Gathering Prey (26 page)

Laurent got on the phone and Frisell, who was lying on the town-side creek bank, said, “I saw somebody running, they went into that little pink house . . . looked like a local woman. Didn’t look California.”

“Just now?” Lucas asked.

“No, when we were shooting at the window up there . . . There’s still somebody there, by the way. If he peeks around that windowsill one more time, he’s gonna get a chest full of .223.”

“If it was a local, and they were running into the pink house . . . that probably means there aren’t any Pilates in there.”

Laurent said, “They’re making a call. They got two numbers, but it’s a husband and wife, so they could be in the same place.” He put the phone to his ear again, and Lucas and Frisell went back to scanning the town.

There were six visible commercial buildings in Mellon, all single-story except two, which had two stories. The buildings were weather-worn, a little dirty, with what looked like vinyl siding. They could only see the side of one of the two-story buildings, but had an angle on the other one: the front windows were blank, unadorned, and dirty—the building was empty, Lucas thought. The houses were either shingled or had vinyl siding and several of them were faded pastel colors in blue, green, yellow, and pink; all of them had garages.

Laurent was still on the phone and Lucas said to him, “Tell whoever’s on the other end of the phone, to make sure that they’ve got the road blocked. Park those patrol cars across it. They’ll have access to cars in there, and they might try to bust through the line. Can’t get across this bridge.”

Laurent did that, listened for a minute, then said, “They talked to a Mrs. Boden, who said she’s in the gas station with the clerk, and none of the Pilates are in there, and they’re both armed. She said there are more people in Ted’s, that’s the bar, and they’re armed, too. She knows that some of the Pilates are in the Old Eagle Inn, which is that two-story place where they were shooting at us from the window.”

“We already knew that,” Frisell said.

Laurent continued, “There are a couple of artists living in the inn, she hasn’t seen them, so the Pilates may have them. She doesn’t think the artists have guns. There might be more Pilates on the other side of the street in the old hardware store. She thinks there might be some in the blue house by the creek.”

Frisell said, “That’s right there,” and pointed to his left.

Lucas left Frisell and, walking in a deep crouch, crossed under the bridge and crawled up the bank where he could see the blue house. Laurent knelt beside him a few seconds later. The house stood by itself, in an open yard, with a garage around back, fifteen or twenty yards from the house.

“That looks tough,” Laurent said.

Lucas said, “I think we sneak back to the trucks, then go farther back in the brush and circle around to the posse.”

“What if they sneak across the creek into the woods?” Laurent asked.

“Sneak to where?” Frisell asked. “Nearest town is probably fifteen miles down that way. They’d die out there in the woods, and they couldn’t walk on the road without being seen.”

“They got keys for that car.”

Lucas said, “Give me your rifle.” And to Laurent, “Tell your guy in the posse that they’re going to hear some gunfire and not to get excited about it.”

As he did that, Lucas crawled up the bank, waited until Laurent said, “I told them,” and Lucas fired a shot into each of the car’s three wheels that he could see. That done, he slid back down the bank and handed the rifle to Frisell, and said, “They’ll need some tires before they take the car anywhere.”

“All right,” Laurent said. “I’ll go first. They can’t see me from that window, but they probably could from the roof.”

“Be best if they thought we were still here . . . probably be a good idea to crawl down there,” Frisell said.

“That’s a goddamn mud hole,” Laurent said.

Lucas looked at him and said, “You already look like the fuckin’ swamp monster. A little more mud won’t make any difference.”

Laurent said, “Goddamnit,” and started off at a fast crawl. It took him a minute to get far enough down the creek to stand up, and wave Lucas over. Frisell came in a couple of minutes after Lucas, and they continued walking up the creek, past their vehicles, out of the settled area and into the woods.

Ten minutes later, they emerged on the other side of town, where the posse was dug in.

•   •   •

THE POSSE HAD STRUNG
a line of cars across the road and over the shoulder and into the trees on both sides. No way out that way.

Peters, the lawyer, wearing a bulletproof vest, had been organizing the cops. He waved Lucas, Laurent, and Frisell over behind a van, where he’d set up with a couple of deputies with radios.

“We’ve got more phone numbers, and we think we know where everybody is. We think there are eight or nine of them, five or six men and at least three women. Some of them have rifles—I guess you know that. There’s a good possibility that they have a couple hostages at the inn. Hasn’t been any shooting that wasn’t either from you guys, or at you guys.”

