Gathering Prey (24 page)

F
risell was holding the Benz at a steady eighty-five on the narrow two-lane highway when the Hale County sheriff’s car went screaming by at better than a hundred. Frisell put the right two wheels in the weeds, and blurted, “Jesus Christ,” and then, “The guy in the passenger seat was waving at us. Something happened.”

“Yeah, and it’s something bad.”

Lucas took out his phone and called Laurent, who was trailing a few cars back. “Something happened in Hale County,” he said, when Laurent answered.

“I know. I’ve got Peters looking up the number for the law enforcement center . . . Hang on, he’s getting it.”

Lucas hung on, and a couple of minutes passed and then Laurent came back and said, “It’s confusing, but there’s been a shoot-out in Brownsville. The sheriff and a deputy were wounded bad. The shooters took off, but we’re told there’s a guy trailing him in his truck, and he’s calling back on his phone. He says they just got off the main highway and are headed northwest toward the town of Mellon.”

“Ah, shit, Pilate was there and they tried to take them,” Lucas said.

“I think so.”

“Where’s Mellon?”

“Straight on through Brownsville for ten miles or so, then there’s a branch highway headed northwest to Marquette. More of a back road than a highway, though it’s paved and they can move right along. A couple miles on the other side of Mellon, there’s a three-way intersection, an east-west road cuts across the one they’re on. If they get to that intersection, finding them is going to get tougher, if we don’t know which way they went.”

“Gotta hurry,” Lucas returned.

A minute later, he got another call from Laurent: “There’s a state patrolman on his way to Mellon. If he gets there first, he can block the road at a bridge. There’s only the highway, and if he jams them up, he should be able to hold them off. There were at least four of them, maybe five, but one of them may have been shot by a woman who owns the local café . . . and she was hit by return fire. That’s what we’re hearing. We don’t know about the guy who’s trailing them.”

“Gotta go faster,” Lucas said. “Gotta get there. How many highway patrolmen?”

“Only one, far as I know.”

“Gotta go faster,” Lucas said. “Call ahead to that town, Mellon, is that right? Call them and tell them what’s coming.”

“I’ll do that now,” Laurent said.

Frisell leaned into the accelerator, crossed a hundred, and said, “Let me know when you get nervous.”

“Not yet,” Lucas said. He added, “I’m gonna reach past you.”

He reached past Frisell to the dashboard and hit the switches for his flashers.

And they rolled, rapidly pulling away from the cars behind them.

•   •   •

THEY’D BEEN LEAVING WINTER,
twenty miles out of Brownsville, when the shooting started. They found out about it a minute or so later when the sheriff, who’d been shot, began screaming for help from his car, and the Hale County deputy’s car passed Lucas and Frisell.

Fifteen miles, more or less. Frisell pushed the Benz to a hundred and ten and then chickened out, saying, “I don’t think I can hold it much faster than this. Highway’s too rough.”

They got to Brownsville about nine minutes after the shooting, and fifteen seconds behind the deputies in the car that had passed them on the highway.

Both of the wounded men were still there in the street. It was a long run to the nearest hospital; the closest one was in Munising, where the phone pings had placed the second group of Pilate’s disciples. Brownsville had no doctor, but there was a large-animal vet a couple of miles out and he’d been called to do first aid. He’d gotten there a minute before Lucas and Frisell.

•   •   •

THE SHERIFF WAS LYING
next to his car, at the end of a blood trail. He’d been shot in the middle of the street, and had crawled back to his car to call for help. Three townspeople were gathered around him and one of the deputies from the squad car was stuffing gauze packs into a wound on his side.

The sheriff had been hit in the side, the left hip and right calf, and was conscious. A deputy had been hit in the back, twice, high and low, and was unconscious, still breathing, still lying in the middle of the street in a pool of blood. The vet was working over him, trying to stop the bleeding.

