He told them of running around the rest of the building to find another open door, or even a window he could break to get in behind the woman, but he hadn’t done that. Actually, all he had done was run to Joe Lambert’s car parked down the street, open it with the key he had taken from Lambert, get inside, start the engine, and keep his head low while he looked and listened.

He waited, but the next thing he saw that he could interpret was the other car that the group had driven from Arkansas. It pulled out of the parking lot behind city hall and took off fast. He could see only two men in it, but he had decided to assume that the other three must be accounted for, meaning not his problem. At that point all he could think to do was to follow the car that was getting away.

Later Lee Wolf had to admit modestly that he was proud to have been the last man to leave the city of Weldonville that night. He had stayed the longest, “stood my ground the longest,” as he described it, and then hung back to ensure the others wouldn’t be overtaken, or even pursued.

When Edison Leonard called him on the cell phone and told him that Holliman had been shot in the head and McKinney had been hit in the neck with an ax and Lambert had never been able to crawl out of the council chamber, he had wept. He had pulled himself together after a few seconds and told his own story and wept again, more heroically. The more he told the others about his part in the battle, the more certainty he felt about the details, particularly the reasons for each of his actions.

He also found it necessary to mention that he had not only heard the sirens coming toward city hall as they had, but he had also stayed long enough to see the SWAT team running along the back street toward the building. Leonard and Mann should never doubt that they had done the right thing in getting out, because what they had not seen coming had been worse than what they had seen. The truth was that the SWAT team originated in Lee Wolf’s head after they’d all left town, and the sirens had been the sounds of two police officers in two cars making all the noise they could because nobody else was coming.