“Yup.”
“This guy still out at Lewis?”
“Don’t know. Don’t know full names, don’t know most descriptions, don’t know license plates, except they’re most likely from California, but not for sure. They will be armed and they’re willing to kill. Eager to kill.”
“Well, shit.”
“Yeah. Not a good situation,” Lucas said.
“I called around for mutual aid, we’ll have twenty deputies and reserve deputies from the surrounding counties here at five-thirty, including the guys from Barron County. How many people are we looking at?”
“I’m not sure. We think they started out with nineteen or twenty. We’ve taken down six of them, which would leave twelve or thirteen, but they’re not all at the park. We’ve got locations for at least three more cell phones, not at the park. If there are two people per cell phone, that would mean six people are out in the woods yet, so maybe . . . six or seven at the park? But we really don’t know.”
“Well, twenty deputies ought to be enough. Mostly got to be careful not to shoot each other. The lake’s the best part of a mile off the highway, but there’s some logging roads that come off the park road. There’s one about two-thirds of the way in that leads back to a clear-cut. We put the cars in there, block the road out, and walk in.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lucas said. “Where are we hooking everybody up?”
“Right here. Don’t have a motel, but I got a couch if you want to try to catch a couple hours of sleep.”
“I’m okay,” Lucas said. “How many of those logging roads come off the main park road?”
“Four or five, I guess,” Turner said.
“I think I’ll go back over there and park off the road. Watch for anybody going out.”
Turner nodded. “Okay. I could send Carl over there with you, he’s not doing anything anyway, except driving around. We could stick him in a driveway off the highway, you see California plates going out, you could tag the car until we got far enough from the park that we could run him down without waking anybody else up.”
“Can Carl . . . I mean, is he . . .”
“Competent? Yeah, sure. He’s okay. And he has an M14 we got from the feds with twenty-round magazines. He can punch holes in cars all day.”
“I don’t want any cops killed,” Lucas said.
“Neither do I—but if these guys are as bad as you said they were, I don’t want them driving away, either.”
“All right. If you’re good with Carl backing me up, I’m good with it, too,” Lucas said.
• • •
CARL SHOWED UP a minute later and they decided that he’d park in a driveway a mile or so west of the park turnoff. After a few more words, they loaded up and headed back toward the park. Carl dropped off a mile out, did a two-point turn, and backed into the driveway.
Lucas continued on in the dark, found the lake turnoff, drove a hundred yards down the narrow gravel track, found a narrower dirt track going off to the left. He turned in, drove fifty feet down the track, checking it out in his headlights, then backed out to the main road, turned around, and backed into the side track. When he was thirty feet off, he moved the front seat back as far as it would go, killed his lights and engine, and settled in to wait.
He’d had a long day and let himself doze. He never went completely asleep, he thought, not deep enough that he wouldn’t wake up if a car went by; but he wasn’t disturbed until his iPhone alarm went off at five o’clock. His mouth tasted like a chicken had been roosting in it, and his back hurt. He took care of the mouth with a stick of gum, stepped out of the car to do a few toe touches, and called Carl. “Time to go in.”
“I think. I was about to give you a call. Didn’t see anything on my end.”
“Meet you back at the sheriff’s office.”
• • •
TWELVE DEPUTIES FROM three counties were waiting for him at the sheriff’s office in Winter. Then Turner, the sheriff, showed up, got out of the car, and said, “Roman and his guys are ten minutes out. They got six guys, two regular deputies and three reserves. One more reserve guy might be coming a little later, he had a kid got hurt last night late and had to take him to the emergency room in Sault Ste. Marie.”
“Hope it’s not bad.”
“Nah. Might have a broken fibula in his leg, he was shooting baskets with some friends, got a little rough. Anyway, he walked around on it, but about the time he was supposed to go to bed, the pain got bad. They took him over to the doctor, who sent them up to Sault.”
“All right: so we got twenty.” Lucas looked over the crowd in the parking lot. There were patrol cars from three counties, and a varied collection of trucks and SUVs. All but two of the deputies were men, and about half were wearing uniforms, the rest a motley of camo, canvas, and denim. Subtract the uniforms, and they might have been setting up a deer drive.
Laurent and the Barron County crew arrived a few minutes later; Laurent came over and said, “Doug Sellers’s kid broke his leg.”
“I heard. I think we should be okay.”
Laurent nodded: “Let’s get the show on the road.”
• • •
THEY GATHERED THE DEPUTIES around a pole light outside the sheriff’s office and outlined the plan: go in, quietly, park about four hundred yards from the campground, with two of the cars blocking the road.