The Pilates were apparently holed up in structures that formed a rough triangle, and there were probably two or three people in each building. “We need to talk to them,” one of the deputies said. “Be better to talk them out of there, than try to shoot them out.”

Lucas nodded. “You’re right about that. If we could get a phone number for those artists . . . the ones that might be at the inn . . . we could try ringing them.”

Peters said, “Nobody knows the artists real well—they’ve been there for three weeks, pretty much camping out. Nobody’s lived in the inn for years. We know their names are Sandy and Larry Birch, but we don’t know where they come from. Someplace around Detroit, maybe.”

“Do they have a car?” Lucas asked.

“Don’t know,” Peters said.

“If we could get their tags . . . we could get everything else.”

“That’s like the whole story of this chase,” Laurent said. “If we only had the tags.”

The deputy said, “What about a white flag . . . ?”

“Better you than me,” Lucas said. “They’ve already shot three cops in cold blood. I don’t think they’re gonna quit because we wave a hanky at them.”

Peters said, “Before we do anything, I want to put a patch on your neck. You sort of sprung a leak there.”

“Is this gonna hurt?” Lucas asked.

“I think so,” Peters said.

T
here were nine disciples, holed up in three different places, hooked up by their cell phones. They knew there were some town people in a couple of other buildings, because they’d traded gunfire with them.

“We ain’t in California no more,” Pilate said. “Every fuckin’ body up here’s got a gun. Even that old lady in the hamburger shop, shot Michelle.”

Pilate, Kristen, Bell, and Laine were all on the second floor of the inn, while Coon, Richie, and Carrie were in an abandoned hardware store, and Chet and Ellen were in the blue house. Pilate was looking out a window that faced a line of cars near the entry to the town; Bell was looking straight down on the highway; Kristen was watching the back, and had shot at Lucas’s SUV and Laurent’s truck, scoring three hits on the trucks, none on the passengers.

Laine was watching the creek side. She said she thought all the cops had left the bridge, going back the way they’d come in—she’d seen flashes of movement, all going that way, three times, and nothing since. The fourth man had driven the wounded cop out.

Bell had fired a shot at the people taking the cop out, and had gotten a face full of plaster for his trouble, blown off the walls by a dozen rounds of incoming fire. He hadn’t tried that again.

Pilate’s group had two captives, and there was one captive in the blue house. When Pilate and his group had run up the stairs of the inn, they found the top floor to be completely open—there’d once been several rooms up there, but it appeared that the place had been stripped even of the walls, although a lot of two-by-four uprights were still in place. The outer walls were now hung with a dozen crazy abstract paintings done on four-foot-by-eight-foot plywood panels; the artists had been sitting on the floor, eating, when Pilate and the others stormed the stairs.

The artists were now sitting in a corner, a hippie-looking couple with long hair and dressed identically in jeans and T-shirts and running shoes; they’d both been crying for a while, but now they simply huddled on the floor and watched.

•   •   •

KRISTEN WAS RAGING:
“This was done not right. This is all fucked up. We’re gonna pay now . . .”

Laine was screaming at her: “Shut up, shut up, shut up, I didn’t have anything to do with this.”

Pilate asked Bell, “How far do you think it is to all those cop cars?”

Bell shrugged. “I don’t know. Think about it in football fields. How many football fields is it?”

Pilate peeked out the window again. “Five, six?”

“Something like that.”

“So how high above their heads do we shoot?”

“I don’t know,” Bell said. “A foot? You see anybody down there?”

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“Let’s knock some windows out.”

•   •   •

THEY CRACKED WINDOWS
on all four sides of the top floor, and then Bell stood back a bit, aiming through one of the windows, at the tops of the cars they could see out at the edge of town. “I’ll clear the snot out of their noses,” he said.

He emptied the magazine at the vehicles and then both ducked away from the windows, getting low on the floor. Laine stopped screaming at Kristen as they listened for incoming fire. The woman artist began crying again, and Bell said, “If this gets as bad as it looks, I might fuck her. I mean, why not? It could be my last chance forever.”

“If it’s your last chance, why not the golden pussy?” Pilate asked.

Laine, the golden pussy, said, “Fuck you guys.”

“I’m gonna look out there again,” Pilate said. He crawled to the window and peeked out: saw no movement at all.

“They’re gonna try to sneak up on us,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, Kristen and I should go downstairs, in case they try to get in there somehow. You guys keep a lookout up here. They’ll most likely come in from the back or the front, where they’ve got those trees and houses to hide behind. So you guys look out those ways, and Kristen and I’ll keep a watch on the creek side and over toward the bar. If you see anything, yell.”

