“I think you’re stuck,” Matt suggested. “Better try to back down the hill.”

Frenchy swore a bit more, but put the transmission into reverse as he did, then gunned the engine, trying to get the car moving. It didn’t move an inch; his tires had dug enough of a hole that the car was high centered and not even getting a grip in reverse. “Goddamn motherfuckin’ shit!” he swore. “You two get out and fuckin’ give me a push to get me going.”

It was not a simple procedure to get out of the car; sitting on a hill of about 45 degrees was tough enough as it was, but the door on the right had been crushed badly enough that it wouldn’t open, more news that Frenchy didn’t take well. The left side door at least opened, but it was clear that it wasn’t happy about it and might be difficult to close. Frenchy got out easily; Matt had to scramble across the car to make it out and Larry had a real adventure getting out of the back seat.

The three of them stood uncomfortably on the steep sand hill looking at the car. “I think you guys can get me moving if you give me a good push,” Frenchy said. “We ain’t done yet. We can still catch them fuckers.”

The return road allowed Jack to bring the Jeep down to a nearby road a quarter mile away from the hill-climb hill, and soon they were at the intersection that could take them back to the hill. “I hate to say this,” Jack said, “but curiosity overwhelms me.”

“Me, too,” Vixen said, her heart still pounding and almost unconscious from the relief after the adrenaline rush of the last few minutes. The rest of them were shaking a little from it, too, but Jack was a little less stimulated than the others. At least for now . . .

Jack turned out the lights on the Jeep, and quietly eased up the access road until he was in view of the hill. Heart pounding with the excitement, he reached down into his gear box and pulled out the 8x50s that usually rode there.

Binoculars do more than magnify; they collect light, and it makes things a little easier to see at night. Jack pointed his at the hill, and saw Frenchy’s car stuck about halfway up, with the three looking at it. “I think we better get going,” he said. “They might be able to push it out of there, but we’ve probably got a few minutes.”

“Then let’s get moving,” Vixen said. “I’ve had about all the excitement I can stand for one night.”

Frenchy got in the car, got the engine going again, while Matt and Larry got up on the front fenders to push. Frenchy rolled the window down, and yelled, “Any time you’re ready.”

Matt and Larry heaved on the car, and it began to move. “Shit,” Matt said. “That was easier than I thought it was going to be.”

Frenchy backed the car up enough to feel like he was out of the sand pit, then swung the wheel to one side, to turn around and drive forwards down the hill. “Frenchy! Stop! ” Matt yelled as soon as he saw what was going on, but it was too late. The speed of the car, plus being sideways on the steep hill was too much for it. Quite slowly, it rolled up on its side, hung there for an instant, and rolled on over – and over and over again, rolling down the hill at an angle, while there was nothing that Matt and Larry could do but stand there and watch.

It was even hard to walk down the sandy hill without falling. Matt and Larry did the best they could, half sliding, half walking, to make it to the bottom as quickly as possible. Even in the darkness it was no trick to find the car; it was laying upside down, well off the track for the hill climbers. “Frenchy!” Matt called. “Are you all right?”

It was a relief to hear him cursing: “Fuckin’ fuckers fuckin’ fucked up my fuckin’ car. I’m gonna fuckin’ get their asses for this.”

Now on the level, Matt and Larry raced over to the wreck, to find Frenchy squirming out of the open window, cussing up a storm. They did their best to help him out of the car, and soon had him on his feet. “You OK, Frenchy?” Larry asked.

“Fuck no, I’m not OK,” Frenchy snarled. “I’m fuckin’ pissed! Look at what them fuckin’ fuckers did to my wheels! Would you fuckin’ look at that shit?”

“Yeah, the car is real fucked up, Frenchy,” Matt said. “Are you hurt at all?”

That calmed Frenchy down for an instant. “Yeah, but not too bad,” he said. “I hurt here and there but I don’t fuckin’ think anything is broken, but I’m sure gonna do some fuckin’ breaking on them fuckers when I catch up with them.”

They stood there for a couple minutes with Frenchy snarling and ranting, before Larry raised the issue: “How the fuck are we going to get back to town?”

“Fuck,” Frenchy snorted. “I don’t even fuckin’ know where the fuckin’ town is. You guys got any idea where we are?”

“No idea,” Larry shrugged in the darkness.

“Me, either,” Matt agreed. “About forty fuckin’ miles from fuckin’ Fortymile, I guess.”

