Shadow Prey

CHAPTER 26

Lucas spent the next day working his net, staying in touch with the hospital by telephone. In the early afternoon, Lily woke up and spoke to David, who was sitting at her bedside, and later to Sloan. She could add little to what they knew.

Shadow Love, she said. She had never seen his face, but it felt right. He was middle-height, wiry. Dark. Ate sausage.

That said, she went back to sleep.

At nine, Lucas called a friend at the intensive care unit: he had been calling her hourly.

"He just left, said he was going to get some sleep," the friend told Lucas.

"Is she awake?"

"She comes and goes…"

"I'll be right there," he said.

Lily was wrapped in sheets and blankets, propped half upright on the bed. Her face was pale, the color of notebook paper. A breathing tube went to her nose. Two saline bags hung beside her bed, and a drip tube was patched into her arm below the elbow.

Lucas' friend, a nurse, said, "She woke up a while ago, and I told her you were coming, so she knows. Don't stay long, and be as quiet as you can."

Lucas nodded and tiptoed to Lily's bedside.

"Lily?"

After a moment, she turned her head, as if the sound of his voice had taken a few seconds to penetrate. Her eyes, when she opened them, were clear and calm.:

"Water?" she croaked. There was a bottle of water on the! bedstand with a plastic straw. He held it to her mouth and she sucked once. "Damn breathing tube dries out my throat."

"You feel pretty bad?"

"Doesn't… hurt much. I feel like I'm… really sick. Like I had a terrible flu."

"You look okay," Lucas lied. Except for her eyes, she j looked terrible.

"Don't bullshit me, Davenport," she said with a small grin. "I know what I look like. Good for the diet, though."

"Jesus, it freaked me out." He couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Thanks for the rose."

"What?"

"The rose…" She turned her head away, then back and forth, as though trying to loosen up her neck muscle. "Very… romantic."

Lucas had no idea what she was talking about, and then she said, "I got through the first fifteen minutes… with David. I hurt so bad I wasn't thinking of you or anything, I was just happy to be here. And we were talking and when I thought of you, the first fifteen minutes were gone… and it was okay."

"Jesus, Lily, I feel so bad."

"Nothing you could do: but you be careful," she said in \ her rusty voice. Her eyelids drooped. "Are you getting anywhere?" • j Lucas shook his head. "We've got a screen of people around Clay-I still think it's him. I just haven't figured out j how. We're watching the dumbwaiter, but that's not it."

"I don't know," she said. Her eyes closed and she took j two deep breaths. "I'm so damn sleepy all the time… Can't think…"

And she was gone, sleeping, her face going slack. Lucas sat by her bed for five minutes, watching her face and the slow rise and fall of her chest. He was lucky, he thought, that he wasn't walking beside her coffin across another cemetery, just as with Larry…

Larry.

It came back in a flash, as real as the shotgun behind his ear. He'd been walking across the cemetery grass with Lily and Anderson, after leaving Rose Love's well-tended grave. Anderson was talking about the cost of grave maintenance and the perpetual-care contract he and his wife had bought…

And the question popped into his head: Who paid to take care of Rose Love's grave? Neither Shadow Love nor the Crows had enough money to endow a perpetual-care fund, so they must pay it annually or semiannually. But if they were on the road all the time, where would the bill be sent? Lucas stood, looked down at Lily's sleeping face, paced out of the ICU, past a patient who looked as though he were dying, and then back in, until he was standing by her bed again.

The Crows or Shadow Love, whoever paid for maintenance, might simply remember to write a check once or twice a year and mail it, without ever getting a bill. But that didn't feel right; there must be a bill. Maybe they had a postal box; but if they had their mail sent to a box, and didn't get back into town for a while, important messages might sit there for weeks. Lucas didn't know what the Crows had done, but he knew what he would do in their circumstances. He'd have a mail drop. He'd have the cemetery bill and other important stuff sent to an old, trustworthy friend. Somebody he could rely on to send the mail on to him. He half ran from the ICU to the nurses' station.

"I gotta have a phone," Lucas snapped at his friend. She stepped back and pointed at a desk phone. He picked it up and called Homicide. Anderson was just getting ready to leave.

