Storm Prey

another cloud of concrete dust. Not a sound from the stairwell, and they started up, moving slowly now, scared.
    A spot of blood. Came to the second floor, and Virgil saw another spot of blood, heading up to three. Virgil went that way, gun in front of him, while Lucas had his cell phone going, 911, “We got a police shooting going on at University Hospitals. This is Lucas Davenport of the BCA. We’ve had two grenade blasts, a man armed with a pistol and grenades, we’re in pursuit, we need help ...”
     
     
    CAPPY TURNED in the hallway and saw them coming, the cowboy and the big guy he’d seen when he was buying Joe Mack’s van. The way they were coming, the way they were fixed on him, there was no point in pretending. He was freaked, but not so freaked that it froze him. He took off, and they followed him down the tiled hallways, yelling at him. He yanked the Judge out of his waistband.
    One long stretch, too long, and he turned and fired, and saw the cowboy’s pistol coming up, and he ran, and the cowboy fired at him, and he banged through a stairway door and ran down and around the stairs, and he heard the door bang open above him. They were gaining, he thought. He reached the bottom and paused to look up, to assess, but they were in the stairwell; and there was a flash and muzzle blast, like a cherry bomb going off in his ear, and his foot was smashed and lead fragments spit around him. He pulled a grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, and when he went through the door at the bottom of the stairwell, he dropped the grenade behind him and kept moving, limping now, pain arcing through his foot.
    He was leaving a blood trail: didn’t know what to do about that, then he was in another stairwell, going up this time, not far from the closet. He made the turn to the third floor, smeared some blood on a stair tread, then dropped the second grenade when he heard the door open below.
    The grenade rattled down the concrete steps and he heard somebody scream again, then he was in the hall, and the second grenade went. He ran now with his bad foot tipped up, running only on his heel, toes off the ground, turned a corner, fumbled the keys, got in the closet, locked the door, turned on the light, listened.
    Nobody in the hall—they may have bit on the blood trail, at least for the moment, but there’d be a million cops in the hospital in five minutes. He tore the uniform off, pulled on his street clothes, ripped the sleeve off the uniform, pulled his shoe off, jammed the sleeve into his shoe, and then his foot; he didn’t take time to figure it out in detail, but it looked like he was missing most of his little toe and maybe part of the toe next to it.
    Dressed again, he listened, then was out the door, down the corridor to the security door, and into the parking ramp.
    Barakat had given him a key for his car, because of the problem with the van tags. He climbed inside, his left foot burning like fire, but got the car started and headed out. Sirens everywhere. Two blocks out of the hospital, a cop car passed him, running fast, and then he was on the ramp and down it and onto the interstate.
    The foot hurt, but he’d been hurt worse; he focused on navigating the slippery streets up to the first exit, snow falling hard all around. He made it to Barakat’s house in fifteen minutes, stopped, afraid to use his cell phone, and called Barakat on the land line.
    “Things are fucked up, man,” he said. “They know who I am.”
    “Are you calling—”
    “I’m at your place. Calling on your phone,” Cappy said. “I took your car.”
    “How did they know?”
    “Maybe Joe Mack called them. I don’t know. But I got to get the fuck out of here. And I’m hurt. One of them shot me in the foot, shot a toe off.”
    Barakat said, “Wait for me. In the bathroom cabinet there are three or four pill bottles. One of them is called oxycodone. If you have bad pain, take two of them. Lay on the bed, put your foot up on two pillows. If it’s bleeding bad, get a kitchen towel and press on the wound. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
    “I never got close to the woman. She’s still there . . .”
    Barakat said, quietly, “Man, about fifty cops just ran in. I must go. But: they think you are here, I believe.”

    COPS SWARMED the hospital, sixty or seventy officers from all the jurisdictions in the area—campus cops, Minneapolis and St. Paul police, Ramsey and Hennepin County deputies. Media trucks were right