Phantom Prey

probes about his brother, he’d beaten a St. Paul cop unconscious, then pinned him on the floor and methodically kicked his balls until they turned to ravioli.
    The cop’s partner, a twenty-four-year-old woman named Les Cooper, had gotten into it, and Toms had picked her up by the short hair at the back of her head and whacked her face twice against a mahogany bar, crushing the bones around her eye sockets. She was the niece of a BCA agent who worked out of the Bemidji office.
    Toms had always been a cruel, racist, child-beating, dope-taking freak, and had always walked . . . until now. He’d been hiding out ever since he’d beaten up the cops, but had been seen a couple times in western Wisconsin and north of the Twin Cities in St. Cloud, so they knew he was still around.
    His real name, Lucas had once been told, was Antanas. From there, Antsy was a natural: maybe the name had made him what he was. Like Bugsy . . .
    They made the Taco Shed parking lot and climbed out of the car, three large men wearing bulletproof vests. Shrake hit the locks and the car beeped at them and they ran across the lawn of the first house and then up the porch steps of the second house and Shrake kicked the door and they were inside and there was Antsy, standing in the middle of the living room with an old-fashioned princess phone in his hand.
    Jenkins pointed the shotgun at him and screamed, “On the floor, you piece of shit,” and Antsy threw the phone at Jenkins’s head and spun and ran for the stairs. Jenkins ducked and pointed the shotgun, but shook his head and screamed, “Stop . . . wait, wait.”
    Antsy’s mother, a large woman in blue Nike workout sweats, appeared in the kitchen doorway carrying a cutting board as though it were a Ping-Pong paddle and she threw it overhand at Lucas, who ducked, and then Shrake was on the stairs going after Antsy and they heard a rumble and Antsy’s mom yelled, “Not the organ,” and an old Hammond electric organ flew down the stairs like a freight train and Shrake jumped down just in front of it.
    As it crashed at the bottom of the stairs, they heard windows breaking upstairs and Lucas yelled, “He’s going out the window,” and Jenkins yelled, “I’m going up, you guys go out,” and he pushed the shotgun out in front of him and took the stairs.
    Shrake ran toward the front door and Lucas toward the back of the house, through the kitchen. Antsy’s mom had run back into the kitchen after the organ crashed, and she pulled a butcher knife out of a drawer and blocked Lucas’s route past the kitchen counter.
    Lucas got in close, then punched her with a good right hand and she flew ass-over-teakettle under the breakfast table. Lucas went out the back door and around to the side, where he saw Shrake coming toward him. Antsy, appropriately dressed in a wife-beater shirt, jeans, and socks, with no shoes, had climbed out of a dormer window, hesitated on the edge of the roof, just above the gutter, thinking about jumping, twelve feet up.
    Then the barrel of Jenkins’s shotgun poked through a broken window and hit him between the shoulder blades, hard, and he tipped forward, tried to catch himself, swinging his hands in little circles, said, “Shit,” and jumped off the roof and landed in the neighbor’s hedge.
    Shaken and maybe hurt, he rolled onto his stomach and Shrake ran up and screamed, “Look out, look out,” and punted Antsy in the teeth. Antsy was flopped over on his hands and knees, still in the hedge, which seemed to be some kind of prickly stuff, roses, maybe, and Shrake took the opportunity to kick him in the balls, hard, with a steel-toed brogan.
    Antsy groaned and scrambled straight ahead, still tangled in the hedge, and Lucas vaulted the low chain-link fence around the neighbor’s backyard and ran up as Antsy finally staggered to his feet, clutching at his crotch, blood bubbling out of his mouth, around his broken teeth. Lucas hit him as hard as he could right between the eyes.
    Antsy went back in the hedge and this time didn’t move. Jenkins came running out of the house and said, “Goddamnit, you didn’t wait for me.”
    “He’s a violent man,” Lucas said, breathing hard, shaking out his hand.
    But the movie wasn’t over, quite.
    Antsy’s mom came out of the house, screaming, fat, Lithuanian, they’d heard, from the Old Country, hard lard, not soft, waving the butcher knife. “His mother made him what he is,” Jenkins said, quoting a country song. Mom