Gathering Prey (25 page)

No luck. He saw a quick flash of hat as the man went farther back, behind the car’s tires.

The cop started shouting again, and then Kristen was behind him, shouting, “What should I do? What should I do?”

Pilate didn’t know what she should do, but it didn’t matter, because another car rolled up the highway, behind the cop. They could see the cop’s hand as he waved the other car down. The car stopped, and a moment later, the passenger-side door popped open. Richie, who’d been up at the lake, and who’d come south to rendezvous with Pilate, got out with his rifle, poked it over the top of the door, and began firing at the cop. The cop made a stumbling run for the side of the bridge, trying to get into the creek or ravine beneath it, but was hit and knocked down as he got to the edge.

He went flat for a moment, dropping his rifle, then managed to pull himself up and throw himself over the edge of the bridge.

Pilate ran out from behind the house, toward the cop car, and Richie ran toward the bridge from his side. Standing back a bit from the bridge, they both looked into the space beneath it. It wasn’t quite a creek, but not quite a ravine, either—more like a swale, currently occupied by a marsh. They could see where the cop had landed in the marsh weeds, a five-foot drop, and where he’d pulled himself under the bridge, but they couldn’t see the cop.

“I think he’s hit, I hit him pretty hard,” Richie called. Then, in the best movie fashion, in which the speaker never got shot, he called, “Cover me.”

He went out into the yard on the far side of the bridge, so he could better see under it, pointing his rifle at the bridge as he did it. He’d just squared up to the bridge, crouching a bit, when there was a single gunshot from beneath it, and Pilate saw the dirt spit up just in front of Richie’s legs—the bullet must have gone right between them. Richie screamed something and ran back toward the bridge, where the cop couldn’t see him.

Behind Richie, Ellen and Carrie had gotten out of the car. The women ran toward the bridge, then out on it, Ellen picked up the cop’s rifle, and then Carrie stooped again and Pilate realized she’d gotten two or three more magazines.

Pilate shouted, “This way, this way . . .” and at the same time, fired a burst of three shots under the bridge, with no idea of where the cop might be. As he did it, Richie, Ellen, and Carrie ran across the bridge and around behind the house. Another car pulled up behind Richie’s, and Coon and Chet got out.

Pilate yelled at them until they understood the situation, and Pilate and Richie fired two more bursts under the bridge while Coon ran up to the cop car. He stopped to look into it, and as he did, a bullet banged off the windshield. And then another, and Coon dropped behind the car as Chet, who hadn’t stopped, dashed across the yard. A bullet whanged off an old clothesline post, not more than a foot from Chet’s head as he passed the post.

Coon popped up and yelled, “I can’t get out of here. They’re shooting at me from the gas station.”

Richie said, “Hang on,” and he ran down to the corner of the blue house, then across an empty lot to a pink house, crawled to the front corner of it and started banging away at the filling station. The station’s window glass went out with the fourth or fifth shot and Coon dashed across the open space to the blue house. Richie jogged back from the pink house and they huddled in the shelter of the blue house.

“We gotta get that cop and get him fast,” Richie said. “We gotta move that car.”

“No keys in it,” Coon said, breathing hard, more from excitement than exercise. “That’s why I stopped to look. He must’ve had them on him.”

“Here’s what we do—I mean you guys with the rifles,” Kristen said. “One of you runs a way down that creek, and another one runs down the creek the other way, until you’re far enough down that you can shoot under the bridge. That’ll kill him or push him out in the open where we can kill him. Once we get him, we move his car off the bridge, bring the RV and the Firebird across, put the cop car back on the bridge, shoot up the gas tank, set it on fire, so nobody else can cross, and we take off.”

“Works for me,” Pilate said. His brain seemed stuffed with cotton; he was freaking out. Then, over Coon’s shoulder, he saw the RV rumbling into town. “Here’s Bell.”

Bell hardly slowed coming through town and ran past them in the side yard of the blue house, and got out, wild-eyed. The RV had a half dozen bullet holes in it: “It’s like a fuckin’ shooting gallery out there,” he said. Laine got out of the passenger side, a streak of blood on her face. Bell looked back the way they’d come, and added, “That goddamn pickup’s still back there. He followed us all the way down here.”

Pilate went to look: the pickup was probably six hundred yards away, idling in the middle of the road.

“He’s been tracking us the whole time.”

“I’ll get him,” Bell said. “You guys hang here.” He pulled a magazine out of his rifle and slammed another one into it. To Pilate he said: “This is it, man. This is the Fall. This is what we trained for. This is fuckin
it.
”

He ran behind the houses and commercial buildings along the main street. He’d gone two hundred yards and was jogging across an open space between two buildings, when a door popped open on a place called BAR and somebody fired a shot at him.

The shot missed, but he saw the door moving and fired back as he ran, ducking behind the next building. He went on, running hard, and at the last of the commercial buildings, risked running down the side of one of them, to look down the street. The pickup had backed away and was farther out of reach than it had been when they began.

