Sudden Prey

accompanied by the working of the bolt. Enough noise to attract attention in an ordinary room, but the door was closed.
    He waited another two seconds, then stepped toward the door. Elaine Kupicek sprawled facedown, unmoving. Butters put the pistol back in the Velcroed flap, and the .380 decoy gun in his pocket.
    When he opened the door, the man in the white shirt was still talking to the customer. Butters strolled out easily, hands in his pockets, got to the tiled corridor outside the store, looked both ways and then ambled off to the left.
    LACHAISE CROSSED THE street in the snow, up the walk to the left-hand door of the town house. He carried the .44 in his right hand, and pushed the doorbell with his left. He stepped back, and a gust of snow hit him in the eyes. The gust came just as the door opened, and he wondered later if it was the snow in his eyes that was to blame . . .
    A woman opened the inner door, then half-opened the storm door, a plain woman, half smiling: “Yes?”
    “Mrs. Capslock?”
    “Yes?”
    He was coming around with the gun when Del loomed behind her: a shock, the sudden movement, the face, then Del’s mouth opening . . .
    Capslock swatted his wife and she went sideways and down, and Capslock screamed something. LaChaise’s gun, halfway up, went off when Capslock screamed, and Capslock’s arm was coming up. LaChaise’s gun went off again and then Capslock had a gun, short and black with the small hole coming around at LaChaise’s eyes, and LaChaise slammed the storm door shut as Capslock fired. Splinters of aluminum sliced at LaChaise’s face and he backed away, firing the Bulldog again, aware that the door was falling apart, more slugs coming through at him.
    The muzzle flashes were blinding, the distance only feet, then yards, but he was still standing and Capslock was standing: and then he was running, running toward the truck, and a slug plucked at his coat and a finger of fire tore through his side . . .
     
     
     
    DEL FIRED FIVE times, cutting up the door, smashing the glass, then stopped, turned to Cheryl, saw the blood on her neck, dropped next to her, saw the wound, and her eyes opened and she struggled and he rolled her onto her side and she took a long, harsh, rattling breath.
    “Hold on, hold on,” he screamed, and he ran back to the phone and dialed 911 and shouted into it—was told later that he shouted. He remembered himself talking coldly, quietly, and so he listened to the tape and heard himself screaming . . .
     
     
     
    LACHAISE WAS BLEEDING.
    He drove the truck, looking at himself in the rearview mirror. Shrapnel cuts on the face, agony in his side. He was holding his side with his hand, and when he looked at his hand, it was wet with blood. “Motherfucker . . .” he groaned.
    A spasm of fear seized his heart. Was he dying? Was this how it would end, with this pain, in the snow?
    A cop car went screaming past, lights blazing, then another, then an ambulance. Hit somebody, he thought, with a thread of satisfaction. God, it hurt . . .
    The man must have been Capslock himself; and he was fast with a gun, blindingly fast. And what had he screamed? He’d screamed LaChaise . . .
    So they knew.
    LaChaise looked into the rearview mirror.
    He was bleeding . . .

8
    LUCAS WAS ON the west side of Minneapolis, pushing the Explorer up an I-394 entrance ramp, when a dispatcher shouted, “Somebody shot Capslock’s wife,” and a second later, Del patched through: “LaChaise shot Cheryl.”
    “What?” Lucas was on the ramp, moving faster. To his right, an American flag as big as a bedsheet fluttered in the gloom. “Say that again.”
    “LaChaise shot Cheryl . . .” From behind Del’s voice, Lucas could hear a jumble of noise: voices, highway sounds, a siren. Del seemed to be out of breath, gasping at his radio.
    “Where are you?” Lucas asked.
    “Ambulance. We’re going into Hennepin.” Now the words were tumbling out, like a coke-fired rap. “I saw him, man. LaChaise. I shot at him. I don’t know if I hit him or not. He’s gone.”
    “What about Cheryl?”
    “She’s hit, she’s hit . . .” Del was shouting; several words came through garbled, then he said, “It’s our wives, man; he’s going after the families. Eye for an eye . . .”
    Weather.
    She’d be in the clinic, doing minor patch-up work on post-op patients. The fear caught Lucas by the throat; Del said something else, but he missed it, and then Del was gone.
    The dispatcher blurted,