Текст книги "Gathering Prey"

Автор книги: John Sandford

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Laurent ran downstairs and Lucas could hear him shouting. Lucas walked over to the woman, whose eyes had gone dim with shock. He asked, “Where’s Pilate?”

She moaned again, but she’d heard him, and she said, “He ran away. We think he ran away with Kristen. He tricked us.”

“Goddamnit.”

•   •   •

HE WALKED TO the front of the building and looked down at the blue house, across the street, and not far from the creek. He went back to the woman and asked, “Are you talking to the other people on a phone?”

She nodded. “Bell has it.” She looked at his body and the spreading pool of blood that seeped out from beneath it. “Had it.”

“Do the people in the blue house have hostages?”

“They didn’t say they do. Am I gonna die?”

“Yeah, but not today,” Lucas said. Then he felt mean for saying it, and added, “We’ll get you to a hospital quick as we can. You should be okay. What’s your name?”

She said, “Laine.”

Peters said, “The guys are coming in, they’re bringing a blanket, they’ll take her out in a hammock.”

Lucas went to the dead man, found a phone in his jacket pocket, looked at the recents, called up the latest one and tapped Call.

A woman answered instantly. “What?”

“I’m a cop. We shot Bell and Laine and we’ve taken over the inn building. Pilate ran away with Kristen.”

“You fuck. You fuck.” But fear was riding through her voice.

Lucas said, “If you’re in the blue house, you’ve got one minute to walk out the back side with your hands in the air. We’ve got marksmen under that bridge. They’re gonna start hosing down the house from there and we’ll start from up here. So, you quit, or we kill you. Your choice.”

The woman said, “I gotta talk to Chet.”

“You got one minute,” Lucas said. “And tell him hello from Pap, in Minnesota.”

He called Frisell and said, “We want you guys to do the same thing to the blue house as you did to the inn, in two minutes. Or, a couple people may come out the back with their hands in the air. If they do, walk them into the creek bed and arrest them. Be careful about hidden guns . . .”

“Got it,” Frisell said. “Two minutes, if they don’t come out. You got the inn? We heard some shooting.”

“Yeah, we got it.”

•   •   •

BEHIND HIM, two of the deputies who’d covered their advance into town came up the stairs, carrying a quilt. Peters began helping move the wounded woman onto the quilt, while Laurent came over and stood by the front window next to Lucas. Lucas said, “Peek, don’t stand there gawking like a dumbass.”

“Sorry,” Laurent said. “Wish I had a cigarette.”

“Nasty habit,” Lucas said.

“I know. That’s why I stopped twenty years ago.”

The phone in Lucas’s hand rang, and the woman said, “I’m coming out the back, right now, my hands are over my head.”

Lucas asked, “What about the guy with you?”

“I don’t think he’s coming,” she said.

•   •   •

AT THAT MOMENT, a man walked out the front door of the blue house with a rifle, with the attitude of a man who deeply, seriously didn’t give a shit, even about himself. He raised the rifle and began shooting at the window where they were standing, and Lucas and Laurent lurched back into the room and went to the floor as bullets winged off the windowsill and buried themselves in the ceiling.

•   •   •

THE SHOOTING STOPPED for just a moment, and Laurent low-crawled to the window, peeked as Lucas shouted, “No, no!” and Laurent said, “Fuck him,” and stood up and shot the man, who had just jammed another magazine in his rifle. The man fell down in the street, and Lucas came over and looked down and said, “Nice shot, I guess.”

In the silence after the shooting, they could hear Frisell shouting at the woman: “Hands all the way up. All the way up,” and they saw the woman walking with raised hands through the weeds toward the creek.

There were two more recently dialed numbers on the phone, and Lucas punched the first of the two. No answer, and no ring. He tried the third number, and a man answered. “You in the hardware store?”

“Yeah. This a cop?”

“Yes. Pilate ran away, Bell is dead, Laine is shot, but might make it if we can get her to a hospital, and Chet’s shot in the street. You should be able to see him. We don’t know if he’s dead or not. As long as you’re in the hardware store, we can’t help him. If you quit now, we might be able to save his life,” Lucas said.