Once they were all parked, they’d go single file down the road until they got close enough to see the park: “It should be light enough to see by the time we get there,” Lucas said, waving off to the east, where the night sky was beginning to lighten. “You guys with rifles, keep the muzzles up in the air. I don’t want to see anybody pointing a muzzle at somebody else’s back. Guys with sidearms, keep them holstered. When we get in there, we want to nail down every tent, car, RV, whatever. Nobody comes out. If somebody gets aggressive . . .”
They talked it out, and when everybody agreed that they knew what would happen, a guy in camo pants and a CAT shirt suggested that they stop down at the store for snacks and coffee.
“Good idea,” Turner said. “Load ’em up, boys. And girls. But don’t stay in the store more’n a minute or two. We gotta roll.”
One of the women had to pee and hurried into the sheriff’s office, and then one of the men had to, and everybody else headed down to the store, where Lucas loaded up on Diet Coke and crunchy-style Cheetos. Five minutes later, Turner did a head count, and everybody was set, and they took off.
• • •
LUCAS HAD ONCE BEEN a deer hunter, though he’d given it up about the time he married Weather—she didn’t particularly object to the idea of shooting deer, and rather liked venison spaghetti and meatballs, but she’d read a paper that said that lead bullets, especially of the expanding variety, contaminated much of the meat with lead particles.
No lead particles in the diet of her children . . . But over the years, Lucas had spent the equivalent of three or four months sitting in deer stands or still hunting, and had learned that at dawn, it was too dark to safely shoot; but within fifteen minutes, you could read the small print in a newspaper, and could plainly see two or three hundred yards out.
That transition happened as the cop convoy rolled down the road toward the lake. When they turned in, headlights were useful. By the time they all got parked, and got the exit road blocked, they were in full daylight.
Most of the members of the posse were carrying rifles, and most of the rifles were .223 black rifles. Carl had his M14, and another man carried a semiauto .30-06, both of which would be useful if they had to bust up an RV.
Laurent led the way out, followed by his reserve deputies, all of them in uniform now and all of them military veterans carrying black rifles. Lucas moved with them, with Carl and Turner following behind Lucas.
Everybody automatically shut up as they were walking along, strung out in a line with four or five yards between them; a few squirrels were chattering away in the woods, and a crow was complaining, b
ut other than that, there was no sound but the crunch of their feet in gravel.
They detoured around a few wet spots in the trail and finally topped a low ridge and started down a gentle slope toward the end of the lake—they could see the curve of the shoreline, and as they got closer, Lucas could smell coffee.
A boat ramp was straight ahead of them, with three boats tied off to one side of the ramp. The road curved to the right, and as they walked down into the open, they saw a line of camping spaces along the lakeshore. Maybe half of them were occupied, mostly by pickups with campers. Three people, two men and a woman, were sitting around a fire on canvas camp stools at the first camping space, and they all stood up as the posse moved out of the woods with their guns. They called someone, and a second woman came down from a camper.
Lucas moved forward, caught up with Laurent, and told the guy behind him to “wait here, and pass the word to everyone to stop where they are.” The column stopped, still mostly back along the trail, and Lucas and Laurent walked up to the campers. One of the men, tall with a white beard, asked, “What the heck’s going on?”
Their trucks both had Michigan plates.
Lucas said, “We’re looking for a bunch of people with California plates on their vehicles. Have you seen anybody . . . ?”
One of the women said, “I was walking back from the clear-cut yesterday before dark, I was up there picking blueberries, and I saw a car with a California license plate. Only one, there was a man and a woman inside.”
“Where’d it go?”
She pointed down the line of camping spaces. “Down there somewhere. Everybody wants to get close to the ramp, but they were late in the day, and no boat, either, so I suppose they could be anywhere down there . . . but close to the end of the campers.”
The car, she said, was several years old, and probably a Honda or a Nissan, “or one of those, not American,” and dark blue or green. Because of the curve of the lake, Lucas couldn’t see more than two or three campsites, but no one in the camping areas could see them, either. He waved for the rest of the deputies to come down, and they gathered behind the pickups.
“We’ll go down as a group, not all together, but not all strung out, either. Stay as close to the edge of the trees as you can, they won’t see us coming until we’re right there.”
“How many are there?” Turner asked.
“Only saw one car, two people,” Lucas said.
• • •
THEY STARTED OUT AGAIN, but bunched up closer now, rifle muzzles up in the air like lances. They passed nine more camping sites, each with a pickup or a van parked in it, then an empty camping space, another SUV, then, past two more empty camping spaces, a dark green car. Lucas pulled his gun, and he, Laurent, and Laurent’s deputies crept toward it. California plates.
