Storm Prey

by Sandford, John

  “So, we’ve got the snow and the dark going for us. We’ll set up outside, around the house, and wait for him to come out. If Miz Wilson comes out first, we’ll move her out. Then we’ll just see—but we’re putting the guy’s name and ID photo on TV, so we figure he’ll be moving early. He needs to get away from here.

  “We’re all going to go out and get set up, and then half of us will peel off and come back here and get warm and comfortable. We’ll change over every hour so nobody gets too cold. The whole idea, now, is to stay out of sight ...”

  Then there were questions, and when the questions stopped, Nelson said, “Everybody be cool. You all know about the grenades, and the crime-scene guys dug some buckshot out of the hospital walls this evening, so the guy’s got a shotgun going for himself. We think he’s hurt, but we don’t know how bad. The idea is to corner him, squeeze him. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets hurt.”

  THEY WENT OUT in four squads, like an army patrol, circling the blocks to come in from all sides of the house, Lucas tramping along with Nelson. The St. Paul Park cops took them in, and they set up at the corners of the house, a lot away, behind whatever barriers or cover was available. A light burned in the second-floor window, behind translucent bathroom glass, but there was no sign of movement.

  Nelson and Lucas set up behind a couple of large cottonwood trees across the street from the front door; they could see both the door and the front of the detached garage. Nothing happened for a half hour, when Nelson took a radio call, leaned over and said, “The Minneapolis guy is here. Sherrill.”

  “She’s always wanted to be one of the guys,” Lucas said, and, “I’m gonna sneak back there.”

  MARCY HAD BROUGHT two other investigators with her. She was wearing a ski jacket and had a pair of ski pants, rolled into a bundle, on the floor by her feet. She saw Lucas come in the door and walked over.

  “Should have called,” she said.

  “It’s more our jurisdiction than yours, but I don’t want to fight about it. We figured out who he probably was—”

  “I want to hear about that ...”

  And another cop, from St. Paul Park, called. “We got media. We’re gonna hold them here.”

  “Ah, man,” Lucas said. “Somebody’s been on the phone.”

  “Not me,” Marcy said. They stepped out in the darkened hallway and walked down to the front door, and saw a media truck from Channel Three, two guys standing outside talking to two cops.

  “Well, here’s your shot—you handle them,” Lucas said. “Be nice.”

  SHE WAS BACK in five minutes: “They say it was a tip, but they know it’s a SWAT thing, and they know it’s the hospital grenade guy.”

  “So, what’d you tell them?”

  “I told them what’s going on, threatened them nicely, and they’ll wait here until something happens.”

  “Any more coming?” Lucas asked.

  “They don’t know.”

  Three more stations rolled up in the next forty-five minutes. They let the reporters in the City Hall just to get them off the street. Then Ruffe Ignace, the cop reporter for the Star-Tribune, showed up: “Lucas Davenport and the prettiest little ol’ detective lady west of the Mississippi,” he said.

  Marcy said, “Bite me.”

  “Anytime, anyplace—I mean, anyplace geographically. Or, come to think of it, anatomically. So you got this guy cornered like a rat. When are you going in?”

  “Not till morning. There’s an old lady sleeping in there and we’d like to get her out first,” Marcy said.

  “You running this, or the BCA?” Ignace asked her.

  “It’s a co-op deal,” Lucas said, answering for her. “Minneapolis is handling the investigation, but since we’re out of their jurisdiction down here, BCA is supplying the SWAT. St. Paul Park knows the territory, and they’re setting up with us.”

  “How’d you get in on it?” Ignace asked. “You’re not SWAT.”

  “I needed the overtime,” Lucas said.

  “And you’re sure he’s in there? Last time I went on a SWAT deal, they were outside the house and the guy was at a movie and he comes walking back with a six-pack of Mickey’s wide-mouth—”

  “We know about that,” Marcy said. “No, we don’t know that he’s inside. We’re hoping he’s inside.”

