Sudden prey ld-8

by John Sandford

  ''It's over on the southeast side… you got a pencil?''

  As Lucas took it down, Del asked, ''You want me to come along?''

  Lucas shook his head. ''It's probably bullshit. Half the dopers in town will be calling, trying to fake us out. Go see Cheryl.''

  ''They'll let me in pretty soon,'' Del said. The light on his watch face flickered in the dark. ''I gotta be there when she wakes up.''

  ''Keep an eye out,'' Lucas said. ''The crazy fucks could be around the hospital.''

  LUCAS, BEGINNING TO FEEL THE WEIGHT OF ALL THE sleepless hours, looked at the house and wondered: called to a semi-slum duplex, in the early-morning darkness.

  An ambush?

  ''What do you think?'' he asked.

  ''You wait here,'' the patrol cop said. ''We'll go knock.''

  The two patrol cops, one tall and one even taller, were wearing heavy-duty armor, capable of defeating rifle bullets. Two more cops sat in the alley behind the house, covering the back door.

  Lucas stood by the car, waiting, while the cops approachedthe door. One of them peeked at a window, then suddenly broke back toward the door, and Lucas saw that it was opening. A woman, gaunt, black-haired, poked her head out and said something to the cops. The tall cop nodded, waved Lucas in, and then he and the taller cop went inside.

  Lucas caught them just inside the door. The taller cop whispered, ''Her husband's in the back bedroom, and he keeps a gun on the floor next to the bed.

  We're invited in, so we can take him.''

  Lucas nodded, and the two cops, walking softly as they could over the tattered carpet, eased down the hallway, with the woman a step behind them. At the last door, the lead cop gestured and the woman nodded, and the cop reached inside the dark room and flipped on the light. Lucas heard him say, ''Police,'' and then,

  ''Get the gun,'' and then, ''Hey, wake up. Wake up. Hey you, wake up.''

  Then a man's voice, high and squeaky, ''What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?''

  The woman walked back down the hall toward Lucas. She was five-six, and weighed, he thought, maybe ninety pounds, with cheekbones like Frisbees. She said, ''I heard you're putting up the money.''

  ''If your information is any good,'' he said.

  The two patrol cops prodded her husband out into the hallway. Still mostly asleep, he was wearing stained Jockey shorts and a befuddled expression. His hands were cuffed behind his back.

  ''Oh, the information is good,'' the woman said to Lucas. Then, ''You remember me?''

  Lucas looked at her for a moment, saw something familiar in the furry thickness of her dark brows, mentally put twenty-five pounds on her and said, ''Yeah. You used to work up at the Taco Bell, the one off Riverside. You were

  … let's see, you were hanging out with Sammy Cerdan and his band. You were what-you played with them. Bass?''

  ''Yeah, bass,'' she said, pleased that he remembered.

  He was going to ask, ''What happened?'' but he knew.

  Still smiling, a rickety smile that looked as though it might slide off her face onto the floor, she said, ''Yeah, yeah, good times.''

  Her husband said, ''What the hell is going on? Who's this asshole?''

  The tall cop said, ''He had a bag of shit under his mattress.''

  He tossed a Baggie to Lucas: the stuff inside, enough to fill a teaspoon, looked like brown sugar.

  ''This is fuckin' illegal. I want to see a search warrant,'' the husband said.

  ''You shouldn't of hid the bag, Dex,'' the woman said to him. To Lucas, ''He never gave me nothin'. I'm boostin' shit out of Target all day and he never give me nothin'.''

  ''Kick you in the ass,'' Dexter shouted at her, and he struggled against the taller cop, and tried to kick at her. She dodged the kick and gave him the finger.

  ''Shut up,'' Lucas said to him. To the woman: ''Where are they?''

  ''My brother rented them a house, but he doesn't know who they are. The one guy,

  Butters? He was here asking about crooked cops and houses he could rent. As soon as I saw on TV, I knew that was him.''

  ''You cunt,'' her husband shouted.

  Lucas turned to him and smiled: ''The next time you interrupt, I'm gonna pull your fuckin' face off.''

  The husband shut up and the woman said, ''I want the money.''

  ''If this pans out, you'll get it. What's the address?''

  ''I want something else.''

  ''What?''

  ''When my mom took the kids, they kicked me off welfare.''

  ''So?''

  ''So I want back on.''