Kristen wanted to argue: “I think we should all stay together.”

Pilate said, “If they come in, they’ll have to come in the first floor first. Once they get in there, it’s all over for us. Somebody’s got to be down there to meet them.”

“We really fucked this up,” she said. “We’re gonna get killed for sure.”

“Get your ass downstairs,” Pilate snapped. And to Bell, “Keep watch. Yell the minute you see something. And don’t go fuckin’ around with that hippie. When we get out of here, you can do whatever you want with her. But right now, you best be looking out the windows.”

Pilate went down the stairs ahead of Kristen, the rifle tracking possible targets ahead of him, like he’d seen people do in the movies. They could hear Bell and Laine arguing upstairs, and Pilate put a finger to his lips and said, quietly, “We gotta get the fuck out of here. They’ll surround us, sooner or later, and then they’ll kill us. We shot those cops back in Brownsville, they’re not gonna let that go.”

Kristen whispered back, “You mean . . . ditch everybody?”

“You want to die?”

“No.”

“Then we got to get out of here, before they move in,” Pilate said. “Knock the glass out of the windows on the creek side, and then I yell that we see something down the street, and we call up Chet and Ellen, and tell them the same thing, and then everybody who could see us would be looking the other way.”

“I got it, I got it,” Kristen said. “But we’re about a million miles from anywhere.”

“It’ll take a while for them to roll over the town. If we get into the woods, we can stay back in the trees and run along the highway until we see a car coming, then we flag it down . . . and take it.”

She nodded. She knew what “take it” meant. She thought about it for two seconds, then asked, “Why me? Why not the golden pussy?”

“You can get pussy anywhere—I need somebody willing to use a gun, and you’re a better shot than Bell. You in?”

She nodded: “I’m in.”

“Let’s break out some windows,” Pilate said.

T
he posse had gathered in a Boy Scout–like circle, around Lucas and Laurent, and Lucas said, “We need to get three or four people back under that bridge. We’ve got them contained at the moment, but if they all ran out into the woods, it’d be a hell of a job to track them all—or even know if any got away.”

Laurent said to Frisell, “Jerry, you’ve already been back there, so take Jim and . . . Any volunteers?”

A half dozen cops and reserve deputies raised their hands and Frisell pointed at two who were carrying black rifles and wearing vests, and said, “How about you two? We’d all have the same weapons, same ammo.”

The two chosen men nodded, and Lucas said, “Okay. Another thing you guys have to do. One of you should get back in the trees and run along the road for a half mile or so, to stop traffic coming in.” He turned to Laurent: “You ought to send somebody in uniform down the other way, too. Don’t let anyone in who isn’t a cop.”

Laurent nodded. “We need to break into compass-point groups. We’ll have Frisell on the north, but we need more groups in the woods, where they’ve got both cover and concealment, on the east, west, and south sides.”

Lucas said, “Then you and I, and a couple of other guys, can try to sneak up to the inn. I think I see a way in. We’ll need guys with vests: So who’ll that be? Who has vests?”

They broke into the compass-point groups, including Frisell’s. As they got ready to move out, Lucas said, “You all know how dangerous this is—some of us will be scrambling around in town. Don’t shoot anyone if you’re not sure of your target. There’ll be townspeople and reserve deputies without uniforms, and we don’t want to be killing each other. Be careful. Be careful.”

The compass-point groups moved out, leaving behind the men who’d go into the town with Lucas and Frisell. They started by calling the woman who was holed up in the gas station, who said she’d call a guy in the bar and have him call Lucas directly. “I’d just give you his number, but he might not believe you. But I’ll vouch for you, because you’re with Walt, and I know Walt.”

Walt was the guy who first called her.

Lucas hung up, stared at his phone, and a minute later, it lit up with an incoming call. “This is Ralph Setzer.”

“What’s your situation there?” Lucas asked.

“We got six people here, two shotguns, a rifle, and two handguns,” Setzer said. “We’ve barricaded the doors. We got plenty of beer and brats, so we can hold out indefinitely.”

“Glad to hear it,” Lucas said. “Save one of the brats for me.”

“We’ll do that.”

Behind him, Laurent laughed and said, “Gotta love those fuckin’ hosers.”

“We’re gonna try to come in through the side,” Lucas said. “If you’ll push one of those windows open, we think we can get there without getting shot at.”

“When are you going to do this?”

“Right away,” Lucas said.

“C’mon ahead. We’ll get the windows open for you. We’ll put a chair out there, the windows are a little high.”

