Hidden Prey

fuckin’ car . . .”
    Lucas pulled his pistol and shouted, “Don’t come in here, put down your gun, I don’t want to have to shoot you.”
    “Fuck you,” Carl shouted back.
    “Carl, don’t do this,” Nadya screamed.
    Carl was moving across the front of the garage, and Lucas and Nadya tried to move back, so they could get around the back fender, but Lucas thought he was coming too fast, that he wouldn’t make it, and braced his shoulder against the back door and pointed the .45 . . .
    Boom. Carl fired the rifle, and the bullet went through the car’s windshield, Lucas thought; and maybe the back window. He heard the glass crack, not shatter, but pop with a funny glass sound, and Carl was still coming and then, Crack.
    The shot came from the woods and Carl went down, screaming, lost the gun. Lucas was around the car in three quick running steps, kicked the rifle, the kid twisting in the dirt like a broken-back dog.
    The sniper was running down the hill with his rifle, and Lucasyelled to the radio guy, “Call an ambulance, tell them we need an ambulance . . .”
    He pushed Carl down, the kid moaning in pain, checked his belt for a gun, found nothing, picked up the rifle, carried it out of arm’s reach, and put it down again.
    The sniper had stopped and was talking into his shoulder microphone; Wolfe was in the woods, standing, looking down at them. Another deputy was running in from the other side of the house.
     
    C ARL STARTED CRYING . He looked very young, lying on the ground, with his slender blond face and pink cheeks. Lucas bent over him and asked, “Where are you hit, where are you hit?” and Carl began stuttering incoherently. The sniper came up and said, “I tried to take him in the butt. I was sure he was going to get you.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “Help me roll him.”
    Another deputy came up, and Wolfe, and then the third deputy, and they rolled Carl up on one hip and Lucas saw the blood soaking into his jeans. “Let’s get his jeans off, make sure it’s not arterial.”
    Nadya helped, held Carl’s hand, and Lucas noticed that she was bleeding; she had three or four small cuts on her face. She said to Carl, “You will be okay, you will be okay,” and stroked his hair as a mother would.
    The single, copper-jacketed bullet had penetrated the top of Carl’s left buttock, angling down, then went through his right buttock and exited. Blood was flowing from all four wounds, but the flow wasn’t too heavy. “I got a first-aid kit in the car; I’ll bring it over,” one of the deputies said. He left his rifle behind and ran off through the woods for the cars.
    “Am I gonna die?” Carl asked.
    “No, but you’re gonna spend some time in the hospital,” Lucas said. “Hell of a lot better than what you did to Oleshev or Jerry Reasons.”
    Carl, in pain, opened his mouth to say something, then a light came on in his eyes and he looked at Lucas and said, “I want a lawyer.”
     
    “F UCK YOU ,” L UCAS SAID . He stood up and said to Nadya, “What happened to you? Let me look.”
    She stood up and Lucas took her chin between two fingers, turned her face. “You have four small cuts, probably from glass. There may still be glass . . . here. Here’s a piece.” He could see a small sliver of glass protruding from one of the cuts. He caught it between the fingernails of his two index fingers, and lifted it out. Blood tricked down her face. “That’s what happens when you don’t behave.”
    “Bad?” she asked.
    “Nah. You might have to have some glass picked out, but nobody’ll even see the cuts after they heal up. You’ll still be gorgeous.”
    He looked back at the kid, and Nadya walked away, back into the garage and behind the car. He turned back in time to see her pick up a long, thin piece of glass from the car’s trunk. “Careful with that . . . ,” he called.
    She fit it between two fingers and then lightly slapped herself twice on the forehead. Blood trickled from two long new cuts, running across her fair skin into her eyebrows.
    “What the fuck are you doing?”
    “Politics,” she said.

     34 
    T HE AMBULANCE TOOK a full half hour to get to the shooting scene. Carl had slipped into shock, and while the wounds were serious, they weren’t life threatening, an EMT told them—Carl was young, in good shape, and should recover quickly. Before they took off in the ambulance, the EMT looked at Nadya’s face, and found one additional small