“That fucker led us all over the fuckin’ countryside,” Frenchy complained. “Fuck, I don’t want to have to fuckin’ walk back.”

“Me, either,” Larry agreed. “I know this sounds stupid, but if we could get the car back on its wheels, maybe it could at least run. That would beat walking.”

“Can’t hurt to try,” Matt agreed. The three of them headed over to the car, and did their best to turn it back on its wheels, but after considerable trying, it didn’t work. Finally, they gave up when Larry smelled gas dripping from the fill spout; it seemed like a fire was going to break out any second.

“Well, fuck,” Frenchy said as he stepped back from the car to look things over. “That fucker is totally fuckin’ totaled. I guess that means we walk back. Now, how the hell do we get there?”

“That road is where we came in,” Matt suggested “I guess that’s where we start.”

The Jeep and its occupants reached the state road about the time that Frenchy, Matt and Larry decided they’d have to walk back. It hadn’t been a short drive, but Jack had kept the Jeep moving quickly. The last couple miles of gravel was a long straightaway, and Alan had been looking back, trying to see through the dark and dust if they had been followed. “No telling,” he told Jack as they stopped at the stop sign before pulling onto the state road.

“Maybe we lost them,” Jack said. “If you don’t take the right corner back there at Six Forks you can wind up going all over hell’s half acre.”

“Yeah,” Vixen agreed. “I was wondering about that. You sure didn’t take what I thought was the obvious road.”

“Let’s not stay here and talk about it,” Summer suggested. “Let’s get back to town.”

“That may be the best idea I’ve heard all evening,” Jack said as he shifted out of four-wheel drive, let up on the clutch and turned onto the state road.

Alan kept watch out the back as they drove up the state road, and Jack kept his eyes on the rear view mirror as well. Nobody followed them off the truck trail as far as they could see it, and no lights came up behind them. Finally, Jack turned onto Central Avenue, beginning to think that they’d actually made it and wondering about what the next step would be. “Let’s all go to my place,” he suggested. “We need to let all the folks know, and we probably ought to call the cops.”

“Yeah,” Alan agreed. “They’ll probably want to talk to us all and it might as well be at one spot.”

It felt very, very good to pull into the driveway of Jack’s house, to get out of the Jeep, and to use what energy they could muster to stand up. The adrenaline dump had hit all of them hard by now, and they were shaking and fading from the release. Before he headed in, Jack patted the Jeep on the front fender. “You did good, guy,” he told it. “You saved our butts tonight.”

Jim and Barb Erikson could tell that something was wrong when the four kids walked into the house. “What happened to you?” Barb said in an alarmed voice.

“Frenchy and his buddies caught up with us out on the state road as we were coming back to town,” Jack said simply. “We were able to lose them back on the two- ruts, but it was pretty close there for a while.”

“Isn’t this ever going to end?” Jim Erikson snarled. “This is getting ridiculous. You kids get your stuff together. You’d better go out and hide out at the hunting camp like I thought earlier.”

“No,” Alan said. “Let’s just go call the cops.”

“Have they done anything to stop this shit?” Jim asked rhetorically. “Not hardly!”

“They haven’t done anything that we can see,” Alan said, “but this is the perfect time to find out how well that personal protection order stuff works. Frenchy was within ten feet of me tonight on purpose and looking to kick ass. I have three witnesses. That might just get him sent down to the slammer for a while.”

“Yeah,” Jim conceded. “It would be good to know if it works.”

“It’s the best way I can think of to find out,” Alan agreed. “If it works, then maybe we can relax for a while. If it doesn’t, then yeah, the hunting cabin sounds like a good idea, and maybe a new school for all of us while we’re thinking about it.”

While the families gathered at the Erikson house and waited for Sergeant Piwowar to arrive, Frenchy, Matt, and Larry reached the intersection of Six Forks. “Now, where the fuck do we go?” Matt asked.

They wandered around looking for a bit, without any real idea of which road to choose. “Well, it’s like this,” Frenchy said. “That fuckin’ road over there looks like it’s the most traveled. It probably fuckin’ leads to town, and there might be a little more chance that someone would come along so we could fuckin’ hitch a ride.”

Once it was stated, Matt and Larry couldn’t fault Frenchy’s logic. Matt thought the chances of hitching a ride on these backroads tonight were roughly about equal with hell freezing over; it wouldn’t surprise him to still be trying to hitch a ride when hunting season started. That wasn’t something he really wanted to say around Frenchy, who had been continuing his nonstop rant about how he was going to kick that fuckin’ Erikson’s ass as soon as he caught up with him. “Looks like about as good a choice as any,” he said.

