Certain Prey

fall.
    The silencers were good. The loudest noise in the stairwell was the cycling of the pistol’s action. Rinker got off a second shot before Allen fell too far, then stepped down to the sprawled body and fired five more shots into Allen’s temple.
    As she stepped away from the body, ready to head down the stairs, a cop came through the door in the stairwell above them. He was in uniform, a heavy guy carrying a manila folder.
    Rinker had thought about this possibility, a surprise from a cop, though she’d never experienced anything like it. Still, she’d rehearsed it in her mind.
    “Hey,” the cop said. He put up a hand, and Rinker shot him.

TWO

    Baily Dobbs’s first day on patrol had taught him that police work was more complicated than he’d thought—and more dangerous than he’d expected. Baily had seen police work as a way to achieve a certain authority, a status. He hadn’t thought about fighting people bigger than he was, about drunks vomiting in the backseat of the squad, about freezing his ass off outside the Target Center when the Wolves were playing. So Baily resolved to keep his head down, to volunteer for nothing, to show up late for trouble calls, and to get off the street as fast as he could.
    He was inside in less than two years.
    One Halloween, responding—late—to a domestic, he’d walked up a dark sidewalk, stepped on the back axle of a tricycle, flipped into the air and twisted his knee. He was never exactly disabled, but it became clear that if he couldn’t run, he couldn’t work the streets. His hobbling progress around a gymnasium track baffled the docs and amused his former partners. The phrase “I’m gonna baily on that” came into the vocabulary of the Minneapolis Police Department.
    Baily went inside and stayed there. He still wore a uniform, carried a gun and got paid for being a cop, but he was a clerk and happy with it. Which is why he didn’t respond as quickly as he might have, when he saw Rinker execute Barbara Allen. His cop reflexes were gone.

    B AILY’S LUNCH STARTED at eleven o’clock, but on this day he’d taken some under-time. He snuck out through the basement of City Hall, into the county government building, carrying a manila folder that contained a few sheets of paper addressed to a court bailiff—his cover-your-ass file, if he was spotted by his supervisor.
    Once in the government building, he took a quick look around, then dodged into the skyway that went over to the Sixth Street parking garage. From there, he planned to take the stairs to the street level and cross over to the Hennepin County Medical Center, which had a nice discreet cafeteria rarely visited by cops. He’d eat a cheeseburger and fries, enjoy a few cups of coffee, read the newspapers, then amble back to City Hall, just in time for lunch.
    That perfectly good plan fell apart when he stepped into the stairwell.
    Two women were in the stairwell below him, and one of them, a redhead, appeared to be sticking something in the ear of the other, who was lying on the stairs.
    “Hey,” he said.
    The redhead looked up at him, and in the next quarter-second, Baily realized that what she had in her hand was a pistol. The pistol came up and Baily put a hand out, and the redhead shot him. There wasn’t much noise, but he felt something hit his chest, and he fell down backward.
    He fell in the doorway, which saved his life: Rinker, standing below him on the stairs, looking over the sights of her pistol, couldn’t see anything but the bottoms of his feet. Baily groaned as he fell, and he dimly heard a man’s voice call, “Are you all right?”
    Rinker had taken two quick steps toward him, to finish him, when she heard the new voice. Complications were increasing. Quick as a blink, she decided: down was safe. She went down, not running, but moving fast.
    Baily struggled to sit upright, to crawl away from the stairwell, and heard a door bang closed in the stairwell below. His chest hurt, and so did his hand. He looked at his hand, and it was all scuffed up, apparently from the fall. Then he discovered the growing bloodstain on the pocket of his white uniform shirt.
    “Oh, man,” he said.
    The other voice called again, “Hey, you okay?”
    “Oh, Jesus, oh, God, Jesus God,” said Baily, who was not a religious man. He tried to push himself up again, noticed his hand was slippery with blood, and started to cry. “Oh, Jesus . . .” He looked up the ramp, where a man carrying a briefcase