Two more dusty paths and we broke onto Quarry Street and raced down the southern side of the hills, with red and blue lights bouncing and swerving behind us in the rearview mirror.

Broussard didn’t slow as he shot through a stop sign at the end of Quarry Street. He fishtailed over the shoulder and turned into the rotary, actually giving the gas pedal a deeper push. All four tires fought him for a second. The heavy car seemed to jerk in against itself and buckle, as if it would suddenly turn on its side, but then the wheels caught and the powerful engine moaned and we shot off the rotary. Broussard pinned the wheel again, and we tore over another shoulder, spewed grass and dirt up onto the hood, and burst past an abandoned mill on our right, saw Poole sitting against the rear quarter panel of the Lexus RX 300 on the left side of the road about fifty yards past the mill.

Poole ’s head lolled against the fender. His shirt was open to the navel, and he’d placed one hand against his heart.

Broussard slammed the car to a stop and jumped out, slid on the dirt, and dropped to his knees by Poole.

“Partner! Partner!”

Poole opened his eyes, smiled weakly. “Got lost.”

Broussard felt his pulse, then put a hand to his heart, pushed up Poole ’s left eyelid with his thumb. “Okay, buddy. Okay. You’re gonna be…you’re gonna be fine.”

Several police cars pulled past us. A young cop stepped out of the first one, a Quincy unit, and Broussard said, “Open your back door!”

The cop fumbled with the flashlight in his hand, dropped it to the dirt. He reached down to pick it up.

“Open your fucking door!” Broussard screamed. “Now!”

The young cop managed to kick the flashlight under the car before he reached back and opened the door.

“Kenzie, help me lift him.”

I got a grip on Poole ’s lower legs, and Broussard eased behind him and wrapped his arms around his chest, and we carried him to the back of the police car and slid him onto the seat.

“I’m fine,” Poole said, and his eyes rolled to the left.

“Sure you are.” Broussard smiled. He turned his head to look at the young cop, who appeared very nervous. “You drive fast?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

Behind us, several troopers and Quincy cops approached the front of the Lexus, guns drawn.

“Step out of the car now!” one trooper shouted, pointing his weapon at Gutierrez’s windshield.

“Which hospital is closer?” Broussard asked. “Quincy or Milton?”

“Uh, from here, sir, it’s Milton.”

“How fast can you get there?” Broussard asked the cop.

“Three minutes.”

“Make it two.” Broussard slapped the cop’s shoulder and shoved him toward the driver’s door.

The cop hopped behind the wheel. Broussard squeezed Poole ’s hand and said, “See you in a bit.”

Poole nodded sleepily.

We stepped back and Broussard shut the back door.

“Two minutes,” he repeated to the cop. The wheels of the unit spewed gravel and kicked up clouds of dust as the cop blew out onto the road, turned on his lights, and sped down the asphalt so fast he could have been shot from a rocket booster.

“Holy shit,” another cop said. He stood at the front of the Lexus. “Holy shit,” he said again.

Broussard and I walked toward the Lexus and Broussard grabbed a pair of troopers, pointed at the abandoned mill building. “Secure that building. Now.”

The troopers didn’t even question. They placed hands to the guns on their hips and ran back up the road toward the mill.

We reached the Lexus, worked our way through the small crowd of cops blocking the front bumper, and looked through the windshield at Chris Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierrez. Gutierrez was in the driver’s seat, Mullen riding shotgun. The headlights were still on. The engine was running. A single hole formed a small spiderweb in the windshield in front of Gutierrez. An identical hole was bored through the glass in front of Mullen.

The holes in their heads were pretty similar, too-both the size of a dime, both puckered and white around the edges, both spilling a thin stream of blood down the men’s noses.

By the looks of it, Gutierrez had taken the first shot. His face registered nothing except a sense of impatience, and both his hands were empty and lying palms up on the seat. The keys were in the ignition, the shift in PARK. Chris Mullen’s right hand gripped the gun in his waistband, and the look on his face was a sudden frozen seizure of fear and surprise. He’d had about half a second to know he was going to die, maybe less. But enough time for everything to turn slow-motion on him, a thousand terrified thoughts scrambling through his angry brain in the time it took for him to register the bullet that had killed Pharaoh, reach for his gun, and hear the spit of the next bullet punch through the windshield.

Bubba, I thought.

Fifty yards in front of the Lexus, the abandoned mill with its sagging widow’s walk would have provided a perfect sniper’s perch.

In the shafts of light cast by the car’s headlamps, I could see the two Staties approaching it slowly, knees bent slightly, guns drawn and aimed up at the widow’s walk. One of them pointed to the other, and they approached the side door. One threw it open, and the other stepped in front of it, gun pointed at chest level.

Bubba, I thought, I hope you didn’t do this just for fun. Tell me you have Amanda McCready.

Broussard followed my gaze. “How much you want to bet the angle of trajectory tells us the bullets were fired from that building?”

“No bet,” I said.

Two hours later, they were still sorting out the mess. The night had turned suddenly cold, and a light sleet fell and splattered windshields and stuck in our hair like lice.

The troopers who’d entered the mill had come back out with a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle they’d found, with LAD target scope attached. The rifle had been dumped in a barrel of ancient oil on the second floor, just to the right of the window that led to the widow’s walk. The serial numbers had been filed off, and the first guy from Forensics who looked at it laughed when someone suggested the possibility of prints.

More troopers were sent into the mill to look for further evidence, but in two hours they hadn’t found shell casings or anything else, and Forensics had been unable to get any prints off the railing of the widow’s walk or the frame of the window leading out there.

The ranger who’d met Angie on the back side of the hill leading to Swingle’s Quarry had given her a bright orange raincoat to cover herself and a pair of thick socks for her feet, but still she shivered in the night, kept rubbing her dark hair with a towel even though it had dried or frozen hours ago. Indian summer, it appeared, had gone the way of the Massachusetts Indian.

Two divers had attempted a search of the Granite Rail Quarry but reported visibility at absolute zero below thirty feet, and once the weather kicked in, the slit deposits loosened from the granite walls had turned even the shallow water into a sandstorm.

The divers quit at ten without finding anything but a pair of men’s jeans hanging from a shelf about twenty feet below the water line.

When Broussard had reached the south side of the quarry, almost directly across from the cliff where Angie and I had seen the doll, a note had been waiting for him, placed neatly under a small boulder and illuminated by a pencil-thin flashlight hung from a branch above it.

Duck.

As Broussard reached for the note, the trees erupted with gunfire, and he dove out from the tree line onto the cliff plateau, grappling for his gun and walkie-talkie, leaving the money bag and his flashlight back at the tree line. A second barrage of bullets drove him to the edge of the cliff, where he lay in darkness, his only safety, and trained his gun on the tree line but didn’t fire for fear the muzzle flashes would reveal his exact position.