“Get into town where there’s people. When you and Toby are safe, Joe and I will see what we can do with Charlie.”

Karen called Toby and we went quickly out the front door and into her LeBaron. I told Peter to get in the back and I told Karen that I would drive. Neither of them objected.

Toby said, “Is it those men again, Mom?”

We pulled away from her house and went down the clean new tarmac street and turned onto the main road toward Chelam. It was twenty-eight minutes after noon.

We had gone about two miles when they found us.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Thirty-seven

They came up behind us in two cars, a green Dodge station wagon and the black Town Car, just as the snow began to fall.

Pike saw them first. “Behind us. Turned out from a side road, maybe a half mile back.”

I pushed Toby’s head down. “Get on the floor. Make yourself as small as you can and wrap your arms around your head.”

I pushed Karen down on top of him.

The Town Car pulled into the left lane and the wagon stayed in the right and they came on hard. Pike reached under his jacket and took out his .357.

I pressed the LeBaron’s pedal to the floor, but the Town Car inched closer and then there were gold specks flashing around it and something hit the rear of the LeBaron two times, bam bam, like rocks thrown by a kid hiding behind a tree. The right rear tire blew and Karen Lloyd made a sharp gasping sound and Toby said, “What was that?”

The LeBaron nosed up and I swung us to the right, and then we were off the road and bouncing across an untended pumpkin field, ripping through weeds and a barbed-wire fence and a couple of white birch saplings. I gunned the engine and forced the LeBaron across the field, sideways half the time and near out of control, until the flat right rear dug into the loam maybe three hundred yards from the road and the LeBaron wouldn’t go any farther. I said, “Everybody out.”

The station wagon and the Town Car skidded to a stop on the road and doors banged open and eight men pushed out, five of them with shotguns. Charlie DeLuca had been driving the Town Car and Joey Putata was one of the guys in the wagon, but I didn’t recognize anyone else. Ric was conspicuous by his absence. No one now to keep Charlie calm, no one to rub his back and say the quiet things and keep Charlie DeLuca among the land of the sane. Sal the Rock had learned that. Charlie was certifiably, stark-raving, bad-to-the-bone out of control.