Lucas looked at the sheriff and then called out to the circle of townspeople who were gathering around, “We need a door to use as a stretcher. We need a pickup and a mattress off a bed—and a box spring, if we can get it. We need it right now.”

A group of the townspeople broke off, running for their houses, calling back and forth. A couple of them headed for a house that appeared to be abandoned. Lucas had gone to look at the downed deputy, when he heard a smashing sound. He turned and saw a heavy man in boots kicking a door off the empty house.

The vet looked up as Laurent came jogging over and said, “Orville’s gone if we don’t get him to the hospital right quick. I’m losing his airway.”

“We’ve got an airway kit in my car,” Laurent said.

The vet said, “Get it! Quick!”

A woman was backing a super-duty pickup toward them, and somebody yelled, “We got the bed . . .”

The heavy guy was carrying a broken door toward them, and Lucas went that way, and shouted to four people struggling with a double-sized mattress and box spring, “Put the mattress in the pickup bed. Bring the door here.”

Four of them carefully edged the sheriff onto the door. He moaned once, and muttered, “Hurts . . .” and they carried the door to the pickup and put the sheriff on the mattress.

A minute later they transferred the deputy onto the mattress next to the sheriff. The vet climbed into the truck with the woman deputy from Cray County, who was holding a plastic airway piece in the deputy’s throat. The vet was now on the phone to an emergency room doc, and they took off, headed for Munising.

•   •   •

A WOMAN HAD ALSO
been wounded, somebody said, and Lucas went into the café to look at her. The woman was lying on the café floor, on her side, smoking a cigarette. She’d been hit on the edge of her hip. Unless she had a weak heart, she’d make it, Lucas thought, at least until lung cancer got to her. She’d lost some blood, but not a lot, and another woman was pressing a towel on the wound.

“We got to get her going,” Lucas said.

“I’ll take her in my car,” the second woman said.

The woman on the floor said, around her cigarette, “What a pain in the ass . . .”

The second woman shook her head: “Margery—”

“What happened to the boys?” Margery asked.

“They’re headed north,” said a man who’d come through the door behind Lucas.

“How many were there?” Lucas asked the woman on the floor.

“Either four or five,” the woman on the floor said. “I think there were two women pumping gas and two men and a woman in here, waiting for the cheeseburgers, which they never paid for.”

“You don’t have to be funny, Margery, for God’s sakes,” said the woman with the towel.

“I shot at them, but I was pretty shaky. I think I hit that one woman, even though I wasn’t shooting at her, particularly. I saw Hugh and Orville go down and I grabbed my gun and let go.”

As they were talking, a clerk from the filling station across the street ran up and said, “Ben says they shot up his truck, but he’s okay. They kept going and he’s still trailing them. He said they’re definitely headed toward Mellon, but they’re not going very fast because of the RV.”

“We’re going,” Lucas said. He looked at Frisell and then asked one of the deputies, “You got an extra rifle?”

“In the trunk of the sheriff’s car.”

“We need it . . . And somebody get this lady to the hospital, quick as you can.”

They got the rifle, another .223, and four magazines, and Lucas led the posse out of town again. He was driving this time while Frisell checked out the rifle.

“How far are we from Mellon?”

“Twenty, twenty-five miles, I guess,” Frisell said.

“So . . . ten or twelve minutes.”

“Only if you’re driving a hundred and twenty.” He looked up at the trees going by: “Oh, Jesus . . .”

“He’s not here,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

THREE MILES WEST OF MELLON,
a Michigan state cop named Richard Blinder was on the radio to a Hale County deputy about the shooting at Brownsville. “If they’re coming my way, I can block the culvert at Mellon and hold them off for a while, depending on how many there are. I’ll be there in two minutes, but for God’s sakes, get me some help.”

Two minutes later, running with flashers and siren, he hit the fifteen-foot-long bridge over a seasonal stream at Mellon, slewed the cruiser sideways, jogged it back and forth until he covered both lanes between the metal railings. The creek beneath the bridge had only a trickle of water at the bottom, and was mostly filled with wetland foliage.

