“Made for each other,” Lucas said, with a wry undertone cops affected when they were getting too close to sincerity.
“Yeah. Jesus, I want to kill that motherfucker . . .”
Then the handset:
“Lucas. Got one coming.” A surveillance voice. Lucas grabbed the radio and stepped to the front door. He could see out the inset glass windows without being seen himself.
“White male in a pickup, moving slow. He’s not delivering papers.”
“Can you see the plates?”
“I can’t, but Tommy can, he’s got the night scope . . . Tommy? He’ll be there in a minute.”
“Right, I got him coming . . .”
“Lucas, he’s coming up to the house now.”
Lucas could see the headlights on the snow, then the slowly moving pickup. “Get the plate, get the plate.”
“He’s going by, but he was looking. Jeff, what’d you think?”
“He was looking, all right.”
“We don’t want to shoot a goddamn reporter, take it easy . . .”.
Lucas said, “Tommy, you got that plate?”
“Front plate’s dirty, I can get CV. It’s Minnesota . . .”
“Tommy, c’mon . . .”
“I got it, I got it . . .” He read the license out, and Dispatch acknowledged. “He’s going around the corner . . .”
“Which way?”
“South. Wait a minute, he’s stopping. He’s stopping.”
“Dick, you guys get down here in the car,” Lucas said into the handset. “Come around the block from the back.”
“Didn’t think it’d happen,” Del said. He was wide awake, breathing hard.
“Take it easy,” Lucas said.
Small called down the stairs: “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” Lucas called back, and then Del led out through the front and down the sidewalk, moving with the wintertime short-step duckwalk of a man on ice.
Lucas still had the handset. Tommy: “He’s getting something out of the back. He’s got the dome light on and he’s doing something in the back.”
Lucas brought the radio up: “Everybody take it easy, he could have anything in there.”
Dick came back: “We’re coming in, we’re coming around the corner.”
Lucas said, “Let’s go,” and they started running, moving off the sidewalk into the snow, high-stepping. At the corner, they rounded an arbor vitae, and saw the truck fifty feet away, across the street, the door open now. The driver was turning toward them, he had something in his arms . . .
“Hold it,” Lucas shouted. Del was sprinting ahead, and Tommy came in from the side, his long coat whipping around his legs, and Dick came in with the car . . .
BUTTERS HAD SPIRALED in toward the house from a half-mile out, quartering the neighborhood, watching faces in the few cars he’d encountered, looking for lights, looking for motion. In the woods, he’d learned to look not for the animal, but the disturbance in the animal’s wake. Deer sometimes sounded like they were wearing jackboots, pounding through the woods; squirrels made tree limbs jiggle and jerk in a way that wasn’t the wind; even a snake, if it was big enough, parted the grass like a ship’s prow cutting through water.
He watched for the odd motion; and saw none.
Still, there was something not right about this. He understood that the cop might think that the kid was safe, but why would he take the chance? Putting the kid in the hotel would have been the natural thing to do.
Butters saw nothing, but he smelled something: the kid felt like bear bait, a bucket of honey and oatmeal, meant to pull them in. They had to check, because the kid might be one of their last chances to really get even. And that, he thought, made the kid even better bait.
But he turned toward the house, spiraling, moving closer . . .
THE UNMARKED CAR caught the truck in its high beams, and the man turned, hearing Lucas’s scream, saw the running men . . . put his back to the truck and said, “What? What?”
Del was twenty feet away and coming in, and the man raised his hands and Del almost popped him: almost . . .
“Freeze. Right where you are.” Lucas behind Del, Tommy on the edge, the doors popping on the blocking car.
“What?” The guy was white-faced, shocked, his mouth dropping open. He stepped back away from the van.
There was movement in the van, and Tommy swiveled toward it, his shotgun raised. A blond head. Then a child’s voice, tired and frightened: “Daddy?”
SPIRALING: AND CATCHING, down a street that led almost straight into the target house, a dark-night tableau. A car parked diagonally across the street, its headlights on a van. A man outside the van, his hands up. More men in the street.