  HE WAS INSIDE. Not sleeping well. His foot throbbed with his pulse, but he could live with it: the pain was dampened by the drugs. The drugs were doing nothing for his head. He thought, and thought, and couldn’t see a way out.

  If the cops knew enough about him to shout at him in a hallway, and chase him, they knew too much. They’d know his name sooner or later, and then they’d find out where he lived. He didn’t know how they’d do that, but they would.

  If not for the storm, he would have left already. Stop for gas in Iowa, stop for gas in Kentucky, and then those other states ... He could be in Florida in twenty-four hours.

  He tried to plan it out—pack his clothes, not much, put the bike in the van. But what about the van? If they knew his name, they’d find his van plates in California and put out a watch. So he needed new plates ... Needed to sell the van, get cash, buy a new one under another name.

  Lay in bed in the dark, sitting up every once in a while, to run his hands over his head, wishing for daylight.

  He was sitting up when the yelling started. Sounded like a fight. He rolled out of bed, looked out the window across the street. Howard, he thought that was the name, was on his front porch, porch light on, yelling at somebody, and somebody ran up to him from behind a tree, not a kid screwing around, but a grown man, and said something to him, and after a second, Howard stepped back and turned off his porch light and the man followed him into his house.

  Cops.

  Cops outside the house. It could have been something else, but it wasn’t. They’d figured out where he lived, and there they were. He laughed, a short snort: bound to happen sooner or later, and here it was.

  He got dressed in the semi-dark: boots, jeans, sweatshirt, parka. Cigarettes, wallet, baggie of cocaine, gun. Stepped over to the bathroom, careful to stay away from the window, checked the cylinder : four shotgun, two .45 Colts. He stepped back to his dresser, dumped the box of .410 shells into his pocket, took the .45s out of the cylinder and reloaded with .410s. Took four grenades out from under the bed, thought about it, took two more.

  “Nothing to do now, man. Run.”

  Had an image of himself busting out of the garage on the back of the BMW Like a movie. Never happen in the snow. Thought about sliding down a roof, like a movie. Never happen: he’d slid off a roof before and broke his legs.

  Peeked at the window, saw the ruts in the snow: no cars gone by for a while. Wouldn’t have been many anyway, but the snow had killed whatever traffic there might have been.

  But the ruts gave him an idea. He went back to the bed and pulled the sheet off.

  THE ST. PAUL PARK chief said to Lucas and Marcy, “We had a problem.”

  They were sitting on a bench eating Twinkies and drinking coffee. Marcy: “What happened?”

  “A guy across the street saw the SWAT guys trading places. He turned on his porch light and yelled at them. They shut him up, but ... it happened.”

  “Anything happen upstairs?”

  “No. But we don’t know he’s upstairs. We only think he is.”

  Marcy rubbed her face, then said to Lucas: “The snow muffles everything.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know.”

  They talked about it.

  CAPPY CUT a slit in the sheet and draped it over his head, so he was covered from head to toe in white, like a ghost. Said aloud, “Gonna feel like a fool if nobody’s there.”

  But somebody was there, he thought.

  He was down in the basement, having snuck down the stairs past Mrs. Wilson’s bedroom door. Darker than the inside of a coal sack. There was a chair by the washing machine...

  He lifted it over to the basement window, a low, eighteen-inch-high doub
le-pane affair that hinged at the top. Probably, he thought, hadn’t been opened in years. Didn’t want to wake Mrs. Wilson, though she was hard of hearing, and so he didn’t have to be absolutely quiet.

  He stood on the chair, brushed his hand around the perimeter of the window, until he found the latch, worked it loose. Window didn’t want to open. Got his knife out, pried around the edges, had to work at it, first one end, then the other, finally felt it give. A minute later, a rush of cold air and snow blew over him.

  The snow was as high as the window. He stepped up on the dryer, put his gloves on, pushed the window up, and started to work through it. Not easy: he was wearing too much clothing and kept getting hung up. He struggled, pushing with his feet, and then with his hands, and finally dragged his feet through the window. He was lying flat on his stomach, covered with the sheet, in fourteen inches of snow.

