He stayed on the road, glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Laurent was still with him. He accelerated, passed the first couple of houses, saw the ditch ahead of him, probably five or six hundred yards away. He could take the gravel tracks for most of the way, but there was a band of weeds and low shrubs along the line of the ditch.
They were moving faster now, passing the houses, bouncing through yards and back onto other tracks; they were a hundred yards out when there was a nasty crack from the backseat and Lucas felt a stinging burn on his neck, and Frisell blurted, “They’re shooting at us, they took out a piece of the window.”
“We’re almost there, we’re almost there—”
“You’re bleeding, man.”
“How bad?”
“Not too bad.”
“Glass,” Lucas said. He touched his neck and came away with blood on his fingers.
There was another crack from the back, but farther back on the truck, and Frisell said, “Dumb shit isn’t leading us enough.”
He said it with such technical disapproval that Lucas had to laugh, and then Frisell started, and they were laughing when they crashed into the brush at the edge of the ditch and were out and running. Laurent and one of his uniformed deputies, Bernie Allen, were out of their truck and running behind them, and they went down into the ditch into ankle-deep water.
Crouching, they were out of sight from the town. Laurent looked at Lucas’s neck and said, “You got hit.”
“Glass. Not too bad.”
“All right,” Laurent said. “I’ll go first with the rifle. Everybody behind me, five meters between you. If I get hit, take out the shooter before you try to help me—no point in anyone else getting shot. Jerry, follow me, we’ll put Lucas in the third spot, and Bernie, you cover our back. Everybody got it?”
Lucas was about to suggest that he lead, but Laurent was already spotting his move, and he started off down the marsh, holding his black rifle at his shoulder, ready to fire, and Lucas realized . . . Laurent’s done this before. So had Frisell. He was the tactical dummy in the group.
They were two hundred yards west of the bridge. They’d covered a hundred of that when Laurent stopped and put up a hand, then said, aloud, “We’re getting closer to the buildings, where somebody on the roof could see us. Bernie, you cover the roofs. I’m going on to the bridge. Lucas, you come behind me, but not until you see me get there. Jerry and Bernie, come down one at a time—we’ll cover you from the bridge. We’ll be moving fast now.”
Everybody nodded, and Laurent took a breath and ran toward the bridge, not bothering to crouch anymore. Frisell and Allen half stood with their rifles, looking at the rooflines of two nearby buildings, but nobody showed, and fifteen seconds after he took off—it seemed like forever—Laurent ducked under the bridge, and Frisell said to Lucas, “Go.”
Lucas went. He was carrying the first aid kit and ran as hard as he could, but the creek bed was mucky and he went knee-deep in the mud at one point—the muck smelled like rotten eggs—and was breathing hard when he struggled under the bridge.
He could see Blinder tucked up under the bridge deck, right where the concrete abutments came down into the bank. He was awake and had a gun in his hand, but in the dim light, looked pale as a ghost: loss of blood, maybe, or shock. He was wearing a jacket, but no shirt. Laurent had ignored him and was half under the bridge, half out, covering the roofs as Frisell came blundering down the creek bed.
Lucas crawled over to Blinder, who said, “Glad to see you, man. I’m hurting.”
“Where are you hit?”
“Both legs and my butt,” he said, in a voice that was mostly a groan. “Ripped up my shirt and tried to plug the holes, but I’m still bleeding. And I really fuckin’ hurt. Goddamn, I didn’t know that gettin’ shot hurt this bad.”
Lucas unzipped the first aid kit, found a bottle of morphine with an eyedropper top. “Gonna give you a squirt of this under your tongue. Don’t swallow, just let it sit there for a minute. It’ll kill the pain.”
Blinder nodded.
As Lucas gave him the eyedropper of morphine, Frisell slid under the bridge, turned with his rifle, and joined Laurent in watching the rooftops. Lucas took a pair of scissors out of the first aid kit and began cutting away Blinder’s pant legs. Laurent came over to help as Allen slid under the bridge; the wound in Blinder’s butt was bleeding, but was basically a groove in a layer of fat. The through-and-through wounds in his legs were worse.
They threw the shirt-rag bandages away, replacing them with heavy gauze pads, binding them tight, and Frisell, who’d been watching them work, said, “We gotta get him out of here. That’s a long run back and we won’t have anyone to cover us.”
Laurent said, “Well, we gotta do it. We need to get him up to Munising.”
Lucas said, “Let’s get him plugged up, then you can cover me. I’m going to run over to the cars on the other side of the bridge, see if there are any keys. If there are, we can take him out that way. It’s only fifteen yards, instead of two hundred, and two of us could move him, while the other two cover.”
Laurent nodded: “Yes.”
Lucas asked Blinder, “How’re you feeling?”
“That stuff in the bottle . . . starting to kick in.” He looked sleepy.
“Good.”
They finished bandaging him as well as they could, then Laurent took a call, listened for a moment, then said, “Good. Freeze it right there. We’ll keep them from getting out on this side,” and a few seconds later, “Ah, shit. Are you sure?”
He got off the phone and said, “They’re saying the Brownsville deputy didn’t make it.”
They all sat for a moment, then Lucas said, “You guys cover the roofline and windows. I’m going for that car.”