  Lucas shrugged. ''I'll ask. If you can show them the kids, then. ..''

  ''I don't want the kids back. I just want back on the roll,'' the woman said.

  ''You gotta fix it.''

  ''I'll ask, but I can't promise,'' Lucas said. ''Now, where are they?''

  ''Over in Frogtown,'' she said. ''I got the address written down.''

  ''What about the cop?'' Lucas asked. ''Who'd you send him to?''

  The woman shook her head. ''We didn't know any cop. Dex just gave him names of some dopers who might know.''

  Lucas turned to her husband. ''What dopers?''

  ''Fuck you,'' Dex said.

  ''Gonna give you some time to think about it,'' Lucas said, poking a finger in

  Dexter's face. ''Down in the jail. For the shit.'' He held up the bag. ''If you think about it fast enough, maybe you can buy out of the murder charge.''

  ''Fuck that, I want a lawyer,'' Dex said.

  ''Take him,'' Lucas said to the patrolmen. To the woman: ''Gimme the address.''

  LACHAISE WOKE UP SOBER BUT HUNG OVER. HE STOOD up, carefully, walked down to the bathroom, closed the door, found the light switch and flicked it on, took a leak, flushed the toilet.

  He'd been sleeping in his jeans, T-shirt and socks. He pulled up the shirt to check the bandage on his ribs, looking in the cracked mirror over the sink, but saw no signs of blood, just the dried iodine compound. Best of all, he didn't feel seriously injured: he'd been hurt in bike accidents and fights, and he knew the coming-apart feeling of a bad injury. This just plain hurt.

  The house was silent. He stepped back out of the bathroom, walked down the hall to the next room and pushed the door open. Sandy was curled on the bed, wrapped in a blanket.

  ''You asleep?'' he asked quietly.

  There was no response, but he thought she might be awake. He was about to ask again, when there was a noise in the hall. He stepped back, and saw Martin padding down the hallway, a. 45 in his hand. When Martin saw LaChaise, his forehead wrinkled.

  ''You all right?'' Martin asked.

  ''I'm sore, but I been a lot worse,'' LaChaise said. ''Where's Ansel?''

  ''He went to see about that Davenport kid.''

  ''Jesus Christ, that's my job,'' LaChaise said.

  Martin's mouth jerked; he might have been trying to smile. ''He figured you'd think that. But he thought it might be a trap and he figured, you know, you're the valuable one. You're the brains of the operation.''

  ''Shoulda told me,'' LaChaise growled.

  ''You was drunk.''

  Sandy pushed herself up. Beneath the blanket, LaChaise noticed, she'd been wrapped in a parka. ''What's going on?''

  ''Ansel went after the cop's kid,'' LaChaise said. He looked at her in the long coat, and said, ''What's wrong with you? What's the parka for?''

  ''It's like a meat locker in here,'' she said, crossing her arms and shivering.

  ''Bullshit: she wants to be ready to run,'' Martin growled.

  LaChaise turned to her: ''You run, we'll cut your fuckin' throat. And if you did get away…'' He dug in his shirtpocket, and came up with a stack of photographs. Two men sitting at a table, one black, one white. LaChaise riffled them at her like a deck of cards. ''We got a cop on the string. The only way he gets out is if we get away, or we're all dead. If you get away from us, and go to the cops, he'll have to come after you, in case you know his name. Think about that: we've got a cop who'l
l kill you, and you don't know who it is.'' He put the photos back in his pocket.

  Sandy shivered. ''I'm not thinking about running,'' she said. ''I'm just cold.''

  ''Bullshit,'' Martin snorted.

  ''Whyn't you put some shoes on?'' LaChaise said. ''Let's go out.''

  ''Go out?'' she asked doubtfully. She looked toward a window: it was pitch black outside. Then she looked back at LaChaise. ''Dick, you're hurt.. .''

  ''Hell, it ain't that bad. There's no bleeding. And I can't be cooped up in here,'' LaChaise said. Despite the headache, he was almost cheerful.

  ''I'd rather stay here.''

  ''Don't be an asshole,'' he snapped. ''Let's go out and see what's cookin'. One of you can drive, I'll sit in the back.''

  WHILE SANDY AND MARTIN GOT READY, LACHAISE turned on the television, clicked around the channels and found nothing of interest but a weather forecast. The snow would diminish during the morning, and the sun might peek through in the afternoon. Big trouble was cranking up in the Southwest, but it was several days away.

