Stolen Prey

shut and went on down to the master bedroom.
    W EATHER WAS in the kitchen with the baby. Martínez and Tres couldn’t see her, but they heard her when she knocked over a chair as she ran toward the back stairs, up to the housekeeper’s apartment over the garage.
    Martínez snapped at Tres, “Take the girl,” and Tres ran that way, toward the stairs, as Martínez ran toward the kitchen. She expected Davenport to appear, and ran awkwardly, with the pistol extended in front of her, toward the kitchen.
    I N THE BEDROOM , Letty pulled open the bottom drawer of Lucas’s bedside stand, forced herself to calmly go through the quicktwo-finger-three-finger-two-finger sequence of Lucas’s pistol safe’s combination lock.
    Had to get it right the first time and she did it deliberately, even as she heard the footsteps on the stairs, the man with the machine gun…
    T RES RAN up the stairs and saw the bloody splotch on the wall, and heard the girl in the far bedroom. He smiled and slowed his step: it was over.
    L ETTY LOOKED and mostly behaved like a young upper-middle-class girl, but she’d grown up so desperately poor, in the far-northern Minnesota backcountry, her father long gone, her mother a helpless and hopeless alcoholic.
    She had, as a child, learned to fend for herself trapping muskrats off the local swamps, for grocery money. Pushed to the wall, she’d had no problem with killing, either muskrats or people. Davenport met her on a murder investigation, during which her mother had been murdered. He and Weather had later adopted her.
    The early desperation had marked her, indelibly. She did all the things that young girls now did, texted and Tweeted and Facebooked, fretted over lip glosses and uncurling her hair, and a few other things as well. When Lucas went to the range to work with his pistols, she went along as often as she could.
    And she had an ability.
    W ITH HER left arm dangling at her side, she used her right hand to do the two-three-two-finger sequence, meant for rapid access to the pistol, and there was the Gold Cup Colt .45. She picked it up and slapped the butt against her thigh, to make sure the magazine was well seated, then, holding the stock between her knees, used her good hand to jack a shell into the chamber. There was a second magazine in the safe, and she stuffed it in her back jeans pocket, gripped the pistol, and turned back toward the door.
    All of it, from the time she’d shouted at Weather to the time she turned toward the door, had taken no more than eight or ten seconds; perhaps not that. But she could hear the gunman pounding up the stairs, and she ran toward him, heard him coming down the hallway, lifted the pistol eye-high, stepped sideways, and saw him.
    Right there.
    Eight feet and coming fast, but his gun pointed sideways toward the bloody wall. He wouldn’t have done it that way if he’d believed Lucas was upstairs. He would have moved more slowly with the pistol up.
    As it was, he had just tensed his diaphragm for what would have been a grunt of surprise, but he never got it out. Tres never had a chance to talk to his saints, to see that their prediction of his early death would be correct. Before he could begin any of that, Letty, shooting for the white spot in his left eye, pulled the shot a bit and sent the .45 slug through the bridge of his nose. As she stepped over his dead, falling body, she shot him a second and third time in the heart.
    L ETTY SPENT no time worrying about the Mexican boy: he was dead. She heard a burst of shots, one at a time but fast, from the stairs to the housekeeper’s apartment above the garage, and she went that way, running lightly, quietly, down the stairs, turning the corner, through the living room and kitchen, to the bottom of the stairs, and then up.
    M ARTÍNEZ HAD gone into the kitchen expecting a close-up shoot-out with Davenport, but the kitchen was empty. At the same time, she heard somebody running in the back, and she followed the noise, pushing the pistol out ahead of her, as she’d been trained, found a door going into the garage and a carpeted stairway going up.
    She heard a door slam at the top of the stairs, but took just a second to pop the garage door and look inside the garage. There were two cars, but no sign of life. She ran up the stairs, heard a heavy
thump
behind the door, and fired five shots through it, fast as she could,
bam-bam-bam-bam-bam
.
    She heard Weather scream something, and she kicked at the door, but