yourselves a world of hurt. . . .'
'Harold?'
Confused by the unexpected sound of his wife's voice, Harold swung his big head around to see Jean out of the truck, cowering by the right fender, terrified eyes jerking back and forth from her husband to the rifles. Jesus Christ, he would never understand women. She wouldn't eat eggs for fear of clogging an artery forty years down the line, but she'd walk out in front of two M16s as if she were made of Kevlar.
'Get back in the truck, Jean,' he said calmly, because even though he was sure-absolutely sure-those guns weren't loaded, he didn't need her out here complicating matters.
She looked at him for a moment, then turned and got back into the truck.
'You too, sir,' Freckle-face called out, gesturing with his rifle. 'Back in the truck, please. Now. You're almost cleared for entry. I'm just waiting for a callback. It should only be another minute or so.'
Harold glared at him for a second, then climbed up into the truck. He glanced at the tears coursing down his wife's face, saw the violent trembling of her hands, and for the first time in his life, wanted to harm another human being. Two of them, in fact. For right now, there wasn't a whole lot he could do with a couple of puffed-up hot-shots who might or might not be carrying live ammunition, but by God, the second he got near a phone he was going to burn up the wires all the way to Washington if he had to, and see these assholes up on ...
Wait a minute, Harold.
He'd been staring at the soldiers by the jeep, vision and mind clouded by the red blur of impotent fury, and goddamnit, he hadn't seen it, hadn't seen what any clear-eyed fool would have noticed right off, and now he felt a ball of fear that clenched at his stomach and almost stopped his heart.
'Jean,' he whispered, eyes straight ahead now, lips barely moving, sweat rolling down from his forehead like someone had just turned on a faucet. 'Get down on the seat and hang on.'
The funny thing was that Jean, as strong-minded a woman as he'd ever known, did as she was told without a second's hesitation, probably because she had known long before he did how wrong things were here. 'Are we going to find Tommy?' was the only thing she asked.
'That's where we're going.'
Harold eased the gearshift out of park, slowly, carefully, sliding his butt forward on the seat until he could barely see over the wheel, and then his lug-soled lace-up punched the accelerator and the old Ford leaped forward and smashed through the sawhorses like a crazed bull going through a barn wall. Shards of wood were flying everywhere, and the engine was roaring so loud that they could hardly hear the gunfire that was shattering the windows around them.
ANNIE AND SHARON had moved up next to Grace at the cafe's screen door by the time the distant popping sound started to syncopate the roar of whatever was coming.
Annie was pretty excited. She'd already identified the roaring as the approach of a big pickup-she'd spent a fair amount of time in those during her Mississippi youth, both upright and reclined-and at this point she wasn't at all particular about the mode of transportation arriving. Just so she didn't have to walk ten miles in this heat or spend two hours trying to patch twenty-five telephone wires. The popping was troublesome, though. 'What is that? Firecrackers?'
'Automatic rifles,' Sharon replied without a trace of doubt, slipping her weapon from her leather shoulder bag, and Annie's vision of rescue by some husky country good ol' boys took a dark turn.
Grace already had her Sig in her hand. Over the years, her survival instinct had been honed down to the most primal level. She never stopped to analyze, to moralize, to ethically weigh the wisdom of pulling her gun. If she sensed danger, the weapon came out of the holster. It was that simple. And automatic rifle fire didn't belong in the Wisconsin countryside.
She was still looking through the screen door to the left where the road curved into the woods, and then they all heard it and saw it at the same time: a battered white pickup roaring around the curve and into the town, zigzagging crazily, steam pouring out of the grill, the shredded rubber of its tires slapping the tar while sparks flew from the undercarriage.
Grace flung out an arm, saying, 'Back! Back!' and pushing Annie and Sharon away from the door and the big front windows, her first fear being that the truck would veer into the cafe, shattering the glass.
Instead, the roaring sound ended abruptly with the sudden death of its engine, and the truck came to a wheezing stop in the middle of the street directly in front of the cafe, its windows shattered, its side peppered with what had to be bullet holes.
In the next heartbeat, a jeep came careening around the curve and screeched to a halt inches behind the crippled truck, and Grace and Sharon both started to raise their guns. But then two soldiers jumped out, automatic rifles leveled at the truck, both of them red-faced and screaming, 'Get out! Get out! Get out!' and for the very first time in more than a decade, Grace was holding a gun in her hand and wasn't certain what to do with it. Pulling her gun at the sound of automatic weapon fire had seemed perfectly sensible, but when the fire was coming from men in uniform, it changed everything. She caught a glimpse of Sharon's gun in her peripheral vision, frozen at half-mast as hers was.
The soldiers were yelling, the damaged passenger door screamed as it was flung open, and then there was silence so deep that Grace could hear the bright tinkling of shattered glass tumbling to the asphalt. A pretty blonde woman in a print dress stepped down from the truck and would have collapsed, had she not been supported by the strong hands of the man who climbed down behind her. Grace had a millisecond to see the flash of a gold wedding band on the man's left hand and a skim of white slip showing below the hem of the young woman's dress before the soldiers opened fire.
The man fell first, a red blossom erupting on the blue of his denim shirt. And then new red flowers bloomed all over the woman's dress and she began to sink to the ground.
For an instant, Grace, Sharon, and Annie were frozen in place like mannequins on display-three women with their breath caught in their throats, standing ten feet behind a plate-glass window in plain view of anyone who happened to look.
But the guns kept firing, and when the man and the woman fell, that single heartbeat of immobility was over. The three women dove to the floor as one, below the sight line of the windows, and started scrambling on hands and knees toward the cafe's back door. They slipped outside with the guns still firing behind them, bolted across the narrow strip of grass between the cafe and the frame house, then into the woods.
That was the great thing about women, Grace thought. Forget the female reputation for endless speculation and discussion-when things went south, women didn't stop to analyze. Even women with guns in their hands deferred to instincts honed by centuries. Warning. Danger. Run. Hide.
A FEW YARDS into the trees, the relative darkness of the forest closed around the three women, giving the illusion, if not the reality, of safety.
And then the shooting stopped.
It was deathly still again-quiet enough to hear the muffled voices of the soldiers in the street in front of the cafe, even with the buildings and trees between them-quiet enough for the soldiers to hear them if they made too much noise.
The three women froze, moving again only when new noises broke the silence-another vehicle arriving in front of the cafe, then more voices that sounded like mad dogs barking.
More soldiers,Grace thought.But how many more, where are they coming from, and why the hell did they shoot those people down?
She remembered last October, when the entire city of Minneapolis knew that a killer would be at the Mall of America looking for the next anonymous victim; and she remembered how many people went to the mall anyway, blinded by that ingrained belief that bail things happened to other people, not to them. Grace had never thought that way- If there was a bad thing in the neighborhood, it was surely coming for her next, and the very first thing you did was try to get the hell out of there.
Her eyes searched the trees until she caught a glimpse of the old logging road, and when she started to move toward it, Annie and Sharon followed. Apparently all of them had the same thought in mind: getting back to the Range Rover, to the highway they'd come in on, away from whatever nightmare was happening in this town.
