Marshall scrambled out onto the carpet at the top, and he was shouting, "Living room is clear, I don't see him."

Another BANG from the back, and Lucas shouted, "He's in the back, it sounds like he went out." He heard somebody screaming, "Watch it, watch it, coming your way, watch it…"

Allport, he thought, and then he was at the top of the stairs and saw Marshall, now up and moving in a crouch, headed toward a hallway leading toward the back. He did a peek as Lucas came up and said, "Clear, I think."

Lucas did a peek and heard more shouting from the back, and ran down the hallway just in time to hear a fusillade of shots, and more yelling. He was coming up on a room to his right and a closed door on his left. He did a quick peek into the bedroom, saw nothing, continued through a small kitchen, saw broken glass, shouted back, "Watch the rooms, they're not clear, they're not clear," saw Del behind Marshall, got to the window, and looked out.

Randy Whitcomb was lying faceup, spread-eagled on the grass below the back deck. His shirt was soaked with blood and one hand was flapping convulsively, as though he were fanning himself with a broken arm.

Lucas turned, saw Del and Marshall in the hallway, and said, "He's down out back. Check the rooms." Allport and the hammer cop loomed from the living room. To Allport, Lucas said, "Get an ambulance moving." Then he was out and down the stairs onto the lawn, where the St. Paul uniforms, guns still drawn, had gathered around Randy.

Randy had been hit four times, twice in the legs, once in the stomach, and once in his left forearm, the arm that had been flapping. One of the uniform cops was now holding it to the grass so he couldn't flap it. Randy wasn't saying anything, not a sound: no whimpers, nothing. His eyes rolled, rolled, rolled, from this side to the other, up and down; and his mouth strained, not to say something, but as if it were trying to escape his face.

"Got an ambulance coming," Lucas said to him. He didn't hear it.

One of the St. Paul uniforms said, "He had a gun."

"Yeah, he let go a couple of times inside," Lucas said.

The cop said, "He had a gun. Up there, we heard it."

"Yeah, he did."

One of the other cops said, "I think it's in the bushes. He had it in his hand when he came out."

"Find it," Lucas said. "Don't touch, just find it."

Del came out on the deck. "Nobody in the house. But, uh…" He looked back into the condo, and Lucas could hear Marshall talking. Then Del turned back to Lucas and said, "There's a lot of blood up here."

"Nobody shot at him up there."

"No, no, I mean, somebody else's blood. He was trying to clean it up with paper towels, but it's kind of splattered on the couch and there are little droplets on the wallpaper."

Now Randy moaned, just once. Lucas looked down at him and said, "What'd you do?" But Randy didn't hear him; he just rolled his eyes again.

From the corner of the house, one of the St. Paul uniforms said, "There it is." To Lucas: "Got the gun, Chief."

"Just stay right next to it. Keep an eye on it until the crime-scene people get here. Don't let anyone get near it."

Allport came out on the deck and asked, "Everybody okay?"

"Everybody except Randy. He's hit pretty hard." Lucas looked down at him again. Randy's shirt was soaked with blood, and Lucas noticed that even with the convulsions running through his upper body, his lower body never moved. Spinal, he thought.

Allport yelled at one of the uniforms: "Freeze everything, John. Don't let anything move." Then, to Lucas: "You oughta come up and look at this mess."

Lucas said, "Okay," then looked down at Randy again. "What the fuck did you do, you little asshole? What'd you do?"

16

MARSHALL AND DEL came down from the apartment to watch the paramedics working over Randy. Whatever they did brought the pain on, and the kid started a cowlike lowing that seemed to inhabit all the air in the common area. He was still doing it when they strapped him on a gurney, ready to move him.

Two dozen kids, half of them white, the other half Hmong or black, most of them serious but a few cutting up, milled in a wide semicircle around the shooting scene, kept back by uniforms. Somewhere in the crowd was a young girl who'd periodically call out in her high-pitched TV-whore voice, "That motherfucker dead?" or "You shoot that motherfucker?" When the paramedics started wheeling the gurney toward the ambulance, she cried out, "Put him in the 'fridge, he dead."

When he was gone, the cops on the original blocking squads were isolated to make statements, and Randy's revolver was photographed, measured, and carefully plucked out of the weed bed where it had fallen. The crime-scene guy who lifted it popped the cylinder and said, "Four rounds fired."

"That's about right," Allport told him.

"Can't tell when," the crime-scene guy said.

"About a half an hour ago, dickhead," Allport said.

Lucas, Del, and Marshall clustered around the bottom of the apartment steps. Marshall said, "He doesn't look that bad, considering."

Lucas nodded. "If they get him to Regions alive, he'll make it-as long as he doesn't have too much shit in his bloodstream."

"I told the paramedics about the crack," Del said. "They'll watch out for it."

"I want to know what the heck happened," Marshall said. "Why'd he open up? Because we took the door down?"

Lucas rubbed his head, looking up at the apartment, and said, "I don't know. He's always been a crazy sonofabitch, and he never worried about getting hurt. Not brave, just nuts. I never really thought about him being suicidal."

"It's that blood," Del said. He looked up, where Lucas was looking, and continued, "Something happened up there."

"He couldn't be our guy," Marshall said. "You didn't have any goddamn twelve- or thirteen-year-old traveling around the countryside picking up women in their twenties. I mean, I don't know what it means."

"He was probably just a connection," Lucas said. "But he knows our guy."

"We could get a name tonight, then," Marshall said. "They sew him up-"

"If he'll talk," Del said. "He's a little asshole, and he'll be pissed."

"More pissed than you might think," Lucas said. "His legs weren't moving when he was on the ground. The slug that took him in the stomach might have clipped his spine."

Marshall winced, and Del said, "Ah, shit."

The crime-scene people were taping the apartment when the three of them climbed back up the stairs and tentatively stepped inside. Allport spotted them, shook his head: "Quite a bit of day-old blood. We don't think it was his."

"Is someone dead? That much blood?" Lucas asked.

Allport relayed the question to somebody out of sight. A second later, a cop in a tweed jacket and golf slacks stepped into the hallway and looked down at Lucas and said, "Not that much. I'd say it's gotta be maybe a pint, give or take. Of course, we don't know how much he cleaned up."

"Doesn't look like he'd done much cleaning," Del said. "There was still some blood on the wallpaper."

"You find any jewelry?" Lucas asked. "Good stuff?"

"Haven't looked yet," the cop said. "Would that be a priority?"

"Yeah, it would be," Lucas said. "Get the sequence of events on the entry nailed down first, though. We don't want that to get confused."

The cop nodded and dropped back out of sight. Allport said, "Give us half an hour. Then I'd appreciate if you could slow-walk through the place, see if anything catches your eye."

Lucas nodded. "We'll be back." To Del and Marshall, as they stepped back out onto the deck: "The day started so pretty that I drove the Porsche."

"Still not a bad day," Marshall said, looking up at the sky. "Still pretty. Even smells good, once you get away from the blood."