John Sandford - Storm prey

Lay in bed in the dark, sitting up every once in a while, to run his hands over his head, wishing for daylight.

He was sitting up when the yelling started. Sounded like a fight. He rolled out of bed, looked out the window across the street. Howard, he thought that was the name, was on his front porch, porch light on, yelling at somebody, and somebody ran up to him from behind a tree, not a kid screwing around, but a grown man, and said something to him, and after a second, Howard stepped back and turned off his porch light and the man followed him into his house.

Cops.

Cops outside the house. It could have been something else, but it wasn't. They'd figured out where he lived, and there they were. He laughed, a short snort: bound to happen sooner or later, and here it was.

He got dressed in the semi-dark: boots, jeans, sweatshirt, parka. Cigarettes, wallet, baggie of cocaine, gun. Stepped over to the bathroom, careful to stay away from the window, checked the cylinder: four shotgun, two.45 Colts. He stepped back to his dresser, dumped the box of.410 shells into his pocket, took the.45s out of the cylinder and reloaded with.410s. Took four grenades out from under the bed, thought about it, took two more.

"Nothing to do now, man. Run."

Had an image of himself busting out of the garage on the back of the BMW Like a movie. Never happen in the snow. Thought about sliding down a roof, like a movie. Never happen: he'd slid off a roof before and broke his legs.

Peeked at the window, saw the ruts in the snow: no cars gone by for a while. Wouldn't have been many anyway, but the snow had killed whatever traffic there might have been.

But the ruts gave him an idea. He went back to the bed and pulled the sheet off.

The St. Paul Park chief said to Lucas and Marcy, "We had a problem."

They were sitting on a bench eating Twinkies and drinking coffee. Marcy: "What happened?"

"A guy across the street saw the SWAT guys trading places. He turned on his porch light and yelled at them. They shut him up, but… it happened."

"Anything happen upstairs?"

"No. But we don't know he's upstairs. We only think he is."

Marcy rubbed her face, then said to Lucas: "The snow muffles everything."

"Yeah. I don't know."

They talked about it.

Cappy cut a slit in the sheet and draped it over his head, so he was covered from head to toe in white, like a ghost. Said aloud, "Gonna feel like a fool if nobody's there."

But somebody was there, he thought.

He was down in the basement, having snuck down the stairs past Mrs. Wilson's bedroom door. Darker than the inside of a coal sack. There was a chair by the washing machine…

He lifted it over to the basement window, a low, eighteen-inch-high double-pane affair that hinged at the top. Probably, he thought, hadn't been opened in years. Didn't want to wake Mrs. Wilson, though she was hard of hearing, and so he didn't have to be absolutely quiet.

He stood on the chair, brushed his hand around the perimeter of the window, until he found the latch, worked it loose. Window didn't want to open. Got his knife out, pried around the edges, had to work at it, first one end, then the other, finally felt it give. A minute later, a rush of cold air and snow blew over him.

The snow was as high as the window. He stepped up on the dryer, put his gloves on, pushed the window up, and started to work through it. Not easy: he was wearing too much clothing and kept getting hung up. He struggled, pushing with his feet, and then with his hands, and finally dragged his feet through the window. He was lying flat on his stomach, covered with the sheet, in fourteen inches of snow.

He began low-crawling his way forward, like a worm, nearly invisible in the dark. He was headed straight out to the back of the lot.

Lucas said, "If he's upstairs, and I don't know why an old lady would want to have her bedroom upstairs… if he's upstairs, you could come in from the side of the house where the roof comes down. You know what I mean? He can't see out that way."

Nelson, the SWAT commander, said, "Yeah, we could do that, but if he saw our guy… if he's moved downstairs, he could be looking out a window, our guy would be dead meat."

Nelson's radio burped and he put it to his face and said, "Yeah?" Listened, and said, "Can you get over there? Okay. Stay right where you are. I'm going to alert everybody. We'll be there with you in a minute… Sure it wasn't a dog? Okay."

He said to Lucas, Marcy, and the chief, "Billy Harris thinks somebody, or something, might have just hit the fence in Wilson's backyard. He didn't see it, but he heard it, and thought he might have seen something."

"How could he get out?" Marcy asked.

"Don't know."

"Let's go look," Lucas said. "Let's get a couple guys to go with us."

They left the building at a jog, five of them, running around the block, in the night, slowed by the snow. Nelson called up Harris at the end of the second block and said, "Careful, we're coming in."

They went in single-file, groping past hedges and garbage cans; the only light was from the streetlights, and there wasn't much, not in the close-packed older houses, with grown-up trees and bushes. Harris had been set up behind a neighbor's garage at the back of the house.

They came up and he said, in a whisper, "Right there, across the yard. Something big hit the fence."

They could see the back window of the upstairs room, a dark rectangle in the barely visible house.

"I'm going out there," Lucas said. "Right around this house behind us, and then over to the fence. Johnny, tell your guys I'll be moving out there."

He slipped away to his left, groping in the dark, behind the neighboring house, sheltered by a hedge. Once across the yard, he forced a hole in the hedge, into Wilson's yard, next to the fence. Unlikely that he could be seen: he couldn't see the window anymore. But if Cappy was out there, with a shotgun, waiting…

He got his guts up and started crawling down the fence line. Fifteen yards down the line, he crossed Cappy's trail. Thought nothing. Turned to look at the fence: couldn't see anything. Listened. Nothing. Crawled down the trail to the house, and the basement window. "Goddamnit." Never thought of the basement. He got to his feet, crouching, and dashed across the yard to Harris's post, where the others were waiting.

"He's out," Lucas said. "But there's a trail. He's five minutes ahead of us."

Shrake volunteered to follow the track. He was wearing a helmet and full armor, and Lucas said, "Don't forget, he had grenades. If you see him, and go after him, he could drop one on you."

"I'm not forgetting that," Shrake said. "I think about it every two seconds."

"Five-meter kill zone. Four or five seconds from the time he throws it. The time is not precise," Lucas said.

"I can handle all that," Shrake said. "The question is, will we ever see it?"

"Don't push out front-stay way back. Keep your flashlight working."

They moved out in a V-shaped line two hundred yards across, fifty yards deep, with Shrake at the bottom of the funnel with a super-bright LED flashlight and a radio. The line was mostly invisible as they moved, with the exception of Shrake. As the trail went one way or another around houses, into the next street, Shrake adjusted the vector.

St. Paul Park put all their squads on the streets, moving, light racks flashing, on a perimeter, hoping to keep Cappy inside, but the snow was so heavy that he'd probably be able to cross the line. On the other hand, the flashing lights might make him cautious, and slow him down.

The search, Lucas thought, as he tramped up through the snow with his shotgun, had all the characteristics of a clusterfuck, but he couldn't think of a better alternative. He was the first man up the funnel from Shrake, twenty yards to Shrake's left, fifteen yards in front of him.