Текст книги "Gathering Prey"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Frisell 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.

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.”

Way 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.”