Behind him, Laurent said, “I don’t think so.”

Lucas held up his finger to quiet him—honesty was not always the best policy—and the man said, “Hold on.” Lucas waited, then a woman came on and asked, “How do we know that Pilate really ran away?”

“Well, you could call him.”

“He said not to call him unless it was an emergency,” the woman said.

Lucas rolled his eyes at Laurent, and then said, “Chet might be bleeding to death in the street. We’re about to shoot that hardware store so full of holes that it’ll look like a fuckin’ colander. Excuse the language. We’ve got fifty cops out here with machine guns. You want to call Pilate first, that’s fine, because I’d say, all things considered, that you have an emergency.”

After a few seconds, she said, “Okay.”

Lucas could hear a man talking in the background, and then she said, “We’re coming out the front, don’t let anybody shoot us.”

“Wait three minutes, then come out. We’ve got to calm some people down, after you shot those cops up in Brownsville.”

“Brownsville. We didn’t go through Brownsville. We were up at the beach.”

“Okay, but give us three minutes. How many of you are there?”

“Two. Two of us. Just me and Richie. We’ll come out when you say so. Don’t shoot us.”

•   •   •

LAURENT CALLED THE COPS at the compass points, told them to hold off firing at the disciples when they showed themselves in the street. Lucas called the bartender, and the people holed up in the gas station, and told them not to shoot. Then Lucas and Laurent went down to the ground floor and stood by a window where they could see the front of the hardware store.

Peters and the deputies had rolled the wounded woman in the quilt, and Lucas told them to wait to see what happened: if the people in the hardware store surrendered, they wouldn’t have to try to wrestle her through a window.

When everybody was set, Lucas called the woman back, and when she answered, said, “Come on out.”

Ten seconds later, the front door of the hardware store opened and a tall natural-blond woman poked her head out. They knew she was a real blonde because she was naked. She stepped out into the street followed by a man, who was a natural brunette and just as naked. They stepped out to the edge of the street with their hands raised.

“What the hell is that all about?” Laurent asked.

Lucas stepped outside, his .45 leveled at the two naked disciples, and said, “It’s an L.A. thing. If you surrender naked, it makes it harder for the cops to say they thought you were going for your gun.”

“Well, I guess that’s true,” Laurent said. “Although the guy appears to be in possession of a .22.”

•   •   •

LUCAS AND LAURENT kept their guns on the disciples and two of the deputies nervously approached them, handcuffs dangling from their hands. Peters and the other three deputies came out the front door, carrying the wounded woman in the quilt.

Laurent moved to his left so he wouldn’t be shooting at the deputies if the naked people produced guns, from the legendary back-cheek holsters. As the deputies got close, Lucas saw movement in the hardware store window and screamed, “Watch it, watch it,” and the deputies flinched and then a spray of shots blew through the hardware store window and the deputies went down.

Lucas didn’t know if the deputies had dropped to make smaller targets, or had been hit, but Laurent had gone to full-auto on his rifle and was blowing up the front of the store and Lucas ran across the street toward the side of the hardware store, scared to death, peeked in a side window and saw a man squatting next to a pile of firewood that had been stacked in the middle of the floor, the man’s hands covering his head as glass and splinters rained down on him from Laurent’s return fire. The man had a black rifle in one hand. He saw Lucas at the last minute and Lucas emptied his .45 at the man, who stood up and did a little death dance and then fell back.

Lucas dropped the magazine and stepped back to the front of the store and saw four people down in the street: both deputies and the two naked people, all of them dappled with bloodstains. Laurent was walking toward them and Lucas shouted, “We gotta clear the store.”

Laurent shouted back, “Okay,” and Peters, who’d dropped his corner of the quilt that held the wounded woman, jogged up and asked, “Who’s going first?”

Laurent said, “I will. I got the big gun. Barney, you cover the window. If you see anything, open up. Lucas, get back around to the side and see if there’s anybody in front of me when I go in.”

