Sudden Prey

block, passed between two houses, and in the dark space between them, ran almost headlong into a small tree. The blow knocked him down, but he held on to the rifle. Blood trickled into his mouth, and the sting told him that he’d cut his lip, probably badly. He crawled toward the street, gathered himself.
    Across the way, he could hear people talking; more gathered behind him. He had no choice. He slapped the magazine once to make sure it was seated, and ran out into the street.
    There: a cop—someone—dead ahead, behind a squad car, not much to see, turning toward him, crouching, hand coming up . . .
    Butters, still running, fired a burst at the cop behind the car, saw him go down.
    Another cop opened up from his right, then a third, and then he was hit: a stinging blow, as if somebody had struck his bare butt with a hickory switch. He knew what it was, and even as he returned the fire he passed through the line of cars, and cops were firing into each other as they tried to get him, men spilling themselves into the snow to get away from the bullets, others screaming . . .
    And Butters ran.
    A house, straight ahead, with lights on. And there was some pain now, more than an ache, more like a fire, in his thigh. He ran up four steps of the porch of the lighted house, to a stone-faced entry and an almost full-length glass pane in the front door. He fired a short burst at the glass, blew it out, and went through the door.
    A man in pajamas stood at the bottom of a stairway; a woman stood at the top, looking down.
    Butters pointed the gun at the woman and screamed at her: “Get down here.”
    And a kid yelled, “What? What’s going on? Mom?”
     
     
     
    LUCAS SAW HIM coming, down to the right. He fired twice, thought he might have hit him once, but the man was very fast, and ran in an odd, broken, jerky two-step that made him hard to track, especially with the bad light. The man fired a burst and Lucas felt a hard, scratching rip at his hairline, not hard, like a slug, but ripping, like a frag. Then Butters went through the line of cops and Lucas could see muzzle flashes coming at him and he dropped, screaming, “Hold it, Jesus . . .”
    And when the firing stopped, he lurched up on his elbows in time to see Butters sprint up the porch steps, and the muzzle flash from the gun as he went through the glass door . . .
    “Around back, somebody around back,” Lucas shouted.
    Two St. Paul cops, frozen by the fire, broke toward the side of a nearby house, heading toward the back, and Lucas and another Minneapolis cop—Lewiston—moved in toward the porch.
    “Take him?” Lewiston asked.
    “Get in tight,” Lucas said. “Let’s . . .”
    “You’re hit,” Lewiston said. “There’s blood running out of your head.”
    “Just cut myself, I think,” Lucas said. “You go right . . .”
     
     
     
    BUTTERS POINTED THE AR-15 at the woman on the stairs and screamed, “Get down here.”
    And then the kid called, “Mom?”
    The woman shouted, “Jim, go back in your room. Jimmy . . .”
    Butters couldn’t think. His leg was on fire, and the man in the pajamas was frozen, the woman was yelling at the kid: a car rolled by outside and he turned, looked that way, couldn’t see anything. The woman was shouting at the kid and Butters yelled at her, “Get your ass down here, goddamnit, or I’ll fuck your old man up . . .”
    He pointed the gun at the pajama man and the woman came down the stairs, red-faced, terrified, watching his eyes. She wore a flannel nightgown, and something about it, the nightgown, the man’s pajamas . . .
    Then the kid came to the head of the stairs. He was wearing a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, skinny bare legs, and he looked frightened and his hair stood up where his head had been on a pillow.
    And Butters remembered: the winter the cops came, and they got his mother and his old man out of bed, and Butters had come to the stairs in his shorts, just like this . . . He remembered the fear, and the guns the cops wore on their hips, and the way his old man seemed to crawl to them, because of the guns, and his mother’s fear . . . They stank of it. He stank of it.
    And all of this was exactly the same, but he had the gun.
    “Don’t hurt us,” the woman said.
    “Fuck this,” Butters said.
    He popped the magazine from the rifle, slapped in the third full one, checked to make sure that the half-empty one was ready, easy to reach in his pocket.
    “You go back to bed, kid,” he said.
    He ran