Sudden prey

LUCAS LOOKED DOWN AT BUTTERS. GONE.

He squatted, felt under Butters's butt. The dead man kept his wallet on the left. Lucas lifted it out, opened it, started riffling through the paper: a

Tennessee driver's license, current. The picture was right.

Stadic came around the car, his eyes wide, staring at the dead man. ''I hope I just, I hope I just…''

''You did perfect,'' Lucas said. Lewiston came up, and Lucas said, ''You okay?''

''Fine. Freaked out.''

''Why don't you run Andy into Ramsey?'' Lucas suggested.

''I'm okay,'' Stadic said.

''You're tuning out,'' Lucas said. ''You need to go sit somewhere, get your blood pressure down.''

Stadic looked at him, a flat, confused stare, and then suddenly he nodded:

''Yeah. Okay. Let's do it.''

He used a sharp command voice, out of place, out of time. Lucas looked at the other cop: ''Take him.'' And, as they walked away, ''Hey: Thanks again.''

LUCAS WENT BACK TO THE WALLET, LOOKING FOR ANYTHING: a scrap of paper with an address, a note, a name, but Butters carried almost nothing: a Mobil credit card, a Sears card, a Tennessee hunting license, the driver's license, an old black-and-white picture of a woman, wearing a dress fromthe '40s, and a more recent, color photograph of a Labrador retriever. Not much to work with.

The lieutenant ran up, said, ''Dispatch is calling the FAA, they'll try to get these assholes out of here.'' They both looked up at the chopper, and then the lieutenant said, looking at Butters's body, ''You know how lucky we are?''

''What?'' Lucas looked up. His scalp had begun to hurt, as though somebody had pressed a hot wire against it.

''He was in that house,'' the lieutenant said, and Lucas turned to look.

A man, a woman and a kid were looking out through the shattered door, past a patrol cop who'd run up to see that everybody was okay. The woman kept pushing the kid back, but the kid wanted to see. ''If he'd holed up in there, there wouldn't have been a goddamn thing we could do. We could've had some kind of nightmare out here.''

''Yeah…'' And Lucas suddenly laughed, all the tension of the last ten minutes slipping away. ''But look what he did to your cars.''

The lieutenant looked at the car, which showed a ragged line of holes starting in the front fender and running all the way to the back bumper. A couple of slugs had grooved the roof, the windows were gone. The lieutenant did a little

Stan Laurel walk down the length of the car and said, ''They hurt m' auto-mobile, Ollie.''

''I guess. He didn't miss a single piece of sheet metal,'' Lucas said.

''Sure, it's a little rough,'' the lieutenant said, switching to a car salesman's voice. ''But look at the tires: the tires are in A-1 condition.''

They both laughed, shaking their heads. They laughed from relief, the lifting of the fear, the safety of the other cops and the people in the house.

Another chopper, TV3 this time, arriving late, swept over the house with its lights and beating blades and caught them standing over the body of Ansel

Butters, looking at the car, laughing, unable to stop.