  ''Cold,'' Martin grunted, coming back from his bedroom. He was wearing his camo parka.

  ''Better for us, since they plastered pictures of me and Butters all over hell,'' LaChaise said. ''Less people on the street.''

  ''Nothing must've happened with Ansel. They'd be going on all channels if he'd done something.''

  ''Maybe backed off,'' LaChaise said. ''Maybe nothin' there.''

  Martin looked at Sandy: ''You ready?''

  ''I'm not sure about this,'' she said. ''If somebody sees us.. .''

  ''We're just gonna ride around,'' LaChaise said. ''Maybe go to a drive-through and get some Egg McMuffins or something.''

  ''Gonna be light soon,'' Martin said.

  BUTTERS GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE AND SAW THE SNOWFREE spot where Martin's truck had been parked, and the tracks leading away. Hadn't been gone for more than a couple of minutes, he thought: wonder what's going on? He parked Sandy's truck over the same spot and went inside. A note in the middle of the entry floor said, ''Cabin fever. Gone an hour. We'll check back.''

  Butters shook his head: Cabin fever wasn't a good enough reason to go out. Of course, he'd been out. Still. LaChaise had once saved his life, LaChaise was as solid a friend as Butters had ever known… but nobody had ever claimed that he was a genius.

  WHEN LUCAS ARRIVED AT THE PARKING LOT OFF UNIVERSITY and Lexington, the St. Paul cops were putting together the entry team under a lieutenant named Allport. Four plainclothes Minneapolis cops, all from homicide or vice, were standing around the lot, watching the St. Paul guys getting set.

  Allport spotted Lucas and walked over to shake hands: ''How're you doing?''

  ''Anything we can do to help?''

  Allport shook his head. ''We got it under control.'' He paused. ''A couple of your guys were pretty itchy to go in with us.''

  ''I'll keep them clear,'' Lucas said. ''Maybe we could sit out on the perimeter.''

  Allport nodded: ''Sure. We're a little thin on the ground 'cause we're moving fast. We want to get going before we have too many people on the street.'' He looked up into the sky, which seemed as dark as ever with snow clouds. But dawn was coming: you couldn't see it on the horizon, but there was more light around.

  ''Why don't you take your guys up on the east side, up on Grotto. You'll be a block off the house, you can get down quick if something happens.''

  ''You got it,'' Lucas said. ''Thanks for letting us in.''

  ''So let's go,'' Allport said.

  Lucas rounded up the Minneapolis cops: ''There'll be two squads on Grotto, which is a little thin. We'll want to spread out along the street. St. Paul will bring us in as soon as the entry team pops the place.''

  A sex cop named Lewiston said, ''St. Paul don't have a lot of guys out here.''

  ''There's a time problem,'' Lucas said. ''They want to get going before they have too many civilians on the street.''

  Lewiston nodded, accepting the logic, but Stadic said, ''I wish we were doing the entry. These fuckin' shitkickers…''

  Lucas grinned and said, ''Hey.'' Then: ''We don't even know if it's anything.

  Could be bullshit.''

  The entry team left, followed by the other cops in squads and their personal cars, a morose procession down through the narrow streets of Frogtown, staying two blocks from the target, walking in the last block.

  STADIC HUNG BACK AS THEY WALKED, HIS SHOTGUN under his arm. He'd been caught up in the rush around theoffice, when word got back that Davenport's source might have something. Now he was worried: if they got tight on the house, they just might pull some people out of it alive…

  Davenport pushed on ahead, walking fast with two other Minneapolis cops. This was his first chance, and probably his last: Stadic stepped behind a dying elm, took his cellular from his pocket and pushed the speed-dial button.

  ''Yeah?'' LaChaise answered in two seconds, as though he'd been holding the phone.

  ''Get out of there,'' Stadic rasped. ''There's a St. Paul entry team coming in right now. Go out the back, go east, they're thin up there. Get out.''

  After a second of silence, LaChaise said, ''We ain't there.''

  ''What?''

  ''We're in the truck. Where're you at?''

  ''Old house in St. Paul, north of the freeway a few blocks

  … If that's your place, you stay away. I can't talk, I gotta go.''

  He heard LaChaise say ''Shit'' and then Stadic turned the phone off and hurried to catch the others.

