Michael Palmer - The Society

“I was the Four-H queen in junior high!” she explained.

“Amazing.”

Watkins had swung around and was lumbering toward them, his gun drawn, when the tractor lurched forward.

“Duck down!” Patty cried. “Head right at him!”

They were gaining speed when Watkins began firing. Bullets clanged off the grill, and one splintered the top of the steering wheel. Will was crouched awkwardly on one knee, peering along the side of the engine casing, reaching overhead to steer by one hand, wondering how long he could survive a bullet between the eyes. To his right, Patty was now hanging off to the side of the tractor by one arm, completely exposed to the gunfire, the pitchfork extended forward like a lance.

“That’s it!” she hollered. “Right at him, Will! Then keep him on my side!”

For several frozen seconds, the massive killer looked confused. Then, with the tractor bearing down on him, he took several clumsy steps to his left, stumbled, and fell to one knee. Although he still had a grip on his pistol, he never got the chance to fire it again. As the tractor rolled past him, Patty drove the pitchfork straight through the softness beneath his chin and then upward, almost to the hilt, in his brain. His death was instantaneous.

“Stop, Will!” she yelled.

Will slammed down on the brake. Clambering off the tractor, Patty retrieved the pitchfork, grabbed Watkins’s gun, and was quickly back on the step as Will again accelerated.

“I think that way,” he said, pointing.

“You’re in charge.”

“Boy, am I glad that isn’t true.”

Will swung the tractor to the right in a wide arc that would take them around to the front of the house. At that instant Susan appeared on the back porch brandishing the submachine gun and screeching at them hysterically.

“You killed him, you bastards! You killed my Marsh!”

She rattled off a burst, then raced down the stairs, but the tractor was moving away to her left, and it seemed as if none of the shots had hit. Firing like a commando as she ran, Susan took a line that would cut them off before they made the far side of the house.

“What should we do?” Will called out over the wailing engine.

“Just hold us steady,” Patty answered. “Real steady.”

She gripped the seat with her left hand and lay her right arm down across her left, sighting down the barrel of the pistol.

“Payback time,” she murmured, as she cracked off a single shot.

Through the gloom, thirty yards away, Susan cried out and fell, clutching her thigh and cursing. She was up with incredible quickness, though, hobbling after them, almost dragging her leg. But what chance she had to cut them off was gone.

Will swung the tractor to the left, alongside the house.

“That was an unbelievable shot!”

“It was a terrible shot. I was aiming at her chest. Take me past those cars. If she gets ahold of the keys to any of those, she’ll catch us in no time.” Will stopped beside Watkins’s Lincoln. Patty limped over to it and drove the pitchfork through the tire.

“Why don’t you just shoot it?” Will called down.

“I may need what’s in here.” It took two tries, but she stabbed through the left rear tire of Susan’s nifty Porsche. Then she climbed back onto the step. “Over there, the Jaguar!” she cried.

They were still twenty feet away from the car when Susan appeared at the corner of the house. She was bathed eerily in the light from the windows, her lips pulled back in a snarling, wolflike rictus as she fired.

“Go!” Patty cried.

She fired once at Susan and once at the Jaguar’s tire, missing both times. The third shot produced only an impotent click. With the cracks from Susan’s gun growing fainter, Will steered the tractor around two huge oaks and back onto the gravel driveway. One of the only things he remembered from the drive to Roxbury with Watkins was the right turn he took at the base of the drive.

“Even Boyd Halliday might have difficulty explaining that mess back there,” Will said as he made the right and they rumbled off down a narrow, deserted country road.

He was feeling absolutely buoyant.

“You have this thing wide open?” Patty asked grimly.

“Full speed ahead. Why?”

“I don’t think we can chance being on this much longer. Dammit, I should have taken more time for that shot at the Jaguar’s tire.”

“Nonsense.”

“Just the same, assuming Hollister limps inside, finds the keys to the Jag, and limps back out, she’ll be on top of us before you know it. Then there’s the people she told Watkins to call. They could come driving down this road at any second.”

Will rapidly deflated.

“So what should we do?”

“I’d rather take our chances in the dark in the woods than out here on this noble steed. You want your sneakers back?”

“No way. You’ve earned them. Besides, given where my socks have been, I don’t think I want to risk even touching them.”

“We should get off this thing soon,” she said. “One more minute, two at the most. I’m out of bullets, but I guarantee you that your pretty practice partner has plenty. I’ll get off and move inside the tree line. You drive about a hundred more yards, then ditch the tractor, get into the woods, and work your way back here. I’ll go straight in, twenty or twenty-five yards. That’s where we’ll meet.”

Without questioning, Will did as he was told, nosing the tractor off into the edge of the woods, then gingerly hiking back to where he estimated Patty was waiting. In just a few minutes, he heard her harsh whisper, calling him to the right. He was holding her tightly, concealed in a dense grove of young beech trees, when they heard a car skid to a halt by the tractor. Another minute and it accelerated, headlights slicing through the blackness as it sped past them toward the farm.

“Once again the woman in the pajamas proves her worth,” he whispered, genuinely impressed as he had been so many times this night. “You are the master. Speak, and so it shall be.”

“Well, I say we head diagonally away from the tractor and away from the farm. They’ll be back as soon as they meet up with Hollister. If we can put some distance between us and that road, I think we’ve got a chance. It’s cold out here, but not cold enough to kill us. As long as you can walk, if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, sooner or later we’ve got to run into some sort of civilization. Massachusetts isn’t that big. Your feet okay?”

“I can manage. How about yours?”

“The right one where I stepped on the glass is starting to kill, but I can handle it. The sneaks are a godsend.”

“And they really look good on you, too.”

As rapidly as they could manage, they pushed deeper and deeper into the forest. At one point early on they both heard voices, but those quickly died away. Soon, there was only silence, intense darkness, and the damp chill of night. After an hour, they sank down at the base of a tree and held each other.

“Should we keep going, or try to wait until morning?” Will asked.

“I don’t mind resting for a bit, but I think we should push on. Halliday has a big meeting in the morning. He spoke about it when he thought I was in a coma. A number of companies are going to sign themselves into a merger with Excelsius. The way corporate lawyers operate, these sorts of business dealings are much easier to stop before they happen than they are to untangle afterward. If we can’t stop it, Halliday may not only get away with murder, but he’ll get away richer than ever.”

“I see what you mean. We really have no proof of anything. We may not even be able to find our way back to the farmhouse.”

“I think with a chopper we’ll be able to, but I’d be surprised if Hollister and Sanderson and the rest didn’t have the place cleaned up by then.”