One of the videos showed a tall thin cop firing a rifle out the window, while another one, with a pistol, huddled on the floor, watched. Before he pulled the trigger, they heard the thin cop say, quite clearly, “Fuck him,” and after he fired, the other cop walked to the window and looked out, and then say, almost conversationally, “Nice shot.”

The camera then tracked down across the floor where a group of men surrounded a body on the floor, and then to another man who lay in pool of blood. Kristen was sitting on the couch, eating a pot pie, and said, “Bell. Bell and Laine.”

Pilate said, “Motherfuckers. That could be us.”

Toward the end of the newscast, the anchorman asked people throughout the UP to check on their neighbors, but to do so carefully: “Don’t just walk up to a house, but watch to see if your neighbors follow their usual routine. If something seems different, call the police and report your suspicions.”

“We gotta get out of here before daylight,” Pilate said. “Maybe . . . I don’t know. Get as far away as we can in one day in the old lady’s car, then . . . take a bus? Or grab another car.”

They hadn’t had any decent sleep for a long time, it seemed, and they crawled into the old lady’s double bed after watching the news. At five o’clock in the morning, they ate cereal and milk, then rummaged through the old lady’s closets and found hats and jackets that no Californian would ever wear. They also took the thirty dollars in the old lady’s purse, along with her driver’s license and Visa card.

When Kristen put on a wide-brimmed straw hat with a white bow, she looked in the mirror and said, “I’m a fuckin’ church lady.”

“Church lady is good,” Pilate said.

Kristen said, “If you had a ring in your ear, you’d look like Mr. Clean.”

They gassed the car up at a station on the edge of town, where a sleepy clerk told Kristen that the I-75 bridge was still blocked.

With that option gone, they headed west, on the far north side of the peninsula, toward Duluth, Minnesota, eight hours away.

They found a road atlas in the car, which Pilate read as Kristen drove.

“We’ll be in Duluth before three o’clock. Can’t go back to Pap’s because they either caught Chet or killed him, and they’ll be onto Pap’s by now.”

A while later, he said, “If we go south to Minneapolis, we’ll be good. Stay there overnight, next day, drive to Kansas City, dump the car where they won’t find it right away . . .”

“Walmart parking lot.”

“Catch a bus and we’re good,” Pilate said.

Another while later, he added, “That big fuckin’ cop and his nosy kid are from down there. That’s something to think about.”

Lucas said good-bye to the posse the next day at Pat’s, the sandwich shop across the street from Laurent’s office, shaking hands, slapping backs, reliving the shoot-out at Mellon, speculating on the location of Pilate and Kristen. The mood was frenetic, half excitement and half regret, still mixed with anger about the cops who’d been shot. Four of the five of them were still alive, but one had lost a leg.

Everybody agreed that the fugitives certainly had Louis Frey’s truck and were hiding somewhere.

“Best case, they’re hiding in the woods. Worst case, they stuck it in somebody’s garage where nobody’ll find it for a while, killed the owners, and holed up,” Lucas said. “This thing isn’t over until you’ve nailed them down.”

Laurent said, “We’ll get them. We will. By the way, you know when you guys were sitting on a bench, eating those ice cream cones and talking about who’d be playing you in the movies? Guess who I got a call from this morning? It’s some producer out in L.A. and he’s talking about options and so on.”

Lucas said, “See you on the red carpet.”

•   •   •

IN THE END, Lucas got out of town a little before noon, drove too fast going home, and would have pulled into his driveway right at eight o’clock if a couple of TV trucks hadn’t been blocking it.

He parked in the street behind the last TV truck and a pretty blond woman hopped out and he said, “Oh, shit.”

Jennifer Carey and he had a relationship that went back a couple of decades. More than that: Lucas was the father of Carey’s first daughter, who was now in high school. Carey had married another man long ago, who had more or less adopted Lucas’s daughter, not counting private school fees and college tuition, all of which was fine with Lucas.

But Carey still had the mojo on him. She couldn’t read him as well as Weather could, but was still better than fifty-fifty on when he was lying. She was walking straight at him with a microphone thrust out at his face, and a trailing cameraman.

Another woman popped out of the lead truck, Annie McGowan, who was now anchoring at Channel 11. She rarely was on the street with a cameraman, but she was now, because she also had an edge on Lucas. Lucas did have one advantage: the two women were not friends and a catfight was possible. Then he could arrest them both for assault, send them down to the Ramsey County jail, and go to dinner.

He got out of the car, fists on his hips, saw Letty jogging across the lawn. She came up and slapped hands with Carey. Letty had interned at Carey’s TV station for three years, as a high school student, under Carey’s watchful eye. Letty nodded at McGowan and asked Lucas, “Where’s Pilate?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said, as the microphones came up. “The two best possibilities are that he’s out in the woods somewhere in the UP, or that he made it across the Mackinac Bridge before we got the roadblocks up and is hiding out in Detroit.”

“Do you think he’ll surrender when he’s caught?” Carey asked.

“Depends on how it happens. He’ll run as far as he can. If he’s cornered and doesn’t have any options, he’ll quit. Fundamentally, he’s a coward. When we caught up to them in Michigan, he organized his disciples for a fight, then when the fight started, he snuck out the back door and ran. Abandoned his so-called friends. Some of them were actually dying for him and he was sneaking away into the woods.”

McGowan held up three fingers and asked, “Do you think he’ll surrender when he’s caught?” and then counted the fingers down one-two-three, which would allow her editors to cut her question in, before Lucas’s response. When she’d built in a little space for her editors, she turned to Letty, with her enormous black eye, and asked, “Do you agree with your father? When you tried to save your friend, this Pilate beat you up.”

“That’s all he’s good at,” Letty said. “Beating up women. He kicked my friend Skye to death, over in Wisconsin, and the guy they crucified in South Dakota was just a nice, gentle boy. Pilate is an enormous . . . I can’t say it on TV, but he is one. A vicious one.”

Carey held up three fingers and asked Letty, “Do you agree with your father? Pilate attacked you . . .” then counted down one-two-three.

Lucas answered a few more questions, and declined to answer some that he thought might be legally sensitive.

“I can’t actually answer all your questions, because I’m being deposed tomorrow at the BCA. We’ll send copies to all the departments involved in the case. Copies of the depositions should be available through the BCA, whenever the authorities . . . think they should be.”