Storm Prey

thigh, the pain like being hit by a baseball bat; saw the lump out front pointing a shotgun, dropped down behind the wheel. Getting close to the end, now, Cappy: his face contorted in a rictus of a grin, teeth showing. The windshield got hit, but held; then the passenger-side window blew through the truck like the end of the world, shot smashing through his wheel hand, glass through his head and face. The truck went sideways. One hand almost gone, he pulled another grenade out of his pocket, pulled the pin. He was holding it when the truck hit a tree, and jolted to a sudden stop.
    Somebody was screaming at him: “Out, out, out ...”
    Somebody else was yelling, “Careful, careful, careful ...”
    A voice close now, “Get out of there, motherfucker. Get out of there ... Let me see your hands ...”
    Voice right there. Door was jerked open, and Cappy let go of the spoon. Cop was right there and Cappy grinned at him through bloody teeth and said, “Suck on this,” but he wasn’t sure he could be understood; he closed his eyes and counted, “Two-three ...”
     
     
    THE ST. PAUL PARK cop had a shotgun almost pointing in the window and Lucas, running up, screaming, “Careful,” looked in the window and saw the quick flick and grabbed the cop by his collar and yanked him back from the truck and dragged him down by the front wheel and then the grenade went.
    And everything stopped.
    Nothing but the sound of snow, for ten seconds, fifteen, like the film had gotten stuck in the projector.
    And started again, jerking unevenly to full speed. Shrake ran up and shouted, “You guys okay? You guys okay?”
    Lucas stood up, and the cop stood up, and the cop turned white-faced to Lucas and said, “Boy, I almost fucked that up.”
    The grenade had gone off in Cappy’s lap.
    He was long gone.
     
     
    ONE SECOND LATER, another grenade went off, most of a block away, and a woman began screaming.

23
    WEATHER SLEPT LATE, for her, until six o’clock—three too many daiquiris—and as she slowly surfaced, thought first of the Raynes twins, and then, quickly, of the fact that she was alone in bed. She rolled over and patted Lucas’s side, saw that it hadn’t been slept in.
    She sat up, scratched and stretched, the worry pulling at the back of her brain—Virgil would have woken her if anything disastrous had happened, right? She threw the covers off, made a quick stop in the bathroom, got a robe and headed downstairs, still tasting the mixture of Bacardi rum and Crest toothpaste on the back of her tongue.
    Virgil was curled on the couch, watching Channel Three’s good-morning show. He sat up when she walked into the living room. “Where’s Lucas?” she asked.
    “Down in St. Paul Park. He’s fine, but there was a big shoot-out with our skinhead. Caprice M. Garner. He’s dead, he blew himself up with a grenade.”
    “No!” She stared at the television, as though the talking heads would refute what Virgil had just said; instead, the television told her about the joys of growing winter tomatoes in your basement, using equipment available in an ordinary hardware store. “Has he been on? Lucas?”
    “Hovering in the background. Marcy’s been up front.”
    “Good for her,” Weather said. “Ambitious witch.”
     
     
    SHE RAN back up the stairs, cleaned up, got into jeans and a sweater, got her cell phone, and punched up Lucas’s number. He came up and she said, “When are you coming home?”
    “I’m just fine,” he said.
    “I knew that—Virgil saw you on TV. So it’s done.”
    “There’s a question about the doc. I would like to talk to the guy you saw in the elevator,” Lucas said.
    “Maybe I was off base—”
    “You think so? The dead doc, Shaheen, was about an inch taller than you. You think you would have missed that, and thought he was taller?”
    “Well. No.”
    “Then we’ve—”
    “Let me make a phone call,” she said. “So—when’ll you be home?”
    “There was a mess last night. I fired one of the shots, we’re working through the reconstruction for everybody’s reports. It’ll be a while, yet.”
    “How do you feel? You okay?”
    “You know. Coming down. Garner was hurt, but he would have made it—he pulled the pin himself.”

    WEATHER CALLED the MMRC and was told by the duty nurse that the Raynes kids were okay: Sara still struggling a bit, but coming on. Ellen was fine. “The parents are still here. They’ve been sleeping off and on.”
    “I’ll be there in a bit,”