A dozen cars were already in the parking lot beside the building, and Lindahl put the Ford in with them. They got their rifles, then walked over to where a group of men milled around the closed front door. They were mostly over fifty, hefty and soft, and they moved with checked-in excitement.
Lindahl knew all of these people, though it was clear he hadn’t seen any of them for some time. They were pleased to see him, if not excited, and pleased to meet Parker as well, introduced as an old friend of Lindahl’s here on a visit.
Parker shook hands with the smiling men who were hunting him, and then a state police car arrived and two uniformed men got out, the younger one an ordinary trooper, the older one with extra braid and insignia on his uniform and hat.
This is the one who went up on the steps leading to the Grange Hall and turned around to say, “I want to thank you gentlemen for coming out today. We have two very dangerous men somewhere in our part of the world, and it’s an act of good citizenship to help find them and put them under control. You’ve all heard on the television the crime they committed. They didn’t kill anybody, but they caused a great deal of property damage and put three armored-car employees in the hospital. The weapons they used are banned in the United States. We don’t know if they’re still carrying those weapons, or if they might have others as well. We do know they were armed and are extremely dangerous. We ask that no one go off by himself, but always have at least one other person from your group in sight. If you come across one or both of these fugitives, do not try to apprehend them yourselves. These are professional criminals, desperate men facing long prison sentences, and they have no reason not to shoot you down if you get in their way. If you believe you’ve found them, get that information to us or to some other authority at the earliest possible moment. Try to keep them in sight, and do not under any circumstances exchange gunfire with them. Trooper Oskott has artist’s drawings of the two men that we’ll pass among you, and then your club president, Ben Weiser, will describe to you the area we’d like you to patrol. Ben?”
Ben Weiser was a man in his sixties, as overweight as most of the rest of them, with absolutely no hair on the top of his head but very long gray hair down the sides and back, covering his ears and his collar, so that he looked like a retired cavalry scout. As Trooper Oskott moved among the group, handing out sheets of copy paper, Weiser said, “It’s nice to see just about everybody here, and even an extra volunteer, Ed Smith over there, brought to us by Tom Lindahl, so I guess that makes up for all the times Tom didn’t show up. Glad you’re here, Tom. Welcome to Hickory Rod and Gun Club, Ed.”
Parker took the two sheets the trooper handed him and looked at them while Weiser went on being folksy and another man went into the Grange Hall and came back out with an easel that he set up on the top step. The drawing of himself he’d seen before, on the television set in the diner before the law had arrived, attracted by his rental car. Nobody in the diner had looked from the screen to this customer among them and said, “There he is!” and nobody here in front of the Grange Hall turned to say, “Ed? Isn’t this you?”
The other drawing, he knew, was supposed to be McWhitney, his partner back then, and if you knew McWhitney and had been told this was supposed to be him, you could see the similarities, but McWhitney himself could walk past this group right now and not one of them would give a second look.
Artist’s drawings didn’t bother Parker. What bothered him was the four thousand dollars in traceable cash in his pocket and the lack of a usable ID. Until he replaced both of those, the best place for him was right here with the search party.
“Tough-looking guys,” somebody said. “I’m not sure I want to find them.”
That got a laugh, and then somebody else said, “Oh, I think Cory and me could take em, couldn’t we, Cory?”
“I’ll hold your coat,” the one next to him said, and while that got its own laugh, Parker looked at the two of them, Cory and the one whose coat he’d hold.
They were a little younger than most in the group, a little rougher-looking, both dressed in jeans and boots and dark heavy work shirts. They might have been brothers, with the same thick dark blond hair hanging straggly around their ears, the same easy slope of the shoulders. The one who thought he and Cory could take the fugitives had a black patch over his left eye, which inevitably gave him a piratical look, as though he were the tougher brother. With that eye, now, he peered around at the group, slightly challenging, watching out for somebody else he could take. His good eye brushed past Parker, and Parker looked away, not needing to be noticed too much.
Meanwhile, up in front of them, Ben Weiser said, “Here’s a government survey map,” which somebody had put on the easel, but then had to hold there because otherwise the breeze would blow it off. Weiser then went on to describe what area they were expected to search in, saying things like, “You know the old Heisler place,” which they all did.
Parker paid little attention to the details, because this wasn’t a part of the country he knew, but it was interesting to see the approach they had taken. They were guessing that the men they wanted would have left the main roads, and possibly the secondary roads as well, though why they should think bank robbers were woodsmen wasn’t clear. But the approach was to cover back roads and dirt roads and dead-end roads that weren’t used any more, and particularly to cover abandoned buildings, old farmhouses and barns, and even a railroad station up where a town no longer existed because its iron mine had given out more than a century ago.
Which was where Parker would be searching, along with Tom Lindahl and Fred Thiemann. The decision had been made that the search parties should consist of groups of three, and Weiser explained the reason. If they did come across one or both of the fugitives, one of their group could go off to raise the alarm without leaving one man alone to keep the quarry in sight.
The men, who had arrived here separately or in pairs, now sorted themselves into threes and headed for the cars. Lindahl’s SUV was roomier than Thiemann’s Taurus, so they’d use that, with Lindahl driving, Parker beside him as before, and Thiemann in back with the rifles.
They joined the exodus from the Grange Hall parking lot, followed a couple of other cars for the first mile or so, and Lindahl explained, “This place we’re going to, called Wolf Peak, was a mining town way back when.”
“Before the Civil War,” Thiemann put in from the backseat. “The whole Northeast was iron mines, but the Civil War used it all up.”
“Wolf Peak went on till the end of the century,” Lindahl said, “with the tailings, and some lumbering, but the younger generations kept moving away, and when the railroad stopped going up there, around 1900, that was the end.”
Thiemann said, “The houses were all wood, so they burned or rotted, but the railroad station was good local stone. The roof’s gone, but the walls are solid. I hunkered down in there myself once, out hunting and here comes a thunderstorm.”
“There might be a couple other hidey-holes up around there,” Lindahl said, “but mostly it’s the railroad station.”
Spreading himself comfortably across the backseat, Thiemann said, “What I’m guessing about these robbers, I’m guessing they’re city people, and they aren’t gonna know what it means to try to hide out in a place like this.”
Parker said, “How’s that?”
“People like Tom and me,” Thiemann said, “we been here generations, it’s like we got our grandparents’ memories mixed in with our own. We know this chunk of the planet Earth. No city person’s gonna know a city like we know these hills. A stranger tries to move through here, tries to hide out in here, somebody’s gonna see him and say, ‘That fella doesn’t belong.’ You can’t hide around here.”