LUCAS TALKED TO the SWAT commander: “We know he’s got at least three security guys- we’ve seen them. He might’ve had more people with him, when he came in. You gotta count on five or six guys. Just looking at them, I’d say they’re cocked and ready to go.”
The SWAT started in, and Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins armored up, heavy stuff with drop- down groin protection and Level IV armor plates in the chest and back. Del slapped the Velcro bands around his vest and they all put on helmets. Shrake had an M16, Jenkins his 12 gauge pump, Lucas and Del their pistols.
“It’d be stupid if they were all up there in that apartment, listening to Siggy and Heather getting it on,” Lucas said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one of them on this side of the street, another one in the garage, another one on the other side of the building, couple in the apartment, plus Siggy. They’ll all have phones. Let the SWAT do the hard stuff, keep your eyes on the windows…”
“Here comes SWAT,” Del said.
AS T. PAUL undercover guy had photographed the interior of the apartment house, and had gotten keys for the lobby door. Since Heather’s apartment was on the second floor, with street- side windows, the squad could be through the lobby, up the fire stairs, and in the hall outside the apartment in less than fifteen seconds.
As they came in, in three vans, the undercover guy, in plain clothes, would open the door and hold it: the squad would go straight through, up the stairs, and attack the apartment door, knocking down opposition with a couple of flash- bangs.
That was the theory. If they killed the pregnant wife or the baby, they’d be, as the SWAT commander noted, permanent residents of shit city.
THE VANS ROLLED slowly down the street, and the undercover guy walked up the steps to the front door, working the key. Lucas said, “Let’s go.”
They went out the door and down the stairs in a rush, hit the outside door, and thirty feet down the alley and around the corner of the drugstore and down the width of the store and around the next corner and the SWAT guys were boiling out of the vans and into the apartment.
As they came around the corner, running into the street, Lucas saw a guy run out of a bagel shop across the street, seventy or eighty yards away from them, looking up at the apartment, a cell phone to his ear.
Shrake yelled, “Hey!” and the guy turned and looked at them and took off running, away, up Snelling, and Del said, “I’ll get him,” and took off after him.
Lucas, Shrake, and Jenkins ran across the street and up the sidewalk and heard the flash- bangs go off in the apartment, then the long, ripping stutter of a machine gun, and Jenkins yelled, “Holy shit,” and the machine gun wouldn’t stop and Lucas thought about drywall and plywood walls in apartment buildings, and hoped the shooting was being done by the cops, but it didn’t sound like it, it sounded too uncontrolled and crazy.
Then Lucas picked up individual shots, and a man ran out the front door, looked at the vans, yanked up a small, short weapon, and fired a burst at the vans and then turned and ran away, up the street, where Del could still be seen chugging after the first runner, and Shrake said, “I got him,” and lifted his M16 and Lucas shouted, “No, no…” and behind the runner, a car pulled out of the parking garage and stopped across the sidewalk and Shrake yelled, “Shit!”
A chair came through the end window on the apartment, and then a blanket dropped over the edge and Siggy looked out at them, saw them, turned the same weapon the second runner had, and fired a burst at them and they all went sideways behind parked cars and the bullets patted and whanked like bees.
Siggy dropped the gun out the window and threw himself over the edge, hung one second and dropped, ten or twelve feet into a flower bed, and Shrake stood up and the second runner, now eighty or a hundred yards off, opened up again and they all went flat again and then Siggy was running away with the gun, around the car still sitting in the driveway, behind it. The driver came flying out the driver’ side door and sprawled on the ground and Siggy was in the car, fired another burst through the open driver’s door, reached up and grabbed the steering wheel and pushed on the gas pedal with his other hand, and as the car started into the street, Shrake walked out into the street and said, “Fuck this,” and dumped half a magazine into the front of the car.
The car straightened out and drifted across the street and ran into a parked car in front of the bagel shop, and sat there.
Lucas was running after the second runner, screaming, “Del, Del,” and Del, at the top of a low hill, finally heard him, saw the second runner across the street coming toward him, ducked behind a car, and fired half a magazine at him, and the runner unloaded his weapon, whatever it was, the bullets pounding and zinging under the car that Del was hiding behind. Then he was out of ammo and he dropped the gun and started running again, and Del shot him, one long leading shot, and knocked him off his feet.
Lucas saw the second runner go down, then there were two more flash- bangs and the machine gun stuttered once, again, then a heavier, harsher sound erupted, and the higher- pitched shooting stopped.
All of a sudden, it was absolutely quiet in the street. Lucas ran across and looked in the car Siggy had tried to take. Siggy was dead, his face a hash of blood and meat where Shrake’s.223 slugs had torn into him. Jenkins was talking to the car’s driver, a young guy in a blue suit, now wearing a pair of broken glasses and a stunned look.
Up the street, Del was approaching the man on the ground. The SWAT commander ran out of the apartment and said, “We okay?"
"Got a loose runner, maybe two, got two down,” Lucas said
“What happened?”
“Guy on the front room couch with a fuckin’ M7 and we came through the door and man, he opened up and didn’t quit; we shot him.”
“Any of our guys…?"
"We’re all okay, got some cuts and splinters and shit."
"Heather and the baby…?"
"They’re okay.”
DEL’S BULLET went through the second runner’s triceps, his armpit, and into his chest, where it made a hash out of his heart and lungs. They called ambulances, but he was gone before Del even crossed the street.
They never saw the first runner again. The way they later worked it out, he’d run three blocks, spotted a passing cab, jumped in, and took the cab to Minneapolis. The driver said he dropped the passenger conveniently close to a light- rail station, which went to the airport, among other places.
They got Heather dressed and took her out in cuffs, and downtown to be processed, but she was already screaming, “I didn’t know he was coming, I didn’t know…”
She wanted a lawyer; and had his card in her purse. Jenkins asked, “Where’d they get those fuckin’ machine guns?” Lucas shook his head: “They were coming in from Miami."
"But we got him,” Shrake said.
THEN EVERYBODY in the world came down on top of them: TV and newspapers and even a public radio guy with a tape recorder and a boring voice, a dozen cop cars, the cops to check the neighborhood for any collateral injuries or damage, crime- scene people. The street and the various shooting scenes were cordoned off, and crime- scene guys landed in force, the ME’s investigators, Jackson with his Nikon D3 and every lens in the world, the St. Paul police photographer with an inferior Canon camera, a variety of deputy chiefs, homicide investigators, and a partridge in a pear tree.
It all took forever, it seemed; and Lucas was there, the whole time, and they all talked about it over and over, what everybody had seen and done, and Lucas had this sense that he hadn’t done much, but he was there, and it all felt pretty large.