"Harmon? I'm heading out to Riverwood Cemetery in a hurry. You get on the line, find out where Riverwood does its paperwork and call me. I've got a handset. If the office is closed, run down somebody who can open it up, somebody who does the bills. I'll be there in ten minutes."

"What have you got?" Anderson asked.

"Probably nothing," Lucas said. "But I've got just the smallest fuckin' hangnail of an idea…"

Clay and a security man stood in the parking garage and argued.

"It's a fuckin' terrible idea," the security man said intently.

"No, it's not. When you get a little higher in management, you'll recognize that," Lawrence Duberville Clay replied. An undertone in his voice hinted that it was unlikely the security man would ever rise higher in management.

"Look: one car. Just one. You wouldn't even see it."

"Absolutely not. You put a car on me and you better warn the people inside that I'll fire their asses. And you with them. No. The only way for me to do this is to go out on my own. And I'll probably be safer than if I was here. Nobody'11 expect me to be out on the street."

"Jesus, boss…"

"Look, we've been through this before," Clay said. "The fact is, when you're surrounded by a screen of security, you don't have any feel for anything. I need to get away, to be effective."

They had a car for him, a nondescript rental that one of the agents had picked up at the airport. Clay took the wheel, slammed the door and looked out at the unhappy security man.

"Don't worry, Dan. I'll be back in a couple, three hours, no worse for the wear."

Lucas had to wait ten minutes at the cemetery office, watching the moon ghost across the sky behind dead oak leaves. He shivered and paced impatiently, and finally a Buick rolled up and a woman got out.

"Are you Davenport?" she asked in a sour voice, jingling her keys.

"Yes."

"I was at a dinner," she said. She was a hard woman in her early thirties, with a beehive hairdo from the late fifties.

"Sorry."

"We really should have some kind of papers," she said frostily as she unlocked the door.

"No time," Lucas said.

"It's not right. I should call our chairman."

"Look, I'm trying to be fuckin' nice," Lucas said, his voice rising as he spoke. "I'm trying as hard as I can to be a nice guy because you seem like an okay woman. But if you drag your feet on this, I'll call downtown for a warrant. It'll be here in five minutes and we'll seize your whole goddamn billing system. If you get lucky, you'll get it back sometime next year. You can explain that to your chairman."

The woman stepped away from him and a spark of fear touched her eyes. "Please wait," she said. She went into a back room, and soon Lucas could hear her typing on a computer keyboard.

It was all bullshit, Lucas told himself. Not a chance in a fucking million. A moment later a printer started, and then the woman came out of the back room.

"The bills have always been sent to the same place, every six months, forty-five dollars and sixty-five cents. Sometimes they're slow-pay, but they always pay."

"Who?" asked Lucas. "Where'd you send the bill?"

The woman handed Lucas a sheet of computer paper, with one short line pinched between her thumb and forefinger. "It's right here," she said. "A Miss Barbara Gow. That's her address under her name. Does that help?"

Corky Drake had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, only to have it rudely snatched away in his teens. His father had for some years neglected to report his full income to the Internal Revenue Service. When the heathens had learned of Corky Senior's oversight… well, the capital barely covered what was owed, much less the fines.

His father had removed himself from the scene with a garden hose that led from the tailpipe of a friend's Mercedes into the sealed car. The friend had refused to forgive him, even in death, for what he had done to the upholstery.

Corky, who was seventeen, was already a person of refined taste. A life of poverty and struggle simply was not on the menu. He did the only thing he was qualified to do: he became a pimp.

Certain friends of his father's had exceptional interests in women. Corky could satisfy those, for a price. Not only were the women very beautiful, they were very young. They were, in fact, girls. The youngest in his current stable was six. The oldest was eleven, although, Corky assured the wits among his clientele, she still had the body of an eight-year-old…

Corky Drake met Lawrence Duberville Clay at a club in Washington. If they hadn't become friends, they had at least become friendly. Clay appreciated the services offered by Drake.

"My little perversion," Clay called it, with a charming grin.

