“You don’t have to be funny, Margery, for God’s sakes,” said the woman with the towel.
“I shot at them, but I was pretty shaky. I think I hit that one woman, even though I wasn’t shooting at her, particularly. I saw Hugh and Orville go down and I grabbed my gun and let go.”
As they were talking, a clerk from the filling station across the street ran up and said, “Ben says they shot up his truck, but he’s okay. They kept going and he’s still trailing them. He said they’re definitely headed toward Mellon, but they’re not going very fast because of the RV.”
“We’re going,” Lucas said. He looked at Frisell and then asked one of the deputies, “You got an extra rifle?”
“In the trunk of the sheriff’s car.”
“We need it . . . And somebody get this lady to the hospital, quick as you can.”
They got the rifle, another .223, and four magazines, and Lucas led the posse out of town again. He was driving this time while Frisell checked out the rifle.
“How far are we from Mellon?”
“Twenty, twenty-five miles, I guess,” Frisell said.
“So . . . ten or twelve minutes.”
“Only if you’re driving a hundred and twenty.” He looked up at the trees going by: “Oh, Jesus . . .”
“He’s not here,” Lucas said.
? ? ?
THREE MILES WEST OF MELLON, a Michigan state cop named Richard Blinder was on the radio to a Hale County deputy about the shooting at Brownsville. “If they’re coming my way, I can block the culvert at Mellon and hold them off for a while, depending on how many there are. I’ll be there in two minutes, but for God’s sakes, get me some help.”
Two minutes later, running with flashers and siren, he hit the fifteen-foot-long bridge over a seasonal stream at Mellon, slewed the cruiser sideways, jogged it back and forth until he covered both lanes between the metal railings. The creek beneath the bridge had only a trickle of water at the bottom, and was mostly filled with wetland foliage.
The land was flat, and the road straight, and Blinder could see nothing coming at him. He got his rifle out of the trunk and jogged up the street to a convenience store/gas station. There were two cars parked at the station, three patrons and the clerk standing outside by the gas pumps. They saw him coming, turned toward him, and the clerk shouted, “They called us from Brownsville. We’re holing up here and in the bar, and some people are getting guns and hiding out in their houses.”
“All right, but it’d be better to get out in the woods. One way or another, this can’t last long. They’ll be here in five minutes.”
Blinder ran back to his car and somebody came out of the bar and yelled, “Hey, Dick, you need somebody with you?”
“No, no, cover up. Barricade the doors. Get people safe.”
? ? ?
THE TOWN OF MELLON had barely impinged on Pilate’s consciousness. He was running hard in the Pontiac, leaving the RV behind. Had to get somewhere, far away, had to hide, had to find out what the cops knew and what they didn’t. Mellon was nothing more than a pimple on the ass of the UP, and they’d picked it as an emergency rendezvous only because they could get gasoline there, and food, and they’d be close to a major intersection—or what passed for a major intersection. Back in L.A., it’d be called a bike path.
Kristen wasn’t helping: “This whole fuckin’ trip has been crazy,” she shouted at him. “This was badly planned. Badly planned. Now we got every cop in the world chasing us. We’d have been better off if that bitch in Hayward had stabbed you a little. Get that sewn up, she’s in jail, we get out of there. But no! You had—”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up. You want to get out? You want to hitchhike back? So shut the fuck up.”
“I knew this was . . .” She paused, then said, “There’s something up ahead. What is that?”
“That’s that town . . .”
They could see a scattering of houses, and beyond that, a half dozen commercial buildings of some kind, with signs out front, and beyond that, more houses, and a car parked sideways across the street. As they got closer, they could see it was a cop car, blocking a narrow two-lane bridge: no way around it. No movie moves.
? ? ?
“OH, FUCK . . . IT’S A roadblock. Get the rifle, get the rifle. Load it up.”
Pilate hadn’t even planned to slow down for Mellon: he had plenty of gas, he’d just wanted to meet the boys at the intersection. They’d stashed the black rifle in the backseat, and Kristen turned in her seat, pulled the rifle out, and two long magazines, and said, “I don’t shoot so good.”
“You see that blue house down from the roadblock?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m pulling in right there.”
He’d slowed to forty miles an hour: they’d be at the roadblock in half a minute if they continued at the same speed. “Can’t slow down too much, or they’ll figure out what we’re doing.”
“What’re we doing?”
“What you always wanted to do. We’re gonna kill a fuckin’ cop.”
“I think we done that already.”
They rolled on, not slowing, into the town, past a convenience store and gas station, a tire place/garage, a bar/café, a used-boat dealer, and a couple of low-rise commercial buildings, which appeared to be abandoned. They could see the cop on the far side of his car, holding up a hand, warning them to stop, a rifle on his hip, and two hundred feet away, Pilate swerved off the road, up a short gravel driveway and behind the blue house.
As soon as he was out of sight of the cop car, he jammed on the brakes, shifted into Park, grabbed the rifle, and ran to the corner of the house.