John Sandford - Field of Prey

“If you don’t tell me where she is, I’m gonna shoot you in the gut,” Lucas said. “I swear to God. I’m gonna see if I can poke a round through your spine, so even if you come out of it alive, you’ll be a cripple for the rest of your life. You got three seconds.”

“Got you now,” Horn said, from behind Lucas.

Axel said, “No way he’s got me. He’s only one man.”

He said it so naturally that Lucas flinched: snapped a look backwards. Nobody there. “Two seconds,” he said.

“Fuck you. Shoot me,” Axel said, squaring up with Lucas.

“He’s gonna do it,” Horn said.

“No, he won’t,” Axel said. He took a step forward and Lucas did the same, closing up to four feet, the gun still high, and then Axel juked left. Lucas had been in two hundred fights in his life. He enjoyed fighting. He was good at it. He’d seen the juke coming, and swatted the other man with the.45.

Axel went down when Lucas hit him, and Lucas took a quick look around: there was nobody else in the house. He holstered the pistol, and when Axel tried to push himself to his knees, Lucas kicked him in the shoulder, hard as he could. Axel half-grunted, half-screamed, went down and then rolled, fast, and then rose up fully on his feet and charged.

Lucas waited until he came in, slipped a wild punch, then hit Axel hard, on the forehead. The blow straightened him up, dazed him. He stumbled back, hit a wall, straightened up and lifted his fists, but only neck high. Lucas hit him in the eye and then hit him again, and again, and again, all the frustration coming out now, and Axel went down again, on his stomach.

Lucas kicked him hard in the other shoulder, and Axel squealed, and Lucas stepped to the door and pushed it shut. It was broken, and didn’t close all the way, but it was good enough.

Axel was still facedown, trying to push up, but his shoulders were ruined, and he was having trouble. Lucas kicked him in the hip, knocking him flat, then straddled him, grabbed his wrists, and lifted him off the floor, rotating his arms back and up, stressing them in Axel’s shoulder sockets, and Axel began to scream and Lucas shouted, “Where is she?”

“I don’t have-”

Lucas lifted his arms higher, felt one begin to dislocate, and Axel screamed, “Down the basement. She’s down the basement.”

Lucas lifted higher, and felt the second arm begin to dislocate: “She still alive?”

“Yes. Yes. She is,” he screamed. “She’s alive.”

Lucas reached under Axel’s neck, lifted him up by his shirt collar, then swatted him with the back of his hand, knocking him to the floor again, then said, “Crawl to the basement door. Crawl there, or I swear to God, I will kick you to death right here.”

To prove it, he kicked Axel in the ribs.

Axel tried to crawl, sobbing with pain as he did it. His arms were unable to support his body weight and he wound up shuffling forward on his knees into the kitchen, to a gray door set in the kitchen wall.

“Here,” he said.

Lucas kicked him between the shoulder blades, and he smashed forward and down, his face bouncing off the tile floor.

In the bomb shelter, Mattsson had managed to crawl back to her corner. She felt she was dying. She was freezing, hadn’t had water for nearly twenty hours, had several broken bones. The next time he came, she thought, would be the end, and there was no way she’d be able to stop it.

She had at least the satisfaction of knowing that she’d hurt him. The scratches might provide somebody with evidence that would hang him, and might show somebody that she’d at least fought back. They’d think well of her, the other cops would.

Huddled there, she’d occasionally hear footfalls as Axel crossed one of the rooms on the first floor of the house, above her. Eventually, she would hear him coming down the steps, and when that happened. .

Then, after a lot of time, she heard running footfalls, and then a louder noise, still muffled, and then a heavy thump. A thump like a body hitting a floor, a sound she’d heard several times in her career, usually when she and another cop were breaking up a bar fight.

She pushed herself up.

Lucas snapped on the basement light and pushed Axel down the stairs ahead of him. Pushed harder than he intended, but he was insanely angry, and Axel collapsed and tumbled down them, bouncing off the walls, but at the bottom, managed to come to his knees. His face was a red mask of blood, flowing from cuts in his forehead, and from a broken nose.

He looked around, grabbed a wooden dowel rod off a shelf and used it as a cane to push himself to his feet.

“You swing that thing at me, I’m gonna turn you into a fuckin’ Popsicle,” Lucas said.

Axel staggered backwards, and with Lucas coming down fast, managed to reach back, snatch a Ball jar off a shelf and throw it at Lucas’s head. Lucas dodged and stepped forward and Axel jerked the dowel rod straight up, and more out of dumb luck than anything, rammed it into the bottom of Lucas’s nose, a stunning blow that instantly clouded Lucas’s eyes with tears.

Lucas had been stunned before. He swung a fist where he’d last seen Axel’s head. His head was still there and Axel fell back into a rack of ancient canned vegetables, and sank to the floor.

Several of the jars fell off the shelf and shattered around him, and Lucas bent and grabbed Axel by the shirt again, yanked him out of the mess, and threw him spinning against a concrete wall, where he hit face-first. Axel went down again, and Lucas grabbed an arm and wrenched it back and up and shouted, “Where?”

“Around the corner, around the corner, Jesus, I’m hurt, I’m hurt, around the corner,” Axel sobbed. “Don’t hurt me no more.”

Lucas dragged him around the corner and found himself looking at a gray steel door with a key sticking out of the lock. A light switch was next to it. He turned the key and pulled the door open. The room behind the door was dark: he flipped the switch.

Mattsson had heard the fight-sounded like a fight-and a thrill went through her, lifting her to her feet. She pressed back against the wall, waiting, heard the key rattling in the lock.

The door opened, the light snapped on, and Davenport was there, blood running like a creek out of his nose, across his mouth and chin. Axel was lying facedown by his feet.

She asked, “Where the fuck have you been?”

Lucas said, “Catrin. I just, uh. . just. .”

He backed up a few steps, one hand going to his nose, the blood running over his fingers. He nearly stumbled over Axel, who was pushing up with one arm, rolling over onto his back.

Axel looked up at Mattsson and said, “You got me, Cat.”

Mattsson looked at him for a moment, then asked, “How bad are you hurt? Who else is up there?”

Lucas said, “I’m not bad, he just. .”

He was looking at her, and unconsciously shook his head, and she asked, “How bad am I?”

Lucas didn’t answer directly. He said, “Gotta get an ambulance. .” He fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. She put an arm out, held on to his shirtsleeve, stepped around him, pulling him around a bit, almost as though they were square-dancing, and said, “Just excuse me, I’m just. .”

There was a crowbar on a workbench, a three-foot-long piece of cold steel. Lucas was turning after her, but she just kept going around behind him, sweeping up the crowbar as she did and she came around to Axel, half-sitting, looking up at her, his eyes widening at the last minute as the crowbar came around and

Whack!

She hit him, once, at the hairline just above his eyes. The bar shattered his skull, blowing bits of brain matter out to the sides.

Lucas recoiled: “Jesus.”

Mattsson looked up at him, held onto his shirt.