Sudden Prey

the phone off and hurried to catch the others.
     
     
     
    BUTTERS HAD WALKED up the stairs toward the bathroom when he glanced out a back window and saw the man dart through the streetlight a block over. The motion was quick, but heavy. Not a jogger, a soldier. He knew instantly that the cops were at the door.
    He was still wearing his camo parka. He ran light-footedly down the stairs to the hall, where Martin had stacked the weapons in an open hall closet, out of sight but easy to get to. Butters grabbed the AR-15, already loaded, and four loaded magazines. He jammed the mags in his pocket and jacked a shell into the chamber and kept going, right to the back door.
    The rear of the house was still dark, and he listened for a moment. He couldn’t hear anything, but the door was the place they’d come. He turned back, crossed the house to the darker side away from the back door, went into Martin’s bedroom, and tried a window. Jammed. He went to the next, turning the twist lock, lifting it. There was a vague tearing sound as old paint ripped away; the smell of it tickled his nose, but he had been quiet enough, he thought. The old-fashioned storm windows opened behind some kind of withered, leafless bush. He looked out, saw nobody, pushed open the storm window and peeked. Still nothing, too dark. He took a breath and snaked over the windowsill into the snow behind the hedge.
    The snow crunched beneath his weight where dripping water from the eaves had stippled the surface with ice. He lay still for a moment, listening. Listening was critical in the dark: he’d spent weeks in tree stands, turning his head to the tweaks and rustles of the early morning, the deer moving back to bedding areas, the foxes and coyotes hunting voles, the wood ducks crunching through dried-out oak leaves, the trees defrosting themselves in the early sun, the grass springing up in the morning. Ansel Butters had heard corn grow; and now he heard footsteps in the snow, coming from the back, and then more, from the front.
    Butters went down the side of the house, listening to the crunch of feet coming in: they wouldn’t hear him, he decided. They were making too much noise on their own, city people in the snow, carrying heavy weapons. He went left, to the house next door, pressed himself against its weathered siding. Trying to see, trying to hear . . .
    And here they came, through the backyard, three or four of them, he thought. Staying low, he moved to the corner of the house, then around it, to the east. He really had no choice about which way to go . . .
    The loudspeaker came like a thunderbolt:
    “Halt. By the house, freeze . . .”
    And he thought, Night scope. Before the last words were out, he fixed on the position of the men coming up from the back.
    He could sense the motion.
    Butters ran sideways and fired a long, ripping burst across the group, thirty rounds pounding downrange, his face flashing in the muzzle flash like a wagon spoke in a strobe light.
    The return fire was short of him, of where he had been. Moving all the time, he punched out the magazine and slammed in another, looking for muzzle flashes, squirting quick three- and four-shot bursts at them, more to suppress than to hit.
    And still the return fire was short . . .
    Then he was behind a garage; he sensed something in front of him and slowed just in time. He touched and then vaulted a four-foot chain-link fence, crossed a yard, went over the next fence, pushed through a hedge, scratching his face, took another fence, then another, heard garbage cans crashing behind him, screams, another burst of gunfire which went somewhere else, more screams.
    He could hear himself breathing, gasping for air, trying to remember about how many shells would be left; he thought maybe six or eight, plus the third magazine in his pocket.
    He felt good, he was moving, operating, he was on top of it.
    Heading east.
     
     
     
    THE LOUDSPEAKER AND the gunfire took them by surprise, Lucas and the other cops standing behind cars, talking quietly among themselves. They stiffened, turned, guns coming out, men crouching behind cars. Then radios began talking up and down the block, and Lucas, running to a St. Paul squad, said, “What? What?”
    “Shit, one of them’s out, he’s maybe coming this way,” a patrol sergeant said.
    Lucas ran back toward his own people, touched them, “Watch it, watch it, he could be coming . . .”
    Butters ran hard as he could, made it to the end of the