He really had no choice about which way to go…

The loudspeaker came like a thunderbolt:

''Halt. By the house, freeze…''

And he thought, Night scope. Before the last words were out, he fixed on the position of the men coming up from the back.

He could sense the motion.

Butters ran sideways and fired a long, ripping burst across the group, thirty rounds pounding downrange, his face flashing in the muzzle flash like a wagon spoke in a strobe light.

The return fire was short of him, of where he had been. Moving all the time, he punched out the magazine and slammed in another, looking for muzzle flashes, squirting quick three- and four-shot bursts at them, more to suppress than to hit.

And still the return fire was short…

Then he was behind a garage; he sensed something in front of him and slowed just in time. He touched and then vaulted a four-foot chain-link fence, crossed a yard, went over the next fence, pushed through a hedge, scratching his face, took another fence, then another, heard garbage cans crashing behind him, screams, another burst of gunfire which went somewhere else, more screams.

He could hear himself breathing, gasping for air, trying to remember about how many shells would be left; he thought maybe six or eight, plus the third magazine in his pocket.

He felt good, he was moving, operating, he was on top of it.

Heading east.

THE LOUDSPEAKER AND THE GUNFIRE TOOK THEM BY surprise, Lucas and the other cops standing behind cars, talking quietly among themselves. They stiffened, turned, guns coming out, men crouching behind cars. Then radios began talking up and down the block, and Lucas, running to a St. Paul squad, said, ''What? What?''

''Shit, one of them's out, he's maybe coming this way,'' a patrol sergeant said.

Lucas ran back toward his own people, touched them, ''Watch it, watch it, he could be coming…''

Butters ran hard as he could, made it to the end of the block, passed between two houses, and in the dark space between them, ran almost headlong into a small tree. The blow knocked him down, but he held on to the rifle. Blood trickled into his mouth, and the sting told him that he'd cut his lip, probably badly. He crawled toward the street, gathered himself.

Across the way, he could hear people talking; more gathered behind him. He had no choice. He slapped the magazine once to make sure it was seated, and ran out into the street.

There: a cop-someone-dead ahead, behind a squad car, not much to see, turning toward him, crouching, hand coming up…

Butters, still running, fired a burst at the cop behind the car, saw him go down.

Another cop opened up from his right, then a third, and then he was hit: a stinging blow, as if somebody had struck his bare butt with a hickory switch. He knew what it was, and even as he returned the fire he passed through the line of cars, and cops were firing into each other as they tried to get him, men spilling themselves into the snow to get away from the bullets, others screaming

…

And Butters ran.

A house, straight ahead, with lights on. And there was some pain now, more than an ache, more like a fire, in his thigh. He ran up four steps of the porch of the lighted house, to a stone-faced entry and an almost full-length glass pane in the front door. He fired a short burst at the glass, blew it out, and went through the door.

A man in pajamas stood at the bottom of a stairway; a woman stood at the top, looking down.

Butters pointed the gun at the woman and screamed at her: ''Get down here.''

And a kid yelled, ''What? What's going on? Mom?''

LUCAS SAW HIM COMING, DOWN TO THE RIGHT. HE fired twice, thought he might have hit him once, but the man was very fast, and ran in an odd, broken, jerky two-step that made him hard to track, especially with the bad light. The man fired a burst and Lucas felt a hard, scratching rip at his hairline, not hard, like a slug, but ripping, like a frag. Then Butters went through the line of cops and Lucas could see muzzle flashes coming at him and he dropped, screaming,

''Hold it, Jesus…''

And when the firing stopped, he lurched up on his elbows in time to see Butters sprint up the porch steps, and the muzzle flash from the gun as he went through the glass door…

''Around back, somebody around back,'' Lucas shouted.

Two St. Paul cops, frozen by the fire, broke toward the side of a nearby house, heading toward the back, and Lucas and another Minneapolis cop-Lewiston-moved in toward the porch.

''Take him?'' Lewiston asked.

''Get in tight,'' Lucas said. ''Let's…''

''You're hit,'' Lewiston said. ''There's blood running out of your head.''

''Just cut myself, I think,'' Lucas said. ''You go right…''

BUTTERS POINTED THE AR-15 AT THE WOMAN ON THE stairs and screamed, ''Get down here.''

And then the kid called, ''Mom?''

The woman shouted, ''Jim, go back in your room. Jimmy…''

Butters couldn't think. His leg was on fire, and the man in the pajamas was frozen, the woman was yelling at the kid: a car rolled by outside and he turned, looked that way, couldn't see anything. The woman was shouting at the kid and

Butters yelled at her, ''Get your ass down here, goddamnit, or I'll fuck your old man up…''

He pointed the gun at the pajama man and the woman came down the stairs, red-faced, terrified, watching his eyes. She wore a flannel nightgown, and something about it, the nightgown, the man's pajamas…

Then the kid came to the head of the stairs. He was wearing a T-shirt and Jockey shorts, skinny bare legs, and he looked frightened and his hair stood up where his head had been on a pillow.

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.