“Okay, your name is Terry?”
“Yeah, T-E-R-R-Y, he’s got the number.”
“I’ll tell him,” Cheryl Capslock said.
MARTIN WALKED ACROSS the street to the car lot. The Firebird was in a display stand, forty feet from the main side window on the dealership. He walked once around the car, then again, then bent to look in the side window.
As he rounded the car the second time, he saw a salesman, in the lighted room, pulling on a coat. Martin took the knife out of the sheath and put it in the right side pocket of his coat. Ten seconds later, the salesman, shoulders humped against the snow, trotted out to the car. His coat hung open, showing a rayon necktie.
“She’s a beaut,” he said, tipping his head at the car.
“You’re Mr. Sherrill?” asked Martin.
“Yeah, Mike Sherrill. Didn’t we meet last week sometime?”
“Uh, no, not really . . . Listen, I can’t see the mileage on this thing.”
Sherrill was in his mid-thirties, a onetime athlete now running to fat and whiskey. A web of broken veins hung at the edges of his twice-broken nose, and his once-thick Viking hair had thinned to a blond frizz. “About fifty-five thousand actual. Let me pop the door for you.”
Sherrill skated around the car, used a gloved hand to quickly brush the snow off the windshield, then fumbled at the locked keybox on the door. Martin looked past him at the dealership. Another salesman stood briefly at the window, looking out at the snow, then turned away.
“Okay, here we go,” Sherrill said. He got the key out of the keybox and unlocked the car door.
Martin didn’t mess around, didn’t wait for the better moment. He stood to one side as Sherrill opened the door. When Sherrill stepped back, he moved close against the other man, put one hand on his back, and with the other, delivered the killing thrust, a brutal upward sweep, like a solar plexus jab.
The knife took Sherrill just below the breastbone, angling up, through the heart.
Sherrill gasped once, wiggled, started to go down, his eyes open, surprised, looking at Martin. Martin guided his falling body onto the car seat. He pushed Sherrill’s head down, caught Sherrill’s thrashing legs and pushed them up and inside. Sherrill was upside down in the car, his feet over the front seat, his head hanging beneath the steering wheel. His eyes were open, glazing. He tried to say something, and a blood bubble came out of his mouth.
“Thanks,” Martin said.
Martin pushed down the door lock, slammed the door and walked away. There was nobody in the dealership window to see him go.
BUTTERS WAITED UNTIL the man in the white shirt had a customer and the woman was free. He walked into the store, his hand on the silenced pistol. At the back of the store, near the door to the storeroom, was a display for DirecTV. He headed that way, and Elaine Kupicek followed. She was a nice-looking woman, Butters thought, for a cop’s wife.
“Can I help you?” She had a wide, mobile mouth and long skinny hands with short nails.
“I own a bar, down in St. Paul.”
“Sure . . .”
“If I put in DirecTV, would I be able to get, like, the Green Bay games, even when there’s no broadcast over here?”
“Oh, sure. You can get all the games . . .”
The man in the white shirt had moved with his customer to a computer display, where they were talking intently about TV cards for a Windows 95 machine.
“We have a brochure that shows the options . . .”
Butters looked at her, then put the fingers of his left hand to his lips. She stopped suddenly in midsentence, puzzled, and then he took the .380 out of his left pocket and pointed it at her.
“If you scream, I’ll shoot. I promise.”
“What . . .”
“Step in the back; this is a robbery.”
He prodded her toward the door. She stepped backward toward it, caught the knob with her hand and her mouth opened and Butters said, conversationally, “Be quiet, please.”
She went through, her eyes looking past Butters, searching for the man in the white shirt, but Butters prodded her further into the room, and then closed the door behind them.
“Don’t hurt me,” she said.
“I won’t. I want you to sit down over there . . . just turn over there.”
She turned to look at the chair next to a technician’s desk: a brown paper lunch sack sat on the table, with a grease stain on one side. Her lunch sack, with a baloney sandwich and an orange. She stepped toward the desk and said, “Please don’t.”
