“Well, now, wait a minute,” Skutnik said. “Let’s not involve the police unless it is absolutely necessary.”

“Hal has a phone?” Martine said. “Somebody grab it from him!”

Martine, Danielle, and Ort all lunged at Skutnik, but one of the Mexicans fired at the ceiling again, then shook his weapon at the three and yelled for them to back off.

“Listen,” Martine said to the Mexican, “you made a real bad play, and if the Figueros get ahold of you, you are fucked from Mount Shasta to Tijuana, so you just better let us call the sheriff’s office right now!”

Rover came back with Cleft Beardley’s tight white pants, and he had also brought a long metal rod.

Wenske and I attached the pants to the rod with some sound cable, and I went over and stood next to the door away from the line of fire and thrust the white object out into the early evening air. I waved it up and down, and at least one round of fire hit the pants and sent them pin-wheeling around the rod.

The gunfire kept up for nearly a minute, but I could hear shouting, and as I kept waving the white pants the shooting soon abated, and then it stopped altogether.

A male voice outside shouted, “Throw out your weapons.”

I said to the frightened Mexicans, “Toss out one of the automatics. They don’t know how many we have. They know we have one.”

The guy threw his gun out the door, then ducked back out of the way.

“Hal, why don’t you go out first?” I said. “Just put your hands in the air like on one of your Hey Look private-eye shows. You must know how it’s done.”

“What?”

“You’re the boss. These people won’t want to talk to the paid help.”

Skutnik had begun to tremble. “What if they shoot me?”

“They might not. I’d put the chances at fifty-fifty. And if we stay in here and make the Figueros madder and madder, that’ll be even worse once they get their hands on us. Which sooner or later they will do.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Skutnik said. “I think we’d better call the police. How long will it take them to get up here?”

Another shout came from outside. “Hey, you get your asses out here right now or we are gonna throw a firebomb in the door. Do you understand what I am saying? You have ten seconds.”

Martine said, “Oh shit, come on, let’s go.”

Danielle shrugged, and so did Ort, and then the three of them strode out the door, Martine first, their hands high in the air, stepping over the battered corpses of Blanco and Pablo.

“They’re not shooting. Let’s go,” I said to the others.

Hively climbed out from under the table and said something like, “Oh, Lisbeth, Lisbeth, help us, help us!”

The rest of us were not foxhole converts to Stieg Larsson and instead just hoped for the best.

The trembling Mexicans and I placed our firearms in the pantry on a shelf next to the SPAM, and as our group all moved toward the open door, Skutnik said, “I knew I should have brought along somebody from legal.”

“Yeah, Hal,” Wenske said. “These guys are going to be tougher to deal with than Marva Beers. Good luck.”

We climbed over the corpses and filed out into the twilight and faced a crew of about twenty armed men, most but not all of them Hispanic. They wore jeans and flak jackets and had what looked like Uzis aimed at us, courtesy, I guessed, of an NRA-approved legal gun show somewhere in the Mount Shasta area.

The gang’s boss, a squat man with a nicely trimmed thick black mustache, stepped forward and directed two of his men to check the building to see if anyone was left inside.

“Eduardo,” Martine said to the boss, “we just now heard about your brother Francisco. Danielle, Ort and I are sorry for your loss.”

“You’re sorry? Oh. That’s nice.” Both his voice and his look were cold and hard.

“Now, you know us, and I think you know we didn’t have anything to do with any shit that went down. We’ve all gotten along real nice for too many years for this to get some freakin’ war started that’s not gonna do anybody any good. The DEA would just love it if we all were tearin’ each other’s guts out—save them a lot of trouble and expense. So I just want to say that we know who did this stupid-ass thing, and Danielle and Ort and I are gonna deal with those dudes in an appropriate manner and make everything right again.”

Rover and Hiveley went bug-eyed when they heard this, and Hal gawked around in confusion.

“Martine, what’s that supposed to mean?” Rover said. “What the fuck?”

Martine said to Eduardo, “If one of you gents will give me the loan of your firearm that has at least three rounds in it, I’ll settle the matter right now. And then we can all go back to leading the law-abiding good lives we had until Hal and his phony-ass L.A. ilk came up here to Happy Valley and started fucking everything up for the rest of us. Will that work for you, Eduardo? Do we have a deal?”

Hal and Rover both began to sputter, and Hively swayed and looked as if he might faint.

Delaney looked both horrified and maybe a bit relieved. But Wenske, who knew the drug gangs and their ways, just looked mournful. He knew what was coming.

“I am so sorry,” Eduardo the boss said to Martine. “But it is too late for deals.”

“I see.”

“My brother is dead.”

“I understand that.”

“So what I must now do represents both a punishment that will serve as a deterrent to others and also compensation.”

“Compensation. You mean our weed business.”

“Yes. Just the weed. The logging business your heirs can keep.”

Now Hively was crying and Skutnik was whimpering, “Oh please, oh please.” Rover was paralyzed again and made no sound except heavy breathing.

“Please kneel in a row,” Eduardo said.

“Who?” Skutnik said.

“All of you.”

“Oh!”

“There can be no mercy and there can be no witnesses.”

Skutnik said, “Have you ever…have you ever considered being part of a television reality show?”

Eduardo ignored this. He gave some kind of signal, and his men began leading us into a line side by side, the three Mexican van goons included.

“I know people at Telemundo,” Skutnik croaked out. “I’m a player! I’ve got juice!”

I looked at Wenske again, and he shrugged. I thought, Timothy, you are going to be so pissed off at me. Delaney still looked fascinated, as if, wow, what a great story he’ll never be able to write or edit.

Then the helicopter sounds that had been at the edge of our peripheral hearing grew louder, and then suddenly they were very loud, and the choppers appeared over the trees just as the convoy of sheriff’s cars came roaring up the driveway.

Eduardo yelled something to his gang, and they broke and ran. They ran past their own caravan of SUVs and headed for the woods on the hillside behind the lodge. A large van rolled into view, and men wearing vests that said FBI poured out of the van and ran in the direction of the hillside. Almost immediately sporadic gunshots could be heard.

One of the sheriff’s cars pulled up next to us, and among the four men who climbed out of it were Ricky Esteban and Marsden Davis.

I said to Davis, “Did you take a wrong turn at Copley Square? I thought you knew your way around Boston.”

“When you didn’t pick up on Saturday when I called back with the name of a helpful cop in Mount Shasta, that got me worried. I was even worrieder when we got the security camera tag ID of the black van in the Bryan Kim killing. The van was registered to a hoodlum in Mount Shasta with a rap sheet as long as your nose, Strachey. When I couldn’t get hold of you, I had a good idea you were in deep shit of a type that would be of genuine interest to the Boston Police Department. So I did some re-budgeting, and here I am. I ran into your friend here, Mr. Esteban, and at first I wondered if he was part of the problem for you. But he convinced me pretty fast that he was part of the solution to tracking down your whereabouts.”