Stolen Prey

through both of Kline’s thighs and he began screaming even louder, “I’M SHOT, THEY SHOT ME, MURDER…”
    Uno fired the whole magazine through the door, angling the gun around, heard the
whank-whank-whank
as a few of them hit the tub, but he didn’t know what the sound was. He was using hollow-points, which began coming apart as they went through the old-fashioned oak-paneled door, and didn’t have enough residual energy to pierce the tub. He continued to kick, but the door wasn’t moving, and finally Tres shouted at him, “We go, we go, the police…”
    They were making a lot of noise; and the sound of Uno’s silenced pistol still sounded like a gun when it was fired quickly: it went
bop-bop-bop-bop
, and while it was quieter than an unsilenced weapon, it still sounded like a gun and nothing else. In the meantime, Kline was screaming for help.
    Uno shouted, “Son of a whore,” at Kline, and he and Tres turned and ran out of the apartment and away from the direct stairway down, to the back of the building. They came out in an alley and heard sirens, sprinted to the end of the alley, walked a hundred feet down to their car, did a U-turn, and rolled away through the dark streets.
    Kline, in the bathtub, was bleeding from four through-and-throughholes caused by one slug, and from about a hundred oak splinters. When the shooting stopped and he thought he heard the Mexicans running, he continued to scream and managed to reach over the side of the tub to his pants. He fumbled out his cell phone and called 911.
    “I’m shot, it’s the Mexicans, it’s the fucking Mexicans.”
    The woman on the other end sounded almost robotically calm. “Sir, please tell me where you are and the situation there.”
    “Get me some help! I’m shot, I’m shot, you stupid shit!” He screamed the address at her, and then screamed, “Get that cop Davenport. Davenport knows, it’s the Mexicans, they shot me, I’m bleeding, I’m shot….”
    T HE FIREMEN who eventually got him out had to use an ax to open the door, and the paramedics wearing yellow toxic-waste gloves lifted him out of the tub and bundled him onto a stretcher and off to the hospital.
    Both the cops and the paramedics were talking to him as they went, the paramedics asking about street drugs he may have ingested, the cops wanting to know who did it. Kline, in deeper pain than any he’d previously experienced, managed to say, “It’s those Mexicans. The ones everybody wants. Davenport the cop was here today. They think I took that money…. Call Davenport.”
    Eventually, the cops did.
    L UCAS FOUND Kline sedated but still conscious at Hennepin County Medical Center, conscious but woozy, but not so woozythat he still wasn’t pissed, and when Lucas came through the door, the doc trailing behind, Kline asked, “Who told them about me? Who told them?”
    Lucas said, “We’re trying to figure that out. We’re thinking that they may have an insider at Polaris.”
    “Man, I gotta get out of here,” Kline said. “You know what happens. They’ll come in here while I’m sedated and they’ll put some shit into my drip bag and that’ll be it. That’ll be it! Game over, man! Game over!”
    “That’s mostly in the movies, where they do that,” Lucas said. “There’s about fifteen people right outside your door, including a couple of cops. Nobody’s coming in here that we don’t know about.”
    “Aw, Jesus, they killed my legs.” Kline began weeping. “You guys did this. I don’t know anything about any money. You guys sicced them right on me. I’m suing you guys for everything you got.”
    L UCAS CALMED him down enough to get him to describe the shooting, and when Kline was done, Lucas said, “That’s the smartest goddamn thing I ever heard of. You’re the only one who survived these guys, and you did it with a gun in your face…. Man…”
    “They would have cut me up like a summer sausage,” Kline said.
    “Yeah, probably—but most people would have frozen,” Lucas said. “You came up with a plan.”
    “I shit my pants,” Kline said.
    “You’re still here, it was a hell of a move,” Lucas said. He patted Kline on the arm. “You look like a stoner and wastoid, but you got some major balls.”
    “I’m still gonna sue you,” Kline said. His eyelids dipped. “They’re giving me the good stuff, but when I come out of it, I’m gonna hurt. If the Mexicans don’t get me first…”
    Two minutes later, he was gone, sound