  He began low-crawling his way forward, like a worm, nearly invisible in the dark. He was headed straight out to the back of the lot.

  LUCAS SAID, “If he’s upstairs, and I don’t know why an old lady would want to have her bedroom upstairs... if he’s upstairs, you could come in from the side of the house where the roof comes down. You know what I mean? He can’t see out that way.”

  Nelson, the SWAT commander, said, “Yeah, we could do that, but if he saw our guy ... if he’s moved downstairs, he could be looking out a window, our guy would be dead meat.”

  Nelson’s radio burped and he put it to his face and said, “Yeah?” Listened, and said, “Can you get over there? Okay. Stay right where you are. I’m going to alert everybody. We’ll be there with you in a minute ... Sure it wasn’t a dog? Okay.”

  He said to Lucas, Marcy, and the chief, “Billy Harris thinks somebody, or something, might have just hit the fence in Wilson’s backyard. He didn’t see it, but he heard it, and thought he might have seen something.”

  “How could he get out?” Marcy asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Let’s go look,” Lucas said. “Let’s get a couple guys to go with us.”

  THEY LEFT the building at a jog, five of them, running around the block, in the night, slowed by the snow. Nelson called up Harris at the end of the second block and said, “Careful, we’re coming in.”

  They went in single-file, groping past hedges and garbage cans; the only light was from the streetlights, and there wasn’t much, not in the close-packed older houses, with grown-up trees and bushes. Harris had been set up behind a neighbor’s garage at the back of the house.

  They came up and he said, in a whisper, “Right there, across the yard. Something big hit the fence.”

  They could see the back window of the upstairs room, a dark rectangle in the barely visible house.

  “I’m going out there,” Lucas said. “Right around this house behind us, and then over to the fence. Johnny, tell your guys I’ll be moving out there.”

  He slipped away to his left, groping in the dark, behind the neighboring house, sheltered by a hedge. Once across the yard, he forced a hole in the hedge, into Wilson’s yard, next to the fence. Unlikely that he could be seen: he couldn’t see the window anymore. But if Cappy was out there, with a shotgun, waiting ...

  He got his guts up and started crawling down the fence line. Fifteen yards down the line, he crossed Cappy’s trail. Thought nothing. Turned to look at the fence: couldn’t see anything. Listened. Nothing. Crawled down the trail to the house, and the basement window. “Goddamnit.” Never thought of the basement. He got to his feet, crouching, and dashed across the yard to Harris’s post, where the others were waiting.

  “He’s out,” Lucas said. “But there’s a trail. He’s five minutes ahead of us.”

  SHRAKE VOLUNTEERED to follow the track. He was wearing a helmet and full armor, and Lucas said, “Don’t forget, he had grenades. If you see him, and go after him, he could drop one on you.”

  “I’m not forgetting that,” Shrake said. “I think about it every two seconds.”

  “Five-meter kill zone. Four or five seconds from the time he throws it. The time is not precise,” Lucas said.

  “I can handle all that,” Shrake said. “The question is, will we ever see it?”

  “Don’t push out front—stay way back. Keep your flashlight working.”

  THEY MOVED out in a V-shaped line two hundred yards across, fifty yards deep, with Shrake at the bottom of the funnel with a super-bright LED flashlight and a radio. The line was mostly invisible as they moved, with the exception of Shrake. As the trail went one way or another around houses, into the next street, Shrake adjusted the vector.

  St. Paul Park put all their squads on the streets, moving, light racks flashing, on a perimeter, hoping to keep Cappy inside, but the snow was so heavy that he’d probably be able to cross the line. On the other hand, the flashing lights might make him cautious, and slow him down.

  The search, Lucas thought, as he tramped up through the snow with his shotgun, had all the characteristics of a clusterfuck, but he couldn’t think of a better alternative. He was the first man up the funnel from Shrake, twenty yards to Shrake’s left, fifteen yards in front of him.

  Shrake said, “He’s going around the left side of the house ...” They pushed through the first line of lots, into the next street, then through the next double line, the houses back-to-back. Lights were popping on here and there, people starting to check the flashing lights of the squads.

