He ran behind the houses and commercial buildings along the main street. He’d gone two hundred yards and was jogging across an open space between two buildings, when a door popped open on a place called BAR and somebody fired a shot at him.
The shot missed, but he saw the door moving and fired back as he ran, ducking behind the next building. He went on, running hard, and at the last of the commercial buildings, risked running down the side of one of them, to look down the street. The pickup had backed away and was farther out of reach than it had been when they began.
“Shit.” He jogged back toward Pilate and the rest of the group, sprinting through the open space where he’d been shot at.
“He’s backing off—I can’t get to him, but he’s gotta be calling all the other cops from everywhere,” he told Pilate.
“Too late,” Kristen said. A black SUV was coming down the highway, flashers on the front bumper. “Here come some more of them.”
Pilate looked around, wildly, trying to find a way out. He didn’t want to hear that Fall bullshit.
Coon said, “Look—there’s not that many of them. I say we fight it out here. We can take them. We get in these houses, we make them come to us. We’re out in the fuckin’ wilderness, they can’t get help no more than we can.”
Kristen said, “I knew we shouldn’t have come. This was a bad idea right from the start.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Pilate said. “Let’s do what Coon said. Let’s take over some of these buildings and ambush the motherfuckers. Fight it out. We got a chance.”
They all looked at him, his magic almost gone now.
“We do,” he said. “We got a chance.”
Way up ahead, Lucas could see the flashing lights of the state police car, and he said to Frisell, “Gonna have to pull up before we get there. We might have them trapped between us.”
As the last words came out of his mouth, Laurent called from a trailing car. “Dick Blinder’s calling us, he’s been hit, shot, he’s under the bridge. They’re trying to blast him out. He says he’s bleeding bad. There are two cars on the opposite side of the bridge, they’re with Pilate. Dick thinks they left the cars and they’re up in town with Pilate and the others. They’ve got rifles. Dick says if we can’t get him out of that ditch, he won’t make it.”
Lucas took his foot off the gas. “Can you call him back?”
“Yeah, we got him on his shoulder set.”
“Ask him if any of Pilate’s people are in the ditch. If somebody’s in the ditch with him, are they on the east side or the west?”
A moment later, Laurent came back. “He doesn’t think anyone’s in the ditch. He thinks they’re all up in town.”
Lucas couldn’t see Laurent in his rearview mirror; Laurent was in his pickup, and didn’t have flashers. Lucas asked, “Can you see me? Up ahead of you?”
“Yeah, but you’re a way out, probably a mile or more.”
“Okay, we’ll wait for you. When you get close, we’re gonna take off, and try to go around the town to the ditch. Follow along behind us. Tell Dick we’re coming. And tell everybody else in the posse to take up positions on this side of town, block the road and wait, until we know what’s going on.”
“Got it.”
? ? ?
“WHAT EXACTLY are we doing?” Frisell asked.
“Damned if I know. Gotta get closer before I can figure it out,” Lucas said. “You ever been through here?”
“Sure. Once or twice a year, probably.”
“Which side of the road has the most houses, and the least trees?”
“Oh, shit, I’ve never been far off the road . . . uh, God, I think the most houses would be on the left.”
“If they’re planning to shoot it out with us, or take hostages, they’ll probably be along the main street,” Lucas said. “I want to swing around them to the ditch. Once we’re in the ditch, we’ll have cover and we can get to Dick. What’s his last name?”
“Blinder. Kind of an asshole, but I wouldn’t wish him bad luck.”
“Well, he’s highway patrol, or state police, or whatever you call them up here. Being an asshole kinda comes with the territory.” In the rearview mirror, Lucas could see Laurent coming fast.
“Get ready with that rifle. There’s a canvas bag in the back, right behind your seat. It’s a first aid kit. Get that out, and there’s a hard box under the seat, right in front of the first aid kit. Get that, too.”
Frisell popped his safety belt and Lucas started toward the town. Frisell came up with the first aid kit, and the hard box, and Lucas said, “The hard box is full of magazines for my .45. Give them to me. And buckle up.”
Lucas put the magazines in his jacket pocket, and as Frisell buckled in, Lucas said, “Pucker up. Here we go.”
“If I puckered up any harder . . .”
“What?”
“I can’t think of anything funny.”
“I know what you mean.” Lucas took off as Laurent came up behind, and they rolled toward the town at forty miles an hour or so. At the edge of the built-up area, which sat in what amounted to a clearing in the forest, Lucas saw a long strip of vacant ground on the left, leading up to a concrete platform that might once have supported a gas station. Nothing remained of a building. Behind it was more open ground, and beyond that, a scattering of postwar houses.
“Going cross-country,” he said. He slowed and turned into the empty concrete platform, then bounced across the crumbling curb at the back, and ricocheted and bounded and twisted over the rough, soggy ground behind it, his speed falling to ten miles an hour, eventually coming out on a gravel street that led through the scattered houses behind the business district.