She backed up quickly and spun the car around to pick up Gutierrez and Willenz. She saw them step toward her car and called, “Don’t leave the shotgun.”

Ballard got out of the car, stepped to the disabled police cruiser, and took the shotgun out of its vertical holder. He returned with it and sat down. She glared at him. “Thank you.”

Leah drove fast with the windows open, and they heard more distant gunfire. It sounded like it was coming from the northeast. She drove faster but slowed nearly to a stop at each intersection, looking up and down the streets to see if she could spot any escaped prisoners. The quiet night streets still looked empty and benign, not much different from the way they had looked when she was a teenager walking home late from a party, slowly if she liked the boy she was with, or fast if she didn’t, using her long legs to stay a step away from him.

She reached the broad intersection with Main Street in a few minutes. She looked to the north along the wide street. It was marked for diagonal parking on both sides and had two more lanes for traffic, but the only cars there now were a row of police cruisers facing outward from the curb on the west side with their doors open. Cops—some in uniform and others in various kinds of civilian clothes that they’d thrown on—walked up and down the sidewalk behind the cars, some of them just hearing what had happened and others settling into firing positions.

Leah pulled the black car into line with the others, and she and her passengers got out and walked to the spot where Chief Roberts was giving his men and women their orders. “We’ll try to stop them right here,” he said. “Use the cars as well as you can. The engine block is the best barrier. Always stay low. And if you use the door as a shield, open it only halfway so rounds will ricochet past you instead of piercing it and hitting you. When they arrive across the street, turn your high beams on. Any order to fire will come from me.”

As Leah approached the chief, she appraised the situation. There were only eight cars, all in the line with fifteen or twenty feet between them. The small town’s whole fleet didn’t constitute a barricade, just a few firing positions along a two-hundred-foot stretch of Main Street.

“We’re here, Chief,” she said.

“Who else?”

“Gutierrez and Willenz. And we picked up Mark Ballard on the way. He was coming home from meetings in Denver and heard shots. I gave him my spare Glock and the shotgun from the wrecked unit on Calloway Street.”

Chief Roberts pointed at Gutierrez and Willenz. “Where did they get M4s?”

“From the bodies of the two shooters. They’ve got to be from the prison.”