"No. It's not a perversion, it's perfectly natural," Drake said, swirling two ounces of Courvoisier in a crystal snifter. "You're a connoisseur, is what you are. In many countries of the world…"

Drake would serve his clients in Washington or New York, if they required it, but his home base was in Minneapolis, and his resources were strongest there. Clay, in town on business, visited Corky's home. After that, the visits became a regular part of his life…

Drake was talking to the current queen of his stable when he heard the car in the driveway.

"Here he is now," he said to the girl. "Remember, this could be the most important night of your life, so I want you to be good."

Leo Clark sat in a clump of brush thirty yards from Drake's elaborate Kenwood townhouse. He was worried about the cops. Barbara Gow's car was parked up the street. It didn't fit in the neighborhood. If they checked it and had it towed, he'd be fucked.

He sat in the leaves and waited, looking at his watch every few minutes and studying the face of the Old Man in the Moon. It was a clear night for the Cities, and you could see him staring back at you, but it was nothing like the nights on the prairie, when the Old Man was so close you could almost touch his face…

At ten minutes after nine, a gray Dodge entered Corky's circular driveway. Leo put up a pair of cheap binoculars and hoped there'd be more light when Corky opened the door. There was, and just enough: the elegant gray hair of Lawrence Duberville Clay was unmistakable. Leo waited until Clay was inside the house, then picked his way through the wood to Barbara's car, quickly started it and headed back to her house. He stopped only once, at a pay phone.

The message was simple: "Clay's at the house."

Anderson was waiting in his office when Lucas hurried in.

"What you got?"

"A name," Lucas said. "Let's run it through the machine."

They put Barbara Gow's name into the computer and got back three quick hits.

"She's Indian, and she's a rad, or used to be," Anderson said, scanning down the monitor. "Look at this. Organizing for the union, busted in a march… Christ, this was way back in the fifties, she was ahead of her time… Civil rights and then antiwar stuff there in the sixties…"

"She'd of known the Crows," Lucas said. "There weren't that many activist Indians back in the fifties, not in Minneapolis…"

Anderson was scanning through one of his notebooks; he found a page and held it up to the screen. "Look at this," he said. He tapped an address in the notebook and touched an address on the screen. "She lived just a couple blocks from Rose E. Love, and at the same time."

"All right, I'm going down there," Lucas said. "Get onto Del and some of his narcs, tell them I might need surveillance help. I'll look the place over now. It's too much to hope that they'll be there."

"You want me to start some squads that way, just in case?"

"Yeah, you could start a couple, but keep them off the block unless I holler."

Leo pulled into Barbara Gow's driveway and Aaron lifted the garage door. Leo rolled the car inside but left the engine running. Sam stepped out of the house carrying a chopped-down shotgun. Leo had cut the gun down himself. What had been a conventional Winchester Super-X, a four-shot semiauto, wound up as an ugly illegal killing machine that looked as much like a war club as a shotgun. Sam opened the car door and slipped the shotgun under the passenger seat, and then helped Aaron load a six-foot chunk of railroad tie into the cargo space. They'd sharpened one end with an ax and screwed handles to the top. When it was in, Aaron slammed the tailgate and he and Sam got in.

"You want to leave the garage door up?" Leo asked.

"Yeah. If we gotta get off the street in a hurry when we ' come back, it'll get us an extra minute."!

Lucas cruised by the side of the Gow house, moving as / slowly as he could without being conspicuous. There were lights on in both front and back, probably the living room and the kitchen or a bedroom. The upper floor was dark., He turned the corner to pass in front of the house and saw that the garage door was up, the garage empty. As he passed, a shadow crossed the living room blind. Someone inside. Since the car was gone, that meant more than one person was living in the house…

He picked up the handset and put in a call to Anderson.

"Get me the description of the woman who was seen with Shadow Love," he said.

"Just a second," Anderson said. "I've got the notebook right here. Can't get Del, he's on the street, but one of his guys has gone after him. There are a couple of squads wait- j ing out on Chicago." j "Okay."

There was a moment of silence. Lucas took another corner and went around the block. "Uh, there's not much. Very small, barely see over the steering wheel. Indian. Maybe an older woman. She didn't seem young. Green car, older, a wagon, with white sidewall tires."

