Storm Prey

happened?”
    “A guy across the street saw the SWAT guys trading places. He turned on his porch light and yelled at them. They shut him up, but ... it happened.”
    “Anything happen upstairs?”
    “No. But we don’t know he’s upstairs. We only think he is.”
    Marcy rubbed her face, then said to Lucas: “The snow muffles everything.”
    “Yeah. I don’t know.”
    They talked about it.
     
     
    CAPPY CUT a slit in the sheet and draped it over his head, so he was covered from head to toe in white, like a ghost. Said aloud, “Gonna feel like a fool if nobody’s there.”
    But somebody was there, he thought.
    He was down in the basement, having snuck down the stairs past Mrs. Wilson’s bedroom door. Darker than the inside of a coal sack. There was a chair by the washing machine...
    He lifted it over to the basement window, a low, eighteen-inch-high double-pane affair that hinged at the top. Probably, he thought, hadn’t been opened in years. Didn’t want to wake Mrs. Wilson, though she was hard of hearing, and so he didn’t have to be absolutely quiet.
    He stood on the chair, brushed his hand around the perimeter of the window, until he found the latch, worked it loose. Window didn’t want to open. Got his knife out, pried around the edges, had to work at it, first one end, then the other, finally felt it give. A minute later, a rush of cold air and snow blew over him.
    The snow was as high as the window. He stepped up on the dryer, put his gloves on, pushed the window up, and started to work through it. Not easy: he was wearing too much clothing and kept getting hung up. He struggled, pushing with his feet, and then with his hands, and finally dragged his feet through the window. He was lying flat on his stomach, covered with the sheet, in fourteen inches of snow.
    He began low-crawling his way forward, like a worm, nearly invisible in the dark. He was headed straight out to the back of the lot.
     
     
    LUCAS SAID, “If he’s upstairs, and I don’t know why an old lady would want to have her bedroom upstairs... if he’s upstairs, you could come in from the side of the house where the roof comes down. You know what I mean? He can’t see out that way.”
    Nelson, the SWAT commander, said, “Yeah, we could do that, but if he saw our guy ... if he’s moved downstairs, he could be looking out a window, our guy would be dead meat.”
    Nelson’s radio burped and he put it to his face and said, “Yeah?” Listened, and said, “Can you get over there? Okay. Stay right where you are. I’m going to alert everybody. We’ll be there with you in a minute ... Sure it wasn’t a dog? Okay.”
    He said to Lucas, Marcy, and the chief, “Billy Harris thinks somebody, or something, might have just hit the fence in Wilson’s backyard. He didn’t see it, but he heard it, and thought he might have seen something.”
    “How could he get out?” Marcy asked.
    “Don’t know.”
    “Let’s go look,” Lucas said. “Let’s get a couple guys to go with us.”
     
     
    THEY LEFT the building at a jog, five of them, running around the block, in the night, slowed by the snow. Nelson called up Harris at the end of the second block and said, “Careful, we’re coming in.”
    They went in single-file, groping past hedges and garbage cans; the only light was from the streetlights, and there wasn’t much, not in the close-packed older houses, with grown-up trees and bushes. Harris had been set up behind a neighbor’s garage at the back of the house.
    They came up and he said, in a whisper, “Right there, across the yard. Something big hit the fence.”
    They could see the back window of the upstairs room, a dark rectangle in the barely visible house.
    “I’m going out there,” Lucas said. “Right around this house behind us, and then over to the fence. Johnny, tell your guys I’ll be moving out there.”
    He slipped away to his left, groping in the dark, behind the neighboring house, sheltered by a hedge. Once across the yard, he forced a hole in the hedge, into Wilson’s yard, next to the fence. Unlikely that he could be seen: he couldn’t see the window anymore. But if Cappy was out there, with a shotgun, waiting ...
    He got his guts up and started crawling down the fence line. Fifteen yards down the line, he crossed Cappy’s trail. Thought nothing. Turned to look at the fence: couldn’t see anything. Listened. Nothing. Crawled down the trail to the house, and the basement window. “Goddamnit.”