Sudden Prey

by John Sandford

  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...

  Butters, still running, fired a burst at the cop behind the car, saw him go down.

  Another cop opened up from his right, then a third, and then he was hit: a stinging blow, as if somebody had struck his bare butt with a hickory switch. He knew what it was, and even as he returned the fire he passed through the line of cars, and cops were firing into each other as they tried to get him, men spilling themselves into the snow to get away from the bullets, others screaming...

  And Butters ran.

  A house, straight ahead, with lights on. And there was some pain now, more than an ache, more like a fire, in his thigh. He ran up four steps of the porch of the lighted house, to a stone-faced entry and an almost full-length glass pane in the front door. He fired a short burst at the glass, blew it out, and went through the door.

  A man in pajamas stood at the bottom of a stairway; a woman stood at the top, looking down.

  Butters pointed the gun at the woman and screamed at her: ``Get down here.''

  And a kid yelled, ``What? What's going on? Mom?''

  LUCAS SAW HIM COMING, DOWN TO THE RIGHT. HE fired twice, thought he might have hit him once, but the man was very fast, and ran in an odd, broken, jerky two-step that made him hard to track, especially with the bad light. The man fired a burst and Lucas felt a hard, scratching rip at his hairline, not hard, like a slug, but ripping, like a frag. Then Butters went through the line of cops and Lucas could see muzzle flashes coming at him and he dropped, screaming, ``Hold it, Jesus...''

  And when the firing stopped, he lurched up on his elbows in time to see Butters sprint up the porch steps, and the muzzle flash from the gun as he went through the glass door...

  ``Around back, somebody around back,'' Lucas shouted.

  Two St. Paul cops, frozen by the fire, broke toward the side of a nearby house, heading toward the back, and Lucas and another Minneapolis cop-Lewiston-moved in toward the porch.

  ``Take him?'' Lewiston asked.

  ``Get in tight,'' Lucas said. ``Let's...''

  ``You're hit,'' Lewiston said. ``There's blood running out of your head.''

  ``Just cut myself, I think,'' Lucas said. ``You go right...''

  BUTTERS POINTED THE AR-15 AT THE WOMAN ON THE stairs and screamed, ``Get down here.''

  And then the kid called, ``Mom?''

  The woman shouted, ``Jim, go back in your room. Jimmy...''

  Butters couldn't think. His leg was on fire, and the man in the pajamas was frozen, the woman was yelling at the kid: a car rolled by outside and he turned, looked that way, couldn't see anything. The woman was shouting at the kid and Butters yelled at her, ``Get your ass down here, goddamnit, or I'll fuck your old man up...''

  He pointed the gun at the pajama man and the woman came down the stairs, red-faced, terrified, watching his eyes. She wore a flannel nightgown, and something about it, the nightgown, the man's pajamas...

  Then the kid came to the head of the stairs. He was wearing a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, skinny bare legs, and he looked frightened and his hair stood up where his head had been on a pillow.

  And Butters remembered: the winter the cops came, and they got his mother and his old man out of bed, and Butters had come to the stairs in his shorts, just like this... He remembered the fear, and the guns the cops wore on their hips, and the way his old man seemed to crawl to them, because of the guns, and his mother's fear... They stank of it. He stank of it.

  And all of this was exactly the same, but he had the gun.

  ``Don't hurt us,'' the woman said.

  ``Fuck this,'' Butters said.

  He popped the magazine from the rifle, slapped in the third full one, checked to make sure that the half-empty one was ready, easy to reach in his pocket.

  ``You go back to bed, kid,'' he said.

  He ran straight out the door, across the porch, at the two cop cars that were parked up the street to the right. There were two men close by, one left, one right, and the one to the right looked familiar and he decided to take that one.

  He turned toward Lucas and raised the rifle, and saw Lucas's gun hand coming up but knew that he was a quarterinch ahead...

  STADIC WAS COMING UP THE MIDDLE, BUT WAS STILL thirty yards out, when Butters came through the door. Davenport and Lewiston were too close to the porch, and below it, to see Butters as he came through, but Stadic, back in the dark, had just enough time to set his feet and lift the shotgun.

  Butters turned toward Davenport, the gun coming up. Davenport reacted in a fraction of a second, and maybe an entire lifetime, behind Butters. The shotgun reached out, a cylinder of flame, reached almost to Butters's face, it seemed.

  And blew it off.

  Butters went down like an empty sack.

  THE COPS ALL AROUND FROZE, LIKE A STUCK VIDEOTAPE. After one second, they started moving again. Radios scratching the background. Everything, Stadic thought, moving in slow motion. Moving toward Butters, Davenport looking at him...