“There you are,” Butters said, with satisfaction. “I knew you were out there.”
Lucas saw Butters’s truck: noticed it mostly because it was identical to the truck they were standing next to.
Del was apologizing to the owner, who had just gotten home from his parents’ farm, and trying to reassure the little girl, who was old enough to be frightened by the men who’d suddenly surrounded them.
The truck in the intersection paused for just a heartbeat, two heartbeats, then casually rolled on. The driver must have seen the commotion in the street, Lucas thought. “I’ve got a daughter just like you, who lives up the block,” Lucas said to the little girl. “Do you know Sarah Davenport?”
The girl nodded without saying anything, but now the world was okay.
“Sure, she knows Sarah . . .” the father was saying, and Lucas made nice and forgot about the other truck.
And walking away, a shaky, white-faced Del said, “Jesus, I gotta ease off. I almost shot the guy. He didn’t do a fuckin’ thing, I just wanted to do it . . .”
STADIC THOUGHT ABOUT it all the way into the Cities. He was exhausted from the day on duty, from the drive, from the killing. Through the thinning snow, he had flashes, almost visionlike in their clarity and intensity, of Elmore Darling sitting at the table in the instant before the gunshot. Darling was smiling, hopeful . . . afraid. He was alive. Then he wasn’t. There was no transition, just a noise, and the smell of gunpowder and raw meat, and Elmore Darling wasn’t there anymore.
The visions frightened Stadic: What was happening? Was he losing it? At the same time, his cop brain was working out the inevitable progression. He now knew where LaChaise and his friends were hiding. If he worked it right, if he came up with the right story, he could ambush them. He needed to draw them out of their house, unsuspecting.
He could set up outside the house, in the dark, next to their vehicles. Darling said the trucks would be on the street. Then he could prod them out. He could call and say that the cops had been tipped, that they were on the way. They’d have to run for it.
LaChaise was injured, so only Martin and Butters would be at full strength. He’d catch them as soon as they stepped out on the porch, before they could get the door shut, then he’d go in after the woman.
But how about the shotgun? Darling had been killed with 00s, maybe he ought to change to 000s? Or maybe just go with the pistol. If he was right there, real close, take them with the pistol and forget the shotgun. Of course, if LaChaise was really hurt, if he didn’t come out, then he’d have to go in after him . . .
There’d be risk. He couldn’t avoid it.
And how would he explain the sequence to the St. Paul cops? He could say he’d been tipped to the location by one of the local dopers, but he hadn’t given it much credence. He’d gone to take a look, when he’d stumbled right into them . . .
But why would he go into the house? Why not fall back and call for an entry team?
Stadic chewed it over, worried it, all the way down to the Cities. If he was going to do it, he should stop down at his office and pick up a vest. But when he stopped at the office, the first thing he heard was people running in the hallways . . .
LUCAS STARED OUT through the slats in the venetian blinds. Still dark. ??
?Not coming.”
“So it was bullshit,” Del said. He yawned.
“Maybe. Strange call, though,” Lucas said, thinking about it. “Came straight into me. He had the number.”
“We oughta leave a couple of guys here, just in case,” Del said. “I gotta get down to Hennepin and see Cheryl.”
“Yeah, take off,” Lucas said.
Dispatch called: “Lucas?”
He picked up the handset. “Yes?”
“A woman called for you. Says she has some information and she wants the ten thousand.”
“Patch her through.”
“She hung up. She says her old man might hear her. But she gave her address. She says she wants you to take her out of her house, if her old man gets . . . she said, ‘pissed.’ ” A dispatcher couldn’t say “pissed,” but she could quote “pissed.”
“What’s the address?” Lucas asked.
“It’s over on the southeast side . . . you got a pencil?”
As Lucas took it down, Del asked, “You want me to come along?”
Lucas shook his head. “It’s probably bullshit. Half the dopers in town will be calling, trying to fake us out. Go see Cheryl.”