“Next few minutes,” Lucas said. His neck was bothering him: Peters had used tweezers to take a few pieces of automotive glass out of his skin, and said he didn’t think that any had really penetrated. He’d covered the small cuts with Polysporin and a gauze pad, but now the wound was beginning to itch.

Nothing to do now but ignore it.

Lucas said to his group, “We can dodge along behind houses until we get a line that’ll let us go directly to the bar. The big problem, of course, would be if one of Pilate’s people is inside one of the houses. So we go in groups. Guys in uniforms will lead, so the locals don’t freak out and shoot us—Rome will lead, then Peters, and I’ll follow. The rest of you guys will stay back one house, under cover. Three of you should watch the windows we’re exposed to. You see movement at the windows, fire a shot high over the window, through the wall. If they break out a window and you see a gun, then take them out. We don’t want to kill anybody, but we don’t want them killing us, either. Everybody got it?”

“Just like hopscotch, going in,” Laurent said.

“The other two guys,” Lucas said, “should be looking backwards. If one of Pilate’s guys that we don’t know about is in a house, and lays low until we go by, he could back-shoot us. So two of you should be looking at windows behind us.”

When they were sure that everyone knew his assignment, Lucas and Laurent led the way out.

•   •   •

FRISELL AND THE THREE MEN
with him walked in the woods past Lucas’s SUV and Laurent’s truck, and one of the cops saw the bullet holes in Lucas’s SUV windows and whistled. “That would tend to tighten your testicles,” he said.

“Tightened mine,” Frisell said. “Since I’m the squad leader here, I’ll make the call and say that I’m going down to the bridge and I want Jim to come with me, because we’ve worked together. One of you guys has to go straight across the creek and into the woods, and down the highway, and stop traffic. Any preferences?”

One of the deputies suggested that the other guy should do it, and the other guy shrugged and said, “Okay,” and they left it at that.

Frisell went first, down the creek and under the bridge. Jim Bennett, the post office guy, was next, followed by the third deputy. The fourth guy crossed the creek, climbed the opposite bank, and disappeared into the trees.

They missed Pilate and Kristen by five minutes.

•   •   •

LAURENT, PETERS, AND LUCAS
led the way into town, crossing the open spaces in a hurry, huddling behind the houses they’d reached while they looked at the next one, searching for signs of life or guns. They saw no one, and after the last short sprint, climbed on a folding chair and through the window into the bar. The people inside had little information about who was where, but thought that most of the people in town were either in the bar or in the gas station. A few had holed up in their houses, doors locked. Most of them had guns and were willing to use them. The state cop had given them just enough warning to get organized a bit, but not completely synchronized.

“Somebody’s in the blue house, we know that,” the bartender said. He was a meaty guy with a mustard-stained white apron, with a shotgun in his hand and boxing scars under his eyes. “I mean, one of these crazies, or maybe two or three are in there. We know they’re in the hardware store, because they were shooting at us after we shot at one of the crazies—he was out in the open and we know he was one of them. We missed him, though. We’re pretty sure they’re in the inn and we think they’ve got the artists. We don’t think anyone warned the artists.”

“We’ve been shot at from the inn, so we know they’ve got that for sure,” Lucas said.

•   •   •

THERE WAS AN EMPTY LOT
between the bar and the inn, with eight windows on the inn facing the bar and three in the bar facing the inn. All the inn windows had been broken out, but they could see no faces or movement behind the windows.

Lucas, Laurent, and Peters crouched behind the bar windows, looking across at the inn, and Lucas asked Laurent, “What do you think?”

“If we can take the high ground, we can get them out of the hardware store and the blue house—but if they get up on that roof, we’ve got a big problem.”

Lucas nodded. “That’s what I think. We got to get them out of there.”

“You got a plan?”

“I do, but it’s sorta horseshit.”

•   •   •

LAURENT CALLED IN
the deputies who’d been assigned to cover Lucas’s group as they went for the bar. Once inside, he gave them their directions—they’d be covering the windows of the inn, both first and second floors, and the edge of the roof. While he was doing that, Lucas called Frisell at the bridge, and when he’d told Frisell what he wanted, Frisell said, “We can do that. When do you want it?”

“Stay by the phone. When we’re cocked and ready to go, I’ll call you.”

“We’re all set here. Go anytime. Good luck.”

Lucas, Laurent, and Peters went out the back door of the bar, and edged close to the corner nearest the inn. Peters said, “I’m the tiniest bit scared. Nothing to quit over, though.”