“It’s got to be the right fuckin’ road,” Frenchy snorted as they started down it. “I mean, does the fuckin’ Pope shit in the fuckin’ woods?”

Sergeant Piwowar’s curiosity was definitely aroused by the story the kids had told him at the Erikson house. It hadn’t taken long there; he’d ascertained that the Jahnke kid had a legitimate complaint about the personal protection order having been breached. He listened with amusement to a brief version of the car chase through the woods, but his amusement increased when he heard of Frenchy getting the Eagle stuck on the hill- climb hill while in hot pursuit of the Jeep. “Boy,” he commented to the assembled group. “They better watch it out there. You get stalled on that hill and you could be in a world of trouble.”

“My heart bleeds for them,” Jim Erikson said sarcastically. “So what happens now?”

“As soon as we find him we’ll pick him up and lodge him at the jail,” Sergeant Piwowar replied. “There has to be some court action, but it’s fairly quick. My guess is that once we find him he won’t be an issue for at least thirty days.”

“How long is it going to take for you to pick him up?” Jack asked.

“Don’t know,” Sergeant Piwowar replied. “We have to find him first, but I can’t imagine it would take long. I think I’ll take a drive out to the hill-climb hill and see if they’re still stuck. That might be the simplest answer of all.”

So Fred took the patrol car out to the hill to check things out. He tried to take it easy; going down the dirt road would get the patrol car all messed up, which Wexler didn’t like very much, but this was in a good cause, after all.

Fred had been out to the hill many times before. He hadn’t been there much in recent years, but when he’d been younger he’d taken his four wheeler out there with the gang any number of times, so he knew how to get there.

He pulled into the parking area at the bottom of the hill. The place seemed deserted, but when he shined his spotlight up the hill he could see the telltale tracks of someone trying to back down the hill, getting sideways, and rolling. He could follow the marks of the car downward, until the light fell on the mangled mess of Frenchy’s car. A touch concerned, he got out of the car and went over to the wreck, but an inspection with a flashlight proved that there was no one in the car, and a further look around the area proved that there was no one else around, either.

They must be walking out, he thought, unless one of them had a cell phone and had called someone to pick them up. That seemed like the likely answer; most kids seemed to have cells these days; that would have accounted for not seeing the three walking out when he drove into the place.

He got back in the car and drove back out to Six Forks. If they’re walking out, he thought, what’s the odds that they took the right road? Not good, especially since he hadn’t seen them on the way in. He looked off to the north, and thought of the aimless network of roads that lay in that direction. Nothing to be done now, he thought, but the odds seemed good that a good portion of the next day would be spent driving obscure woods roads.

It was getting near to the time for the shift to change, so he figured he’d better be heading back in, anyway. Chief Wexler had that special project for the morning, and he hadn’t been too clear on what it was all about – Fred thought it might be drug related, but it could be anything, really. He decided to head back in, but made a mental note to tell Leo, the graveyard shift guy, to keep his eyes open for Frenchy and his buddies.

“Does anybody have any idea where the fuck we are?” Frenchy said listlessly as they faced another nameless intersection between two nameless roads. The anger, the exhaustion, and the adrenaline dump left him just about out of it. He hadn’t been saying much the last hour or two, and he was limping again, after having pretty much gotten over the kick to the knee on Sunday.

Larry wasn’t doing a hell of a lot better; both he and Frenchy could still feel the effects of getting hosed with pepper spray the night before. Earlier in the evening it hadn’t mattered all that much, but now he was just about out of it, too. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “We’re fuckin’ lost.”

“Well, which way do we fuckin’ go?” Frenchy snorted.

Matt, once again, was the only one thinking halfway clearly, at least partly since he had only been lightly hit with the pepper spray. He took a look around, and the sky seemed a little lighter off in one direction. “Take the right fork,” he said. “That might be the right direction.”

Charlie Wexler was in a good mood when he got into the office about six-thirty the next morning. Several pieces had to come together at the right time to pull off what he’d been planning, and now he was ready. He found Leo there, doing paperwork. “Anything happen overnight?” he asked.

“Not much,” Leo shook his head. “Fred caught kind of an interesting one a little before midnight. He wasn’t directly involved, though.” Leo went on to explain Fred’s call to the Erikson house and the things that he’d learned there, and his visit to the hillclimb hill. “Anyway, he figures the three of them are out getting their exercise in the woods someplace.”