"Thanks. I'll get back to you."

He took another corner, then another, and came back up along the side of Gow's house. As he did, a man walked out of the house across the street from Gow's, leading a dog. Lucas stopped at the curb as the man strolled out to the sidewalk, looked both ways, then headed around the side of his house, the dog straining at the leash. Lucas thought about it, let the man get a full lot down the opposite block, then called Anderson.

"I need Del or a couple of narcs in plain cars."

"I got a guy looking for Del; we should have him in a minute."

"Soon as you can. I want them up the block from Gow's place, watching the front."

"I'll pass the word."

"And keep those squads on Chicago."

The dog was peeing on a telephone pole when Lucas pulled up next to the night walker. He got out of the car, his badge case in hand.

"Excuse me. I'm Lucas Davenport, a lieutenant with the Minneapolis Police Department. I need a little help."

"What d'you want?" the man asked curiously.

"Your neighbor across the street. Mrs. Gow. Does she live alone?"

"What'd she do?" the man asked.

"Maybe nothing at all…"

The man shrugged. "She usually does, but the last few days, there's been other people around. I never seen them, really. But people are coming and going."

"What kind of car does she drive?"

"Old Dodge wagon. Must be fifteen years old."

"What color?"

"Apple green. Ugly color. Never seen anything like it, except in those Dodges."

"Huh." Lucas could feel his heart pounding harder. "White sidewalls?"

"Yep. You don't see them like that anymore. Bet she don't drive a couple thousand miles a year. The tires are probably originals. What's she done?"

"Maybe nothing," Lucas said. "Thanks for your help. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep this to yourself."

As Lucas started back to the car, the man said, "Those other people… they left about five minutes ago. Somebody drove up in her car and somebody else opened the garage door, and one minute later, they left."

Lucas called Anderson: "I got something," he said. "I'm not sure what, but the Crows may be on the street."

"Sonofabitch. You think they're hitting somebody?"

"I don't know. Don't let those squads get away, though. I don't care what happens. And get me Del's man."

"I got Del. He was maybe a mile away, he oughta be there anytime."

"All right. Tell him I'll wait at Twenty-fourth and Bloomington, right by Deaconess Hospital."

Del was waiting when Lucas arrived. The street was empty, and Lucas crossed into the left lane until their cars were door to door. Both men rolled their windows down.

"Got something?"

"Could be heavy," Lucas said. "I think I got the Crows' hideout, but they're on the street."

"What do you want from me?"

"I was gonna ask for some surveillance help, but if the Crows are on the street… I'm going in. I need some backup."

Del nodded. "Let's do it."

"Let me introduce you to Lucy," Drake said. He turned toward the back and called, "Lucy? Darling?"

They were standing in front of the fireplace, glasses in their hands. A moment after he called, Lucy appeared from the back. She was tiny, blonde, shy, and wore a pink kimono.

"Come over here, darling, and meet a friend of mine," Drake said.

"Cop," Leo said.

"Shit. He's going in," Sam said.

Drake's house was on a long loop road, to the left. The cop had just turned into the loop, then stayed to the right. If he continued along the loop, he'd pass Drake's house on the way back out.

"We gotta wait," Sam said. He pointed at a supermarket parking lot. "Pull in there. We can watch for him to come out."

"What if Clay leaves?"

Aaron looked at his watch. "He's only been there a half-hour. He usually stays two or three. This is not something you do quick. Not if you can help it."

Lucas and Del left their cars just down the block, and Lucas led the way to the porch. Del took a short black automatic out of a hip holster and stood to one side of the door as Lucas knocked.

He knocked once, then again.

A woman's voice: "Who is it?"

Before Lucas could answer, Del piped up, in a childish falsetto, "StarTribune."

There was a moment's hesitation and then the door started to open. As it opened, Lucas realized that it was on a chain. A woman's eye appeared in the crack. Lucas said, "Police," and the woman screamed, "No," and tried to push the door shut. She was small and dark and not young, and Lucas knew for sure. As she tried to push the door shut he rocked back and kicked it; the chain ripped off and they were inside, the woman running awkwardly toward the back. Lucas was on her, punching her between the shoulder blades, and she went down on her face in the hallway. Del was braced in the entrance to the living room, his gun in front of him, scanning.

