Then they were both out of ammo and Michelle was screaming in pain and Bell picked her up and carried her to the RV and threw her inside. Laine dropped the diesel nozzle on the ground but managed to get the cap back on the gas tank, and she and Bell piled into the RV, and they took off, the RV leading for the first fifty yards before Pilate’s Firebird blew past it. As they passed the RV, another shot bounced off the angled back window of the Firebird, cracking the glass and ricocheting off to somewhere else.

A half minute later, they were out of town. Two miles down the road, Pilate looked back and saw the RV already a half mile behind. He slowed and told Kristen, “Get Bell on your phone.”

She nodded and put the phone on speaker and punched in Bell’s number, and he came up and said, “Michelle was hit in the back, she’s pretty bad, we gotta get her to a hospital.”

Pilate shook his head at Kristen and then said, loud enough for Bell to hear, “Let’s get off somewhere up ahead and take a look.”

Bell came back: “There’s a pickup behind me, he’s staying way back but he’s keeping up, and I think he followed me out of town. He might be tracking us.”

They were coming up to a low hill, and Pilate said, “When you get over the hill and can’t see him in the rearview, stop on the side of the road. We need to get the rifle out of the closet.”

“Okay.”

Pilate said to Kristen, “We’re in deep shit, man, we’re in deep shit.”

They went over the top of the hill and pulled over into some weeds on the side of the road and the RV caught up with them and pulled in behind them, and Bell hopped out and ran around to the back and popped the door and Pilate vaulted inside and yanked open the closet door and pushed the clothes out of the way and got the black rifle and the big magazine and slammed it home and ran back outside.

He leaned against the side of the RV, and when the pickup came over the top of the hill he pulled the trigger but nothing happened, and for an instant he thought that the rifle was broken, and then remembered that he hadn’t charged it, and he pulled back the charging handle and let it go and started firing, ripping through the full magazine.

The pickup shuddered to a stop and then began backing away, and Pilate kept firing until he ran out of ammo, and thought Shit again and ran back inside the RV and dug the second magazine out of the shoes on the floor of the closet, pulled out the first magazine, and jammed in the second as he ran back outside.

By the time he got there, the pickup had disappeared back over the hill, and he ran up the hill, and the pickup was now five hundred yards away. The driver had managed to turn it around and it was accelerating away.

Bell had lifted Michelle out of the RV’s passenger seat and placed her on the ground at the side of the road. She was conscious and moaning, and there was a streak of pale pink blood by her mouth.

“If we leave her here, somebody’ll see her . . . We could call somebody and tell them that she’s here,” Bell said.

Pilate turned away and then ran two fast steps to the RV and kicked the fender, once, twice, then whirled to Bell and screamed, “Why does this shit always happen? Why does this shit always happen to me?”

Michelle said, “I’m hurt really bad—”

Pilate lifted the rifle, and in an instant, shot her twice in the face. Laine and Kristen flinched away, and Pilate shouted at them, “Fuck her, she would have given us up. Sent us to the electric chair. I hate this fuckin’ place! I hate this fuckin’ place!”

They had to go. Before they left, they threw Michelle’s body into a stand of cattails, then pushed it under and bent some cattails over it.

Had to go. Had to go.

They went. Once or twice, as they fled down the highway, Bell thought he caught the sparkle of glass in the rearview mirror, a windshield way back.

Nothing he could do about it.

Frisell was holding the Benz at a steady eighty-five on the narrow two-lane highway when the Hale County sheriff’s car went screaming by at better than a hundred. Frisell put the right two wheels in the weeds, and blurted, “Jesus Christ,” and then, “The guy in the passenger seat was waving at us. Something happened.”

“Yeah, and it’s something bad.”

Lucas took out his phone and called Laurent, who was trailing a few cars back. “Something happened in Hale County,” he said, when Laurent answered.

“I know. I’ve got Peters looking up the number for the law enforcement center . . . Hang on, he’s getting it.”

Lucas hung on, and a couple of minutes passed and then Laurent came back and said, “It’s confusing, but there’s been a shoot-out in Brownsville. The sheriff and a deputy were wounded bad. The shooters took off, but we’re told there’s a guy trailing him in his truck, and he’s calling back on his phone. He says they just got off the main highway and are headed northwest toward the town of Mellon.”

“Ah, shit, Pilate was there and they tried to take them,” Lucas said.

“I think so.”

“Where’s Mellon?”

“Straight on through Brownsville for ten miles or so, then there’s a branch highway headed northwest to Marquette. More of a back road than a highway, though it’s paved and they can move right along. A couple miles on the other side of Mellon, there’s a three-way intersection, an east-west road cuts across the one they’re on. If they get to that intersection, finding them is going to get tougher, if we don’t know which way they went.”

“Gotta hurry,” Lucas returned.

A minute later, he got another call from Laurent: “There’s a state patrolman on his way to Mellon. If he gets there first, he can block the road at a bridge. There’s only the highway, and if he jams them up, he should be able to hold them off. There were at least four of them, maybe five, but one of them may have been shot by a woman who owns the local café . . . and she was hit by return fire. That’s what we’re hearing. We don’t know about the guy who’s trailing them.”

“Gotta go faster,” Lucas said. “Gotta get there. How many highway patrolmen?”

“Only one, far as I know.”

“Gotta go faster,” Lucas said. “Call ahead to that town, Mellon, is that right? Call them and tell them what’s coming.”

“I’ll do that now,” Laurent said.

Frisell leaned into the accelerator, crossed a hundred, and said, “Let me know when you get nervous.”

“Not yet,” Lucas said. He added, “I’m gonna reach past you.”

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.