Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  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 the
m work, said, “We gotta get him out of here. That’s a long run back and we won’t have anyone to cover us.”

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

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

  Laurent nodded: “Yes.”

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

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

  “Good.”

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

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

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

  The three of them spread, two on the bank at one side of the bridge, one on the other side, and Laurent said, “We gotcha.”

  Lucas launched himself up the bank on the other side. The first of the two cars was fifteen or twenty yards away, the second, five yards beyond that. He ran hard, feeling the tension in his back where the bullet would hit, and dodged behind the first car . . . safe for the moment. He crawled to the door and looked at the ignition; no keys. He checked the front seat and the center console. Nothing.

  He crawled back to the second car and realized, as he got close, that it was actually still running. The passenger-side door was closed but unlatched, and he pulled it open. An unfinished cheeseburger was sitting on the floor on the passenger side; he picked it up and threw it into the backseat.

  Lucas slid inside, crawled into the driver’s seat, got his legs beneath himself, trying to stay below the windshield level. There’d been no gunshots from the guys at the bridge, so he shifted the car into drive and steered it out around the first car, right down to the creek bank, where he stopped and put the car into “Park.”

  The backseat would probably be too cramped for Blinder, so he pushed the passenger seat back as far as he could, then slipped out the driver’s-side door and crawled over to the bank and down into the creek.

  “Got the car right up above,” he told the others. “We need to get him into the passenger seat, the backseat is too small.”

  Laurent said, “Excellent. Bernie, you and Lucas carry him up there. And Bernie, you’re gonna have to take him up to Munising.”

  “Man, I hate to miss this . . .”

  “Somebody’s got to go and I’m saying it’s you,” Laurent said. “I need Lucas and you’re less crazy than fuckin’ Frisell. So: you’re the guy.”

  Allen muttered, “Okay,” and Laurent said, “You already done good, now you gotta run with him.”

  Lucas said, “The car’s a piece of shit, and there’s not much gas, so flag down the first car you see—first friendly car—and transfer over.”

  “Got it,” Allen said.

  Lucas and Allen joined hands, as in a hammock, and Frisell and Laurent helped put Blinder in the hammock, and went back to their guns. Lucas and Allen got to the edge of the bank, and Lucas asked, “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  The bank wasn’t high—maybe five feet—but it was slippery and steep, and they were not moving fast as they dug their shoes into the bank and struggled up to the top. Once there, they hurried to the passenger side, and fit Blinder into the seat, and Allen ran around to the driver’s side as Lucas buckled Blinder in.

  Laurent fired two shots and shouted, “Second story, second window, left,” and a bullet cracked off the bridge abutment and Laurent and Frisell opened up again with their rifles and Allen backed away in the car as Lucas slid down the bank into the creek bed.

  When Frisell and Laurent stopped shooting, Lucas risked a peek over the top of the bank. Allen was a hundred yards away and still backing up, then a hundred and fifty, and he made a quick turn onto the shoulder, brought the car around, and drove off.

  Lucas ducked back and said to the others, “He’s gone.”

  “Okay,” Laurent said. “Now we just gotta root these other motherfuckers out, without getting any more of us shot.”

  • • •

  “THERE’RE NO COPS in Mellon, right?” Lucas asked.

  Laurent shook his head.

  “Would there be anyone who’d have everybody’s phone number?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe, but I don’t know who it would be.”

  “We need to find out what’s going on with the people in town. Call up whoever you’re talking to, in the posse, ask if anyone’s got a good phone number.”

  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 wa
lk 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.”