"You don't fuckin' move," Lucas snarled at the woman. "You don't fuckin' move, you hear?"

Lucas and Del went through the house in thirty seconds, rotating down the hallway, clearing out the two bedrooms, then taking the stairs, cautiously, ready… Nothing.

At the top, Lucas heard the woman on her feet, and as Del held the stairs, Lucas shouted, "Wait here," and ran back down. Gow was headed for the front door when Lucas; hit her again. She yelped and went down, and he dragged her to a radiator and cuffed her to it. Del was still waiting ' at the top of the stairs; Lucas came and they cleaned out the second floor. Nobody.

Downstairs they checked the bedrooms again, this time for any sign of the Crows. It was all there: a stack of un-mailed press releases, letters, two different sets of men's clothing.

"I'm gonna talk to this woman," Lucas told Del. "You shut the front door and call Anderson, tell him what we've got. Get a warrant down here, maybe we can finesse things later. And tell him we may want an ERU team for when the Crows come back."

While Del went to call, Lucas walked back to Barbara Gow, who was lying on her side with her knees up to her face, weeping. Lucas uncuffed her and prodded her back with his foot.

"Sit up," he said.

"Don't hurt me," she wailed.

"Sit the fuck up," Lucas said. "You're under arrest. Seven counts of first-degree murder. You have the right to remain silent…"

"I didn't do anything."

"You're an accomplice…" Lucas said, squatting next to her, his face two inches from hers. He was not quite shouting, and he deliberately let spittle rain on her face.

"I didn't do anything."

"Where are the Crows…?"

"I don't know any Crows…"

"Bullshit. All their stuff is in back." He gtabbed her by the blouse and shook her.

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know where they went. They took my car."

"She's lying," Del said. Lucas looked up and found Del standing over them. His eyes were dilated and he hadn't shaved for several days. "Stay with her for just a second. I wanna run down to the bathroom."

Lucas waited, watching the woman's face. A few seconds later, they heard the bath water running.

"What're you going to do?" Lucas asked when Del returned. He tried to sound interested-curious-but not worried.

"She's got nice hot water," Del said. "So I thought maybe I'd give the bitch a bath."

"Shit, I wish I'd thought of that," Lucas said happily.

Gow tried to roll away from him but Del caught the old woman by the hair. "You know how many old women drown in the bathtub? Suck in that scalding hot water and can't get out?"

"It's a tragedy," Lucas said.

"Let me go," Gow screamed, struggling now. Del dragged her toward the hallway by the hair. She flailed at him, but he ignored it.

"There's some coffee in the kitchen," Del called. "Why don't you go heat up some water, we can have a cup. This'll only take a minute. She don't look too strong."

"They went to kill Clay," Gow blurted.

"Jesus Christ." Del let her go and the two men crouched over her.

"They can't get to him. He's got round-the-clock bodyguards," Lucas argued.

"He sneaks out," Gow said. "He has sex with little girls, so he sneaks out."

Lucas looked at Del: "Motherfucker. They don't crack the security. They get Clay to come out. Call Anderson and have him get onto the feebs. Find out where Clay is. And get Daniel."

Del dashed down the hall toward the telephone and Lucas gripped the old woman's hair.

"Tell me the rest. I'll testify in court for you. I'll tell them you helped; it might get you off. Where'd they go?"

Tears ran down her face and she sobbed, unable to talk.

"Talk to me," Lucas screamed, shaking the old woman's head.

"There's a man named Christopher Drake. Corky Drake. He lives up in Kenwood somewhere," Barbara Gow sobbed. "Clay goes to his house for the girls."

Lucas let her go and ran into the kitchen, where Del was on the phone. "I gotta go," he shouted. "Stay with her. Tell Anderson I'll call in ten seconds, tell him I'll need those squads." • Lucas sprinted to the Porsche, cranked it, picked up the handset and called Dispatch.

"A Christopher Drake," he told the dispatcher. "In Ken-wood. I need the address now."

