she was hit by return fire. That’s what we’re hearing. We don’t know about the guy who’s trailing them.”
“Gotta go faster,” Lucas said. “Gotta get there. How many highway patrolmen?”
“Only one, far as I know.”
“Gotta go faster,” Lucas said. “Call ahead to that town, Mellon, is that right? Call them and tell them what’s coming.”
“I’ll do that now,” Laurent said.
Frisell leaned into the accelerator, crossed a hundred, and said, “Let me know when you get nervous.”
“Not yet,” Lucas said. He added, “I’m gonna reach past you.”
He reached past Frisell to the dashboard and hit the switches for his flashers.
And they rolled, rapidly pulling away from the cars behind them.
? ? ?
THEY’D BEEN LEAVING WINTER, twenty miles out of Brownsville, when the shooting started. They found out about it a minute or so later when the sheriff, who’d been shot, began screaming for help from his car, and the Hale County deputy’s car passed Lucas and Frisell.
Fifteen miles, more or less. Frisell pushed the Benz to a hundred and ten and then chickened out, saying, “I don’t think I can hold it much faster than this. Highway’s too rough.”
They got to Brownsville about nine minutes after the shooting, and fifteen seconds behind the deputies in the car that had passed them on the highway.
Both of the wounded men were still there in the street. It was a long run to the nearest hospital; the closest one was in Munising, where the phone pings had placed the second group of Pilate’s disciples. Brownsville had no doctor, but there was a large-animal vet a couple of miles out and he’d been called to do first aid. He’d gotten there a minute before Lucas and Frisell.
? ? ?
THE SHERIFF WAS LYING next to his car, at the end of a blood trail. He’d been shot in the middle of the street, and had crawled back to his car to call for help. Three townspeople were gathered around him and one of the deputies from the squad car was stuffing gauze packs into a wound on his side.
The sheriff had been hit in the side, the left hip and right calf, and was conscious. A deputy had been hit in the back, twice, high and low, and was unconscious, still breathing, still lying in the middle of the street in a pool of blood. The vet was working over him, trying to stop the bleeding.
Lucas looked at the sheriff and then called out to the circle of townspeople who were gathering around, “We need a door to use as a stretcher. We need a pickup and a mattress off a bed—and a box spring, if we can get it. We need it right now.”
A group of the townspeople broke off, running for their houses, calling back and forth. A couple of them headed for a house that appeared to be abandoned. Lucas had gone to look at the downed deputy, when he heard a smashing sound. He turned and saw a heavy man in boots kicking a door off the empty house.
The vet looked up as Laurent came jogging over and said, “Orville’s gone if we don’t get him to the hospital right quick. I’m losing his airway.”
“We’ve got an airway kit in my car,” Laurent said.
The vet said, “Get it! Quick!”
A woman was backing a super-duty pickup toward them, and somebody yelled, “We got the bed . . .”
The heavy guy was carrying a broken door toward them, and Lucas went that way, and shouted to four people struggling with a double-sized mattress and box spring, “Put the mattress in the pickup bed. Bring the door here.”
Four of them carefully edged the sheriff onto the door. He moaned once, and muttered, “Hurts . . .” and they carried the door to the pickup and put the sheriff on the mattress.
A minute later they transferred the deputy onto the mattress next to the sheriff. The vet climbed into the truck with the woman deputy from Cray County, who was holding a plastic airway piece in the deputy’s throat. The vet was now on the phone to an emergency room doc, and they took off, headed for Munising.
? ? ?
A WOMAN HAD ALSO been wounded, somebody said, and Lucas went into the café to look at her. The woman was lying on the café floor, on her side, smoking a cigarette. She’d been hit on the edge of her hip. Unless she had a weak heart, she’d make it, Lucas thought, at least until lung cancer got to her. She’d lost some blood, but not a lot, and another woman was pressing a towel on the wound.
“We got to get her going,” Lucas said.
“I’ll take her in my car,” the second woman said.
The woman on the floor said, around her cigarette, “What a pain in the ass . . .”
The second woman shook her head: “Margery—”
“What happened to the boys?” Margery asked.
“They’re headed north,” said a man who’d come through the door behind Lucas.
“How many were there?” Lucas asked the woman on the floor.
“Either four or five,” the woman on the floor said. “I think there were two women pumping gas and two men and a woman in here, waiting for the cheeseburgers, which they never paid for.”