“Shit.” He jogged back toward Pilate and the rest of the group, sprinting through the open space where he’d been shot at.

“He’s backing off—I can’t get to him, but he’s gotta be calling all the other cops from everywhere,” he told Pilate.

“Too late,” Kristen said. A black SUV was coming down the highway, flashers on the front bumper. “Here come some more of them.”

Pilate looked around, wildly, trying to find a way out. He didn’t want to hear that Fall bullshit.

Coon said, “Look—there’s not that many of them. I say we fight it out here. We can take them. We get in these houses, we make them come to us. We’re out in the fuckin’ wilderness, they can’t get help no more than we can.”

Kristen said, “I knew we shouldn’t have come. This was a bad idea right from the start.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Pilate said. “Let’s do what Coon said. Let’s take over some of these buildings and ambush the motherfuckers. Fight it out. We got a chance.”

They all looked at him, his magic almost gone now.

“We do,” he said. “We got a chance.”

W
ay up ahead, Lucas could see the flashing lights of the state police car, and he said to Frisell, “Gonna have to pull up before we get there. We might have them trapped between us.”

As the last words came out of his mouth, Laurent called from a trailing car. “Dick Blinder’s calling us, he’s been hit, shot, he’s under the bridge. They’re trying to blast him out. He says he’s bleeding bad. There are two cars on the opposite side of the bridge, they’re with Pilate. Dick thinks they left the cars and they’re up in town with Pilate and the others. They’ve got rifles. Dick says if we can’t get him out of that ditch, he won’t make it.”

Lucas took his foot off the gas. “Can you call him back?”

“Yeah, we got him on his shoulder set.”

“Ask him if any of Pilate’s people are in the ditch. If somebody’s in the ditch with him, are they on the east side or the west?”

A moment later, Laurent came back. “He doesn’t think anyone’s in the ditch. He thinks they’re all up in town.”

Lucas couldn’t see Laurent in his rearview mirror; Laurent was in his pickup, and didn’t have flashers. Lucas asked, “Can you see me? Up ahead of you?”

“Yeah, but you’re a way out, probably a mile or more.”

“Okay, we’ll wait for you. When you get close, we’re gonna take off, and try to go around the town to the ditch. Follow along behind us. Tell Dick we’re coming. And tell everybody else in the posse to take up positions on this side of town, block the road and wait, until we know what’s going on.”

“Got it.”

•   •   •

“WHAT EXACTLY
are we doing?” Frisell asked.

“Damned if I know. Gotta get closer before I can figure it out,” Lucas said. “You ever been through here?”

“Sure. Once or twice a year, probably.”

“Which side of the road has the most houses, and the least trees?”

“Oh, shit, I’ve never been far off the road . . . uh, God, I think the most houses would be on the left.”

“If they’re planning to shoot it out with us, or take hostages, they’ll probably be along the main street,” Lucas said. “I want to swing around them to the ditch. Once we’re in the ditch, we’ll have cover and we can get to Dick. What’s his last name?”

“Blinder. Kind of an asshole, but I wouldn’t wish him bad luck.”

“Well, he’s highway patrol, or state police, or whatever you call them up here. Being an asshole kinda comes with the territory.” In the rearview mirror, Lucas could see Laurent coming fast.

“Get ready with that rifle. There’s a canvas bag in the back, right behind your seat. It’s a first aid kit. Get that out, and there’s a hard box under the seat, right in front of the first aid kit. Get that, too.”

Frisell popped his safety belt and Lucas started toward the town. Frisell came up with the first aid kit, and the hard box, and Lucas said, “The hard box is full of magazines for my .45. Give them to me. And buckle up.”

Lucas put the magazines in his jacket pocket, and as Frisell buckled in, Lucas said, “Pucker up. Here we go.”

“If I puckered up any harder . . .”

“What?”

“I can’t think of anything funny.”

“I know what you mean.” Lucas took off as Laurent came up behind, and they rolled toward the town at forty miles an hour or so. At the edge of the built-up area, which sat in what amounted to a clearing in the forest, Lucas saw a long strip of vacant ground on the left, leading up to a concrete platform that might once have supported a gas station. Nothing remained of a building. Behind it was more open ground, and beyond that, a scattering of postwar houses.

“Going cross-country,” he said. He slowed and turned into the empty concrete platform, then bounced across the crumbling curb at the back, and ricocheted and bounded and twisted over the rough, soggy ground behind it, his speed falling to ten miles an hour, eventually coming out on a gravel street that led through the scattered houses behind the business district.

He stayed on the road, glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Laurent was still with him. He accelerated, passed the first couple of houses, saw the ditch ahead of him, probably five or six hundred yards away. He could take the gravel tracks for most of the way, but there was a band of weeds and low shrubs along the line of the ditch.