  ``Man,'' Davenport said. ``He had me. You saved my ass.''

  And Davenport clapped him on the shoulder. Back in the furthest recess of his numbed mind, Stadic thought: That's two.

  LUCAS CLAPPED THE WIDE-EYED STADIC ON THE SHOULDER and then ran down the block toward the car where a cop had been hit. Lucas had seen him go down in the flash of fire from Butters, a fact stored in the back of his head until he could do something about it.

  At that moment, a helicopter swept overhead, pivoted around in a tight circle, and they were bathed in light. A cameraman was sitting in the open door, filming the scene in the street.

  Two St. Paul cops reached the downed man just as Lucas did. Lucas knelt: the man had been hit in the head, and the top of his skull was misshapen. There was blood out of his nose and ears, and his eyes were dilated, but still moving.

  ``Gotta take him, can't wait for an ambulance,'' Lucas shouted at one of the St. Paul cops. ``Get him in the car...''

  Together they picked up the wounded man and put him in the backseat of a squad; one of the St. Paul cops got in the back with the wounded man, and the driver took off, the back doors flapping like big ears as he turned the corner, followed by the lights from the chopper.

  ``Jesus Chri
st, get the fuckin' chopper out of here,'' Lucas yelled at another of the St. Paul cops, a sergeant. ``Get them out of here.''

  The sergeant was leaning against the hood of a squad, and he suddenly turned, head down, and vomited into the street. Lucas started away, thinking now: the house. More people coming in? What happened down there?

  Then the sergeant said, ``We just never had a chance to say anything...''

  ``Yeah, yeah...'' And he ran back down the street to the body of the shooter. Butters's face had been obliterated by the shotgun. He was gone.

  All right-the house.

  He stood, and stepped that way, and saw more running figures, cops, coming in. Another St. Paul lieutenant, a patrol officer, one he didn't recognize.

  ``What happened... ?''

  ``Got him, and we got one of your men shot. He's bad, he's on his way in.''

  ``Jesus Christ.''

  ``What happened at the house?''

  ``Jesus Christ, who got hit?'' The lieutenant looked around crazily. ``Who's hurt?''

  ``The house, the house,'' Lucas said. ``What happened?''

  ``Empty. Nobody there. Guns,'' the lieutenant said.

  ``Shit.''

  The lieutenant ran down to the patrol sergeant, who'd stopped vomiting, and was standing shakily against the hood of the squad. ``Who was it, Bill, who was it?''

  LUCAS LOOKED DOWN AT BUTTERS. GONE.

  He squatted, felt under Butters's butt. The dead man kept his wallet on the left. Lucas lifted it out, opened it, started riffling through the paper: a Tennessee driver's license, current. The picture was right.

  Stadic came around the car, his eyes wide, staring at the dead man. ``I hope I just, I hope I just...''

  ``You did perfect,'' Lucas said. Lewiston came up, and Lucas said, ``You okay?''

  ``Fine. Freaked out.''

  ``Why don't you run Andy into Ramsey?'' Lucas suggested.

  ``I'm okay,'' Stadic said.

  ``You're tuning out,'' Lucas said. ``You need to go sit somewhere, get your blood pressure down.''

  Stadic looked at him, a flat, confused stare, and then suddenly he nodded: ``Yeah. Okay. Let's do it.''

  He used a sharp command voice, out of place, out of time. Lucas looked at the other cop: ``Take him.'' And, as they walked away, ``Hey: Thanks again.''

  LUCAS WENT BACK TO THE WALLET, LOOKING FOR ANYTHING: a scrap of paper with an address, a note, a name, but Butters carried almost nothing: a Mobil credit card, a Sears card, a Tennessee hunting license, the driver's license, an old black-and-white picture of a woman, wearing a dress fromthe '40s, and a more recent, color photograph of a Labrador retriever. Not much to work with.

  The lieutenant ran up, said, ``Dispatch is calling the FAA, they'll try to get these assholes out of here.'' They both looked up at the chopper, and then the lieutenant said, looking at Butters's body, ``You know how lucky we are?''

  ``What?'' Lucas looked up. His scalp had begun to hurt, as though somebody had pressed a hot wire against it.

  ``He was in that house,'' the lieutenant said, and Lucas turned to look.

  A man, a woman and a kid were looking out through the shattered door, past a patrol cop who'd run up to see that everybody was okay. The woman kept pushing the kid back, but the kid wanted to see. ``If he'd holed up in there, there wouldn't have been a goddamn thing we could do. We could've had some kind of nightmare out here.''

  ``Yeah...'' And Lucas suddenly laughed, all the tension of the last ten minutes slipping away. ``But look what he did to your cars.''

