Gathering Prey (23 page)

“Where’s Pilate?” Laurent demanded. “You’ve got to know
something
about that.”

“He’s around here somewhere. We have some people at the Gathering who were supposed to call us last night at midnight, and they didn’t, and Pilate was afraid to call them. But the rest of us talked at midnight, and we’re gonna try calling the Gathering people at eight o’clock this morning. If they still don’t answer, we’re supposed to call Pilate and the rest of the people, and decide what to do. Like, Pilate’s thinking that if something happened at the Gathering, we ought to scatter down into Michigan or back to Wisconsin, and then just keep going until we’re back in California.”

“What if you do get a call at eight o’clock from the people at the Gathering?” Lucas asked.

“Well, if everything is okay, then we meet there today.”

“How many more people are there? We know there were five at the Gathering yesterday, and you and Kelly make seven . . .”

“Maybe ten more,” she said. “You knew about the people already at the Gathering?”

“Yes. They’ve been arrested,” Lucas said. He didn’t mention that one had been shot and killed. “How reliable would you say that Melody Walker and Linda Petrelli are? Can we trust what they say?”

She said, “Linda, maybe. But Melody’s like one of Pilate’s main women.”

That struck Lucas as odd; backward from what he believed. They talked to her for another ten minutes, and then Frisell took a camera out of his backpack and made a video of her having her rights read to her, and then saying that she understood that she could have a lawyer but wanted to cooperate, and then they asked her all the questions over again.

When they were done, Laurent asked, “So we wait until eight o’clock? And then make up some bullshit story?”

“Let’s see what Bland has to say, and then if he’ll cooperate, we can probably nail Pilate down,” Lucas said.

“If he won’t, we could have Alice call him, tell him that Bland couldn’t call for some reason, and have her talk to him.”

“We could give it a try,” Lucas said. He turned back to Alice: “Do you know which of the numbers is Pilate’s?”

“Yes, sir . . . I can show you.”

•   •   •

BLAND WOULDN’T EVEN SPEAK
to them, other than to say, “Lawyer.”

Turner had him hauled into Winter to be locked in the town holding cell, and the whole posse tracked back into Winter to wait until eight o’clock. The out-of-county deputies agreed to hang around until they knew whether they’d be needed again, and Lucas called the BCA and told them to step up the pinging on all the phone numbers they had.

McCarthy identified the number of the phone Pilate was now carrying—the numbers listed as “Pilate” were for a phone he used in California as his main number, and didn’t take on the trip, and the
P
, she said, was the phone he’d given to Kelly to use as a switchboard.

“He gave us this bullshit excuse, you know, about how everybody was used to calling that phone, so
we
should use it so there wouldn’t be any confusion. He was setting us up to see what would happen.”

At five minutes after eight o’clock exactly, prepped to give Pilate and the disciples a credible story, Alice made the first call, to disciples she said should be camping near Lake Superior. Lucas’s ear was next to hers as a man answered.

“Where’s Kelly?” the man asked.

“He’s in this store, in Winter. We’re getting gas. He was supposed to be back out by now. You know how unreliable he is. He must’ve gotten stuck at the checkout.”

“Okay. Everything straight there?”

“Everything is with us, and the guys at the Gathering say everything’s cool. If everything’s cool with you, I’ll call Pilate.”

The man said, “Everything’s clear here. We’re with Chet, so you don’t need to call him. See you at the Gathering.”

She hung up and asked, “Was that okay?”

“That was fine,” Lucas said. He cocked his head. “You’re not fucking with us, are you?”

“What?” She shook her head. “I’m cooperating, I’m cooperating.”

He peered at her, uncertain. Then, “Okay. Let’s call Pilate.”

She called and Pilate answered on the third ring: “Yeah.”

“This is Alice. Jase just called, everything’s good at the Gathering. And Richie says everything’s good with those guys.”

“Where’s Kelly?” Pilate had a rusty-gate voice, a guy who’d smoked too much dope.

“We’re in Winter, getting gas. He’s stuck in the store, there’s a line of people here, and after Richie called, I thought I’d better call right through to you. You know how unreliable Kelly is.”

“All right,” Pilate said. Pause. “See you at the Gathering, then.”

He was gone.

•   •   •

BAD VIBE FROM
the phone call. Alice looked up at Lucas, and it seemed to him that she was smothering a look of triumph. What had she done? Or maybe he was reading too much into her eyes . . .

•   •   •

LUCAS GOT A CALL
from the BCA a minute later, from the tech support guy: the Lake Superior group was at Munising and Pilate was close to the town of Brownsville, twenty miles west of Winter, in Hale County. There were two Hale County deputies with them, and Lucas quickly found one and got him to call the sheriff. The deputy called the sheriff’s cell, and handed his own to Lucas and said, “You’re talking to Sheriff Hugh Butcher.”

“Sheriff Butcher: we think they’re right in your town, or close by, probably four to six people, two or three vehicles, one of them an RV,” Lucas said. “The RV may have Wisconsin plates, the others, probably California. Don’t approach them, they’ve all been armed, so far. Just try to track them. We’re coming with the posse.”

