Stolen Prey

gathering herself, looked at Rivera, and said, “You idiot.” If he’d called for backup, she wouldhave found time to step away, to call the Big Voice to warn the children, to get them out. She shook her head, then turned and ran screaming out the front door, half fell down the steps, went down on the sidewalk, skinning her hands, ricocheted down the empty street. She landed a bit sideways on one of her heels and lost the shoe and let it go, and got on the cell phone and called Lucas and when he answered, screamed, “Help us. David is shot David is shot help us…”
    L UCAS WAS working the computer when the call came in, and he listened astonished to the screaming and then shouted at her, “Where? Where are you? Where?”
    “I don’t know, near the pizza, near the pizza…”
    “Look for a street sign,” he shouted. “Find a green sign at the end of a block.”
    She called back a minute later, “Marshall and Kent.”
    “I’m coming,” Lucas said. He punched in 911 and shouted at the man who answered, “Davenport, BCA. We’ve got a cop down at Marshall and Kent in St. Paul. There’s a woman there who was with him. Look for the woman. Tell everybody to be careful, there’s three men with guns.”
    And he was running down the hall, the people in the offices around him looking after him because he was running like something very bad had happened.

8
    T he first St. Paul cop car got to the shooting scene in three minutes. Morris had been organizing the search of the streets around Zapp’s Pizza, which had been going slowly, but it also meant that a dozen additional cops arrived in the next five minutes.
    The first cops gathered up Martínez and locked her in their car, and posted watchers on the corners of the house, nobody going in or out. Martínez, apparently in shock, told them she thought the house was empty and she didn’t know how badly Rivera was hurt, so the next cops went in and cleared the place.
    One came out a minute later and told an arriving patrol sergeant, “Two down. Both of them are gone.”
    “You sure?”
    “Oh, yeah. One of them’s missing most of his brain. The other one took two shots in the heart.”
    “No sign of anybody?”
    “Didn’t clear the basement, but I think it’s empty. I didn’t recognize either of them, but one could be a cop. He’s gotta be federal or something. Doesn’t look local. He was shooting some big old automatic like you don’t see anymore.”
    The sergeant nodded and saw Morris’s car fishtail into the street. “Here comes the man. You get Rudy and block off the street.”
    The cop took off and then Morris was there. He nodded at the sergeant and walked up the steps, took a look at Rivera and said, “Shit. I was just talking to this guy.”
    “He’s a cop?”
    Morris nodded. He might have been Mexican, but a dead cop was a dead cop. The dead man in the dumpster was just another dead man in a dumpster.
    Morris walked back outside and saw Davenport’s Porsche curl into the curb up the street. Davenport jumped out and jogged toward them.
    “He got here in a hurry,” the sergeant said.
    “He’s gonna kill somebody,” Morris said.
    L UCAS DUMPED the Porsche and jogged through the scene, past clusters of neighbors watching from the sidewalks. Morris was talking to a couple of other cops, and he waved Lucas toward the front door of the house, which stood open.
    Lucas stepped up, looked inside, said, “Ah, man.” He stepped inside, moved carefully around the body, squatted to look at it: Rivera was facedown, his brown eyes still open, but flat and dead. A pistol sat a few inches from his right hand, the hammer back, the safety off.
    Across the room, a Mexican guy slumped half-on, half-off the couch, looking dead. Lucas had read of shooting victims looking surprised, but he hadn’t seen that. They just looked dead. TheMexican’s T-shirt was stained with blood, a circle at the heart with seepage lines down the front.
    “Looks like he kicked the door,” Morris said.
    Lucas stood up, made a hand-dusting motion, glanced at the door handle, then looked back in the room. “Did you talk to Martínez?”
    “For a minute, but she’s fucked up. We’re looking for a silver SUV of some kind. Don’t know what kind, don’t know the size, don’t know the plates.”
    “Good luck with that,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah.” Morris waved at the scene. “What do you think?”
    “Looks like he kicked the door, landed on his feet, the guy on the