  The lieutenant looked at the car, which showed a ragged line of holes starting in the front fender and running all the way to the back bumper. A couple of slugs had grooved the roof, the windows were gone. The lieutenant did a little Stan Laurel walk down the length of the car and said, ``They hurt m' auto-mobile, Ollie.''

  ``I guess. He didn't miss a single piece of sheet metal,'' Lucas said.

  ``Sure, it's a little rough,'' the lieutenant said, switching to a car salesman's voice. ``But look at the tires: the tires are in A-1 condition.''

  They both laughed, shaking their heads. They laughed from relief, the lifting of the fear, the safety of the other cops and the people in the house.

  Another chopper, TV3 this time, arriving late, swept over the house with its lights and beating blades and caught them standing over the body of Ansel Butters, looking at the car, laughing, unable to stop.

  TWELVE

  THE DAWN CAME LIKE A SHEET OF DULL STEEL PUSHED over the eastern horizon, cold, sullen and stupid. Fifteen cop cars blocked off the neighborhood, and yellow crime-scene tape wrapped the trail along which Butters had fled. A halfdozen cops were walking the route, looking for anything he might have thrown from his pockets-a piece of paper, a receipt, anything.

  Tennessee cops had been to Butters's broken-down acreage since the night before, when his prints had been nailed down. They'd discovered what looked like a fresh grave in a decrepit apple orchard, opened it and found a Labrador retriever, shot once in the head.

  ``Old dog, had bones sticking out of his back, all gray on his muzzle,'' a Tennessee state cop told Lucas. ``Probably shot him a couple of weeks ago. It's been cold enough that the body's still intact.''

  Lucas, standing in the street next to the shot-up cop car, was impatient with the dog information: ``We need anything in the house that might point to associates,'' Lucas said.``Any piece of paper, phone records, anything.''

  ``We're tearing the place apart,'' the Tennessee cop said. ``But when we saw the grave, we thought we had to do something about it.''

  ``Screw the grave, we gotta find out where he's been and who he was hanging out with...''

  ``We're watching you on TV, we know you got a problem,'' the Tennessee cop said dryly. ``We're turning over everything.''

  LUCAS RECOGNIZED THE TRUCK THE MOMENT HE SAW it: the truck that had slowed through the intersection. He couldn't be absolutely sure, but he was sure enough. Butters had been on his way in to Small's house. Whoever had called him had known, had saved Sarah's life, and probably Jennifer's and Small's and the boy's...

  ``Belongs to Elmore Darling,'' the St. Paul cops told him when he walked up. ``Wisconsin cops are on the way out to his house.''

  ``Goddamnit,'' Lucas said. The woman had suckered them. They'd had her, they'd let her go, and here was her truck.

  The truck produced gas charge slips, maps, empty soda cans, and dozens of prints. The guns at the house had produced nothing but fragments of prints: they'd all been carefully polished with cleaning rags. There were a few good prints on a hunting bow, and more on some hunting arrows. The prints were on the way to the FBI.

  St. Paul crime-scene guys had shrouded the truck's license plate from cameras, and asked the local media not to mention it, but the word was going to leak, and probably soon. If the Dunn County cops got to the Darlings' place soon enough, they might surprise them, and anyone staying with them.Lucas had to smother an impulse to run over to Wisconsin, tobe in on the raid. The Wisconsin cops would do well enough without him.

  As Lucas ran through the bits and pieces of paper coming out of the van, all carefully cased in Ziploc bags, Del wandered up.

  ``How's Cheryl?'' Lucas asked.

  ``Hurtin'. They were giving her another sedative when I left. Christ, I heard about this, I couldn't believe it.''

  ``It was interesting,'' Lucas said.

  ``What happened to your head?''

  ``Cut, somehow. Nothing much.''

  ``You're bleeding like a stuck pig.''

  ``Nah...'' He wiped at his hair, and got fresh blood on the palm of his hand.

  ``Did you hear about the St. Paul cop that got shot? Waxman?'' Del asked.

  Lucas was trying to find a place to wipe the blood, stopped, and asked, ``I didn't know his name... What?''

  ``Just came on the radio: he died.''

  ``Ah, shit.'' Lucas looked down the street. Everywhere, the St. Paul cops were clustering. The word was getting out.

  `
`Radio says they never got him to the table,'' Del said. ``He was barely alive when he went in the door. They say he was gone thirty seconds later.''

  ROUX CAME THROUGH WITH THE ST. PAUL CHIEF AND found Lucas and Del eating cinnamon mini-doughnuts at the house. The guns from the closet had been carefully laid out on the living-room floor, waiting for a ride downtown.