Lucas motioned to Laurent, still outside the window, and he pushed himself through, followed by Peters. They opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the lobby: nobody there. The windows on both sides of the building had been broken, as though somebody had been stationed there, but had gone somewhere else.
There had been two restrooms down a hall that led to a back door. The doors had been scavenged off the restrooms, and they stood open to the hall. Lucas took off his shoes and tiptoed down the hall, checked the two, found them empty—somebody had taken out all the fixtures, including the lights and paper-towel dispensers. The remains of a condom dispenser still hung from a wall in the men’s room, but it had been smashed open and now looked like a toaster that had been hit by a train.
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.
• • •
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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.
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.
As they looked down at him, Lucas said to Laurent, “We’ve got to find Pilate. If we don’t, the killing isn’t over. They go to a house, somewhere, shoot the people and take their car and we won’t even know what to look for, until somebody finds the bodies.”
“They had to go out the back,” Laurent said. “I’ll get everybody looking down that way. They can’t have gotten too far.”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “They might already have hijacked a car.”
They went back outside and Laurent looked at the three dead disciples in the street—the man from the blue house and the two naked people. “This was a right straight war. They’re gonna make movies about this one.”
“Maybe. But Pilate won’t be playing himself,” Lucas said. “Not with one dead deputy and two wounded.”
A deputy was hurrying toward them. “Got another body. Old lady in the blue house. They shot her and stuffed her in a closet.”
Laurent groaned. “Had to be one more, didn’t there? My God, these people . . . these people . . .”
Word of the shoot-out in Mellon leaked to the media almost immediately—Lucas suspected the artists—and when it did, rental car agencies in Sault Ste. Marie and Marquette ran out of cars in ten minutes.