Twenty seconds later, as he turned onto Franklin Avenue, he had it.

"I need everything you've got. No sirens, but make it fast," he told Dispatch.

Anderson came on: "I'm talking to Del, we're going out to the FBI now. How long before you make this Drake's place?"

Lucas ran a red light and calculated. "If I don't hit anything, about two minutes," he said. He crossed the center line into the left lane and blew past two cars, the speedometer nudging sixty.

The squad car came out of the loop road, turned away from them and kept going. Aaron grunted, checked his watch again and said, "Let's go."

Drake's house was a quarter-mile down the lane. They did a U-turn in front of the house, so the car would be pointed out, and left it on the street. The yards were wooded, and the brush would screen them as they approached the house.

"Let's get the tie," Sam said as they climbed out of the car.

Aaron looked up at the sky as Sam popped the tailgate. "Good moon for a killing," Aaron said.

In the soundproofed privacy of the bedroom, the girl dropped the kimono around her feet and slipped onto the bed. Lawrence Duberville Clay peeled off his underwear and slipped in beside her, and she put her arm over her chest. "Smell so good," she said. He looked over her shoulder at the video camera and the monitor screen. The light was just right. It would be an evening to remember.

Leo held the cut-down shotgun by his side as they pulled the railroad tie out of the car and held it by the handles. A battering ram. Nearly a hundred pounds, swung hard, focused on a point no bigger than a hammerhead. Better than any sledgehammer made.

Swinging the tie, they moved swiftly through the dark into Drake's yard.

"Go through it one more time," Leo said.

Sam recited in a monotone. "Aaron and I swing it. When the door goes down, we drop it and you run right over it, freeze anyone inside. Aaron takes the ground floor, blocking anyone out, and you and I go up the stairs. There are four bedrooms up the stairs, and they'll be in one of them."

"Drop the tie, go in, freeze anyone, then Aaron takes over and we go up the stairs."

"Clay carries a gun; you've seen the pictures," Aaron said. He looked up at the moon. "So be careful."

They stayed in a screen of trees as they came up the drive, then broke across an open space to a lilac bush, paused to adjust their holds on the railroad tie.

"You got it?" Aaron asked.

"Let's go," said Sam.

Running awkwardly, they rushed at the door, then stopped at the last second and swung the tie as hard as they could. It hit the door two inches from the knob and blew it open as effectively as a stick of dynamite. They let go as the door flew open; the tie fell half inside, and Leo was in the living room. Drake was there, coming off the couch, a pearl-gray suit and pink open-necked shirt, his mouth open. Leo, his face twisted into a mask of hate, shoved the shotgun at him and said in a coarse whisper:

"Where is he?"

Integrity had never been one of Drake's burdens. "Up the stairs," he blurted. "First door on the left."

"If he's not there, motherfucker, you gonna be sucking on this shotgun," Leo snarled.

"He's there…"

Aaron held Drake as Leo and Sam took the stairs, struggling with the railroad tie as they went, their footfalls muffled by the thick carpet. At the top, they looked at each other, and Leo held the shotgun over his head. They went at the bedroom door with the tie. The bedroom door was no more match for the ram than the front door had been. It blew open and Leo went through.

Music was playing from a stereo; the lights were low enough for comfort, bright enough for spectating. A video camera was mounted on a steel tripod, with a television flickering beside it. Clay was there, his flesh obscenely white, sluglike, on the red satin sheet. The girl was beside him, nearly as pale as he was, except for a streak of scarlet lipstick.

"Get away," Leo said to the girl, gesturing with the shotgun.

"Wait," said Clay. The girl rolled away from him and off the bed.

"Wait, for Christ's sakes," Clay said.

"On your feet," Leo said. "This is a citizen's arrest."

"What?"

"On your feet and turn around, Mr. Clay," Leo said. "If you don't, I swear to God I'll blow you to pieces."

Clay, frightened, crawled off the bed and turned. Sam slipped his pistol into his pocket, took out his obsidian knife and stepped behind him.

"We're going to handcuff you, Mr. Clay," Sam said. "Put your hands behind your back…"

"You're the Crows…"

"Yeah. We're the Crows."