  BUTTERS HAD WALKED UP THE STAIRS TOWARD THE bathroom when he glanced out a back window and saw the man dart through the streetlight a block over. The motion was quick, but heavy. Not a jogger, a soldier. He knew instantly that the cops were at the door.

  He was still wearing his camo parka. He ran light-footedly down the stairs to the hall, where Martin had stacked the weapons in an open hall closet, out of sight but easy to get to. Butters grabbed the AR-15, already loaded, and four loaded magazines. He jammed the mags in his pocket and jacked a shell into the chamber and kept going, right to the back door.

  The rear of the house was still dark, and he listened for amoment. He couldn't hear anything, but the door was the place they'd come. He turned back, crossed the house to the darker side away from the back door, went into Martin's bedroom, and tried a window. Jammed. He went to the next, turning the twist lock, lifting it. There was a vague tearing sound as old paint ripped away; the smell of it tickled his nose, but he had been quiet enough, he thought. The oldfashioned storm windows opened behind some kind of withered, leafless bush.

  He looked out, saw nobody, pushed open the storm window and peeked. Still nothing, too dark. He took a breath and snaked over the windowsill into the snow behind the hedge.

  The snow crunched beneath his weight where dripping water from the eaves had stippled the surface with ice. He lay still for a moment, listening. Listening was critical in the dark: he'd spent weeks in tree stands, turning his head to the tweaks and rustles of the early morning, the deer moving back to bedding areas, the foxes and coyotes hunting voles, the wood ducks crunching through dried-out oak leaves, the trees defrosting themselves in the early sun, the grass springing up in the morning. Ansel Butters had heard corn grow; and now he heard footsteps in the snow, coming from the back, and then more, from the front.

  Butters went down the side of the house, listening to the crunch of feet coming in: they wouldn't hear him, he decided. They were making too much noise on their own, city people in the snow, carrying heavy weapons. He went left, to the house next door, pressed himself against its weathered siding. Trying to see, trying to hear…

  And here they came, through the backyard, three or four of them, he thought.

  Staying low, he moved to the corner of the house, then around it, to the east.

  He really had no choice about which way to go…

  The loudspeaker came like a thunderbolt:

  ''Halt. By the house, freeze…''

  And he
thought, Night scope. Before the last words were out, he fixed on the position of the men coming up from the back.

  He could sense the motion.

  Butters ran sideways and fired a long, ripping burst across the group, thirty rounds pounding downrange, his face flashing in the muzzle flash like a wagon spoke in a strobe light.

  The return fire was short of him, of where he had been. Moving all the time, he punched out the magazine and slammed in another, looking for muzzle flashes, squirting quick three- and four-shot bursts at them, more to suppress than to hit.

  And still the return fire was short…

  Then he was behind a garage; he sensed something in front of him and slowed just in time. He touched and then vaulted a four-foot chain-link fence, crossed a yard, went over the next fence, pushed through a hedge, scratching his face, took another fence, then another, heard garbage cans crashing behind him, screams, another burst of gunfire which went somewhere else, more screams.

  He could hear himself breathing, gasping for air, trying to remember about how many shells would be left; he thought maybe six or eight, plus the third magazine in his pocket.

  He felt good, he was moving, operating, he was on top of it.

  Heading east.

  THE LOUDSPEAKER AND THE GUNFIRE TOOK THEM BY surprise, Lucas and the other cops standing behind cars, talking quietly among themselves. They stiffened, turned, guns coming out, men crouching behind cars. Then radios began talking up and down the block, and Lucas, running to a St. Paul squad, said, ''What? What?''

  ''Shit, one of them's out, he's maybe coming this way,'' a patrol sergeant said.

  Lucas ran back toward his own people, touched them, ''Watch it, watch it, he could be coming…''

  Butters ran hard as he could, made it to the end of the block, passed between two houses, and in the dark space between them, ran almost headlong into a small tree. The blow knocked him down, but he held on to the rifle. Blood trickled into his mouth, and the sting told him that he'd cut his lip, probably badly. He crawled toward the street, gathered himself.

  Across the way, he could hear people talking; more gathered behind him. He had no choice. He slapped the magazine once to make sure it was seated, and ran out into the street.

  There: a cop-someone-dead ahead, behind a squad car, not much to see, turning toward him, crouching, hand coming up…