“I won’t,” he promised, in his gentle southern accent. She turned back to the chair and when her head came around, he took the nine-millimeter out of the Velcroed flap in one swift, practiced motion, put it against the back of her head and pulled the trigger once.
Kupicek lurched forward and went down. Butters half-turned, and waited, listening. The shot had been as loud as a hand-clap, 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, “We lost him, he closed down.”
“I’m going to the U Hospitals. I want Sherrill, Franklin, Sloan and Kupicek on the line now,” Lucas said. He fumbled a cellular phone out of an armrest box and punched the speed-dial button for Weather. A secretary answered, then transferred him to the clinic, where another secretary, bored, said Weather was busy with a patient.
“This is Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport of the Minneapolis Police Department and this is an emergency and I want her on the line immediately,” Lucas shouted. “GET HER.”
Then Franklin came back through Dispatch: he was in the office.
“Get your wife and kid and go someplace until we know what’s happening,” Lucas said.
“The kid’s in school . . .”
“Just get them,” Lucas said. “Have you seen Sloan?”
“I think I just saw him goin’ in the can . . .”
“Tell him. Get his wife, get out someplace. Anywhere. Get lost, but stay in touch . . .”
“You think . . .”
“Move it, goddamnit.” Lucas was stomping the gas pedal, trying to get more speed out of the Explorer.
Weather came up: “I’m on my way there,” Lucas said. He took fifteen seconds to tell her what had happened: “Get out of the clinic and stay away from your office,” he said. “Tell the secretary where you’ll be. I’ll stop and see her when I get there.”
“Lucas, I’ve got things to do, I’ve got a guy with a skin cancer . . .”
“Fuck the clinic,” he snapped, his voice a rasp. “Go someplace where you’re not supposed to be, and wait there. If the guy comes after you, he might start killing your patients, too. Everybody can wait an hour or two.”
“Lucas . . .”
“I don’t have time to chat, goddamnit, just do it.” He cut off a white-haired guy in a red Chevy Tahoe and could see the guy pounding the steering wheel as he went by.
Sherrill was working an ag assault in a bar off Hennepin, drunk college kids beating a black guy with bar stools until he stopped moving. He still wasn’t moving, but he wasn’t quite dead, either. Sherrill called, and Lucas gave her the word on Del.
“Oh, my God, I’m going over there,” she said.
“No. Call Mike, tell him to take a walk. Tell him to go sit in a restaurant until you get to him. We want everybody where they shouldn’t be until we figure out what’s going on.”
Dispatch came back: “Del hit LaChaise—there’s blood on the sidewalk, going out to where a truck was parked. All the hospitals know, we’re covering the emergency rooms . . .”
Kupicek came up. He and his kid were at a peewee hockey match. “Call your wife, you all go out to eat somewhere on the department, catch a movie,” Lucas said. “Check with me before you go home. Look in your rearview mirror, stay on the radio.”
“How’s Del’s wife?” Kupicek asked.
“I don’t know: we’ve got people on the way to Hennepin.”
“Keep me tuned, dude,” Kupicek said.
Thirty seconds later, the dispatcher came back, and asked Lucas to switch over to a scrambled command frequency. “What?” he asked.
“Oh, God.” The dispatcher sounded as though she were weeping, a sound Lucas hadn’t heard from Dispatch. “Roseville called: Danny’s wife’s been shot. She’s dead. In the store at Rosedale.”
Lucas felt the anger rising, building toward a black frenzy: “Don’t put this on the air, don’t tell anyone outside the center . . . when did this happen?”
“The call came in at five-seventeen, but they think she might have been shot about five-twelve.”
“When was Del?”
“About five-fifteen.”
So there had to be more than one shooter. How many?
“Who’ll tell Danny?” the dispatcher asked.
“I will,” Lucas said. “Does Rose Marie know?”
“Lucy’s on the way to her office.”
Lucas called Kupicek back. “Danny, where are you?”
“Hennepin and Lake. Looking for a phone.”
