"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."
CHAPTER 27
"I don't know what else we could have done," Lucas said. In his own ears, the words sounded like excuses, quick and chattery as if tumbling out of a teletype, harsh with guilt. "If we hadn't gone straight in, we'd have lost Clay for sure. We knew they weren't far in front of us."
"You did okay," Daniel said grimly. "It was that fuckin' Clay, sneaking out like that. The Crows must have known. They set him up, slicker'n shit. Fuckin' Wilson is dead, Bel-loo's maybe crippled, it's that fuckin' Clay's fault."
"It must have been Shadow Love with the shotgun," Lucas said. He was leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets and his head down. His shirt was covered with blood. He thought it might be Belloo's. He was missing the heel of one shoe. Shot off? He wasn't sure. That foot hurt, but there were no wounds. Not a scratch. A uniformed captain, his face pale as the moon, stood down the hall and watched them talk. "He did Clay and Wilson and Belloo, all three. One of the Crows must have shot Drake. But that motherfucker Shadow Love, he caught us with that shotgun…"
"The whole thing lasted no more than eight seconds," Daniel said. "That's what they're getting from the tapes…"
"Christ…"
"The main thing is Shadow Love," Daniel said. "He must have gone out the back. We've got the neighborhood blocked off. We'll get him in the morning; I just hope he didn't get out before we set up the line."
"What if he's in somebody's house? What if he went in somewhere and he's got somebody's family on the wall?"
"We'll be going door to door."
"Motherfucker's a fruitcake and he's carrying a shotgun and we just killed his fathers…"
They were standing in the antiseptic hallways of Hennepin Medical Center, outside the surgical suite, one set of doors closer to the operating rooms than was usually permitted. Two dozen family members, friends and cops were corralled one set of doors farther out, waiting for news.
And beyond the next set, a hundred newsmen, maybe more. Doctors and nurses shuttled in and out of the operating suite, half of them with no business there, but officiously correct in demeanor. They wanted to see what was going on.
Clay had been taken in, but he was gone; so was Drake, shot in the heart. The first cop shot was brain dead, but they had him on a respirator; the hospital was talking to his family about organ donations. The second cop was still on the table. A nurse had pointed out the doc working on Belloo, the same redheaded surgeon who'd done Lily. Two more surgeons joined her, and an hour after Belloo went on the table, she came through the doors into the waiting area.
"You guys are giving me more business than I need," she said grimly.
"What's the story?"
"It'll be a while before we know. We've got a neurosur-geon looking at some crap around his spinal cord. There's some bone splinters in there but he's still got function…"
"He can walk?"
The surgeon shrugged. "He's going to lose something but not all of it. And we had to get a urologist down. A couple pellets went through a testicle."
Lucas and Daniel both winced. "Is he going to lose…?"
"We're evaluating that. I don't know. He'd still be functional, even with one, but there's some plumbing in there… Do you know if he has kids?"
"Yeah, three or four," said Daniel.