Storm Front

through the nettles and poison ivy, through the cattails and alders and prickly gooseberry bushes. They were coming up to the Mercedes, muddy nearly to their knees, the big Turk limping and cursing, bunching his trousers against the wound, staunching the blood, when the smaller Turk said, “Listen.”
    In the distance, they could hear a siren.
    “Now we are in a hurry,” the smaller Turk said.
    —
    V IRGIL WAS just finishing the pancakes and had asked the waitress for one last cup of coffee, when the phone rang again. Ellen—Jones’s daughter. He said to Yael, “Jones’s daughter. Could be something.”
    He said, “Hello?”
    Ellen started screaming at him.
    Virgil couldn’t make out what she was screaming but pinned the phone to his shoulder with his ear and stood up and dug out a twenty and threw it at the table and headed for the door with Yael trotting behind, and on the sidewalk he started shouting, “Slow down, I can’t understand you, slow down—”
    “My father,” she screamed. “Somebody’s trying to shoot my father. I’m going there, I’m going there—”
    “Where is he? Where is he?” Virgil piled into the 4Runner and fired it up, barely noticed Yael belting herself into the passenger seat.
    “A cabin—he’s in a cabin off County Road 18, West Elysian Lake Road, north of Janesville.”
    “Ah, Jesus,” Virgil groaned. The cabin that Sugarman had told him about, that he’d spotted the night before. “I know exactly where it is,” he shouted into the phone, as he swung through a U-turn. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”
    “I’m still west of town, I’m coming, but I’m way behind you. My dad just called three minutes ago, said somebody was shooting at him, he’s shooting back. He doesn’t think he can hold out.”
    “I’m going,” Virgil shouted, and clicked the phone off and hit the truck’s sirens and flashers. When they’d made the big turn on Highway 14 and were rolling, he called 911 and told the dispatcher where they were and what was happening. “Are there any sheriff’s cars in the area?”
    “Let me check, Virgil,” the dispatcher shouted at him. “Goldarnit, this is more exciting than string-cheese night at Lambeau Field.”
    “What?”
    “We got Frank Martin is about, mmm, fifteen or twenty miles south of you, but he’s not in his car, can’t get there for a couple minutes. We got Fred Jackson. He’s over to the west.”
    “Get them started and anybody else you can find.”
    “On the way.”
    —
    V IRGIL HAD BEEN out to Elysian Lake a few times, caught a few bass and pike, and more carp than he’d admit to, so he knew the area: they were about twelve miles out. If Jones was being shot at, it had to be either the Turks or Yael, because he knew where Awad and Sewickey were.
    He just finished thinking that when Yael said, “I find it very suspicious that this Arab called you just before the shooting started. He said he was driving to the airport and the GPS says his car is going to the airport . . . so he has this alibi that you provide.”
    Virgil thought about that for a second, and said, “I couldn’t live with that kind of paranoia.”
    “This is because the Hezbollah is not trying to fly a missile into your window every minute.”
    “All right. I’ll put Awad back on the suspect list,” Virgil said.
    “I think this is a good idea.”
    “But I think it’s either Yael-1 or the Turks.”
    “Let us hope it’s this
katsa
, and not the Turks. I don’t think she would kill us. The Turks . . . I don’t know.”
    “Katsa? That’s her name? How—”
    “Not her name. It’s her type. Spy . . . or agent. I ask you this: Why do you use your bell? They will hear us.”
    “I hope so,” Virgil said. “We’re still eight or nine minutes away, that’s forever in a gunfight. Most gunfights last a few seconds. If he’s holed up inside this place, maybe it’ll take longer, maybe whoever is shooting will hear the siren and run.”
    “Good analysis,” she said. “We want the stone, not the shooters.”
    “I want the shooters, too,” Virgil said. “But mostly, I want to keep anybody from being killed.”
    —
    S EVEN OR EIGHT MINUTES after they left town, Virgil threw them off Highway 14 and onto 390th Street to West Elysian Lake Road, and then north, and then they were coming up on the side road that took them into the stand of timber that hid the cabin, and a couple of deer stands that overlooked a cornfield.
    With the