The land was flat, and the road straight, and Blinder could see nothing coming at him. He got his rifle out of the trunk and jogged up the street to a convenience store/gas station. There were two cars parked at the station, three patrons and the clerk standing outside by the gas pumps. They saw him coming, turned toward him, and the clerk shouted, “They called us from Brownsville. We’re holing up here and in the bar, and some people are getting guns and hiding out in their houses.”

“All right, but it’d be better to get out in the woods. One way or another, this can’t last long. They’ll be here in five minutes.”

Blinder ran back to his car and somebody came out of the bar and yelled, “Hey, Dick, you need somebody with you?”

“No, no, cover up. Barricade the doors. Get people safe.”

•   •   •

THE TOWN OF MELLON
had barely impinged on Pilate’s consciousness. He was running hard in the Pontiac, leaving the RV behind. Had to get somewhere, far away, had to hide, had to find out what the cops knew and what they didn’t. Mellon was nothing more than a pimple on the ass of the UP, and they’d picked it as an emergency rendezvous only because they could get gasoline there, and food, and they’d be close to a major intersection—or what passed for a major intersection. Back in L.A., it’d be called a bike path.

Kristen wasn’t helping: “This whole fuckin’ trip has been crazy,” she shouted at him. “This was badly planned. Badly planned. Now we got every cop in the world chasing us. We’d have been better off if that bitch in Hayward had stabbed you a little. Get that sewn up, she’s in jail, we get out of there. But no! You had—”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up. You want to get out? You want to hitchhike back? So shut the fuck up.”

“I knew this was . . .” She paused, then said, “There’s something up ahead. What is that?”

“That’s that town . . .”

They could see a scattering of houses, and beyond that, a half dozen commercial buildings of some kind, with signs out front, and beyond that, more houses, and a car parked sideways across the street. As they got closer, they could see it was a cop car, blocking a narrow two-lane bridge: no way around it. No movie moves.

•   •   •

“OH, FUCK . . . IT’S A
roadblock. Get the rifle, get the rifle. Load it up.”

Pilate hadn’t even planned to slow down for Mellon: he had plenty of gas, he’d just wanted to meet the boys at the intersection. They’d stashed the black rifle in the backseat, and Kristen turned in her seat, pulled the rifle out, and two long magazines, and said, “I don’t shoot so good.”

“You see that blue house down from the roadblock?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m pulling in right there.”

He’d slowed to forty miles an hour: they’d be at the roadblock in half a minute if they continued at the same speed. “Can’t slow down too much, or they’ll figure out what we’re doing.”

“What’re we doing?”

“What you always wanted to do. We’re gonna kill a fuckin’ cop.”

“I think we done that already.”

They rolled on, not slowing, into the town, past a convenience store and gas station, a tire place/garage, a bar/café, a used-boat dealer, and a couple of low-rise commercial buildings, which appeared to be abandoned. They could see the cop on the far side of his car, holding up a hand, warning them to stop, a rifle on his hip, and two hundred feet away, Pilate swerved off the road, up a short gravel driveway and behind the blue house.

As soon as he was out of sight of the cop car, he jammed on the brakes, shifted into
Park
, grabbed the rifle, and ran to the corner of the house.

He peeked around the corner, and saw that the cop, a highway patrolman, had moved to the far back corner of his car and was aiming his rifle over the roof, right at Pilate. Pilate yanked his head back and ran around the house to the far side, peeked again. The cop was still looking at the other corner. Pilate couldn’t see much of him, and the cop was yelling something that he couldn’t make out.

He got up his guts, set his feet, and quickly poked the gun around the side of the building and fired three quick shots at the cop’s head. The cop dropped, but Pilate had the sense that he hadn’t hit him. He fired three more shots, this time under the car, hoping that ricochets might take out the other man.