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THE OLD LADY had a wall of photos of herself and a man who must have been her husband, showing them through the years, with four children, and then a bunch of grandchildren. One of the photos showed the old lady, many years younger, giving the man a haircut with an electric clipper as he sat on a wooden chair in a bathroom, with a towel around his neck. They dug through the bathroom drawers and a linen closet and, sure enough, found the clippers.
The clippers were crude and Pilate kept flinching when the clipper-head yanked at his hair, but they got it done, and finished the job, both his face and scalp, with a throwaway lady’s razor.
When she was finished, Pilate looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and said, “I hate this. I look about twenty fuckin’ years older.”
“That’s a good thing,” Kristen said. “I’ll tell you something else: your head looks about half as big as it used to and your nose looks twice as big. You don’t look nothin’ like that drawing.”
Pilate cut Kristen’s hair, taking his time, looking at the way her hair lay across her head, and when he finished, Kristen turned this way and that, looking in the mirror, and then said, “You know, maybe you should have been a hairdresser. Looks pretty good. Makes me look like a boy.”
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THEY WATCHED THE NEWS on satellite TV, and it was a scream-fest. They caught CNN first, Wolf Blitzer, and then a local station out of Traverse City.
Both CNN and the local station had video shot minutes after the shooting ended. The video had been shot by the woman artist, who said she’d been held captive and had been threatened with rape by the disciples.
She had apparently sold her video to every TV station in sight, and complained that the Michigan state cops had confiscated her original memory card and camera. She’d seen that coming, though, and had saved the video to her laptop before the cops got to her.
One of the videos showed a tall thin cop firing a rifle out the window, while another one, with a pistol, huddled on the floor, watched. Before he pulled the trigger, they heard the thin cop say, quite clearly, “Fuck him,” and after he fired, the other cop walked to the window and looked out, and then say, almost conversationally, “Nice shot.”
The camera then tracked down across the floor where a group of men surrounded a body on the floor, and then to another man who lay in pool of blood. Kristen was sitting on the couch, eating a pot pie, and said, “Bell. Bell and Laine.”
Pilate said, “Motherfuckers. That could be us.”
Toward the end of the newscast, the anchorman asked people throughout the UP to check on their neighbors, but to do so carefully: “Don’t just walk up to a house, but watch to see if your neighbors follow their usual routine. If something seems different, call the police and report your suspicions.”
“We gotta get out of here before daylight,” Pilate said. “Maybe . . . I don’t know. Get as far away as we can in one day in the old lady’s car, then . . . take a bus? Or grab another car.”
They hadn’t had any decent sleep for a long time, it seemed, and they crawled into the old lady’s double bed after watching the news. At five o’clock in the morning, they ate cereal and milk, then rummaged through the old lady’s closets and found hats and jackets that no Californian would ever wear. They also took the thirty dollars in the old lady’s purse, along with her driver’s license and Visa card.
When Kristen put on a wide-brimmed straw hat with a white bow, she looked in the mirror and said, “I’m a fuckin’ church lady.”
“Church lady is good,” Pilate said.
Kristen said, “If you had a ring in your ear, you’d look like Mr. Clean.”
They gassed the car up at a station on the edge of town, where a sleepy clerk told Kristen that the I-75 bridge was still blocked.
With that option gone, they headed west, on the far north side of the peninsula, toward Duluth, Minnesota, eight hours away.
They found a road atlas in the car, which Pilate read as Kristen drove.
“We’ll be in Duluth before three o’clock. Can’t go back to Pap’s because they either caught Chet or killed him, and they’ll be onto Pap’s by now.”
A while later, he said, “If we go south to Minneapolis, we’ll be good. Stay there overnight, next day, drive to Kansas City, dump the car where they won’t find it right away . . .”
“Walmart parking lot.”
“Catch a bus and we’re good,” Pilate said.
Another while later, he added, “That big fuckin’ cop and his nosy kid are from down there. That’s something to think about.”
Lucas said good-bye to the posse the next day at Pat’s, the sandwich shop across the street from Laurent’s office, shaking hands, slapping backs, reliving the shoot-out at Mellon, speculating on the location of Pilate and Kristen. The mood was frenetic, half excitement and half regret, still mixed with anger about the cops who’d been shot. Four of the five of them were still alive, but one had lost a leg.
Everybody agreed that the fugitives certainly had Louis Frey’s truck and were hiding somewhere.
“Best case, they’re hiding in the woods. Worst case, they stuck it in somebody’s garage where nobody’ll find it for a while, killed the owners, and holed up,” Lucas said. “This thing isn’t over until you’ve nailed them down.”
Laurent said, “We’ll get them. We will. By the way, you know when you guys were sitting on a bench, eating those ice cream cones and talking about who’d be playing you in the movies? Guess who I got a call from this morning? It’s some producer out in L.A. and he’s talking about options and so on.”
Lucas said, “See you on the red carpet.”
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