“They’ll let me in pretty soon,” Del said. The light on his watch face flickered in the dark. “I gotta be there when she wakes up.”
“Keep an eye out,” Lucas said. “The crazy fucks could be around the hospital.”
LUCAS, BEGINNING TO feel the weight of all the sleepless hours, looked at the house and wondered: called to a semi-slum duplex, in the early-morning darkness. An ambush?
“What do you think?” he asked.
“You wait here,” the patrol cop said. “We’ll go knock.”
The two patrol cops, one tall and one even taller, were wearing heavy-duty armor, capable of defeating rifle bullets. Two more cops sat in the alley behind the house, covering the back door.
Lucas stood by the car, waiting, while the cops approached the door. One of them peeked at a window, then suddenly broke back toward the door, and Lucas saw that it was opening. A woman, gaunt, black-haired, poked her head out and said something to the cops. The tall cop nodded, waved Lucas in, and then he and the taller cop went inside.
Lucas caught them just inside the door. The taller cop whispered, “Her husband’s in the back bedroom, and he keeps a gun on the floor next to the bed. We’re invited in, so we can take him.”
Lucas nodded, and the two cops, walking softly as they could over the tattered carpet, eased down the hallway, with the woman a step behind them. At the last door, the lead cop gestured and the woman nodded, and the cop reached inside the dark room and flipped on the light. Lucas heard him say, “Police,” and then, “Get the gun,” and then, “Hey, wake up. Wake up. Hey you, wake up.”
Then a man’s voice, high and squeaky, “What the fuck? What the fuck is going on?”
The woman walked back down the hall toward Lucas. She was five-six, and weighed, he thought, maybe ninety pounds, with cheekbones like Frisbees. She said, “I heard you’re putting up the money.”
“If your information is any good,” he said.
The two patrol cops prodded her husband out into the hallway. Still mostly asleep, he was wearing stained Jockey shorts and a befuddled expression. His hands were cuffed behind his back.
“Oh, the information is good,” the woman said to Lucas. Then, “You remember me?”
Lucas looked at her for a moment, saw something familiar in the furry thickness of her dark brows, mentally put twenty-five pounds on her and said, “Yeah. You used to work up at the Taco Bell, the one off Riverside. You were . . . let’s see, you were hanging out with Sammy Cerdan and his band. You were what—you played with them. Bass?”
“Yeah, bass,” she said, pleased that he remembered.
He was going to ask, “What happened?” but he knew. Still smiling, a rickety smile that looked as though it might slide off her face onto the floor, she said, “Yeah, yeah, good times.”
Her husband said, “What the hell is going on? Who’s this asshole?”
The tall cop said, “He had a bag of shit under his mattress.”
He tossed a Baggie to Lucas: the stuff inside, enough to fill a teaspoon, looked like brown sugar.
“This is fuckin’ illegal. I want to see a search warrant,” the husband said.
“You shouldn’t of hid the bag, Dex,” the woman said to him. To Lucas, “He never gave me nothin’. I’m boostin’ shit out of Target all day and he never give me nothin’.”
“Kick you in the ass,” Dexter shouted at her, and he struggled against the taller cop, and tried to kick at her. She dodged the kick and gave him the finger.
“Shut up,” Lucas said to him. To the woman: “Where are they?”
“My brother rented them a house, but he doesn’t know who they are. The one guy, Butters? He was here asking about crooked cops and houses he could rent. As soon as I saw on TV, I knew that was him.”
“You cunt,” her husband shouted.
Lucas turned to him and smiled: “The next time you interrupt, I’m gonna pull your fuckin’ face off.”
The husband shut up and the woman said, “I want the money.”
“If this pans out, you’ll get it. What’s the address?”
“I want something else.”
“What?”
“When my mom took the kids, they kicked me off welfare.”
“So?”
“So I want back on.”
Lucas shrugged. “I’ll ask. If you can show them the kids, then . . .”
“I don’t want the kids back. I just want back on the roll,” the woman said. “You gotta fix it.”
