And Butters remembered: the winter the cops came, and they got his mother and his old man out of bed, and Butters had come to the stairs in his shorts, just like this… He remembered the fear, and the guns the cops wore on their hips, and the way his old man seemed to crawl to them, because of the guns, and his mother's fear… They stank of it. He stank of it.
And all of this was exactly the same, but he had the gun.
''Don't hurt us,'' the woman said.
''Fuck this,'' Butters said.
He popped the magazine from the rifle, slapped in the third full one, checked to make sure that the half-empty one was ready, easy to reach in his pocket.
''You go back to bed, kid,'' he said.
He ran straight out the door, across the porch, at the two cop cars that were parked up the street to the right. There were two men close by, one left, one right, and the one to the right looked familiar and he decided to take that one.
He turned toward Lucas and raised the rifle, and saw Lucas's gun hand coming up but knew that he was a quarterinch ahead…
STADIC WAS COMING UP THE MIDDLE, BUT WAS STILL thirty yards out, when Butters came through the door. Davenport and Lewiston were too close to the porch, and below it, to see Butters as he came through, but Stadic, back in the dark, had just enough time to set his feet and lift the shotgun.
Butters turned toward Davenport, the gun coming up. Davenport reacted in a fraction of a second, and maybe an entire lifetime, behind Butters. The shotgun reached out, a cylinder of flame, reached almost to Butters's face, it seemed.
And blew it off.
Butters went down like an empty sack.
THE COPS ALL AROUND FROZE, LIKE A STUCK VIDEOTAPE. After one second, they started moving again. Radios scratching the background. Everything, Stadic thought, moving in slow motion. Moving toward Butters, Davenport looking at him
…
''Man,'' Davenport said. ''He had me. You saved my ass.''
And Davenport clapped him on the shoulder. Back in the furthest recess of his numbed mind, Stadic thought: That's two.
LUCAS CLAPPED THE WIDE-EYED STADIC ON THE SHOULDER and then ran down the block toward the car where a cop had been hit. Lucas had seen him go down in the flash of fire from Butters, a fact stored in the back of his head until he could do something about it.
At that moment, a helicopter swept overhead, pivoted around in a tight circle, and they were bathed in light. A cameraman was sitting in the open door, filming the scene in the street.
Two St. Paul cops reached the downed man just as Lucas did. Lucas knelt: the man had been hit in the head, and the top of his skull was misshapen. There was blood out of his nose and ears, and his eyes were dilated, but still moving.
''Gotta take him, can't wait for an ambulance,'' Lucas shouted at one of the St.
Paul cops. ''Get him in the car…''
Together they picked up the wounded man and put him in the backseat of a squad; one of the St. Paul cops got in the back with the wounded man, and the driver took off, the back doors flapping like big ears as he turned the corner, followed by the lights from the chopper.
''Jesus Christ, get the fuckin' chopper out of here,'' Lucas yelled at another of the St. Paul cops, a sergeant. ''Get them out of here.''
The sergeant was leaning against the hood of a squad, and he suddenly turned, head down, and vomited into the street. Lucas started away, thinking now: the house. More people coming in? What happened down there?
Then the sergeant said, ''We just never had a chance to say anything…''
''Yeah, yeah…'' And he ran back down the street to the body of the shooter.
Butters's face had been obliterated by the shotgun. He was gone.
All right-the house.
He stood, and stepped that way, and saw more running figures, cops, coming in.
Another St. Paul lieutenant, a patrol officer, one he didn't recognize.
''What happened…?''
''Got him, and we got one of your men shot. He's bad, he's on his way in.''
''Jesus Christ.''
''What happened at the house?''
''Jesus Christ, who got hit?'' The lieutenant looked around crazily. ''Who's hurt?''
''The house, the house,'' Lucas said. ''What happened?''
''Empty. Nobody there. Guns,'' the lieutenant said.
''Shit.''
The lieutenant ran down to the patrol sergeant, who'd stopped vomiting, and was standing shakily against the hood of the squad. ''Who was it, Bill, who was it?''
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.
TWELVE