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“Anybody hurt? Are you okay? Are you still armed and loaded?”
“Yes. No. He ran away. He ran, the cops are coming, a neighbor called the cops, I don’t know where the killer went, he ran away but I shot at him with my revolver. I ran out of bullets, I don’t have any more, I mean I do, around here somewhere, but I don’t know where—”
“I’m coming,” Lucas said. “When the cops get there, meet them in the street. Leave your gun in the house, meet them empty-handed. Tell them right away that this is part of the Sand investigation. That they need to find out where the killer went and if he had a car, what kind of car it was, what direction it went. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Tell the cops about the Sand investigation.”
“Leave the gun in the house. Empty hands, can you say that to me? Ann, too. Say it!”
“Empty hands, empty hands.”
“Good. The baby’s okay?” Lucas asked.
“The baby’s okay. Lucas, you can’t believe this, I kept shooting at him and shooting at him and he never fell down or anything, I thought you were supposed to fall down...”
“Hang tight. Talk to the cops. I’m on the way.”
—
Lucas called Virgilas he drove across the Mississippi, told him about the attack and, “I’ll see you there.”
“I’ll be right behind you,” Virgil said.
At Melton’s street, the cops tried to wave Lucas off, but he hung his marshal’s badge out the window until he got somebody to look at it, and got the name of Edina’s lead investigator. There wasn’t one, yet, he was told, but she was on her way. In the meantime, the patrol cops were freezing the scene. Virgil showed up as Lucas was talking to the cops, and Virgil pulled in behind Lucas’s Cayenne.
Lucas went to meet him and Virgil asked, “Talked to her yet?”
“No. I’ve got the okay to go inside. They’ve got some cops sitting with them.”
They went in the house, found Cooper, Melton, and the baby huddled in the living room, watched over by two patrolmen. Lucas and Virgil identified themselves for the cops and Lucas said to Cooper, “Well, this is another fine mess.”
Cooper looked at them with a wan smile and said, “Laurel and Hardy. But there were actually about a dozen variations on the line.”
Melton asked, “What are we going to do? The killer knows where we are.”
“We’ll start by either finding you another place to stay or getting extra security around this place.”
“Since he knows where we’re at... we should move to my house,” Cooper said. “More protected, stone and bricks, fewer cars, security system. I could hire a security service to watch over us.”
Lucas nodded: “That would work. I could get you a service.”
Virgil: “Tell us the story.”
—
Cooper began thestory, starting with the call from the neighbor woman. She’d gotten to the point where Melton lit up thebackyard, when the Edina lead detective arrived, a bulky woman named Marsha Moss, who was not happy to find Lucas and Virgil already interviewing Cooper.
After some semi-heated rank pulling, she conceded that they knew more about the case, and would be working it harder than she would be, and she settled in to listen.
Cooper: “I pushed open the back door and he was right there and I could see he had something in his hand which I thought was a gun, and it was a gun, he shot it at me a bunch of times...”
She hadn’t actually seen a gun, but she and Melton had agreed, before the cops arrived, that it might be a good thing to say that she’d seen one. And anyway, it had been one.
“Bullet holes all around the door...” Melton interjected.
Moss to Cooper: “Do you have any idea of how many times you fired your weapon?”
“Yes, of course,” Cooper said. “Five shots. I’m such an airhead, I have a box of bullets around here somewhere, I brought them when we came here, the next day after Alex and the boys... Five shots, I fired them all.”
