I shoved the driver’s side door open and fell out, then pushed my seat forward and pulled Karen and Toby out after me. Pike went out the passenger’s side and the .357 boomed twice. Peter followed Pike, and then the five of us were crouched down among the pumpkins behind the LeBaron.

Two of the guys up on the road started blasting away with their shotguns, but then someone did a lot of arm waving and they stopped. Three hundred yards with shotguns was silly.

The little pumpkin field was maybe five hundred yards on a side, bordered to the east and the west and the south by thick stands of birch and elm and maple trees. Behind us to the south there was a little ramshackle feed shed that looked to be maybe a hundred years old. I squatted down next to Karen and said, “Does anyone live around here?”

“Maybe a couple of miles that way.” She pointed southwest.

“Is there a road behind us?”

She scrunched her face, trying to think but not having an easy time of it. “There must be. Some kind of farming road.”

Toby said, “Yeah, there is. It’s a utility road. Dirt.”

“How far?”

“Maybe a mile and a half. It’s on the other side of all these fields. It comes out by this little airport where the crop dusters fly, but there won’t be anyone there. They close it down in the winter.”

Pike said, “If we can get there, maybe we can make a farmhouse.”

The snow fell harder, swirling and piling up in little white pockets on the LeBaron and on the pumpkins, thick enough in the air to make the men on the road indistinct and shadowy. Two of the shadows went off to the left and two of them went right and four of them started off the road directly for us. Classic pincer move. Probably taught that at the mafia academy.

I said, “They’re going to try to envelop us, faster guys moving out on the flank, the other guys coming slow up the middle to drive us toward them.”

Pike said, “Unh-hunh,” and opened the duffel. He took out the shotgun and a cartridge box and began filling his pockets with the shells. Twenty-five rounds in the box, but he found places for all of them.

Peter was squatting next to Karen and behind Toby. He had put an arm around Karen’s shoulders without thinking about it. Or maybe he had. He said, “Maybe we could dig in here and hold them off.”

Pike shook his head. “Not with twenty-five rounds.”