“I’ll ask, but I can’t promise,” Lucas said. “Now, where are they?”
“Over in Frogtown,” she said. “I got the address written down.”
“What about the cop?” Lucas asked. “Who’d you send him to?”
The woman shook her head. “We didn’t know any cop. Dex just gave him names of some dopers who might know.”
Lucas turned to her husband. “What dopers?”
“Fuck you,” Dex said.
“Gonna give you some time to think about it,” Lucas said, poking a finger in Dexter’s face. “Down in the jail. For the shit.” He held up the bag. “If you think about it fast enough, maybe you can buy out of the murder charge.”
“Fuck that, I want a lawyer,” Dex said.
“Take him,” Lucas said to the patrolmen. To the woman: “Gimme the address.”
LACHAISE WOKE UP sober but hung over. He stood up, carefully, walked down to the bathroom, closed the door, found the light switch and flicked it on, took a leak, flushed the toilet.
He’d been sleeping in his jeans, T-shirt and socks. He pulled up the shirt to check the bandage on his ribs, looking in the cracked mirror over the sink, but saw no signs of blood, just the dried iodine compound. Best of all, he didn’t feel seriously injured: he’d been hurt in bike accidents and fights, and he knew the coming-apart feeling of a bad injury. This just plain hurt.
The house was silent. He stepped back out of the bathroom, walked down the hall to the next room and pushed the door open. Sandy was curled on the bed, wrapped in a blanket.
“You asleep?” he asked quietly.
There was no response, but he thought she might be awake. He was about to ask again, when there was a noise in the hall. He stepped back, and saw Martin padding down the hallway, a .45 in his hand. When Martin saw LaChaise, his forehead wrinkled.
“You all right?” Martin asked.
“I’m sore, but I been a lot worse,” LaChaise said. “Where’s Ansel?”
“He went to see about that Davenport kid.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s my job,” LaChaise said.
Martin’s mouth jerked; he might have been trying to smile. “He figured you’d think that. But he thought it might be a trap and he figured, you know, you’re the valuable one. You’re the brains of the operation.”
 
; “Shoulda told me,” LaChaise growled.
“You was drunk.”
Sandy pushed herself up. Beneath the blanket, LaChaise noticed, she’d been wrapped in a parka. “What’s going on?”
“Ansel went after the cop’s kid,” LaChaise said. He looked at her in the long coat, and said, “What’s wrong with you? What’s the parka for?”
“It’s like a meat locker in here,” she said, crossing her arms and shivering.
“Bullshit: she wants to be ready to run,” Martin growled.
LaChaise turned to her: “You run, we’ll cut your fuckin’ throat. And if you did get away . . .” He dug in his shirt pocket, and came up with a stack of photographs. Two men sitting at a table, one black, one white. LaChaise riffled them at her like a deck of cards. “We got a cop on the string. The only way he gets out is if we get away, or we’re all dead. If you get away from us, and go to the cops, he’ll have to come after you, in case you know his name. Think about that: we’ve got a cop who’ll kill you, and you don’t know who it is.” He put the photos back in his pocket.
Sandy shivered. “I’m not thinking about running,” she said. “I’m just cold.”
“Bullshit,” Martin snorted.
“Whyn’t you put some shoes on?” LaChaise said. “Let’s go out.”
“Go out?” she asked doubtfully. She looked toward a window: it was pitch black outside. Then she looked back at LaChaise. “Dick, you’re hurt . . .”
“Hell, it ain’t that bad. There’s no bleeding. And I can’t be cooped up in here,” LaChaise said. Despite the headache, he was almost cheerful.
“I’d rather stay here.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” he snapped. “Let’s go out and see what’s cookin’. One of you can drive, I’ll sit in the back.”
WHILE SANDY AND Martin got ready, LaChaise turned on the television, clicked around the channels and found nothing of interest but a weather forecast. The snow would diminish during the morning, and the sun might peek through in the afternoon. Big trouble was cranking up in the Southwest, but it was several days away.