Robert Crais - Lullaby Town

Peter was squatting next to Karen and behind Toby. He had put an arm around Karen's shoulders without thinking about it. Or maybe he had. He said, "Maybe we could dig in here and hold them off."

Pike shook his head. "Not with twenty-five rounds."

I duck-walked to Karen and Peter and knelt close to them. Their faces were white and their eyes were squinty and drawn. "We're going to have to split up. Pike and I will go out to the flanks. You guys move straight back across the field and try to get to the farm road. Do you understand that?"

They both said, "Yes."

"Stay low and run as fast as you can just like you've seen people do on television. Try to keep the car between you and the four guys coming across the field. They're coming slow because they know we have guns, so you'll have time. Work your way to the feed shed and get behind it, and then work your way to the woods using the shed as cover."

Peter nodded and Karen said, "Yes."

"Don't stop until you get to people. Then call the police."

Karen wasn't looking into my eyes. She was watching my mouth, getting every word. Hanging on by her fingernails.

Peter said, "I don't want to run off. I want to do something."

"You are doing something. You're helping this woman and your son get to a safe place. That's your job."

Peter glanced down at the woman that he used to be married to and their son, and he nodded. "Sure. Okay."

I turned to Toby. "Tobe, you think you can find the road through the woods?"

"Sure. You just keep going south."

"Okay. You get to the road, which way to the airfield?"

"East."

I looked back at Karen and then at Peter. "Do it."

Karen said, "They're going to kill us, aren't they?"

"They're going to try. But Joe and I won't let them."

Her eyes were big and darting. She held tight to Toby's arm. "How can you stop them? There're eight of them and we're trapped here in the middle of nowhere with them."

Pike chambered a round into his shotgun. "No," he said. "They're trapped with us."

I gave Karen a little nod and then she crabbed away, holding on to Toby's shirt with her right hand, crouched low and stumbling through the frozen weeds and the pumpkins. Peter followed close after them.

Pike said, "How many rounds you got?"

"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 booms . Joey got excited and said, "Maybe we got'm." When he said it, he shoved the guy with the hat, and the guy with the hat turned sideways and saw me. I shot him once in the chest. The.357 slug hit him square in the sternum like an express-speed brick and punched him back into the vines. I said, "Hey, Joey. Don't you ever learn?"

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.