Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

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 i
n 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.”