Broken Prey

can hear shooting above us, we’re on the way to three.”
    “I’m already there. I went up instead of down.”
    “We’re on the front steps . . .”
    “I just came up the back. I’m moving into the hallway, you’ll be looking right at me, for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot me . . .”
    Two more boom s and a man screaming and Lucas couldn’t wait, a shattering of glass, more glass breaking, more screaming, and then laughter. Lucas ran to the doorway where the sound seemed to be coming from, did a peek: a man was battering at a thick glass window with a plastic chair.
    In the dim light, he couldn’t see who it was, but he thought it might be Lighter. Lucas shouted, “Hey,” and the man turned, and Lucas saw that it wasn’t Lighter, that he didn’t recognize the man at all. Then he saw movement on his right and pivoted and saw a flash, was hit hard in the left arm, taking in the boom , felt himself falling and jerked two shots in the direction of the flash and crawled back out through the doorway into the hall. There was crouching, combat-style movement down the hall and he shouted, “Help!”
    Sloan shouted back, “Where are you?”
    “Down here. I’m hit.”
    “Ah, Jesus . . .”
    Sloan ran to him in the dim light; the smell of smoke was stronger now, and Sloan came up, Shrake a step behind.
    “How bad?” Sloan asked.
    The pain was coming on. “I think my arm’s busted. Left arm,” Lucas said. “There’s a guy in there to the right. At least a couple people down. I don’t think I hit him when I fired back.”
     
    SHRAKE DID A PEEK , then put his left arm through the doorway, with his face, ready to fire. Sloan was cutting at Lucas’s sport coat with a jackknife. “Let me see . . . ah, man, you got a hole. It’s not bleeding too bad, but it’s right below your biceps, right in the middle.”
    “Yeah, that’s what it feels like,” Lucas groaned. “I can feel a piece moving . . . We gotta take this guy.”
    “You’re out of it,” Sloan said.
    “I can move okay,” Lucas said. He stood up, almost fell, propped himself against the wall. There was smoke now, another fire, the hallways clear except for a man at the far end, dragging a mattress for some reason. “Look: I’ll go back down and sit in the stairway, block it off. You guys gotta keep this asshole penned up, or take him. There’s somebody in there hurt.”
    “You know who it is?”
    “No. Could be Biggie,” Lucas said.
    “That motherfucker,” Sloan said. “You go on. We’ll take him.”
    “Get some more support up here,” Shrake said. “Jenkins went off with that crappie cop, they could hear something down on one.”
    “Cell phone,” Lucas said. “I can’t use mine . . .”
    “Get your ass down to the stairwell,” Sloan said. “We’ll take care of this.”
     
    JENKINS AND THE game warden, whose name was Deacon, saw the flash of the gunshot and moved slowly down the inside wall of the hallway, closing on the door. They found Chase sitting on the shoulders of a dead man, as though the dead man were a low stool, talking to a woman who had propped herself up against a wall. They could hear Chase’s voice before they saw him; a low chatter that continued between the brenk brenk brenk of the alarms. When they got right next to the door, they could hear his voice distinctly, as he talked over the racket around them.
    “. . . is dead, because if he wasn’t dead, he couldn’t stand it when I put my finger on his eyeball like this. But see, he doesn’t even blink. There’s still some blood running out, but that’s gravity, is what it is. Just like when you cut a chicken’s head off, the blood keeps coming for a long time, but the chicken is dead. Have you ever seen anybody do that? No? It’s pretty exciting. You get the chicken and you hold it by its legs, and you rub its stomach and it’ll get real quiet, then you lay the neck on a block and then really quick, chop, and the head flies off. If you let go of the chicken, the body will run all over the place without a head. It’s pretty funny, when you see it . . .”
    Jenkins risked a peek. The room was fifteen-by-fifteen feet and the man was sitting with his back to Jenkins, not more than seven or eight feet away. He was pointing a pistol at a woman against the far wall, who sat motionless, head down; she had blood on her blouse. Jenkins was not sure she was alive. He had to assume she was, though, and she was also directly on