There were two more recently dialed numbers on the phone, and Lucas punched the first of the two. No answer, and no ring. He tried the third number, and a man answered. “You in the hardware store?”

“Yeah. This a cop?”

“Yes. Pilate ran away, Bell is dead, Laine is shot, but might make it if we can get her to a hospital, and Chet’s shot in the street. You should be able to see him. We don’t know if he’s dead or not. As long as you’re in the hardware store, we can’t help him. If you quit now, we might be able to save his life,” Lucas said.

Behind him, Laurent said, “I don’t think so.”

Lucas held up his finger to quiet him—honesty was not always the best policy—and the man said, “Hold on.” Lucas waited, then a woman came on and asked, “How do we know that Pilate really ran away?”

“Well, you could call him.”

“He said not to call him unless it was an emergency,” the woman said.

Lucas rolled his eyes at Laurent, and then said, “Chet might be bleeding to death in the street. We’re about to shoot that hardware store so full of holes that it’ll look like a fuckin’ colander. Excuse the language. We’ve got fifty cops out here with machine guns. You want to call Pilate first, that’s fine, because I’d say, all things considered, that you have an emergency.”

After a few seconds, she said, “Okay.”

Lucas could hear a man talking in the background, and then she said, “We’re coming out the front, don’t let anybody shoot us.”

“Wait three minutes, then come out. We’ve got to calm some people down, after you shot those cops up in Brownsville.”

“Brownsville. We didn’t go through Brownsville. We were up at the beach.”

“Okay, but give us three minutes. How many of you are there?”

“Two. Two of us. Just me and Richie. We’ll come out when you say so. Don’t shoot us.”

•   •   •

LAURENT CALLED THE COPS at the compass points, told them to hold off firing at the disciples when they showed themselves in the street. Lucas called the bartender, and the people holed up in the gas station, and told them not to shoot. Then Lucas and Laurent went down to the ground floor and stood by a window where they could see the front of the hardware store.

Peters and the deputies had rolled the wounded woman in the quilt, and Lucas told them to wait to see what happened: if the people in the hardware store surrendered, they wouldn’t have to try to wrestle her through a window.

When everybody was set, Lucas called the woman back, and when she answered, said, “Come on out.”

Ten seconds later, the front door of the hardware store opened and a tall natural-blond woman poked her head out. They knew she was a real blonde because she was naked. She stepped out into the street followed by a man, who was a natural brunette and just as naked. They stepped out to the edge of the street with their hands raised.

“What the hell is that all about?” Laurent asked.

Lucas stepped outside, his .45 leveled at the two naked disciples, and said, “It’s an L.A. thing. If you surrender naked, it makes it harder for the cops to say they thought you were going for your gun.”

“Well, I guess that’s true,” Laurent said. “Although the guy appears to be in possession of a .22.”

•   •   •

LUCAS AND LAURENT kept their guns on the disciples and two of the deputies nervously approached them, handcuffs dangling from their hands. Peters and the other three deputies came out the front door, carrying the wounded woman in the quilt.

Laurent moved to his left so he wouldn’t be shooting at the deputies if the naked people produced guns, from the legendary back-cheek holsters. As the deputies got close, Lucas saw movement in the hardware store window and screamed, “Watch it, watch it,” and the deputies flinched and then a spray of shots blew through the hardware store window and the deputies went down.

Lucas didn’t know if the deputies had dropped to make smaller targets, or had been hit, but Laurent had gone to full-auto on his rifle and was blowing up the front of the store and Lucas ran across the street toward the side of the hardware store, scared to death, peeked in a side window and saw a man squatting next to a pile of firewood that had been stacked in the middle of the floor, the man’s hands covering his head as glass and splinters rained down on him from Laurent’s return fire. The man had a black rifle in one hand. He saw Lucas at the last minute and Lucas emptied his .45 at the man, who stood up and did a little death dance and then fell back.

Lucas dropped the magazine and stepped back to the front of the store and saw four people down in the street: both deputies and the two naked people, all of them dappled with bloodstains. Laurent was walking toward them and Lucas shouted, “We gotta clear the store.”

Laurent shouted back, “Okay,” and Peters, who’d dropped his corner of the quilt that held the wounded woman, jogged up and asked, “Who’s going first?”

Laurent said, “I will. I got the big gun. Barney, you cover the window. If you see anything, open up. Lucas, get back around to the side and see if there’s anybody in front of me when I go in.”

Lucas went back around to the side, peeked through the window again, and yelled, “Go!”

Laurent gave the building a preliminary squirt, three rounds through the front door, and splinters and dust flew off the door, and then he was at the door, kicking it open. Nothing moved. He stepped inside, and Lucas was aware of people shouting in the street, but nothing moved in the store.

They cleared it in one minute. Their technique was bad, dangerous, hurried; but then, they were in a hurry.

When they were ninety-nine percent sure there were no hidden disciples inside, Laurent called one of the uninjured deputies to stand inside the door, ready to shoot at anything that suddenly appeared from nowhere, and then he, Lucas, and Peters went back to the street.

The two naked people were dead, hit multiple times from multiple angles, by both the deputies who’d been carrying the quilt and the civilians in the bar. The deputies had been shot in the legs. One was showing arterial bleeding from one leg, and Peters put a pressure bandage on the wound and tied it down with a wrapping of nylon rope, and then put lighter pressure on the wound in the other leg, and they loaded him into a truck. Almost as an afterthought, they loaded the wounded woman, Laine, in the same truck, and the driver took off for the hospital in Munising.

The other deputy wasn’t showing as much blood, but had a broken leg. They handled him as delicately as they could, putting him in the backseat of a station wagon, and the driver took off.

The two artists had come out of the inn and the woman was taking photographs with a small Panasonic camera, focusing on the dead naked disciples. Lucas felt like smacking her in the mouth, but didn’t. Instead, he shouted, “Get out of there, get out of there; you’re messing with a crime scene.”

She stepped back but didn’t stop shooting.

“We’ve got to go house by house,” Laurent said. He looked around and people were beginning to drift into the street. Frisell and two other deputies were coming toward them, with the woman they’d taken prisoner at the creek, Laurent told Frisell and Peters to organize a search party.

“There are at least two people missing,” Lucas said. “Pilate and his girlfriend. They may be holed up or they may have taken off. The guy in the inn thought they ran for it. But: we gotta take it slow and easy.”

•   •   •

THEY TOOK AN HOUR working through the town and found no more disciples. Nor had they seen any sign of Pilate or his girlfriend.

Early in the search, Lucas and Laurent had gone into the hardware store to check the man who’d opened fire on them in the street. Lucas had hit him seven times, including one wound in the head and three in the chest, any one of which would have killed him.