Phantom Prey (42 page)

"Here comes SWAT," Del said.

A
St. Paul
undercover guy had photographed the interior of the apartment house, and had gotten keys for the lobby door. Since Heather's apartment was on the second floor, with street-side windows, the squad could be through the lobby, up the fire stairs, and in the hall outside the apartment in less than fifteen seconds.

As they came in, in three vans, the undercover guy, in plain clothes, would open the door and hold it: the squad would go straight through, up the stairs, and attack the apartment door, knocking down opposition with a couple of flash-bangs.

That was the theory.

If they killed the pregnant wife or the baby, they'd be, as the SWAT commander noted, permanent residents of shit city.

The vans rolled
slowly down the street, and the undercover guy walked up the steps to the front door, working the key. Lucas said, "Let's go."

They went out the door and down the stairs in a rush, hit the outside door, and thirty feet down the alley and around the corner of the drugstore and down the width of the store and around the next corner and the SWAT guys were boiling out of the vans and into the apartment.

As they came around the corner, running into the street, Lucas saw a guy run out of a bagel shop across the street, seventy or eighty yard
s a
way from them, looking up at the apartment, a cell phone to his ear.

Shrake yelled, "Hey!" and the guy turned and looked at them and took off running, away, up Snelling, and Del said, "I'll get him," and took off after him.

Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins ran across the street and up the sidewalk and heard the flash-bangs go off in the apartment, then the long, ripping stutter of a machine gun, and Jenkins yelled, "Holy shit," and the machine gun wouldn't stop and Lucas thought about drywall and plywood walls in apartment buildings, and hoped the shooting was being done by the cops, but it didn't sound like it, it sounded too uncontrolled and crazy.

Then Lucas picked up individual shots, and a man ran out the front door, looked at the vans, yanked up a small, short weapon, and fired a burst at the vans and then turned and ran away, up the street, where Del could still be seen chugging after the first runner, and Shrake said, "I got him," and lifted his M16 and Lucas shouted, "No, no . . ." and behind the runner, a car pulled out of the parking garage and stopped across the sidewalk and Shrake yelled, "Shit!"

A chair came through the end window on the apartment, and then a blanket dropped over the edge and Siggy looked out at them, saw them, turned the same weapon the second runner had, and fired a burst at them and they all went sideways behind parked cars and the bullets
patted
and
whanked
like bees.

Siggy dropped the gun out the window and threw himself over the edge, hung one second and dropped, ten or twelve feet into a flower bed, and Shrake stood up and the second runner, now eighty or a hundred yards off, opened up again and they all went flat again and then Siggy was running away with the gun, around the car still sitting in the driveway, behind it.

The driver came flying out the driver's-side door and sprawled on the ground and Siggy was in the car, fired another burst through the open driver's door, reached up and grabbed the steering wheel and pushed on the gas pedal with his other hand, and as the car started into the street, Shrake walked out into the street and said, "Fuck this," and dumped half a magazine into the front of the car.

The car straightened out and drifted across the street and ran into a parked car in front of the bagel shop, and sat there.

Lucas was running after the second runner, screaming, "Del, Del," and Del, at the top of a low hill, finally heard him, saw the second runner across the street coming toward him, ducked behind a car, and fired half a magazine at him, and the runner unloaded his weapon, whatever it was, the bullets pounding and zinging under the car that Del was hiding behind. Then he was out of ammo and he dropped the gun and started running again, and Del shot him, one long leading shot, and knocked him off his feet.

Lucas saw the second runner go down, then there were two more flash-bangs and the machine gun stuttered once, again, then a heavier, harsher sound erupted, and the higher-pitched shooting stopped.

All of a sudden, it was absolutely quiet in the street.

Lucas ran across and looked in the car Siggy had tried to take. Siggy was dead, his face a hash of blood and meat where Shrake's .223 slugs had torn into him. Jenkins was talking to the car's driver, a young guy in a blue suit, now wearing a pair of broken glasses and a stunned look.

Up the street, Del was approaching the man on the ground.

The SWAT commander ran out of the apartment and said, "We okay?"

"Got a loose runner, maybe two, got two down," Lucas said. "What happened?"

"Guy on the front room couch with a fuckin' M7 and we came through the door and man, he opened up and didn't quit; we shot him."

"Any of our guys . . . ?"

"We're all okay, got some cuts and splinters and shit."

"Heather and the baby . . . ?"

"They're okay."

Del's bullet
went through the second runner's triceps, his armpit, and into his chest, where it made a hash out of his heart and lungs. They called ambulances, but he was gone before Del even crossed the street.

They never saw the first runner again. The way they later worked it out, he'd run three blocks, spotted a passing cab, jumped in, and took the cab to Minneapolis. The driver said he dropped the passenger conveniently close to a light-rail station, which went to the airport, among other places.

They got Heather dressed and took her out in cuffs, and downtown to be processed, but she was already screaming, "I didn't know he was coming, I didn't know . . ."

She wanted a lawyer; and had his card in her purse.

Jenkins asked, "Where'd they get those fuckin' machine guns?"

Lucas shook his head: "They were coming in from Miami."

"But we got him," Shrake said.

Then everybody
in the world came down on top of them: TV and newspapers and even a public radio guy with a tape recorder and a boring voice, a dozen cop cars, the cops to check the neighborhoo
d f
or any collateral injuries or damage, crime-scene people. The street and the various shooting scenes were cordoned off, and crime-scene guys landed in force, the ME's investigators, Jackson with his Nikon D3 and every lens in the world, the St. Paul police photographer with an inferior Canon camera, a variety of deputy chiefs, homicide investigators, and a partridge in a pear tree.

