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.

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, "Uh-huh," 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."

I duck-walked to Karen and Peter and knelt close to them. Their faces were white and their eyes were squinty and drawn. "We're going to have to split up. Pike and I will go out to the flanks. You guys move straight back across the field and try to get to the farm road. Do you understand that?"

They both said, "Yes."

"Stay low and run as fast as you can just like you've seen people do on television. Try to keep the car between you and the four guys coming across the field. They're coming slow because they know we have guns, so you'll have time. Work your way to the feed shed and get behind it, and then work your way to the woods using the shed as cover."

Peter nodded and Karen said, "Yes."

"Don't stop until you get to people. Then call the police."

Karen wasn't looking into my eyes. She was watching my mouth, getting every word. Hanging on by her fingernails.

Peter said, "I don't want to run off. I want to do something."

"You are doing something. You're helping this woman and your son get to a safe place. That's your job."

Peter glanced down at the woman that he used to be married to and their son, and he nodded. "Sure. Okay."

I turned to Toby. "Tobe, you think you can find the road through the woods?"

"Sure. You just keep going south."

"Okay. You get to the road, which way to the airfield?"

"East."

I looked back at Karen and then at Peter. "Do it."

Karen said, "They're going to kill us, aren't they?"

"They're going to try. But Joe and I won't let them."

Her eyes were big and darting. She held tight to Toby's arm. "How can you stop them? There're eight of them and we're trapped here in the middle of nowhere with them."

Pike chambered a round into his shotgun. "No," he said. "They're trapped with us."

I gave Karen a little nod and then she crabbed away, holding on to Toby's shirt with her right hand, crouched low and stumbling through the frozen weeds and the pumpkins. Peter followed close after them.

Pike said, "How many rounds you got?"

"Just what's in the gun."

He gave me disapproval.

"I know," I said. "You can't take me anywhere."

He handed me the.357, butt first, then gave me a little leather pouch with three speed-loaders. Be prepared.

"You ready?"

"I'm ready."

"Let's do it."

We fired six quick rounds at the four men coming across the field, then Joe broke left and I broke right, moving low and fast, and then he was behind me and gone.

The snow was a glistening powder across the field, piling up in little mounds that scattered without sound as I moved. Charlie DeLuca saw us break, and the three guys with him opened up, firing with the shotguns and their pistols, still better than two hundred yards out. Panic shots. I guess they hadn't expected us to try to outflank the flankers. Charlie yelled something at the guys who had gone into the woods, but with the snow and the wind and the distance you couldn't make out what he was saying. Pellets rained on the field around me and a great orange pumpkin exploded, but I didn't stop and I didn't look back. I stayed low and moved hard and wondered if the guys in the woods were making better time coming my way than I was making going theirs. Then I didn't think about it anymore and pretty soon I was in the trees.

I moved twenty yards into the tree line and stopped between two white birch to listen. If the flankers had moved fast, maybe they were already behind me. They weren't. Thirty yards upwind toward the road, limbs snapped and dead leaves crunched and it sounded like the Fifth Marines were on the march. City kids come out to play. This deep in the trees, you couldn't see the field. They didn't know Karen and Peter and Toby were falling back and they didn't know Pike and I had moved into the tree line. Out in the field, the pistols and the shotguns had stopped firing and Charlie was yelling, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. If I couldn't hear, the flankers couldn't hear. They were making so much noise that even if Charlie had been understandable, they wouldn't have heard.

I moved deeper into the trees and found a place beside a fallen elm and waited. In the woods the snow fell only slightly, caught higher in the tree canopy by dead leaves and vines and branches. Some of the earlier snow had melted and the water had leached down the trees, making their bark feel velvety and damp and enhancing their good smell. Except for the coming of the flankers, it was quiet. Calm. The natural state of the woods.

Joey Putata and a guy in a blaze-orange hunting jacket pushed their way through a tangle of vines hanging from a dogwood tree. The guy in the orange jacket had heavy sideburns and the kind of coarse virulent beard that had to be shaved three times a day and a little hat with a feather in the band. Joey Putata was carrying a 12-gauge Mossberg slug gun and the guy in the orange had a Ruger Redhawk.44 Magnum revolver. Joey's eyes were still black and green from the beating Charlie had given him, but here he was, tramping through the woods. Some guys are stupid all the way through. The guy in orange ducked down under a branch but didn't duck far enough. The branch knocked his hat off and a slug of fresh snow fell down his back. He said, "Sonofabitch," and then they stopped.