fast, at about the rate it would take to lever a shell into the chamber of a .34-.30 rifle.
I headed for the place the shots were coming from, my gun out now, forcing through the wet woods as hard as I could go. Running in a crouch, with my left forearm bent in front of me to keep from being blinded by a branch. Gunfire from the road cut leaves and branches around me as I ran, but most of it seemed aimed at where the rifle fire came from.
In front of me, Hawk said, “Spenser,” and I saw him standing behind a tree in a small clearing, feeding shells into the magazine of a Winchester. The gunfire from the road was nearly continuous. I scuttled on all fours across the clearing and behind Hawk’s tree. A bullet thudded into it at eye level.
“Dumb to shoot so high,” Hawk said.
The clearing was maybe thirty feet higher than the road, and below me I could see three bodies sprawled in the angular repose of death. The rest of the gunnies were crouched off the shoulder of the road opposite, firing toward us.
“Road does almost a hairpin,” Hawk said. “Car’s about ten yards that way.” He jerked his head behind us. “With the motor running.”
“Let’s get out of here before they bring the cars up,” I said.
Hawk nodded. There was a cut under one eye, and blood ran in a neat trickle down his cheek, diffused pink by the rain before it dripped onto his shirt. He fired six shots down at the enemy as fast as he could work the lever on the Winchester. Then he dropped it behind the tree and we ran for the Volvo. They returned fire, but you tend to shoot high uphill and in five strides we were on the down side of the hill and the bullets hummed and whined harmlessly above us. We half slid, half scrambled the last ten yards as the muddy hill turned into a steep slick banking and then we were sprawling into the road beside the Volvo and, soaking and smeared with mud, we were in the Volvo and spinning rubber away from the hill with me driving. Fifty yards up the road, I jammed the car into a screeching U-turn and headed back down toward the bad guys with the accelerator pressed to the floor. We roared by them and the two cars, which had just pulled up, heading in the other direction and were around the next curve with only three more shots at the car. One shot went through the back window, the other two missed.
I kept the accelerator hard down and drove a lot too fast for the wet curving road. The first crossroad I came to I turned right and at the next I turned left and, at a third I turned right again. There was no one behind us. I slowed to sixty.
I looked at Hawk. He had a wad of cloth pressed against the cut on his cheek.
“Glass?” I said.
“Yeah, when the dude shot through the windshield.”
“Counterman worked for Costigan,” I said.
“Sort of a forward observer,” Hawk said.
I nodded. “And they covered the way out once they knew we’d gone in. So just in case the ambush didn’t work at the lodge…”
“Thorough bastards,” Hawk said.
“Be good to remember it,” I said. “There’s Band-Aids in the glove compartment.”
CHAPTER 20
WE WERE HEADING NORTH ON 410.
“Anything in the house?” Hawk said.
I shook my head.
“We knew there wouldn’t be,” Hawk said.
“Yeah.”
Hawk reached the road atlas from the backseat and opened it in his lap. “We can pick up a major highway in Seattle and head east,” I said.
“Shit,” Hawk said.
“We knew she wouldn’t be there,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Hawk was dripping on the road map. The rain came steady and the windshield wipers beat their metronomic half-circle swipes.
Hawk had removed his jacket and thrown it on the backseat floor. But his shirt was wet and his jeans, like mine, were soaked through.
“What route we looking for?” Hawk said.
“Ninety,” I said. “Runs east all the way to Boston.”
“We going home?”
“I don’t know where we’re going.”
“Might make sense to get dry, maybe get breakfast, sorta regroup.”
“Soon,” I said. “Don’t want to show up too close to the lodge looking like a couple of guys spent the night in the woods.”
“We get the other side of Seattle,” Hawk said, “we stop and change in the car.”
I nodded. The wipers wiped. The wheels turned. The rain didn’t let up. In the parking lot of a Holiday Inn off Route 90 in Issaquah we got our extra clothes out of the trunk and changed awkwardly in the car, putting the wet clothes in a sodden heap in the trunk. Then we headed east again across the Cascade Mountains, through the
