John Sandford - Broken Prey

Marian LeDoux had a husband and three children and brown mousy hair and beautiful turquoise eyes. She knitted when nothing was going on and had once had a brief affair with the manager of the cafeteria. She was at the board, and she swiveled and stood up, eyes widening, reaching for a red alarm button, and Grant shot her in the face from three feet.

Jack Lasker built furniture in his home workshop and always had cuts and nicks on his hands; he was famous for his Band-Aids. He was in the monitoring room, and he fell as he tried to get to the door, to wedge it shut, his watery blue eyes up and looking at the gun, he said, “No, Leo,” and Grant shot him in the neck and then, when he went down, again in the chest.

Grant stepped back to the board, breathing hard now, feeling his heart beating against his rib cage. He opened the inner doors, and then unlocked everything in the building. He could see people running on the other side of the outer doors, but nobody with a gun.

Couldn’t seem to hear anything except his own words running through his mind: Go, go, go . .

He ripped all the wires he could see out of the monitoring rooms, and all the monitoring screens went black; and now he had blood on his hands, literally, where he’d torn skin loose. He felt the pain, but ignored it. There were a number of stereolike consoles on a rack, and he threw the rack to the floor, grabbed more connection wires, ripped them loose.

Back in the main room, he physically ripped the control panel loose, reached into it, and began pulling all the wires he could see. Some sparked, but most didn’t. What else? He wanted as much chaos as he could get. .

Somebody was shouting at him, Leo, Leo, Leo. .

He was about to leave when he saw the circuit-breaker panel. He opened it, loosened the two plastic nuts that held on the inner panel, ripped it off, saw the main lines coming through, took the risk: fired three shots into the main lines, the wires sparking, bits of lead and insulation flicking back into his face.

With the third shot, the power went out, and all the lights that he could see. A few seconds later, emergency lights came up automatically, along with an alarm that sounded like an elevator door was stuck: brenk, brenk, brenk. .

Good enough. He left the cage, ran through the open door into the interior of the hospital.

Behind him, a woman shouted, “ Leo, Leo. . ”

People were coming out of locked rooms, most standing wonderingly in the doorways. He saw two staff members running toward a refuge room, and he continued running himself, past the elevators, into a down-stairway. Down two flights into the security wing.

The Gods should be out of their cells, waiting.

Armageddon. .

Lucas shouted to Nordwall, “Grant’s at the hospital-he’s killing people. Get the guys, get my guys up there, get them to the hospital. Get everybody you can up there. .”

He turned and ran for the truck, jumped in, did a tight circle, and roared toward the street. He was on the north outskirts of town; the hospital was probably seven or eight miles away. Since he’d be slowed going out to the highway and off the highway up the hill to the hospital, just about that many minutes away. Eight minutes: a hundred people could be dead in that time. .

Past kids on the sidewalk, nearly T-boning a red Taurus, losing it on a turn, over a sidewalk, onto a lawn, off the lawn back onto the street, down a hill to the highway, right, flooring it, the truck screaming in grief, his cell phone ringing, ringing. He ignored it through the set of curves, shifted into the vacant oncoming lane, and blew past a Harley with a bearded old man on it. He picked up the phone on a straightaway. Sloan: “You know what’s going on?”

“No, but it’s bad. Cale called, he was freaked. Grant’s inside shooting, there are at least three down, I’m coming up on it, I gotta go. .”

“We’re two minutes behind you. .”

Off the highway, up the hill, down the approach road, burning past the entry building, fumbling in the seat console for extra.45 clips. There were two of them, and he put them in his jacket pocket. He topped the last rise to the main parking lot, cut past a man on a four-bottom lawnmower, serenely chopping grass, and found a sheriff’s car and an official-looking SUV parked facing the steps to the main entrance, their doors open.

Lucas jammed the Lexus in beside them and jumped out, ran up the steps, his eyes catching an insignia on the SUV, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. A game warden. . and then he was through the front doors and down a dark hallway to the cage.

Cale was there, with a deputy, a game warden, two armed guards, and two orderlies who were opening the outer doors with a manual crank. A half dozen administrative types stood back, clustered, silent. Lucas saw Beloit on her knees in the cage, behind the bars, with another orderly, working over a body-she must have been caught inside. Cale, face white, eyes crazy, shouted, “We’ve heard shooting. . all we’ve got is emergency power, the fire alarms are going off. .”

“You got staffers in there?” Lucas asked.

“There are a couple dozen of them, we know there are twelve or fourteen in refuge rooms, there are some more, I don’t know how many, locked in patient rooms, we’ve more coming in, they’re calling on cell phones, all we got is cell phones, we got people shot, Davenport, we got people shot. .”

The outer door was opening, an inch, two inches. Lucas pulled his.45, popped the clip, checked it, jacked a shell into the chamber, and asked, “Does anybody know where Grant went?”

One of the administrative types, a woman in a powder blue jacket, said, “He went to the stairs way down on the end. I think he was going down to the security cells. That’s what I think.”

Lucas said to the deputy and the game warden, “Get all the guys with guns and put them in the stairwells. The elevators won’t be working. I don’t know whether they’re trying to get out or on some kind of suicide run, but we can’t let them run us around. We have to move in on them and finish them in a hurry.” The two men nodded, and the game warden pulled his pistol and checked it. As he did, they heard two muffled explosions and turned that way.

“Big gun,” the warden said. His voice was cool.

Lucas said to Cale, “There are more cops coming in, a minute or two behind us. Get them to seal off all the floors, tell them to be careful, that we’re out there.”

Cale nodded, and then his eyes went wider: “Oh, my God.”

Lucas tracked his eyes, looked down the hall to the right. Black smoke boiled out of a door and began filling the hallways.

“Did you call the fire department?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, yes, they’re coming.”

“Get some of your office people, go in behind the guys with guns, take fire extinguishers, but be careful. Make sure they stay behind the guns.”

Game warden: “I think we can get through.”

Lucas said, “Block the stairs, guys. Remember, more people coming. Tell them we’re out there.”

He squeezed through the slowly opening cell door and heard three muffled boom s. Beloit was crawling out of the cage, hair hanging in her face, leaving bloody handprints on the floor: nothing he could do, just an image to take with him. He pointed the game warden down to the right, while he went straight ahead toward the shooting. Heard another boom , and kept running. .

Grant ran down the stairs, his feet pounding on the steps, briefcase slapping against his legs, screams ringing in his ears. He burst into the hallway and looked to his left. The door to the security wing was open, and Biggie Lighter was peering around the door frame, a smile wreathing his sallow face. When he saw Grant, Lighter stepped into the hallway.