'Just what's in the gun.'
He gave me disapproval.
'I know,' I said. 'You can't take me anywhere.'
He handed me the.357, butt first, then gave me a little leather pouch with three speed-loaders. Be prepared.
'You ready?'
'I'm ready.'
'Let's do it.'
We fired six quick rounds at the four men coming across the field, then Joe broke left and I broke right, moving low and fast, and then he was behind me and gone.
The snow was a glistening powder across the field, piling up in little mounds that scattered without sound as I moved. Charlie DeLuca saw us break, and the three guys with him opened up, firing with the shotguns and their pistols, still better than two hundred yards out. Panic shots. I guess they hadn't expected us to try to outflank the flankers. Charlie yelled something at the guys who had gone into the woods, but with the snow and the wind and the distance you couldn't make out what he was saying. Pellets rained on the field around me and a great orange pumpkin exploded, but I didn't stop and I didn't look back. I stayed low and moved hard and wondered if the guys in the woods were making better time coming my way than I was making going theirs. Then I didn't think about it anymore and pretty soon I was in the trees.
I moved twenty yards into the tree line and stopped between two white birch to listen. If the flankers had moved fast, maybe they were already behind me. They weren't. Thirty yards upwind toward the road, limbs snapped and dead leaves crunched and it sounded like the Fifth Marines were on the march. City kids come out to play. This deep in the trees, you couldn't see the field. They didn't know Karen and Peter and Toby were falling back and they didn't know Pike and I had moved into the tree line. Out in the field, the pistols and the shotguns had stopped firing and Charlie was yelling, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. If I couldn't hear, the flankers couldn't hear. They were making so much noise that even if Charlie had been understandable, they wouldn't have heard.
I moved deeper into the trees and found a place beside a fallen elm and waited. In the woods the snow fell only slightly, caught higher in the tree canopy by dead leaves and vines and branches. Some of the earlier snow had melted and the water had leached down the trees, making their bark feel velvety and damp and enhancing their good smell. Except for the coming of the flankers, it was quiet. Calm. The natural state of the woods.
Joey Putata and a guy in a blaze-orange hunting jacket pushed their way through a tangle of vines hanging from a dogwood tree. The guy in the orange jacket had heavy sideburns and the kind of coarse virulent beard that had to be shaved three times a day and a little hat with a feather in the band. Joey Putata was carrying a 12- gauge Mossberg slug gun and the guy in the orange had a Ruger Redhawk.44 Magnum revolver. Joey's eyes were still black and green from the beating Charlie had given him, but here he was, tramping through the woods. Some guys are stupid all the way through. The guy in orange ducked down under a branch but didn't duck far enough. The branch knocked his hat off and a slug of fresh snow fell down his back. He said, 'Sonofabitch,' and then they stopped.
Joey Putata said, 'You think we're far enough?'
The guy with the hat said, 'How the fuck I know? Let's go that way and see if we can find Tony and Mike.' Tony and Mike must be the other flankers.
From a very long way off there were two quick
Joey brought up the Mossberg, but he didn't bring it up fast enough. I shot him once in the neck and then I was moving back toward the field.
When I came out of the tree line, Pike was running toward the LeBaron. Charlie and the other three guys were gone and so was the black Town Car.
Pike said, 'He took off a couple of minutes ago, heading away from town.'
I came up next to Pike and reloaded the.357. 'He's betting that the others are making for a road behind us and he's gone to look for it.'
Pike cocked his head. 'I don't figure he's looking. I figure it's the side road he came at us from and he knows just where it leads.'
'Great.'
We set off south across the field, running side by side past the little feed shack and falling into an easy rhythm. When we made the woods, it was easy to see where Karen and Toby and Peter had passed. The damp mat of dead winter leaves was kicked up and branches and small winter-dead saplings were broken.
The narrow dirt utility road was less than a mile in from the main road, closer than Toby had thought. We came out of the trees and went east, pounding along as the road cut through the woods, striding in tandem and feeling the cold air cut into our throats. There were foot tracks and fresh tire tracks in the snow, but the tire tracks didn't necessarily belong to Charlie's Town Car. They could have been anything. Pike said, 'I see it.'
The road broke out of the little section of woods and cut across flat white fields of pumpkins and squash and winter truck. Half a mile farther down the road, there was an orange wind sock flapping in the wind and a utility shed and a corrugated-metal hangar. If the wind sock wasn't orange, we would never have seen it against the snow. A couple of Piper Pawnee crop-dusting planes were next to the hangar, tarped and tied down, as winter- dead as the leaves.
The black Lincoln Town Car was parked by the utility shed and people moved between the planes.
We hadn't come out of the woods in time. Charlie DeLuca had them.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
Pike and I picked up our pace, running on either side of the road, our breath great white plumes in the snowy air. We ran hard until we drew close, then we throttled back, trading speed for quiet as we moved up to the hangar. The shadow shapes we had seen when we came out of the woods were gone.
Charlie's Town Car was parked at a skew outside the corrugated-metal hangar, already collecting little pockets of snow on the windward side. The two Pawnees were on the field side of the hangar, and, before them, a couple of rusted water mules used for aviation gasoline and pesticides. Somewhere upwind, Karen Lloyd yelled and there was a single sharp
Pike said, 'They'll be in the hangar or in the fields behind the planes.'
We went to the hangar, looped around the corner, and saw them through a dust-streaked window built into a door. Karen Lloyd was on her knees, crying, and Charlie DeLuca was holding Toby by the hair, pointing a Browning.380 automatic at his right temple. Toby was crying, too. He was probably crying because he was scared, but he might've been crying because a fat guy was hitting Peter Alan Nelsen in the face and knocking him down. He would hit Peter and knock him down, and Peter would get up and go after him again. The fat guy was thick through the middle and the hips and the shoulders and the back, sort of like an overstuffed sausage, but it was hard fat. There wouldn't be a lot of stamina, but there was plenty of mean. Peter kept trying to get to Charlie, but the fat guy kept beating him up. Karen was yelling something about doing whatever Charlie wanted if only he'd stop. It was hard to hear them through the glass.
I touched Pike's shoulder and pointed past them to the big sliding doors at the back of the hangar. The doors were open.
Pike nodded, and we slipped under the window and took one step toward the field when the two other guys who'd been with Charlie DeLuca came around the corner. One of them was tall and the other wasn't. The shorter one had a dead cigar in his mouth and what looked like a.32 revolver in his right hand. The taller one was grousing about the cold, and neither of them knew we were there until they saw us. Joe Pike hit the shorter guy with an outside spin kick that sounded like it broke his neck. The taller guy said, 'Hey,' and fired what was maybe