Lucas went back around to the side, peeked through the window again, and yelled, “Go!”

Laurent gave the building a preliminary squirt, three rounds through the front door, and splinters and dust flew off the door, and then he was at the door, kicking it open. Nothing moved. He stepped inside, and Lucas was aware of people shouting in the street, but nothing moved in the store.

They cleared it in one minute. Their technique was bad, dangerous, hurried; but then, they were in a hurry.

When they were ninety-nine percent sure there were no hidden disciples inside, Laurent called one of the uninjured deputies to stand inside the door, ready to shoot at anything that suddenly appeared from nowhere, and then he, Lucas, and Peters went back to the street.

The two naked people were dead, hit multiple times from multiple angles, by both the deputies who’d been carrying the quilt and the civilians in the bar. The deputies had been shot in the legs. One was showing arterial bleeding from one leg, and Peters put a pressure bandage on the wound and tied it down with a wrapping of nylon rope, and then put lighter pressure on the wound in the other leg, and they loaded him into a truck. Almost as an afterthought, they loaded the wounded woman, Laine, in the same truck, and the driver took off for the hospital in Munising.

The other deputy wasn’t showing as much blood, but had a broken leg. They handled him as delicately as they could, putting him in the backseat of a station wagon, and the driver took off.

The two artists had come out of the inn and the woman was taking photographs with a small Panasonic camera, focusing on the dead naked disciples. Lucas felt like smacking her in the mouth, but didn’t. Instead, he shouted, “Get out of there, get out of there; you’re messing with a crime scene.”

She stepped back but didn’t stop shooting.

“We’ve got to go house by house,” Laurent said. He looked around and people were beginning to drift into the street. Frisell and two other deputies were coming toward them, with the woman they’d taken prisoner at the creek, Laurent told Frisell and Peters to organize a search party.

“There are at least two people missing,” Lucas said. “Pilate and his girlfriend. They may be holed up or they may have taken off. The guy in the inn thought they ran for it. But: we gotta take it slow and easy.”

•   •   •

THEY TOOK AN HOUR working through the town and found no more disciples. Nor had they seen any sign of Pilate or his girlfriend.

Early in the search, Lucas and Laurent had gone into the hardware store to check the man who’d opened fire on them in the street. Lucas had hit him seven times, including one wound in the head and three in the chest, any one of which would have killed him.

As they looked down at him, Lucas said to Laurent, “We’ve got to find Pilate. If we don’t, the killing isn’t over. They go to a house, somewhere, shoot the people and take their car and we won’t even know what to look for, until somebody finds the bodies.”

“They had to go out the back,” Laurent said. “I’ll get everybody looking down that way. They can’t have gotten too far.”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “They might already have hijacked a car.”

They went back outside and Laurent looked at the three dead disciples in the street—the man from the blue house and the two naked people. “This was a right straight war. They’re gonna make movies about this one.”

“Maybe. But Pilate won’t be playing himself,” Lucas said. “Not with one dead deputy and two wounded.”

A deputy was hurrying toward them. “Got another body. Old lady in the blue house. They shot her and stuffed her in a closet.”

Laurent groaned. “Had to be one more, didn’t there? My God, these people . . . these people . . .”

Word of the shoot-out in Mellon leaked to the media almost immediately—Lucas suspected the artists—and when it did, rental car agencies in Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette ran out of cars in ten minutes.

Lucas told Laurent, “You gotta warn everyone to be careful about what they say. You’ll get a hundred professional assholes landing on you. It’d be best if you did most of the talking, and your reserve guys, because they’ll not only be the ones the media want to talk to, but they’re all pretty smart. Don’t let any bullshitters get in front of a camera or you’ll pay for it later.”

“They’ll want to talk to you,” Laurent said.

“Not so much and I’m going back home,” Lucas said. “This is a Michigan deal. There’s three dead in Wisconsin, eight or nine dead in Michigan, more dead in South Dakota and California, so far, and none dead in Minnesota. Guess where I’m from? I’m just here helping out . . .”

