Gathering Prey (29 page)

P
ilate and Kristen worked their way north to Prospect Avenue, got on I-75 and headed for Sault Ste. Marie, away from the blockaded bridge. They drove around town, and found what they were looking for on Tenth Avenue West, an area of older homes, probably from the post–World War II era, small houses on large lots.

They spent some time cruising the whole area, then did it again, and then a third time, until Pilate pointed and said, “There. Right there.”

A white-haired woman was pulling her Taurus station wagon into a detached two-car garage. There were no lights in the house and Pilate said, “She either lives alone or her old man ain’t home yet.”

The old lady dropped the garage door and limped into the house, carrying a bag of groceries. They waited until she was inside, parked the truck in the street, and walked up to the door and knocked.

The old lady came to the door and asked, “Can I help you?”

Pilate said, “Yeah, you can.”

He’d already checked the screen door to make sure that it was unlatched. Now he yanked it open, put his hand in the old lady’s face, and hurled her back against the entry wall, where her head rebounded with a wet smack. Kristen came in behind Pilate and shut the door while Pilate kicked the old lady in the head three or four times. When Pilate was pretty sure she was dead, the two of them checked out the house.

Everything suggested that the old lady lived alone, including a single plate and a cup and saucer sitting in the kitchen sink. They dragged the old woman to the basement stairs and threw her down, then went outside to move the vehicles. The second slot in the garage was half full of crap—boxes of family photographs, thirty-year-old skis, corroding bicycles. They managed to clear enough space to fit the truck inside, and pulled the doors down.

Back inside, they checked the grocery bag—potatoes, grapes, milk, cereal. They found a couple of chicken pot pies in the refrigerator, and half of a quart bottle of bourbon in the cupboard.

“Everything we need,” Pilate said. “We could hole up here for a couple days, if we have to.”

•   •   •

BUT THEY COULDN’T, REALLY.
The UP was getting organized.

They caught the six o’clock news and found out what had happened in Mellon—and that they were national celebrities. The cops had dug up a driver’s license for Kristen Jones—Pilate said, “Jones? Jones?”—and had excellent identikit images of Pilate.

“While we’re waiting to get out of here, we gotta change the way we look,” he said.

“You could shave your beard,” Kristen said. “Though I’d miss your little beard braids.”

“My beard? I’m gonna cut it
all
off—beard, hair, everything. Shave my head. You could get one of those lesbo haircuts like Ellen had.”

“Wonder what’s she’s told the cops?” They’d seen pictures of Ellen in handcuffs, being led into a police station.

“Probably everything,” Pilate said. “I never trusted that bitch.”

•   •   •

THEY ATE,
talking about the fight in Mellon, the last things they’d seen, then went into the bathroom to cut their hair. Pilate looked at himself in the mirror and said, “You know, I can’t cut it all off. I won’t feel like myself. How about a soul patch?”

•   •   •

THE OLD LADY
had a wall of photos of herself and a man who must have been her husband, showing them through the years, with four children, and then a bunch of grandchildren. One of the photos showed the old lady, many years younger, giving the man a haircut with an electric clipper as he sat on a wooden chair in a bathroom, with a towel around his neck. They dug through the bathroom drawers and a linen closet and, sure enough, found the clippers.

The clippers were crude and Pilate kept flinching when the clipper-head yanked at his hair, but they got it done, and finished the job, both his face and scalp, with a throwaway lady’s razor.

When she was finished, Pilate looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and said, “I hate this. I look about twenty fuckin’ years older.”

“That’s a
good
thing,” Kristen said. “I’ll tell you something else: your head looks about half as big as it used to and your nose looks twice as big. You don’t look nothin’ like that drawing.”

Pilate cut Kristen’s hair, taking his time, looking at the way her hair lay across her head, and when he finished, Kristen turned this way and that, looking in the mirror, and then said, “You know, maybe you should have been a hairdresser. Looks pretty good. Makes me look like a boy.”

•   •   •

THEY WATCHED THE NEWS
on satellite TV, and it was a scream-fest. They caught CNN first, Wolf Blitzer, and then a local station out of Traverse City.

Both CNN and the local station had video shot minutes after the shooting ended. The video had been shot by the woman artist, who said she’d been held captive and had been threatened with rape by the disciples.

She had apparently sold her video to every TV station in sight, and complained that the Michigan state cops had confiscated her original memory card and camera. She’d seen that coming, though, and had saved the video to her laptop before the cops got to her.

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.”

L
ucas 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.”

He let the women get a couple of reverse shots over his shoulder, showing their faces in close-up, asking the questions they’d already asked, and then he called it off. “I gotta go say hello to my wife and get something decent to eat. I haven’t had anything all day.”

When the cameras and microphones were off, McGowan said, “I can see your handiwork in that witch Daisy Jones getting the Honey Potts interview.”

“Jeez, Annie, try to be a little more understanding of an enterprising colleague,” Lucas said.

“I was a little annoyed myself,” Carey said. “You really set that up?”

“I was out of town when she did that interview,” Lucas said. “My hands are clean.”

“How about your cell phone?” Carey asked. “Is that clean, too?”

“Jennifer . . .” Lucas began. Then, “Listen, you guys have been here, when I wasn’t, and you hang around the courthouse. What are people saying about the Merion case?”

“I’ve heard that your old basketball buddy Park Raines started sniffing around for a deal about five minutes after that baluster came out of the ground,” McGowan said.

Carey said, “I gotta say, he’s one eminently fuckable attorney. In my opinion.”

“You’re right,” said Letty.

Lucas: “Hey! Not in front of the old man.”

“And he’s even better than he looks,” McGowan said, with a moment of silence following. Then, to Lucas, “Anyway, the baluster sealed the deal. I’ve even heard that Martin Bobson might take the case away from his boy prosecutor and give it to somebody more serious.”

Carey: “Somebody must have briefed you on what balusters are.”

“Fuck you,” McGowan said.

“Why would you fight with each other?” Lucas asked. “It’s Daisy’s tire treads that are running across both your chests.”

They both said, at the same time, “Fuck you.”

Letty said brightly, “Everybody’s feeling scrappy tonight, huh?”

•   •   •

THE TV TRUCKS LEFT,
and Lucas pulled the SUV into the garage and dropped the door.

Weather was inside reading
Microsurgery Letters
, and said, “I hope you won’t get in trouble for talking to those people.”

Lucas kissed her on the forehead and said, “You know, I don’t care anymore. About getting in trouble with anybody.”

Weather looked at him: “You’re okay?”

She meant the depression problem. “I’m feeling pretty cheerful,” Lucas said. “I was working with a police force that was stripped down to almost nothing, and in some ways, it seems to work better than anything we’ve got in the Twin Cities. People in the UP know they have to take care of themselves, because nobody else will. So they do.”

“All right, if you say so,” she said. “I reserve the right to smirk when it all goes wrong.”