Stolen Prey

it didn’t budge, and she fired five shots at the doorknob and lock, and then kicked it, but unlike the usual Hollywood-movie sequence, the door remained closed.
    Frustrated, she emptied the gun at the door, ejected the magazine, and fumbled another magazine from her jacket pocket.
    A woman’s voice, on the stairs, said, “Hey.”
    L ETTY WAS HALFWAY UP the stairs when she saw Martínez empty the gun at the door and jack out the magazine. She said, “Hey.”
    Martínez turned, jerking her head around, saw Letty there, with the big .45 in her hand. Tres, she barely had time to think, must have failed. She blurted, “I have no gun. I am empty.”
    She dropped the pistol and the magazine.
    L ETTY SAID , “Bullshit. You tried to kill my mom and my little sister.”
    She shot Martínez in the heart. Martínez didn’t go down, but staggered backward, a shocked look on her face. She lifted her hand, and Letty shot her again, in the heart, and Martínez sagged but still brought the hand up, as if to fend off the bullets. They were now only six feet apart, and Letty shot her a third time, in the face, and then Martínez slid down the wall, leaving behind a smear of blood. Letty screamed, “Mom, are you all right?”
    “We’re all right,” Weather shouted back. “We’re all right.”
    “Stay there,” Letty shouted. “Call nine-one-one, call nine-one-one.” The housekeeper had a hardwired phone in her room.
    The pistol was empty. She ejected the magazine and slapped in the second one, and followed the muzzle down the stairs. Were there more of them, out in a car? She crawled into the kitchen, took Weather’s cell phone off the kitchen counter, crawled back to the stairway where she could make a stand, if necessary, and, with her good thumb, punched Lucas’s call icon.
    He came up five seconds later, and she shouted, “Dad, Dad, we’ve got a problem, Dad….”
    Lucas said he’d be there, and she believed him. Nobody else came through the door. She crawled up to the kitchen doorway, sat with the gun, not at all in shock, feeling not bad, but feeling ready.
    Two dead, and she felt not bad at all, except for the ache in her arm. She looked down at it, vaguely surprised by the damage: she knew she’d been hit, but blood was draining out of the wound, so she pressed it against her shirt and looked back toward the door.
    From not too far away, a siren started.

23
    T he house that Lucas and Weather had designed and built, and where they intended to live until they died, was sealed with police tape for two days.
    Lucas was profoundly shocked by the shoot-out, and feared in his soul that the house had been ruined for Weather, spoiled by the blood. But Weather was defiant: “Nobody will run me out of my house. Nobody.”
    Lucas loved the place, and hoped that she could hold to that.
    The St. Paul crime-scene people, following Letty’s narration of the shooting, confirmed her story and said that it really wasn’t all that complex, compared to some scenes. But there’d been a lot of damage, a lot of bullet holes, and a lot of blood, and it would take time to clean up.
    While crime-scene specialists did their work, and the DEA and BCA tried to determine whether there was any further danger, Lucas moved the family to a condo in downtown Minneapolis. The apartment was owned by Polaris Bank and normally used to house visiting board members. Jim Bone said they could stay for as long as they wanted.
    Three days after the shoot-out, Lucas walked through the house with a carpenter named Ignacio Jimenez, who was a Mexicanillegal, though he’d come to the U.S. when he was a year old, and who didn’t even speak Spanish. Lucas said, “I want everything with blood on it gone—ripped out, not cleaned up. How long will it take?”
    “The biggest problem is the maple walls. I’ll do my best to match it, but it could be tough.”
    “How about if you rip it out?” Lucas asked. “All of it?”
    “I’ve got some gorgeous American cherry planks I’ve been saving up. They’re pricey, and it’s a little redder, but it’d look great.”
    “Do it,” Lucas said. “What about the rest of the damage?”
    “I’ll have the carpeting out of here this evening. I can get a good solid door upstairs, that’s not a problem, and a temporary door for the front entrance. It’ll take a month or so to get a new custom door in there. But the house’ll look okay by the end of the week, except for the paneling. I’ll have to have