The Greek-looking man ran to the car, threw the shotgun in through the open window, then tugged open the door and climbed in himself.

The woman said, ‘You’re out of your mind! If I’d known you were going to do something like that, I wouldn’t have come! Do you hear me? You’re crazy!’

‘Just shut up,’ snapped the man in the plaid jacket, as he pulled away from the kerb, with the car tyres shrieking like strangled chickens.

They tried to make their way towards Lisbon Avenue, so that they could escape from the centre of Milwaukee through Wauwatosa, and eventually out on Appleton Avenue to Menomonee Falls, where they had come from. But even though Sergeant Kyprianides hadn’t been around to answer Dolores’s call for help, the Milwaukee Police Department had surrounded the city in force. There were road blocks on all the major highways out of town, and as they reached the intersection of Lisbon and North, they saw police lights flashing up ahead of them, and the spotlights of police helicopters flickering from street to street like August lightning.

The man in the plaid jacket jammed on the brakes, and the station wagon slithered to a halt.

‘What do we do now?’ he demanded. ‘They’ve blocked the road.’

‘Either we leave the food and walk, or we try to break our way through,’ the Greek man told him.

‘How can we leave the food?’ asked the woman. ‘We need that food. If we don’t have food, we’re going to starve. For God’s sake, Chris, we even killed for it.’

‘Gerry killed for it,’ said the man in the plaid jacket. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t want any killing.’

‘Oh, no?’ said Gerry. ‘I seem to remember it was your idea to bring the shotgun along.’

‘As a deterrent,’ said Chris angrily. ‘I didn’t mean for you to me the damned thing.’

‘What do you think I was going to do with it?’ shouted Gerry. ‘A gun is a gun. If you don’t use it, there’s no point in taking it along.’

‘Will you two stop it,’ said the woman, as if they were two bickering nephews.

The police helicopter spotted them sooner than they expected. Chris was just about to get out of the car and check that the tailgate was properly closed when the night was suddenly roaring with noise, and a piercing blue-white halogen lamp filled the station wagon with unearthly Close Encounters kind of light.

The helicopter circled the rooftops above them for a few minutes, and then an amplified voice commanded, ‘You people – get out of the vehicle – make sure you get out slow and careful – and lay your hands on the roof.’