It all took forever, it seemed; and Lucas was there, the whole time, and they all talked about it over and over, what everybody had seen and done, and Lucas had this sense that he hadn't done much, but he was
there,
and it all felt pretty large.

By six o'clock, the activity was petering out, and most of the cop cars were gone, and the crime-scene people were turning off work lights, and the TV guys were peeling away.

Lucas called
Weather and told her; and made sure that Del was okay, and that Shrake was okay, and they were, but now they were getting shaky with the realization that they'd actually killed people. Nobody knew exactly who'd killed the machine-gun guy in the apartment, because a number of cops had fired at him.

Lucas said, "Who'd have thought."

"Submachine guns," Del said. "Goddamn, if they'd been heavier, if they'd been assault rifles, we'd of had some dead guys."

"Saw the goddamn slugs powdering the street around you," Lucas said.

"Scared the shit out of me, it was like hail, but they weren't getting through the tires," Del said. "I don't know what they were shooting, but the tires went flat and the slugs weren't getting through."

"Thank God for steel-belted radials, eh?" Lucas said.

"I could hear them hitting those bricks around that bagel shop."

"That was a hell of a shot you made across that street." "Luck, was what it was. Forty yards--I'd be lucky to hit a garbage can at that range." "You all right?"

"A hell of a lot better than the alternative," Del said. "I didn't know he'd dropped that fuckin' gun until you told me."

"You see that guy come out of the store with that pie in the box?" Lucas asked. "He comes out and sees a dead guy laying there . . ."

"Hope it wasn't a cherry pie; he might be getting flashbacks about now."

In his mind's eye, Lucas saw Siggy's head, and the thick coagulating pool of blood underneath it. Imagined a fly buzzing around, though he hadn't seen any flies. Fuckin' Siggy.

"See you
back at the office?" Del asked.

"Yeah. We all oughta get something on paper tonight. This was a long way from perfect."

"See you there," Del said. "I'm gonna stop at home first. Cheryl's been barfing again." "See you there."

Chapter
27.

Fairy had the
gall and the will and even--maybe--the sense of humor that would make it possible to kill Davenport and get away with it. Alyssa herself was too fragile, and could feel the stress pecking at her even as Fairy, with her Valley-girl voice, called Davenport's home and spoke to Weather.

"Is Lucas Davenport there?"

"No, he's not--who is this, please?" Weather was using her surgeon's voice, with the crisp edge of command.

"Um, I'm an old friend of Frances Austin's. Do you know when Officer Davenport will be home?"

"Actually, I don't. There's been a big problem, a shooting, in St. Paul, and he's working it. You might be able to get him at his office."

At his office. The BCA. Where was that? Fairy was standing at a phone kiosk without phone books, or even a place to put them. Had to be some way--how did people get to the BCA, if they had an appointment?

Five minutes later,
Alyssa, now in her office at the Highland Park spa, brought up the BCA website and got not only a map, but a photograph. The photograph gave her an idea, and she brought up Google
Earth, homed in on east St. Paul, and two minutes later sent a satellite view of the BCA building and parking lots to her printer.

And it all came in handy: the BCA was located out of the city center, near a popular lake and park. She cruised the parking lot, spotted Davenport's Porsche. How many cops had Porsches? Very convenient.

She parked across the street, in an empty lot behind some kind of clinic, and let Fairy take over.

"Simple enough," Fairy said, meeting Loren's eyes in the rearview mirror. "If he's by himself when he comes out, I'll kill him here. If he's not, we follow him home, and we kill him at his garage. How far do you have to drive before you're lost in traffic? Not far, I think."

"But you're going as Alyssa," Loren said. "If Weather sees you . . . I'd be happier if we had time to get another wig. Have you go dark."

She shrugged. "If I bought a dark wig, and somebody ran it down . . . This is okay, because"--she tapped her forehead--"Alyssa's right here, and she's a big chicken. If there's any reason not to do it, she'll tell us."

"And you'll let her back."

"Of course," Fairy said. "Alyssa and I are very close now."

Then she got
a taste of cop work: she sat, and
sat,
and
sat,
and Lucas didn't come out. Three dozen people came and went, but the Porsche sat there, untouched. She got the gun out from the storage console at her elbow, turned the cylinder, looked once and then again to make sure each of the chambers was loaded, put it back in the console.

Sat some more,
and after a while, became aware of her bladder and started looking at bushes by the back door of the clinic. If a co
p s
aw her, and she was right across the street from about a million cops . . .

Alyssa didn't want to, but Fairy goaded her into it: "Two minutes, we'll feel a lot better."

"If anybody sees . . ."

"It's pitch-dark out there. We're wearing black. Who's going to see?"

The argument took a while. Fairy won, and she slipped out of the car with a handful of Kleenex, into the bushes, and back to the car a few minutes later, feeling much better.

"See. That's life, Alyssa," Fairy said. "Peeing is a natural function."

"Shut up."

Then he came.
She recognized him immediately--a big guy, athletic, relaxed stride; with another guy, talking. Couldn't take him here-- couldn't take him even if he'd been alone, she realized, because she'd misjudged the distance to the car. The two guys weren't especially hurrying, but they were covering ground, and Davenport would be at the Porsche before she could get close. Then he'd see her, and if he saw her . . .

"Shit! This was so stupid," Alyssa said. "What were we thinking? If he sees us coming, he'll know what's up. He'll kill us."

"So we take him home," Fairy said. "Hey: he's a cop. This is a first time we've done a cop. Let's calm down. Calm down and take him home."