Rules of Prey

hesitated. He saw it just as he hit the fence, a dark shadow at his feet, and felt the ripping pain in his calf as he went over the back fence.
     
    Carl Werschel and his wife, Lois, were almost ready for bed when the dogs went crazy in the backyard.
    “What’s that?” Lois asked. She was a nervous woman. She worried about being raped on a remote North Woodshighway by gangs of black biker rapists, though neither she nor anyone else had seen a black biker gang in the North Woods. Nevertheless, it was clear in her dreams, the bikers hunched over her, ravens circling overhead, as they did the foul deed on what seemed to be the hood of a ’47 Cadillac. “It sounds like . . .”
    “Wait here,” Carl said. He was a very fat man who worried about black biker gangs himself and had stockpiled both ammo and plenty of camouflage clothing against the day. He got the Remington twelve-gauge pump from beneath the headboard and hustled for the back door, jacking a shell into the chamber as he went.
     
    Just for an instant, Sickles, who was forty-five, felt a little kick of joy as he cleared the board fence. He was forty feet and one fence behind the maddog and he was in good shape, and with any luck, with the other guys coming in from the side . . .
    The dogs hit him like a hurricane and he went down, clenching his gun but losing the flashlight he’d had in the other hand. The dogs were at his shoulders, his back, going crazy, barking, snarling, ripping his hands, the back of his neck . . .
     
    Sally Johnson cleared the fence and almost landed in the tight ball of fury around Sickles, and one of the dogs turned toward her, slavering, coming, and Sally Johnson shot the dog twice and then the other one was coming and she turned and aimed the pistol, aware of Sickles on his hands and knees off to the left, enough clearance, and she pulled the trigger once, twice . . .
     
    Carl Werschel ran out his side door with the twelve-gauge and saw the young punk in jeans and black jacket shooting his dogs, shooting them down. He yelled “Stop!” but he didn’t really mean “Stop,” he meant “Die,” and with an atavistic Prussian-warrior joy he fired the shotgun at a thirty-foot range into Sally Johnson’s young head. The last thingSally Johnson saw was the long muzzle of the gun coming up, and she wished she could say something on the radio to stop it from happening . . . .
     
    Sickles felt the dogs go, and he started to roll out, when the long finger of fire reached out and knocked back the partner who had just saved him from the dogs. He knew that much, that he’d been saved. The finger of fire flashed again and Sally went down. Sickles had been around long enough to think, “Shotgun,” and the cops’ tone poem muttered somewhere in his unconscious as he rolled half-blind with blood: “Two in the belly, one in the head, knocks a man down and kills him dead.” He fired three times, one shot piercing Werschel’s belly, wiping out his liver, knocking him backward, the second shot ruining his heart. Werschel was dead before he hit the ground, though his mind ticked over for a few more seconds. Sickles’ third shot went through the wall of the house, into the dining room, through a china cabinet and a stack of plates inside it, through the opposite wall, and, as far as cops investigating later could prove, into outer space. The slug was never found.
     
    When Werschel opened up with the shotgun, the maddog had crossed the street and had fallen into a trench being dug to replace a storm sewer. It was full of wet, yellow clay. He clambered out the far side, a mud ball, not understanding why he had not yet been caught.
     
    And he would have been, except that the north car, with Davey Johnson on board, had closed onto the block when the shotgun blast lit up the neighborhood. Johnson dumped the unit and headed into the fight. His partner, York, on foot, had been caught in mid-block when the maddog changed direction, hadn’t seen it happen, and wound up running behind Sickles and Sally Johnson and just ahead of Lucas, who had cut across McGowan’s yard.
    Cochrane and Blaney had driven out of the alley intending to turn north, in the direction the maddog was running, whenthe firefight started. The firefight took all priority. They assumed Sickles and Sally Johnson had cornered the maddog, found him armed, and shot it out. And when the bad guy’s shooting a shotgun . . . Like Davey Johnson, they dumped