Chosen Prey

into the bedroom, saw nothing, continued through a small kitchen, saw broken glass, shouted back, “Watch the rooms, they’re not clear, they’re not clear,” saw Del behind Marshall, got to the window, and looked out.
    Randy Whitcomb was lying faceup, spread-eagled on the grass below the back deck. His shirt was soaked with blood and one hand was flapping convulsively, as though he were fanning himself with a broken arm.
    Lucas turned, saw Del and Marshall in the hallway, and said, “He’s down out back. Check the rooms.” Allport and the hammer cop loomed from the living room. To Allport, Lucas said, “Get an ambulance moving.” Then he was out and down the stairs onto the lawn, where the St. Paul uniforms, guns still drawn, had gathered around Randy.
    Randy had been hit four times, twice in the legs, once in the stomach, and once in his left forearm, the arm that had been flapping. One of the uniform cops was now holding it to the grass so he couldn’t flap it. Randy wasn’t saying anything, not a sound: no whimpers, nothing. His eyes rolled, rolled, rolled, from this side to the other, up and down; and his mouth strained, not to say something, but as if it were trying to escape his face.
    “Got an ambulance coming,” Lucas said to him. He didn’t hear it.
    One of the St. Paul uniforms said, “He had a gun.”
    “Yeah, he let go a couple of times inside,” Lucas said.
    The cop said, “He had a gun. Up there, we heard it.”
    “Yeah, he did.”
    One of the other cops said, “I think it’s in the bushes. He had it in his hand when he came out.”
    “Find it,” Lucas said. “Don’t touch, just find it.”
    Del came out on the deck. “Nobody in the house. But, uh . . .” He looked back into the condo, and Lucas could hear Marshall talking. Then Del turned back to Lucas and said, “There’s a lot of blood up here.”
    “Nobody shot at him up there.”
    “No, no, I mean, somebody else’s blood. He was trying to clean it up with paper towels, but it’s kind of splattered on the couch and there are little droplets on the wallpaper.”
    Now Randy moaned, just once. Lucas looked down at him and said, “What’d you do?” But Randy didn’t hear him; he just rolled his eyes again.
    From the corner of the house, one of the St. Paul uniforms said, “There it is.” To Lucas: “Got the gun, Chief.”
    “Just stay right next to it. Keep an eye on it until the crime-scene people get here. Don’t let anyone get near it.”
    Allport came out on the deck and asked, “Everybody okay?”
    “Everybody except Randy. He’s hit pretty hard.” Lucas looked down at him again. Randy’s shirt was soaked with blood, and Lucas noticed that even with the convulsions running through his upper body, his lower body never moved. Spinal, he thought.
    Allport yelled at one of the uniforms: “Freeze everything, John. Don’t let anything move.” Then, to Lucas: “You oughta come up and look at this mess.”
    Lucas said, “Okay,” then looked down at Randy again. “What the fuck did you do, you little asshole? What’d you do?”

16
    M ARSHALL AND D EL came down from the apartment to watch the paramedics working over Randy. Whatever they did brought the pain on, and the kid started a cowlike lowing that seemed to inhabit all the air in the common area. He was still doing it when they strapped him on a gurney, ready to move him.
    Two dozen kids, half of them white, the other half Hmong or black, most of them serious but a few cutting up, milled in a wide semicircle around the shooting scene, kept back by uniforms. Somewhere in the crowd was a young girl who’d periodically call out in her high-pitched TV-whore voice, “That motherfucker dead?” or “You shoot that motherfucker?” When the paramedics started wheeling the gurney toward the ambulance, she cried out, “Put him in the ’fridge, he dead.”
    When he was gone, the cops on the original blocking squads were isolated to make statements, and Randy’s revolver was photographed, measured, and carefully plucked out of the weed bed where it had fallen. The crime-scene guy who lifted it popped the cylinder and said, “Four rounds fired.”
    “That’s about right,” Allport told him.
    “Can’t tell when,” the crime-scene guy said.
    “About a half an hour ago, dickhead,” Allport said.
    Lucas, Del, and Marshall clustered around the bottom of the apartment steps. Marshall said, “He doesn’t look that bad, considering.”
    Lucas