“You gotta stay at least until the state cops get here, because, uh, if I remember right, you shot two of those dead people yourself,” Laurent said. “As long as you’re waiting, you might as well help us chase down Pilate.”

“Not much I can do to find Pilate—he’s out in the wind now,” Lucas said. “You’re right about making the statement, though. I’ll stay for that.”

•   •   •

PILATE AND KRISTEN had gone out the window on the lower level of the inn, had run to the creek, then up the creek until they were deep in the trees. Pilate turned up the far bank and Kristen hissed, “Where’re you going?”

“Down the highway.”

“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.

The surviving disciples couldn’t or wouldn’t provide a last name for either one of them. “That’s not something we did—we all had one name,” said Laine Archer, of Eugene, Oregon, when she talked to the state cops at the hospital in Munising, before being taken into surgery to repair her shoulder. She was sure Pilate and Kristen were on foot: they’d snuck out of the lower floor of the inn just a few minutes after they’d gone to their assigned spots in the triangle of buildings.

When the state police began arriving, Laurent took Lucas aside and said, “Look, when you make your statement, they’re gonna want to know how all this happened—why it didn’t happen some other place. And maybe they’ll be looking for somebody to blame.”

“I can handle that,” Lucas said.

“Why would you want to get tangled up in it?” Laurent asked. “We tell them that you came here to provide us information about a group of roaming killers, and to identify Pilate and his crew—but that I was running the show. Nothing wrong with any of that. That I made the decision to take them out, right here. That we believed that they were about to kill the two artists, and I’m sure the artists will back us up on that. If we do it that way, they won’t have anybody to hang. One local cop is dead, three more are shot, all of them were shot without warning or mercy. We give them a choice: they can either celebrate what we did or take Pilate’s side in a media war. I don’t think they’ll choose door number two.”

“You’re a smart guy,” Lucas said. “We’ll do it your way.”

And that’s what they did. As state cops raced from one house to another, in a circle thirty miles across, a captain named Ferguson took Lucas aside for a statement, and Lucas followed Laurent’s proposed story. When they were done with him, they told him to hang around for a while, they were having the interview transcribed and he’d have to sign it.

Laurent had been given the same treatment, as was everyone else who’d been involved in actual shooting, including three civilians from the bar who’d opened up on the naked disciples after the deputies were shot.

The lady artist’s camera and memory card were confiscated, over her protests. The state cops told her that she’d probably get them back, sooner or later.

•   •   •

AFTER THE INTERVIEW, Lucas was out in the street when two TV cameramen came jogging up, led by good-looking women with microphones: “Officer Davenport . . . could you give us a comment, your version—”

“I better leave that to the Michigan state police. I understand that they’re planning a press conference.”

He saw Laurent and Frisell watching and he waved them over and said to the reporters, “Here are two of the main men in the whole operation. What they did, taking out this gang . . . it was right on the edge of unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, to tell you the truth. Everybody in Michigan should be proud about what they did up here today.”

The reporters got a more extensive commentary out of Laurent and Frisell, and then Laurent called Barney Peters over, and Lucas told the story of Peters doing first aid on the wounded.

Late that afternoon, a woman named Constance Frey called to say that her husband, Louis Frey, had heard about the shoot-out in Mellon, and despite her protests, had gotten his gun and jumped in his truck to help out. He had not come home, and was not answering his cell phone.

During his debriefing, Lucas had mentioned that they’d tracked some of the disciples with cell phones. A state police officer approached Lucas, and asked if Lucas could ping Louis Frey’s cell phone to see where he was. “We could do it ourselves, but since you’re already set up to do it . . .”

Lucas did and was told that the cell phone was a mile or so south of town, right on the road. When they went to look, they couldn’t find Frey. They began calling his phone, as they walked along the road, and eventually heard it ringing from behind some brush across the roadside ditch.

He’d been shot once in the head, but for some reason, was still alive, though he couldn’t move and he couldn’t talk. They loaded him into a police car and sent him to the hospital in Munising.

One of the state cops told Lucas, “I know you were doing the right thing by chasing these assholes down, but I wish you’d done it in some other state.”

