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.

The 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.