“Think about what a great fuckin’ story this’ll make—we’ll be living off this for years,” Laurent said.

Lucas said, “Shut up,” and called Frisell. He said, “Anytime you’re ready. Aim for the ceilings.”

Three seconds later, a barrage of gunfire hit the second floor on the other side of the inn, the three cops in the creek bed deliberately aiming at a sharp angle up through the windows, hoping the slugs would embed in the roof and not go ricocheting around inside the upper floor.

As soon as the shooting started, Lucas, Laurent, and Peters dashed for the corner of the inn, where they couldn’t easily be seen by anyone inside. They crouched at the corner for a minute, until the gunfire stopped.

Behind them, in the hotel, they could see the rest of their group at the windows, ready to open fire if anyone showed at the windows of the inn. In the sudden silence after the spurt of gunfire, Lucas said, “I’m going to peek,” and at that moment, a woman began screaming on the second floor and then a man began shouting: it didn’t sound like terror, it sounded like an argument.

Lucas peeked through a broken ground-floor window, a quick half second. Saw nobody, dropped to his knees, and waited. No reaction. Looked again, this time a longer peek, then another, then he whispered to Laurent and Peters, “You’re not going to believe this, but there’s nobody in there. At all. It looks like it used to be a kitchen, and there’s nobody in there.”

“Can you get through the window?” Laurent asked.

“I could if we could get the window open.” Though the glass had been broken out, the wooden crossbars that held the glass panes were still intact.

Laurent was the lightest of the three of them, so Peters made a stirrup with his hands and boosted Laurent high enough that he could reach the lock on the double-hung window, and turn it open. When that was done, he dropped back to the ground; the window had been painted shut, but with some careful pressure on the side bars, they were able to get it loose enough to lift.

Lucas went through the window first, with his pistol, which would be handier than a rifle in the close confines of the kitchen. The wooden floor squeaked underfoot, but he managed to tiptoe to the kitchen door and peek out into the lobby. Nobody there—nothing but a vacant spot where a check-in desk used to be, a pile of what looked like discarded curtains, and stairs going up to the second floor. The whole place smelled of mold and wood rot; a bird’s nest was stuck on a corner beam, with a little pile of black-and-white-speckled droppings on the floor beneath it.

Lucas motioned to Laurent, still outside the window, and he pushed himself through, followed by Peters. They opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the lobby: nobody there. The windows on both sides of the building had been broken, as though somebody had been stationed there, but had gone somewhere else.

There had been two restrooms down a hall that led to a back door. The doors had been scavenged off the restrooms, and they stood open to the hall. Lucas took off his shoes and tiptoed down the hall, checked the two, found them empty—somebody had taken out all the fixtures, including the lights and paper-towel dispensers. The remains of a condom dispenser still hung from a wall in the men’s room, but it had been smashed open and now looked like a toaster that had been hit by a train.

Lucas tiptoed back down the hallway, and called the other two men together. They could still hear a man and a woman, apparently arguing, and a third woman crying, and Lucas whispered, “Sounds like things are tough up there. I need you guys to get on both sides of the stairs, hiding below banisters. If you see a guy with a gun, shoot him.”

“Where’ll you be?” Laurent asked.

“I’m going to
slide
up the stairs,” Lucas said. “I did it once before. If they stay busy up there, I should be able to take them. You gotta take care of me, because if that guy’s got a gun, and I believe he does, and if he walks up to the top of the stairs and looks down at me, I’m gonna be SOL.”

“This does not sound entirely sane,” Peters said.

Lucas grinned at him. “Well, what can I tell you? We need to get them out of there. And that crying woman up there . . . something’s going on.”

Laurent nodded, and said, “Show us where you want us.”

•   •   •

LUCAS SET THEM UP
at the bottom of the stairs, but off to the sides, where they would be mostly hidden against a quick glance. Lucas would also be hidden, from anyone back away from the stairs. If anyone walked to the stairs and looked down, he’d be right there.

“Ready?” he whispered to Laurent and Peters.

They both nodded.

Lucas duckwalked to the bottom of the stairs, then stretched up the risers, his .45 pointing up the stairs. After listening for a few seconds, he pushed himself up another step, and then another.

A man was shouting, “That cocksucker ran off on us, is what he did. You always knew he put himself first. You always knew that, but he was always ‘outlaw this, the Fall coming that,’ and so you thought, well, maybe he’s the real thing. But he never was. He was just another asshole. If I could find that cunt, I’d cut his fuckin’ heart out.”