“Come ahead . . . we’ll go looking.”

•   •   •

MCCARTHY AND BLAND
were left with Turner in Winter. The rest of the posse hustled back to their cars, led by Lucas. Frisell had ridden to Winter with Laurent and Lucas asked to borrow him for the ride to Brownsville: “I need to make a lot of phone calls and it’d be good if he could drive.”

“Take him,” Laurent said. “He doesn’t have his gun, though, we thought it’d be better if he didn’t, after yesterday. He’s sort of along for the ride.”

“That’s fine. Listen, could you get me a number for wherever Melody Walker is up in the Sault jail? I need to talk to her, quick as I can.”

“I’ll get it as soon as we’re moving, and call you.”

•   •   •

A MINUTE LATER,
they were on the highway headed west, a line of cop cars, pickups, and civilian SUVs led by Lucas and Frisell. Laurent called two minutes later and said, “I got that number for you in Sault. It goes to a mobile phone, they’re walking it down to the cell where they’re keeping Walker.”

Lucas took the number down, and a minute later, was talking to a deputy in Sault Ste. Marie on the car’s speakerphone. “We’re just coming up to her cell,” the deputy said. “Okay . . . Melody, Agent Davenport is calling you.”

Walker came on: “This is me.”

“If you were picked up by cops and they asked you to call Pilate directly . . . If I’d asked you to do that . . . would you have any way of warning Pilate that the cops had you?”

“Yes. You’d say that something was unreliable. That meant that everything you said on the phone call was unreliable and there was a cop with you.”

“Thanks.” Lucas rang off and groaned: “Sonofabitch.”

Frisell: “What happened?”

“That goddamn Alice McCarthy warned off both groups—she told them that she was with a cop. I knew something was wrong, the way she was talking. I knew it, and I let her talk to Pilate anyway. Fuck me. Fuck me. Now they know we’re coming.”

“That’s a bad thing,” Frisell said. “Better to know it, though, than not to.”

“Ah, man . . . I really screwed the pooch here. I really did.”

P
ilate was moving early, and at eight o’clock was parked behind the RV at the Crossroads Citgo gas station and convenience store. The Upper Peninsula had been a mystery to him. He’d traveled through barren areas of the Southwest, but nothing like this. In the Southwestern deserts, long stretches of absolutely nothing were punctuated by fairly large towns. In the UP, there were some long stretches of nothing—usually marked as state or national forests—but there were also farms and logging businesses, back roads apparently leading to something, logging equipment being moved around.

But the towns: there was nothing in them. He didn’t really need anything they didn’t have—there was usually a gas pump and convenience store. They just weirded him out.

Brownsville got a prominent dot on their paper map, but when they arrived, they found a scattering of houses, a few empty buildings, and maybe a dozen active businesses: the Citgo station; Tom’s Skidoo Repair and Donuts, which also served coffee and weak soft drinks; Larabee Woodworking, which featured chainsaw sculptures of bears and fish, as well as a variety of cribbage boards; Pat’s Diner and Quilt Shop, which had four booths and four tables and six stools along a bar, plus quilting supplies in a side room; a beer joint called Magic’s, which was closed in the morning; and a large lot full of pine logs, but no sign of life.

There were a few more shops on the other side of the Citgo, but they hadn’t bothered to go look. They’d passed a compact redbrick elementary school on the way in, and next to that, a matching, but even smaller, redbrick government and law enforcement center.

Kristen and Laine were pumping gas into the Pontiac and diesel into the RV when the call from Alice McCarthy came in: she said “unreliable,” and Pilate said a few more words and rang off and said, “Shit. We got a big problem.”

Kristen said, “We got more than one. The gas is
dribbling
out of this pump.”

“Fuck the gas—we just got an ‘unreliable’ from Alice. The cops got her and they were making her call us.”

He looked at the phone in his hand and said, “I got to get rid of this.”

He was headed for a trash can when the phone rang again. Richie, who’d been north of them, up by the lake. Pilate answered, and blurted, “The cops might be listening to this.”

“We were calling to warn you. We stopped for food and drinks at this place, and got an ‘unreliable,’ from Alice, and were taking off, but my girlfriend bought this newspaper on the way out, and it says an unidentified California man was shot and killed at the Gathering in Sault Ste. Marie.”

“What!”

“They’re all over us, man. It’s the California plates that are doing it,” Richie said.

“You know that emergency place we talked about? To meet up?”

“Yeah.”

“Go there. And throw away your phone.”

“See you there.”

Pilate hung up and said to Kristen and Laine, “Some California guy got shot by the cops at the Gathering. Had to be one of us.”

“We got to get out of here,” Kristen said. “We still need the gas. And you gotta go get Michelle and Bell.”

Pilate looked around, got a paper towel out of the dispenser above the window-washing tub, put the towel on the ground and the phone on the towel, and stomped the phone to death. When he was satisfied that it would no longer work—and had separated the battery from the rest of the debris—he wrapped the pieces in the paper towel and threw it all in the trash can. “I’ll get Bell.”