They were moving faster now, passing the houses, bouncing through yards and back onto other tracks; they were a hundred yards out when there was a nasty crack from the backseat and Lucas felt a stinging burn on his neck, and Frisell blurted, “They’re shooting at us, they took out a piece of the window.”

“We’re almost there, we’re almost there—”

“You’re bleeding, man.”

“How bad?”

“Not too bad.”

“Glass,” Lucas said. He touched his neck and came away with blood on his fingers.

There was another crack from the back, but farther back on the truck, and Frisell said, “Dumb shit isn’t leading us enough.”

He said it with such technical disapproval that Lucas had to laugh, and then Frisell started, and they were laughing when they crashed into the brush at the edge of the ditch and were out and running. Laurent and one of his uniformed deputies, Bernie Allen, were out of their truck and running behind them, and they went down into the ditch into ankle-deep water.

Crouching, they were out of sight from the town. Laurent looked at Lucas’s neck and said, “You got hit.”

“Glass. Not too bad.”

“All right,” Laurent said. “I’ll go first with the rifle. Everybody behind me, five meters between you. If I get hit, take out the shooter before you try to help me—no point in anyone else getting shot. Jerry, follow me, we’ll put Lucas in the third spot, and Bernie, you cover our back. Everybody got it?”

Lucas was about to suggest that he lead, but Laurent was already spotting his move, and he started off down the marsh, holding his black rifle at his shoulder, ready to fire, and Lucas realized . . .
Laurent’s done this before
. So had Frisell.
He
was the tactical dummy in the group.

They were two hundred yards west of the bridge. They’d covered a hundred of that when Laurent stopped and put up a hand, then said, aloud, “We’re getting closer to the buildings, where somebody on the roof could see us. Bernie, you cover the roofs. I’m going on to the bridge. Lucas, you come behind me, but not until you see me get there. Jerry and Bernie, come down one at a time—we’ll cover you from the bridge. We’ll be moving fast now.”

Everybody nodded, and Laurent took a breath and ran toward the bridge, not bothering to crouch anymore. Frisell and Allen half stood with their rifles, looking at the rooflines of two nearby buildings, but nobody showed, and fifteen seconds after he took off—it seemed like forever—Laurent ducked under the bridge, and Frisell said to Lucas, “Go.”

Lucas went. He was carrying the first aid kit and ran as hard as he could, but the creek bed was mucky and he went knee-deep in the mud at one point—the muck smelled like rotten eggs—and was breathing hard when he struggled under the bridge.

He could see Blinder tucked up under the bridge deck, right where the concrete abutments came down into the bank. He was awake and had a gun in his hand, but in the dim light, looked pale as a ghost: loss of blood, maybe, or shock. He was wearing a jacket, but no shirt. Laurent had ignored him and was half under the bridge, half out, covering the roofs as Frisell came blundering down the creek bed.

Lucas crawled over to Blinder, who said, “Glad to see you, man. I’m hurting.”

“Where are you hit?”

“Both legs and my butt,” he said, in a voice that was mostly a groan. “Ripped up my shirt and tried to plug the holes, but I’m still bleeding. And I really fuckin’ hurt. Goddamn, I didn’t know that gettin’ shot hurt this bad.”

Lucas unzipped the first aid kit, found a bottle of morphine with an eyedropper top. “Gonna give you a squirt of this under your tongue. Don’t swallow, just let it sit there for a minute. It’ll kill the pain.”

Blinder nodded.

As Lucas gave him the eyedropper of morphine, Frisell slid under the bridge, turned with his rifle, and joined Laurent in watching the rooftops. Lucas took a pair of scissors out of the first aid kit and began cutting away Blinder’s pant legs. Laurent came over to help as Allen slid under the bridge; the wound in Blinder’s butt was bleeding, but was basically a groove in a layer of fat. The through-and-through wounds in his legs were worse.

They threw the shirt-rag bandages away, replacing them with heavy gauze pads, binding them tight, and Frisell, who’d been watching them work, said, “We gotta get him out of here. That’s a long run back and we won’t have anyone to cover us.”

Laurent said, “Well, we gotta do it. We need to get him up to Munising.”

Lucas said, “Let’s get him plugged up, then you can cover me. I’m going to run over to the cars on the other side of the bridge, see if there are any keys. If there are, we can take him out that way. It’s only fifteen yards, instead of two hundred, and two of us could move him, while the other two cover.”

Laurent nodded: “Yes.”

Lucas asked Blinder, “How’re you feeling?”

“That stuff in the bottle . . . starting to kick in.” He looked sleepy.

“Good.”

They finished bandaging him as well as they could, then Laurent took a call, listened for a moment, then said, “Good. Freeze it right there. We’ll keep them from getting out on this side,” and a few seconds later, “Ah, shit. Are you sure?”

He got off the phone and said, “They’re saying the Brownsville deputy didn’t make it.”

They all sat for a moment, then Lucas said, “You guys cover the roofline and windows. I’m going for that car.”

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.”