“Listen—you’re going the wrong way. They’re gonna eventually figure out that we ran for it, and they’re gonna expect that we ran away from the town. What we gotta do is, we gotta run around the town, and go out the other way.”
Pilate said, “You might be right . . . I was thinking about doing that.”
“Then let’s go. We got no time. Every cop in the world’s gonna be jammin’ in here.”
They ran halfway around the town—three hundred yards, all back in the woods—when Kristen, who was leading the way, froze and held up a finger. Human voices. Kristen jerked a finger to the left, and they moved deeper into the woods, as quietly as they could.
Another hundred yards around, they reached a tree that had fallen, but was caught three-fourths of the way down in the crotch of another tree. Pilate climbed up on the trunk, tested it for stability, then climbed as high as he could on the slanting trunk. When he’d gone as far as he could, he peered back to where they’d heard the voices.
A minute later, he climbed back down and said to Kristen, “Bunch of guys with guns. They’re looking at the town. They’re surrounding it.”
“We gotta keep moving.”
? ? ?
FIFTEEN MINUTES OUT, they saw a uniformed cop with a car parked across the highway, turning around a car that had wanted to drive through. They walked for another half an hour, a mile at most, slow going in the woods. They heard several random shots from town, then a long sustained burst of gunfire. Kristen looked back and said, “That didn’t sound good.”
“We gotta get out to the road and grab a car,” Pilate said. “You gotta do it. You run on one side, you see a car coming, you flag it down. When the guy rolls the window down to see what the problem is, you shoot him.”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“Then let’s get closer to the road, where you can move out when a car comes.”
The first car came from behind them, followed quickly by another moving fast. Pilate said, “Not them. They gotta be cops.”
Ten minutes on, a pickup came down the road toward them and Kristen broke out of the trees and ran toward it, waving frantically. The truck slowed. A big guy sat behind the wheel, the only person inside. He stopped, rolled down the window, and asked, “Are they still fightin’ in—”
Kristen pulled the gun from her back waistband and BANG!
Kristen shot him in the head from three feet and the man fell back onto the center console.
Pilate was there, ran around the nose of the truck, yanked the door open and shouted, “Help me drag him, help me drag him out.”
Kristen ran around and together they dragged him through the roadside ditch and behind some brush, then ran back to the truck. They turned, and headed back the way they’d come that morning, moving fast, now.
Kristen was driving and Pilate climbed into the back of the double cab, where he found a toolbox and a tire. He pushed the tire up on the seat, with the toolbox, and said, “Listen, they won’t be as worried about a woman driving alone. If we come up to a roadblock that we can’t beat, I’m gonna lay on the floor back here and pull the toolbox and tire on top of me. You be polite and talk us through.”
“Fat chance,” she said.
“Yeah, well, keep the gun under your leg. If it’s one cop, take him, but shoot either high or low. With all this shooting, he’ll be wearing a vest, so you got to go over it or get under it.”
“They’ll kill us,” Kristen said.
“They’ll kill us no matter what,” Pilate said. “Right now, we at least got a chance.”
They made it down to Engadine in twenty-five minutes, and an hour later, were coming up to St. Ignace, where the Mackinac Bridge came up from Lower Michigan on I-75.
“Once we get across that fuckin’ bridge, we’re free,” Pilate said, his first show of enthusiasm since he’d kicked Skye to death. “Once we get out of shitkicker heaven, they ain’t gonna find us. We got a thousand roads we can take back to L.A.”
“You think they won’t know about us in L.A.?”
“Shut up and learn something. My wholesaler brings the dope up from Mexico. He goes back and forth all the time. He can get us down to Mexico.”
“What would we do there?”
“Shit, I don’t know,” Pilate said. “We could figure out something. We’ll still have our guns—”
Kristen said, “There’s a gas station. We need gas . . . and what the hell is that?”
Straight ahead, a couple hundred yards beyond a truck stop, they were looking at the back end of what looked like an L.A. traffic jam.
“I don’t like it,” Pilate blurted. “Pull into the pumps. Pump some gas and ask somebody what’s going on.”
Kristen pulled in and pumped gas while Pilate lay below window level in the truck. He could hear her talking to somebody and then he heard nothing for five minutes. When she got back in the cab with a sack full of junk food and a six-pack of Budweiser and another of Coke, Pilate asked, “What?”
She muttered, “Stay down and don’t talk.”
She pulled back on the highway, and Pilate sat up and looked back. “What was that?”
“The cops have blocked the bridge. They’re shaking down every car coming out of the UP.” She looked at him: “So what’s the plan now?”
He thought about it, then said, “First, we need a different car.”
The media came in like a bad rain, barely preceded by the Michigan State Police, who took over the town and began organizing a countywide house-by-house search for Pilate and Kristen.