Before he went to get him, he got his .45 out of the Pontiac and stuck it under his belt, and pulled out his T-shirt to cover it. Then he jogged across the street to the diner, where Michelle and Bell had ordered six cheeseburgers to go. The burgers were still cooking.

“Gotta go,” Pilate said, when he came through the door.

“Couple more minutes, we oughta get some—”

“Gotta go!”

A heavyset woman with long yellow-gray hair was cooking the burgers, while trying to keep her cigarette ash out of the meat, and said around the cigarette butt, “They’re not quite ready . . .”

Michelle was by the window, looking out, and said, “Oh, my God! Look at this.”

•   •   •

A SHERIFF’S PATROL CAR
had stopped in the middle of the street and two cops had gotten out. They were walking toward Kristen and Laine, who were still standing at the fuel pumps, looking at the cops coming toward them.

Bell turned to Pilate, who’d frozen in place, and then Bell pulled his revolver, an old .38, and said, “Let’s do it.”

Pilate said, “Wait!”

Bell said, “Bullshit, it all ends right here, if they take the cars away from us.”

And in the next one second he was out the door with his gun, and then Pilate followed behind, pulling his .45, and Bell opened up with the .38 from forty feet, and then Pilate joined in, and the cops turned and tried to fire back but they went down in the street.

Neither of the cops was dead; Bell started toward them, the muzzle of his gun lowered to shoot down at them, to finish them.

At the gas station, Kristen had dropped to the concrete, afraid she’d be hit by wild shots, and Michelle and Pilate ran past the bodies in the street as Kristen got back up and yanked the nozzle out of the Pontiac’s gas tank and then there was another shot, from out of nowhere, and Michelle went down and Pilate and Bell turned and saw the hamburger cook in the door of the diner, working the bolt on a rifle, and they simultaneously began firing at her and she ducked back inside the shop.

Then they were both out of ammo and Michelle was screaming in pain and Bell picked her up and carried her to the RV and threw her inside. Laine dropped the diesel nozzle on the ground but managed to get the cap back on the gas tank, and she and Bell piled into the RV, and they took off, the RV leading for the first fifty yards before Pilate’s Firebird blew past it. As they passed the RV, another shot bounced off the angled back window of the Firebird, cracking the glass and ricocheting off to somewhere else.

A half minute later, they were out of town. Two miles down the road, Pilate looked back and saw the RV already a half mile behind. He slowed and told Kristen, “Get Bell on your phone.”

She nodded and put the phone on speaker and punched in Bell’s number, and he came up and said, “Michelle was hit in the back, she’s pretty bad, we gotta get her to a hospital.”

Pilate shook his head at Kristen and then said, loud enough for Bell to hear, “Let’s get off somewhere up ahead and take a look.”

Bell came back: “There’s a pickup behind me, he’s staying way back but he’s keeping up, and I think he followed me out of town. He might be tracking us.”

They were coming up to a low hill, and Pilate said, “When you get over the hill and can’t see him in the rearview, stop on the side of the road. We need to get the rifle out of the closet.”

“Okay.”

Pilate said to Kristen, “We’re in deep shit, man, we’re in deep shit.”

They went over the top of the hill and pulled over into some weeds on the side of the road and the RV caught up with them and pulled in behind them, and Bell hopped out and ran around to the back and popped the door and Pilate vaulted inside and yanked open the closet door and pushed the clothes out of the way and got the black rifle and the big magazine and slammed it home and ran back outside.

He leaned against the side of the RV, and when the pickup came over the top of the hill he pulled the trigger but nothing happened, and for an instant he thought that the rifle was broken, and then remembered that he hadn’t charged it, and he pulled back the charging handle and let it go and started firing, ripping through the full magazine.

The pickup shuddered to a stop and then began backing away, and Pilate kept firing until he ran out of ammo, and thought
Shit
again and ran back inside the RV and dug the second magazine out of the shoes on the floor of the closet, pulled out the first magazine, and jammed in the second as he ran back outside.

By the time he got there, the pickup had disappeared back over the hill, and he ran up the hill, and the pickup was now five hundred yards away. The driver had managed to turn it around and it was accelerating away.

Bell had lifted Michelle out of the RV’s passenger seat and placed her on the ground at the side of the road. She was conscious and moaning, and there was a streak of pale pink blood by her mouth.

“If we leave her here, somebody’ll see her . . . We could call somebody and tell them that she’s here,” Bell said.

Pilate turned away and then ran two fast steps to the RV and kicked the fender, once, twice, then whirled to Bell and screamed, “Why does this shit always happen? Why does this shit always happen to me?”

Michelle said, “I’m hurt really bad—”

Pilate lifted the rifle, and in an instant, shot her twice in the face. Laine and Kristen flinched away, and Pilate shouted at them, “Fuck her, she would have given us up. Sent us to the electric chair. I hate this fuckin’ place! I hate this fuckin’ place!”

They had to go. Before they left, they threw Michelle’s body into a stand of cattails, then pushed it under and bent some cattails over it.

Had to go. Had to go.

They went. Once or twice, as they fled down the highway, Bell thought he caught the sparkle of glass in the rearview mirror, a windshield way back.

Nothing he could do about it.