  Through the second line of houses, and Shrake said, “Bearing left, bearing left.”

  THE THIN BLOND woman was lying on the kitchen floor, her ankles taped together, and Cappy stuck a grenade between her thighs and said, “Press hard, and don’t move. Don’t even think. The pin is out, and if the lever goes, it’ll blow you in half. And if this fuckin’ key doesn’t start that fuckin’ truck, I’ll come back here and kill you myself.”

  “I won’t move. I won’t move, please don’t do this ...”

  “Shut up. You just lay there.”

  Cappy took the key and slunk back to the front window and looked out. Nothing to see. A flashing light somewhere ... he could see the whip of the light on the snow, like far-off lightning. Had the cops gotten onto him?

  Had to go. He said, one more time, “Don’t move, lady. Keep your shit together, and don’t move.”

  HE WENT OUT to the driveway, fumbled the keys, found them again, got the door open, fired up the truck. Backed out of the driveway, and then, through the muffled air of the storm, heard a human sound, a shouting.

  Had no idea where it was coming from. Left the lights off, backed into the street, and took off, and then the light-whips got brighter, fast, and a squad car pulled in front of him, another behind it, one blocking the street.

  Cappy did a slide, cranked the wheel, backed around, went the other way. The second cop car came after him, and he fumbled a grenade out, pulled the pin, let the spoon fly, counted one-and and dropped it out the window.

  The cop car was fifteen feet from the grenade when it went, Cappy another hundred feet down the street. The cop car went sideways and Cappy felt an exhilarating rush, a coke rush, and then saw a light to his left, coming through the snow, and then a man in front of him. Cappy hit the gas harder, holding down as far as he dared, without spinning, and aimed at the figure in the snow straight ahead ...

  LUCAS SAW the grenade go and the cop car spin out, the truck coming straight down the street at him. He could hear Shrake shouting something, but Lucas was focused on the truck. Then Shrake fired two or three shots with his M-16, and Lucas fired his shotgun into the driver’s-side windshield, took four quick steps sideways to let the truck go past, bullfighter style, put the shotgun almost against the glass of the passenger-side window and pulled the trigger again.

  CAPPY FELT a slug go through his thigh, the pain like being hit by a baseball bat; saw the lump out front pointing a shotgun, dropped down behind the wheel. Getting close to the end, now, Cappy: his face contorted in a rictus of a grin, teeth showing. The windshield g
ot hit, but held; then the passenger-side window blew through the truck like the end of the world, shot smashing through his wheel hand, glass through his head and face. The truck went sideways. One hand almost gone, he pulled another grenade out of his pocket, pulled the pin. He was holding it when the truck hit a tree, and jolted to a sudden stop.

  Somebody was screaming at him: “Out, out, out ...”

  Somebody else was yelling, “Careful, careful, careful ...”

  A voice close now, “Get out of there, motherfucker. Get out of there ... Let me see your hands ...”

  Voice right there. Door was jerked open, and Cappy let go of the spoon. Cop was right there and Cappy grinned at him through bloody teeth and said, “Suck on this,” but he wasn’t sure he could be understood; he closed his eyes and counted, “Two-three ...”

  THE ST. PAUL PARK cop had a shotgun almost pointing in the window and Lucas, running up, screaming, “Careful,” looked in the window and saw the quick flick and grabbed the cop by his collar and yanked him back from the truck and dragged him down by the front wheel and then the grenade went.

  And everything stopped.

  Nothing but the sound of snow, for ten seconds, fifteen, like the film had gotten stuck in the projector.

  And started again, jerking unevenly to full speed. Shrake ran up and shouted, “You guys okay? You guys okay?”

  Lucas stood up, and the cop stood up, and the cop turned white-faced to Lucas and said, “Boy, I almost fucked that up.”

  The grenade had gone off in Cappy’s lap.

  He was long gone.

  ONE SECOND LATER, another grenade went off, most of a block away, and a woman began screaming.