"Do I know you? I've seen you? Your faces…"

Clay was facing curtains that covered windows overlooking the driveway. A set of headlights swept into the drive, then a set of red flashers.

"Cops," said Leo.

"We met a long time ago," Sam said. "In Phoenix."

Clay started to turn his head, recognition lighting his eyes, and Sam reached up from the other side, grabbed his hair and dragged the knife across his throat. Clay twisted away screaming, and the girl broke for the door. Blood pumped through Clay's hands and he fell faceup on the bed, trying to hold himself together. Sam shouted, "Let's go." Leo shouted, "Run," and as Sam went, he stepped close to the supine Clay and fired the shotgun into his chest.

Lucas turned into the loop road fifty yards in front of the first cruiser. He had to slow to find the address, then saw Barbara Gow's wagon in the street and the open door of the white Colonial house. He slid into the circular drive, stood on the brake and piled out, the P7 in his hand. The cruiser was just behind him, and then there were more lights on the lane, more cops coming in. He waited just a second for the first cruiser and heard the shotgun roar…

"Cops," Sam screamed from the top of the stairs, his scream punctuated by the shotgun blast. Both he and Aaron favored old-model.45s, and had them in their hands. The girl, nude, ran down the stairs, saw Aaron waiting and stopped. Sam pushed past her, with Leo just behind.

Drake had his hands on his head and began to back away. "Fucker," Aaron said, and shot him in the chest. Drake flipped back over a sofa and disappeared.

"Try the back?" Leo shouted.

"Fuck it," said Aaron. "Clean the driveway out with the shotgun, then get out of the way."

Leo ran to the door. The car's headlights were focused on it but he could see figures behind the lights. He fired three quick shots, emptying the gun, and ducked back inside as a hail of bullets tore through the doorway into the living room.

"Go out the back," Aaron said to him. He kissed Leo on the cheek, looked at his cousin.

"Time to die, you flatheaded motherfucker," Sam shouted.

The return fire from outside had stopped. There were shouts, and Sam lifted his head, smelling the perfume of the house. Then Aaron was out the door at a dead run, Sam a step behind, the.45s jumping in their hands.

Lucas looked at the cop and said, "Get somebody around back. They're in there, I just heard…"

He never finished the sentence. There was a shot inside the house, a pause, and then a shotgun opened from the doorway. The muzzle blast flickered like lightning in the dark and the cop who'd started for the back went down. More squads were roaring into the driveway, one sliding sideways as another cop went down.

Lucas fired a quick three shots at the doorway and started toward it as the gunner ducked inside. Then the Crows were there, coming out the door at a run, their pistols firing wildly. Lucas fired twice at the first one as the other cops opened up. The Crows were down a half-second later, bullets kicking up dirt around them, plucking at their shirts, their jeans, enough lead to kill a half-dozen men.

And then there was silence.

Then a few words, like morning birds outside a bedroom window. "Jesus God," somebody was saying. "Jesus God."

Sirens. Static from the radios. More sirens. Lots of them. Lucas crouched behind the car.

"Where's the shotgun?" he screamed. "Anybody see the shotgun?"

A cop was crying for help, the pain on him. Another was a lump in the dirt.

"Who's around back?" somebody called.

"Nobody. Get somebody around back."

A uniform dashed into the headlights, stopped next to the cop who was lying still in the dirt, and began tugging him out of the light. Lucas stood, aiming his pistol through the doorway, and squeezed off two suppression shots.

"He's gone," the uniform screamed, holding the dead cop in his arms. "Jesus, where are the paramedics?"

More lights in the lane, then Sloan coming up the driveway.

"Heard you on the radio," he grunted. "What have we got?"

"Maybe a shotgun inside."

There was a figure at the door, and two or three separate voices screamed warnings. t "Hold it, hold it," somebody shouted.

The girl appeared in the doorway, her eyes as wide as a deer's, shambling out of the wreckage.

"Who's in there?" Lucas called as she came across the driveway.

"Nobody," she wailed. She half turned to the house as though she couldn't believe it. "Everybody's dead."