“Shit,” Charlie said. “I figured those young punks would be home in bed with hangovers by now. That louses up my plan royally.”

“Louses up what plan?” Leo asked.

“I’ve got you here, Fred will be here in half an hour, and the sheriff is coming over with a couple guys. I’d planned on getting those young punks up and running them in on assault charges before they had a chance to wake up, and hauling the two girls they had with them in for questioning all at the same time so they couldn’t coordinate their stories. I didn’t say much since I didn’t want the word getting out.”

“If you’re talking about the Jahnke thing, I don’t know that you’ve actually got that clean cut a case,” Leo commented. “But it’s clear that you have LeDroit dead to rights on busting that PPO.”

“That’s something,” Charlie sighed. “Maybe it’ll still work, but it screws up the timing royally. I guess I’d better call Steve and tell him it’s on the back burner after all.”

The sun was up now. It was a little easier to walk when they could see where they were going, but all three of them were tired, hungry, thirsty, and beyond mere exhaustion. They were not really walking anymore; it was more staggering and stumbling along yet another anonymous two-rut. Matt didn’t have the skyglow of the town lights to guide them toward town any longer, but he was pretty sure that town was toward the east, which happened to be the direction the sun was rising. He didn’t have it much more clearly thought out than that, but was of the opinion that if they could find a stream or a swamp or a lake they should stop for a while. They could, maybe get some sleep, have something to drink, and pull themselves together a bit before continuing to search for civilization.

Matt didn’t have much other idea than the thought that the town lay to the east to tell where he was. He really hadn’t had much of any idea where he was since they’d turned off onto the two-rut off the state road the night before. He was really more looking for something to drink than he was looking to find his way out of there.

They came around a corner, to find themselves near the top of a small hill. They trudged onward for quite a ways before any of them noticed something: there was a road crossing at the bottom of the hill, and it was paved.

Under the circumstances, since he’d brought everybody out for what had turned out to be a wild goose chase, Charlie thought that he at least owed everyone breakfast for wasting their time. Thus it was that there were three patrol cars sitting in the parking lot at the Spearfish Lake Café. The officers were inside discussing such important law enforcement topics as the prospects for the Packers, the current state of the Cubs, and the lousy shape of the deer herd with hunting season not that far off.

Charlie was feeling a little down. He’d figured that he had a good chance to sew things up neatly this morning, but now the opportunity was gone since the perps had managed to get themselves lost. He and Sheriff Stoneslinger had briefly discussed sending a patrol car or two out into the network of woods roads to look for the three. Since it was a city case and the perps were expected to be out in the county there were some jurisdictional issues that more involved how bad people wanted to get the patrol cars messed up than anything else. “I’d say not to bother,” Stoneslinger said. “It’d just be a waste of time and money. They’re probably going to turn up here in town sometime today.”

“Yeah, but still,” Charlie protested, “I’d like to get those people off the streets.”

“I can understand,” Stoneslinger shrugged, “but it’s like shit, it all comes out in the end. So what do you think’s going to happen to the Pack this year?”

“Good question,” Charlie replied, shaking his head. “Sorry, Steve. My mind is still on this case. It fries me when something like that slips through my fingers.”

“Maybe not,” Sergeant Piwowar said. “Would you look at who’s walking up the road.”

“I’ll be damned,” Charlie said. “Sometimes you go to the bear, and sometimes the bear comes to you.”

“Let’s stop off and at least get something to drink,” Larry suggested, seeing the Spearfish Lake Café. “I’m about fucking ready to die.”

“Yeah,” Frenchy said, too tired and dispirited to be using his favorite word. “You’d have thought that at least someone would have picked us up.”

“I guess we could stop,” Matt said. “Christ, I didn’t know I could get this fuckin’ tired.”

“Hey, Dorothy!” Chief Wexler called. “You want to get our checks together? We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Frenchy, Matt, and Larry were just getting set to walk in the front door of the Spearfish Lake Café when they met a herd of policemen coming out, heading for their cars. They didn’t have time to do anything but wait for the cops to pass. The actual apprehension was over in an instant; a pair of cops each grabbed one of them as they passed, and handcuffed them almost instantly.

“Hey, what the fuck?” Matt protested.

“We’re going to give you a ride downtown,” Chief Wexler told them. “We have warrants for your arrests on various charges. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

“Can’t we even fuckin’ get a glass of water?” Frenchy pleaded.

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