“Change of plans: We got Roseville with your wife, we need you at the emergency entrance to Hennepin General. Right now. You gotta light with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Light it up and get it in there . . .”
“I got the kid.”
“Bring him: he’ll be okay.”
When Kupicek was gone, Lucas got back to Dispatch: “Check Danny’s file: he’s got a sister named Louise Amdahl and they’re tight. Get her down to Hennepin General. Send a car and tell them to move it, lights and sirens all the way.”
And he thought about Sherrill and Weather. He punched up the phone again, caught Weather, told her about Kupicek’s wife: “I’m not coming. But you gotta hide out and I’m not bullshitting you, Weather, I swear to God, you gotta get out of sight, someplace where I can get you. The guy could be in the hospital right now.”
“I’m going,” she said.
“Take care, please, please, take care,” he said.
And he got Sherrill: “Did you reach Mike?”
“No, Lucas, they can’t find him.” Her voice was high, scared. “He’s supposed to be there, but they can’t find him. I’m going there.”
“I’m sending a squad.”
“Lucas, you don’t think . . . ?” Her marriage had been on the rocks for a while.
“We don’t know what to think,” Lucas said. Sherrill didn’t know about Danny’s wife. He didn’t tell her. “Get on up there.”
Back to Dispatch: “Two cars, get them up there. You gotta beat Sherrill up there . . .”
LUCAS WENT STRAIGHT though the city traffic, not slowing for any light, green, yellow or red, his foot on the floor: driving the Explorer was like driving a hay wagon, but he beat Kupicek by two minutes, pulling in a car length behind Rose Marie Roux. The chief was pale, nearly speechless: She said, “This . . .” and then shook her head and they ran inside, Lucas banging the doors out of the way.
Del, covered with blood, stood in the hallway, talking to a doctor in scrubs: “Sometimes she gets stress headaches in the afternoon and she takes aspirin. That’s all. Wait, she drinks Diet Coke, that’s got caffeine. I don’t know if she took any aspirin this afternoon . . .”
He saw them coming, Lucas and Rose Marie, and stepped toward them.
“He hit her hard,” he said. He seemed unaware that tears were running down his seamed face: his voice was absolutely under control. “But if there aren’t any complications, she’ll make it.”
“Aw, Jesus, Del,” Lucas said. He tried to smile, but his face was desperately twisted.
“What happened?” D
el said. He looked from one of them to the other. “What else happened?”
“Danny’s wife’s been shot; she’s dead. And we can’t find Mike Sherrill.”
“The motherfuckers,” Del rasped.
Then Danny Kupicek banged through the entryway, a kid tagging along behind, still in his hockey uniform, wearing white Nikes that looked about the size of battle-ships, a shock of blond hair down over his eyes. He seemed impressed by the inside of the hospital.
“Del,” Kupicek said, “Jesus, how’s Cheryl? Is she okay?”
“Danny . . .” said Lucas.
Ten minutes later, they found Mike Sherrill. Marcy Sherrill arrived just in time to see the cops gathering around the Firebird, and thrust through them just in time to see the door pop open, and look straight into her husband’s open eyes, upside down, dead.
She turned, and one of the uniforms, a woman, wrapped her up, and a moment later she made a sound a bit like a howl, a bit like a croak, and then she fell down.
LACHAISE WAS THE first to get back to the house. Martin had called from a pay phone and LaChaise sent him to get Butters.
“You bad?” Martin had asked, his voice low, controlled.
“I don’t know, but I’m bleeding,” LaChaise told him. “Hurts like hell.”
“Can you breathe?”
“Yeah. I just don’t want to,” LaChaise said.
“Can you get in the house?”
“Think so. Yeah.”
“Get inside. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
LaChaise hurt, but not so bad that he couldn’t make it to the house. That encouraged him. Except for the burning pain, which was localized, he didn’t feel bad. There was no sense of anything loose inside, anything wrecked.
But when he got in the house, he found he couldn’t get the jacket off by himself. When he lifted his arm, fire ran down his rib cage. He slumped on the living-room rug, and waited, staring at the ceiling.