The three of them spread, two on the bank at one side of the bridge, one on the other side, and Laurent said, “We gotcha.”
Lucas launched himself up the bank on the other side. The first of the two cars was fifteen or twenty yards away, the second, five yards beyond that. He ran hard, feeling the tension in his back where the bullet would hit, and dodged behind the first car . . . safe for the moment. He crawled to the door and looked at the ignition; no keys. He checked the front seat and the center console. Nothing.
He crawled back to the second car and realized, as he got close, that it was actually still running. The passenger-side door was closed but unlatched, and he pulled it open. An unfinished cheeseburger was sitting on the floor on the passenger side; he picked it up and threw it into the backseat.
Lucas slid inside, crawled into the driver’s seat, got his legs beneath himself, trying to stay below the windshield level. There’d been no gunshots from the guys at the bridge, so he shifted the car into drive and steered it out around the first car, right down to the creek bank, where he stopped and put the car into “Park.”
The backseat would probably be too cramped for Blinder, so he pushed the passenger seat back as far as he could, then slipped out the driver’s-side door and crawled over to the bank and down into the creek.
“Got the car right up above,” he told the others. “We need to get him into the passenger seat, the backseat is too small.”
Laurent said, “Excellent. Bernie, you and Lucas carry him up there. And Bernie, you’re gonna have to take him up to Munising.”
“Man, I hate to miss this . . .”
“Somebody’s got to go and I’m saying it’s you,” Laurent said. “I need Lucas and you’re less crazy than fuckin’ Frisell. So: you’re the guy.”
Allen muttered, “Okay,” and Laurent said, “You already done good, now you gotta run with him.”
Lucas said, “The car’s a piece of shit, and there’s not much gas, so flag down the first car you see—first friendly car—and transfer over.”
“Got it,” Allen said.
Lucas and Allen joined hands, as in a hammock, and Frisell and Laurent helped put Blinder in the hammock, and went back to their guns. Lucas and Allen got to the edge of the bank, and Lucas asked, “Ready?”
“Ready.”
The bank wasn’t high—maybe five feet—but it was slippery and steep, and they were not moving fast as they dug their shoes into the bank and struggled up to the top. Once there, they hurried to the passenger side, and fit Blinder into the seat, and Allen ran around to the driver’s side as Lucas buckled Blinder in.
Laurent fired two shots and shouted, “Second story, second window, left,” and a bullet cracked off the bridge abutment and Laurent and Frisell opened up again with their rifles and Allen backed away in the car as Lucas slid down the bank into the creek bed.
When Frisell and Laurent stopped shooting, Lucas risked a peek over the top of the bank. Allen was a hundred yards away and still backing up, then a hundred and fifty, and he made a quick turn onto the shoulder, brought the car around, and drove off.
Lucas ducked back and said to the others, “He’s gone.”
“Okay,” Laurent said. “Now we just gotta root these other motherfuckers out, without getting any more of us shot.”
? ? ?
“THERE’RE NO COPS in Mellon, right?” Lucas asked.
Laurent shook his head.
“Would there be anyone who’d have everybody’s phone number?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe, but I don’t know who it would be.”
“We need to find out what’s going on with the people in town. Call up whoever you’re talking to, in the posse, ask if anyone’s got a good phone number.”
Laurent got on the phone and Frisell, who was lying on the town-side creek bank, said, “I saw somebody running, they went into that little pink house . . . looked like a local woman. Didn’t look California.”
“Just now?” Lucas asked.
“No, when we were shooting at the window up there . . . There’s still somebody there, by the way. If he peeks around that windowsill one more time, he’s gonna get a chest full of .223.”
“If it was a local, and they were running into the pink house . . . that probably means there aren’t any Pilates in there.”
Laurent said, “They’re making a call. They got two numbers, but it’s a husband and wife, so they could be in the same place.” He put the phone to his ear again, and Lucas and Frisell went back to scanning the town.
There were six visible commercial buildings in Mellon, all single-story except two, which had two stories. The buildings were weather-worn, a little dirty, with what looked like vinyl siding. They could only see the side of one of the two-story buildings, but had an angle on the other one: the front windows were blank, unadorned, and dirty—the building was empty, Lucas thought. The houses were either shingled or had vinyl siding and several of them were faded pastel colors in blue, green, yellow, and pink; all of them had garages.
Laurent was still on the phone and Lucas said to him, “Tell whoever’s on the other end of the phone, to make sure that they’ve got the road blocked. Park those patrol cars across it. They’ll have access to cars in there, and they might try to bust through the line. Can’t get across this bridge.”
Laurent did that, listened for a minute, then said, “They talked to a Mrs. Boden, who said she’s in the gas station with the clerk, and none of the Pilates are in there, and they’re both armed. She said there are more people in Ted’s, that’s the bar, and they’re armed, too. She knows that some of the Pilates are in the Old Eagle Inn, which is that two-story place where they were shooting at us from the window.”
“We already knew that,” Frisell said.