Now comes the hailstorm.

Bullets tear through the sheet metal and smash the windshield and the windows. They skip off the steel axles and puncture the tires. They whine and thud and crash. They dislodge snow that has settled on the roof. I make myself as small as possible behind the engine block.

There is a pause in the shooting, and I raise my head. Snow and broken glass fall from my shoulders.

I look over at Reynolds and the twitching of his ruined foot has stopped. I doubt anyone deliberately tried to kill him. They simply didn’t care enough to avoid hitting him.

I will make them pay for that.

The Dillons are going to wait to see if they got me before they close in on the van. Maybe I’m as dead as Reynolds. But they won’t wait long because they can’t be sure what I told dispatch. Dozens of cops may be on the way. If I identified them to the dispatcher, Pill Hill might soon be under siege by the State Police Tactical Team and the Violent Crimes Task Force.

Did I give their name to the dispatcher?

Just then, I hear a war whoop, then footsteps coming toward me. Some foolhardy gunman plans on ending the stand-off single-handedly.

A fast-moving figure in Carhartt coveralls slides past the end of the van and, from his side, brings a black carbine up to the ready position, the sights searching for me in the shadows.

I pull the trigger. Double-ought buckshot punches a hole through his chest, shredding his heart and lungs. Lifeless, his body continues its slide, among the bits and pieces of the dismantled van.

“Todd!” a female voice screams.

My young attacker comes to rest so that only half his face is visible in the beam of the tactical flashlight. I see milk-white skin, a half-grown goatee.

It’s the kid I spoke with earlier. The logger who was cutting down Jewett’s woods.

What happens next happens fast.

A big-engined vehicle comes roaring along the road, and my heart rises with the hope that it’s a state trooper. But if it’s a cruiser, why don’t I hear a siren? Where are the blue strobes?

I hear but don’t see the over-powered truck leave the road and come skidding and sliding down the hill, and I understand that it is about to ram Reynolds’s van and crush me in the process. The realization comes almost too late. There is not enough time to throw myself clear. When the moving vehicle hits the stationary one, the best I can do is fall in the direction of the cairn, where my head strikes stone, and in an instant, everything becomes nothing.

34