Lucas thought, Fuck it, declined a ride back to town and walked back by himself.

•   •   •

HALFWAY BACK, he took a phone call from Jenkins. “I’m standing here with Shrake and Julie Katz and her cadaver dog.” Lucas had lost track of who was doing what with the Merion case: it seemed like he’d last talked to Jenkins or Shrake about a hundred years earlier.

“At Merion’s cabin?”

“Across the road from his cabin. The fuckin’ dog indicated . . . is that what they call it? Indicated? Yeah, anyway, he indicated, and we’re looking at the end of one of those banister things. I don’t see any blood, but the dog says it’s there. We’ve stopped digging, we’re getting the crime scene crew out there.”

“Good doggy,” Lucas said. “Listen: my buddy Park Raines is going to claim that you guys planted it. It won’t work, because if there’s blood, we’ll get DNA from it, and if Merion handled it, we could have his DNA, too. But Park’s gonna say that you planted it. So don’t touch anything.”

“We haven’t touched anything.”

“Good. Call the sheriff’s department and ask them to send a couple of deputies to stand guard, so you won’t be involved anymore,” Lucas said.

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?” Lucas asked.

“You oughta be here for this, when the news gets out,” Jenkins said. “You know, for the glory.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Lucas said. “Get the ball rolling. For Christ’s sakes, don’t contaminate anything . . . Hey, Jenkins: you got him. You fuckin’ got him.”

Made him happy, and he picked up the pace. Called Weather with the news, and told her, “I can’t get back tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to hurry—don’t try to drive back at a hundred miles an hour.”

•   •   •

WHEN LUCAS GOT BACK to Mellon, Peters and Frisell were sitting on a bench outside the convenience store eating ice cream cones. It was a hot day and Frisell said, “You better get one if you want one, This place doesn’t usually have a herd of reporters and cops hanging around, and they’re going fast.”

“Everything’s going fast,” Peters added.

Lucas got the last Diet Coke and the second-to-last cone, and came back out, and Frisell and Peters moved over so he’d have a place to sit. Frisell looked down the street, to where state crime scene people were making measurements and calculating angles and taking photographs.

“I think Clooney will probably play me in the movie,” he said. Frisell looked at Peters and Lucas. “How about you guys?” Peters said, “Tom Cruise.” Lucas thought for a moment and said, “Scarlett Johansson.”

Frisell said, “Really? Is there something you haven’t told us?”

“No, no. It’s just that I’m sure she’d need first-person coaching through the part, some in-depth consultation,” Lucas said.

“Probably,” Peters said, catching a drip that was running down the side of his cone. To Frisell he said, “I’m changing mine to Angelina Jolie.”

•   •   •

AT THE HOLIDAY INN that night, Lucas had just gotten out of the shower, when Weather called and said, “Is there any way to see Channel Three up there?”

“I don’t know how,” he said. “Why?”

“Because you’re in a couple of big stories,” she said. “We just saw the promo for them . . . Hang on, Letty wants to talk to you.”

Letty came on and said, “Dad . . .”

“You still hurting?”

“Yeah, but never mind. Can you get online?”

“I got Wi-Fi in the room,” he said.

“Then you can watch Channel Three online. You gotta hurry.”

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS RIGHT at the top of the news, in a way.

First was the story out of Michigan, video from the reporters who’d talked to Lucas, Laurent, Frisell, and Peters that afternoon, about the fight in Mellon, which was being headlined as High Noon in the UP.

The second item was a press conference called by the BCA, to announce that further important evidence had been discovered in the Ben Merion murder case, in the shape of a bloody club found near Merion’s Cross Lake cabin.

Henry Sands made the announcement, attributing the find to “hardworking BCA detectives” without mentioning names but his own, and to BCA laboratory personnel who would be processing the evidence through the St. Paul laboratory.

“We won’t know the DNA results for some days, but I have been told that there is a substantial evidentiary sample available to us.”

He talked for a while, with the TV people calling out, “Director Sands . . . Director Sands . . . Director Sands . . .”