“Hospital. Out of the radius. Everything here’ll be swamped. Can’t handle it. Cooperstown. Cooperstown’ll be better. Straight to the ER. How about it, ace? Think you can drive my car?”

It struck Gurney as a terrible idea—transporting a man with a bullet wound fifty-five miles over winding two-lane country roads in a vehicle with no first-aid equipment. But he agreed to do it. Because entrusting Hardwick to the mercies of a crushingly overburdened emergency system in the middle of a cataclysm unlike anything the local EMTs had ever faced before seemed like an even more terrible idea. God only knew how many mangled, barely alive Ferris wheel victims, not to mention victims of the several previous explosions and fires, would have to be treated before him.

So they plodded on through the vehicle gate—which also functioned as the exhibitor’s gate—outside of which, at the edge of the entry road, Hardwick had parked his old Pontiac muscle car. Before they got into it, Gurney took off the shirt he was wearing under his sweatshirt and tore it in three pieces. Two he folded into bulky wads and placed over the front entry wound and the rear exit wound in Hardwick’s side. He tied the third tightly around Hardwick’s waist to hold the wads in place. He and Madeleine eased him into the front passenger seat, reclining it as far as it would go.

As soon as Hardwick recovered sufficiently from the pain of the process, he took his cell phone from his belt, pressed a speed dial number, waited, and left a message in an utterly exhausted but smiling voice, presumably for Esti. “Hi, babe. Little problem. Got sloppy, got shot. Embarrassing. Got shot by a dead guy. Hard to explain. On my way to Cooperstown ER. Sherlock’s the chauffeur. I love you, Peaches. Talk later.”

It reminded Gurney to call Kyle. That call also went into voice mail. “Hey, son. Checking in. I followed our man to the fair. All hell broke loose. Jack Hardwick got shot. I’m about to drive him to the hospital in Cooperstown. Hope everything there is okay. Give me a call and fill me in as soon as you can. Love you.”

As soon as he ended the call, Madeleine got into the back seat, he got into the driver’s seat, and they were on their way.

The mass of vehicles fleeing the immediate area of the fairgrounds created a kind of high-pressure traffic that felt surreal in a place where cows as a rule far outnumbered cars, and the rare moments of obstruction were caused by slow-moving hay wagons.