Lucas dropped the magazine and stepped back to the front of the store and saw four people down in the street: both deputies and the two naked people, all of them dappled with bloodstains. Laurent was walking toward them and Lucas shouted, “We gotta clear the store.”
Laurent shouted back, “Okay,” and Peters, who’d dropped his corner of the quilt that held the wounded woman, jogged up and asked, “Who’s going first?”
Laurent said, “I will. I got the big gun. Barney, you cover the window. If you see anything, open up. Lucas, get back around to the side and see if there’s anybody in front of me when I go in.”
Lucas went back around to the side, peeked through the window again, and yelled, “Go!”
Laurent gave the building a preliminary squirt, three rounds through the front door, and splinters and dust flew off the door, and then he was at the door, kicking it open. Nothing moved. He stepped inside, and Lucas was aware of people shouting in the street, but nothing moved in the store.
They cleared it in one minute. Their technique was bad, dangerous, hurried; but then, they were in a hurry.
When they were ninety-nine percent sure there were no hidden disciples inside, Laurent called one of the uninjured deputies to stand inside the door, ready to shoot at anything that suddenly appeared from nowhere, and then he, Lucas, and Peters went back to the street.
The two naked people were dead, hit multiple times from multiple angles, by both the deputies who’d been carrying the quilt and the civilians in the bar. The deputies had been shot in the legs. One was showing arterial bleeding from one leg, and Peters put a pressure bandage on the wound and tied it down with a wrapping of nylon rope, and then put lighter pressure on the wound in the other leg, and they loaded him into a truck. Almost as an afterthought, they loaded the wounded woman, Laine, in the same truck, and the driver took off for the hospital in Munising.
The other deputy wasn’t showing as much blood, but had a broken leg. They handled him as delicately as they could, putting him in the backseat of a station wagon, and the driver took off.
The two artists had come out of the inn and the woman was taking photographs with a small Panasonic camera, focusing on the dead naked disciples. Lucas felt like smacking her in the mouth, but didn’t. Instead, he shouted, “Get out of there, get out of there; you’re messing with a crime scene.”
She stepped back but didn’t stop shooting.
“We’ve got to go house by house,” Laurent said. He looked around and people were beginning to drift into the street. Frisell and two other deputies were coming toward them, with the woman they’d taken prisoner at the creek, Laurent told Frisell and Peters to organize a search party.
“There are at least two people missing,” Lucas said. “Pilate and his girlfriend. They may be holed up or they may have taken off. The guy in the inn thought they ran for it. But: we gotta take it slow and easy.”
? ? ?
THEY TOOK AN HOUR working through the town and found no more disciples. Nor had they seen any sign of Pilate or his girlfriend.
Early in the search, Lucas and Laurent had gone into the hardware store to check the man who’d opened fire on them in the street. Lucas had hit him seven times, including one wound in the head and three in the chest, any one of which would have killed him.
As they looked down at him, Lucas said to Laurent, “We’ve got to find Pilate. If we don’t, the killing isn’t over. They go to a house, somewhere, shoot the people and take their car and we won’t even know what to look for, until somebody finds the bodies.”
“They had to go out the back,” Laurent said. “I’ll get everybody looking down that way. They can’t have gotten too far.”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “They might already have hijacked a car.”
They went back outside and Laurent looked at the three dead disciples in the street—the man from the blue house and the two naked people. “This was a right straight war. They’re gonna make movies about this one.”
“Maybe. But Pilate won’t be playing himself,” Lucas said. “Not with one dead deputy and two wounded.”
A deputy was hurrying toward them. “Got another body. Old lady in the blue house. They shot her and stuffed her in a closet.”
Laurent groaned. “Had to be one more, didn’t there? My God, these people . . . these people . . .”
Word of the shoot-out in Mellon leaked to the media almost immediately—Lucas suspected the artists—and when it did, rental car agencies in Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette ran out of cars in ten minutes.
Lucas told Laurent, “You gotta warn everyone to be careful about what they say. You’ll get a hundred professional assholes landing on you. It’d be best if you did most of the talking, and your reserve guys, because they’ll not only be the ones the media want to talk to, but they’re all pretty smart. Don’t let any bullshitters get in front of a camera or you’ll pay for it later.”
“They’ll want to talk to you,” Laurent said.
“Not so much and I’m going back home,” Lucas said. “This is a Michigan deal. There’s three dead in Wisconsin, eight or nine dead in Michigan, more dead in South Dakota and California, so far, and none dead in Minnesota. Guess where I’m from? I’m just here helping out . . .”
“You gotta stay at least until the state cops get here, because, uh, if I remember right, you shot two of those dead people yourself,” Laurent said. “As long as you’re waiting, you might as well help us chase down Pilate.”
“Not much I can do to find Pilate—he’s out in the wind now,” Lucas said. “You’re right about making the statement, though. I’ll stay for that.”
? ? ?
PILATE AND KRISTEN had gone out the window on the lower level of the inn, had run to the creek, then up the creek until they were deep in the trees. Pilate turned up the far bank and Kristen hissed, “Where’re you going?”
“Down the highway.”