Behind the car, on the other side of a cold fire ring, they could see a blue tent, a self-supporting four-man version, with a rain fly. The front of the tent was zipped.
Lucas put a finger to his lips and Laurent nodded, and waved his deputies to a stop, and then Lucas and Laurent moved up to the car and peeked inside. It was empty. They moved on to the tent.
The problem with a tent was, you couldn’t see into it and the occupants couldn’t see out, but you could easily hear through the thin nylon fabric, and even more easily, shoot through it.
Laurent waved his deputies forward, to spots behind the car. Then he and Lucas eased up to the tent, not quite tiptoeing. From five feet away, they could hear a delicate snoring, like a woman’s snoring, and when they were right outside it, the heavy breathing of a man.
Again, Lucas put a finger to his lips, Laurent nodded, and with his left hand, Lucas delicately grasped the zipper pull on the front flap of the tent and quietly pulled it down. He got it all the way down, then put two fingers through the flap and spread them, and peeked inside. Two people in sleeping bags, their feet toward the flap, on air mattresses, with packs at the back of the tent. There were two horizontal zippers at the bottom of the flap, and Lucas and Laurent slowly pulled them sideways, until the flap was fully open.
When they’d pulled the flaps all the way back, Lucas looked at Laurent, then clenched both fists and made a pulling motion—if they did it right, they could yank both sleepers right out of the tent, still cocooned in their bags.
Laurent smiled and nodded. The woman stirred and said a word, in her sleep, like she might be coming up. Lucas slipped his pistol back in its holster, jabbed a finger at the sleeping bags, and they both took hold of the ends of the bags, and Lucas said, “Now!”
They yanked the bags out of the tent and the woman began screaming and the man said, “What the fuck! What the fuck!”
Laurent shouted, “You’re under arrest, don’t move your hands! Don’t move your hands!”
Both of them had been sleeping on their backs, and with their eyes open, were looking into the muzzles of four guns. Laurent said to Bennett, the post office guy, “Pull the zip down on that sleeping bag.”
The woman was screaming, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Bennett pulled the zip down. The guy was wearing a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, and they pulled the zip on the woman, who was wearing a T-shirt and underpants, and then Turner, who’d looked into the tent, said, “We’ve got a gun here, and what looks like a bag of marijuana—yep, it is—and some telephones. Three telephones.”
• • •
LUCAS ASKED THE MAN, who was still on his back, “Where’s Pilate?”
“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” but the woman said to the guy, “I told you. I told you. He punked you, you dummy. He did it on purpose to see what would happen.”
The guy said, “Shut up!”
Lucas said to the woman, “How did he punk you? Is he right here? Where is he?”
The guy said again, “Shut up!”
But the woman started to cry, and Lucas said to the deputies, “Let’s get the cuffs on them, get some pants on them, get them ID’d.”
He pulled Turner aside and said, “As soon as they’ve got some shoes on, separate them. I want to talk to the woman without the guy getting on her case.”
Turner nodded.
Lucas got the guy’s wallet before the deputies helped him pull his pants on: Kelly Bland, of Los Angeles. The woman had a black tote with a silver sun-face on the side. Inside were a cheap Phoenix .22 automatic, a clasp wallet, a plastic bag with a wad of weed, and all the rest of the crap that women usually carry in totes. Her ID said that she was Alice McCarthy of Torrance, California.
When Bland and McCarthy had their shoes on, Turner’s deputies hustled Bland to the other side of the car so that they could open the trunk. They did it smoothly, keeping Bland’s attention, and by the time they had him there, asking about drugs and Pilate, Lucas, Laurent, Bennett, and Frisell had moved the woman down a path that led from the campsite to the water.
She was a tall, thin woman with protruding brown eyes, and fingernails that had been bitten to the quick. Bennett read her rights to her, and arrested her on marijuana charges, and then Lucas said, “I think you know the charges on the weed are a little bogus. You could go to jail on them, but what we really need to know about is Pilate. If you go to jail on Pilate, you’ll never get out. Never. When this goes to court, you’ll need all the help you can get, and we can give you some, if you start cooperating right now.”
“I don’t know where he is, but I’ll cooperate,” she said.
Lucas shook his head. “That’s not good enough. You can’t just say you’ll cooperate, you’ve got to deliver something. What were all those phones for?”
“Pilate said Kelly would be our switchboard and everybody could call in to him and then he could tell everybody where to go, and then throw the phone away and nobody would ever catch us that way. The phones only cost like twenty dollars apiece. Pilate said that’s the way all the drug dealers do it.”
“Where’s Pilate?” Laurent demanded. “You’ve got to know so
mething 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.”
Prey 25 - Gathering Prey Page 23