Everything was going great until the lights went off.
One second the building was running, NWA was pumping, and the boys were enjoying a good old fashioned stakeout while they waited for the Red Hood to come around, and the next it was silence and darkness.
Everybody knew the guy would hit another safehouse. Why take down just one when there were three others left? Not much point in burning one house to the ground while more prominent fugitives had their feet up in comfortable accommodations elsewhere.
Not everyone in the building was on the outs with the law, either. Some of them were clean, or at least not currently being sought in conjunction with a warrant. But if you wanted the bounty on the Red Hood, the best chance to get it was to bait the trap and wait.
Seemed like a good idea at the time, probably. The darkness gave the men a minute or two to draw their guns and start whispering loudly to each other about checking downstairs, every one of them still nightblind in the darkness.
They didn't get a chance to adjust.
The first went down quiet, smothered into unconsciousness while his buddies asked why he wasn't saying anything. The second was summarily disarmed while approaching the spot where his friend used to be standing.
The rest got the picture after that, and the bullets started flying fast. Muzzle flares created a strobing picture of the fight inside the building - there he was the Red Hood, moving under a guy's line of sight while he shot wildly into the darkness over his head. Here he was, flipping another man into the floor face first. Here he was, breaking the wrist of a woman to get her to drop her gun. He moved fast, now in this window, now nowhere at all, now on the other end of the floor. One by one, the would-be bounty hunters were dropping. Those that were left slowed their fire, leaving longer and longer visual gaps. The man that passed for their captain shouted at them to quit shooting, since they were just as likely to hit each other in the dark. Then he went down, kicked sharply in the chest, slamming hard into the man behind him and rolling across a table.