Lucas tiptoed back down the hallway, and called the other two men together. They could still hear a man and a woman, apparently arguing, and a third woman crying, and Lucas whispered, “Sounds like things are tough up there. I need you guys to get on both sides of the stairs, hiding below banisters. If you see a guy with a gun, shoot him.”
“Where’ll you be?” Laurent asked.
“I’m going to slide up the stairs,” Lucas said. “I did it once before. If they stay busy up there, I should be able to take them. You gotta take care of me, because if that guy’s got a gun, and I believe he does, and if he walks up to the top of the stairs and looks down at me, I’m gonna be SOL.”
“This does not sound entirely sane,” Peters said.
Lucas grinned at him. “Well, what can I tell you? We need to get them out of there. And that crying woman up there . . . something’s going on.”
Laurent nodded, and said, “Show us where you want us.”
• • •
LUCAS SET THEM UP at the bottom of the stairs, but off to the sides, where they would be mostly hidden against a quick glance. Lucas would also be hidden, from anyone back away from the stairs. If anyone walked to the stairs and looked down, he’d be right there.
“Ready?” he whispered to Laurent and Peters.
They both nodded.
Lucas duckwalked to the bottom of the stairs, then stretched up the risers, his .45 pointing up the stairs. After listening for a few seconds, he pushed himself up another step, and then another.
A man was shouting, “That cocksucker ran off on us, is what he did. You always knew he put himself first. You always knew that, but he was always ‘outlaw this, the Fall coming that,’ and so you thought, well, maybe he’s the real thing. But he never was. He was just another asshole. If I could find that cunt, I’d cut his fuckin’ heart out.”
“What’re we gonna do, Bell?” a woman asked.
“I’ll tell you the second thing I’m gonna do. I’m gonna wait until one of those cops sticks his head out from under that bridge again and I’m gonna shoot him in the fuckin’ head. But first, I’m gonna skull-fuck that hippie. They’re gonna kill me, but I’m gonna fuck her first.”
A woman began crying again; Lucas was on the ninth step of fourteen when he heard running steps coming toward the stairs. He quickly slipped back two and then a woman was there with a rifle in her hands, looking right down at him, and there was a bang from below, from Laurent or Peters, and the woman went down, and Lucas scrambled up the last few steps and saw the man gaping at the woman on the floor, and the man was swinging his rifle around and Lucas fired at him and missed and the rifle was almost around on him and Lucas fired again and this time hit the man in the throat, about a foot higher than he’d been aiming, and as the man began to slip down, shot him again, almost as a reflex, and the man twisted and went flat.
The woman who’d been crying was sitting in the corner with a man and now began screaming hysterically. Lucas climbed the last couple of stairs, aware that Laurent was coming up behind him, and Lucas shouted, “Are there any more? Are there any more?”
The man shouted, “No. There were, but they went downstairs.”
Lucas moved up to the woman who’d been shot, kicked the rifle away from her. Laurent had shot her in the chest, just where it joined her shoulder. She was groaning and bleeding heavily, her eyes flat with shock, but Lucas thought she’d make it if they could stop the bleeding and get her to a hospital.
Laurent was thinking the same thing, and said, “We gotta stop the blood. What about the guy?”
Lucas was striding across the floor and looked down at Bell, shook his head. “He’s dead.” To the man and the woman in the corner, he asked, “Are you hurt? Bleeding?”
The man said, “No, no.”
Lucas popped the magazine on his .45, and slapped another one in. Peters was at the top of the stairs with a first aid kit, and was packing the entry and exit wounds in the woman, and called to Laurent, “Rome, run downstairs and get a couple of guys to come over from the bar. We got to take her out the same way we came in.”
Laurent ran downstairs and Lucas could hear him shouting. Lucas walked over to the woman, whose eyes had gone dim with shock. He asked, “Where’s Pilate?”
She moaned again, but she’d heard him, and she said, “He ran away. We think he ran away with Kristen. He tricked us.”
“Goddamnit.”
• • •
HE WALKED TO the front of the building and looked down at the blue house, across the street, and not far from the creek. He went back to the woman and asked, “Are you talking to the other people on a phone?”
She nodded. “Bell has it.” She looked at his body and the spreading pool of blood that seeped out from beneath it. “Had it.”
“Do the people in the blue house have hostages?”
“They didn’t say they do. Am I gonna die?”
“Yeah, but not today,” Lucas said. Then he felt mean for saying it, and added, “We’ll get you to a hospital quick as we can. You should be okay. What’s your name?”
She said, “Laine.”
Peters said, “The guys are coming in, they’re bringing a blanket, they’ll take her out in a hammock.”
Lucas went to the dead man, found a phone in his jacket pocket, looked at the recents, called up the latest one and tapped Call.
A woman answered instantly. “What?”
“I’m a cop. We shot Bell and Laine and we’ve taken over the inn building. Pilate ran away with Kristen.”
“You fuck. You fuck.” But fear was riding through her voice.
Lucas said, “If you’re in the blue house, you’ve got one minute to walk out the back side with your hands in the air. We’ve got marksmen under that bridge. They’re gonna start hosing down the house from there and we’ll start from up here. So, you quit, or we kill you. Your choice.”
The woman said, “I gotta talk to Chet.”
“You got one minute,” Lucas said. “And tell him hello from Pap, in Minnesota.”
He called Frisell and said, “We want you guys to do the same thing to the blue house as you did to the inn, in two minutes. Or, a couple people may come out the back with their hands in the air. If they do, walk them into the creek bed and arrest them. Be careful about hidden guns . . .”
“Got it,” Frisell said. “Two minutes, if they don’t come out. You got the inn? We heard some shooting.”
“Yeah, we got it.”
• • •
BEHIND HIM, two of the deputies who’d covered their advance into town came up the stairs, carrying a quilt. Peters began helping move the wounded woman onto the quilt, while Laurent came over and stood by the front window next to Lucas. Lucas said, “Peek, don’t stand there gawking like a dumbass.”
“Sorry,” Laurent said. “Wish I had a cigarette.”
“Nasty habit,” Lucas said.
“I know. That’s why I stopped twenty years ago.”
The phone in Lucas’s hand rang, and the woman said, “I’m coming out the back, right now, my hands are over my head.”
Lucas asked, “What about the guy with you?”
“I don’t think he’s coming,” she said.
• • •
AT THAT MOMENT, a man walked out the front door of the blue house with a rifle, with the attitude of a man who deeply, seriously didn’t give a shit, even about himself. He raised the rifle and began shooting at the window where they were standing, and Lucas and Laurent lurched back into the room and went to the floor as bullets winged off the windowsill and buried themselves in the ceiling.
• • •
THE SHOOTING STOPPED for just a moment, and Laurent low-crawled to the window, peeked as Lucas shouted, “No, no!” and Laurent said, “Fuck him,” and stood up and shot the man, who had just jammed another magazine in his rifle. The man fell down in the street, and Lucas came over and looked down and said, “Nice shot, I guess.”
In the silence after the shooting, they could hear Frisell shouting at the woman: “Hands all the way up. All the way up,” and they saw the woman walking with raised hands through the weeds toward the creek.