by DL Barbur
Then the rifle fire stopped. I forced myself to pop up and assess what was going on. Byrd and Grogan were both on the ground. Byrd was curled up in the fetal position, clutching his belly. Grogan was trying to wipe blood out of her eyes. She still had her pistol in her hand. Eddie was crouched by the rear bumper of his car, with empty hands. I had no idea why he wasn’t shooting. I couldn’t see Bolle, but judging by the number of bullet holes in his car, he wasn’t having a good day.
I could see Maddox’s silhouette still in the driver’s seat. I figured he was reloading. There wasn’t enough room for him to open his car door.
Bloem couldn’t get his open either, so he was crawling out the car window with a shotgun in one hand. I started running towards Grogan and Byrd’s car, hoping to get a little closer. I could easily put a slug through Bloem’s chest at this range, but we wanted him alive. In some ways closing the distance didn’t seem like a good idea, but I hoped to get to a position where I could put a slug through his lower extremities. If I could get a tourniquet on him quick enough, maybe I could keep him from dying.
Bloem had managed to wiggle out and get his butt on the hood of the car next to him when Grogan rosed shakily to her knees. As I ran up behind her, she raised her pistol with one hand, wiped the blood out of her eyes with the other and squeezed off a single shot at Bloem. He fell off the hood of the car and dropped out of sight. Whether he was hit, or just fell, I didn’t know.
The back window of the Chevy exploded as Maddox started firing again. More rounds hit the Charger and the pavement around us. I dropped to my right shoulder behind the back bumper of the car as bullets tore up the bodywork around us. I hoped Alex had the sense to hit the dirt too.
I inched along the pavement to where I had the front corner of the Charger between me and Maddox. I stayed well back from the car. Direct hits from the steel-cored AK-47 rounds would bore right through the sheet metal, but rounds that struck at an angle on the hood might deflect up, and I wanted to be far enough back that they would pass overhead instead of drilling me in the face.
Gritting my teeth, I forced myself up on a knee and leaned out past the front of the car. I imagined a straight line from me to where Maddox was kneeling in the driver’s seat, picked a spot on the trunk that lined up and triggered two shots from the shotgun.
Despite the shotgun’s gas operated recoil system, the heavy Brenneke slugs had massive recoil. I fired the first and it seemed to take forever before I could drag the red dot down back on target so I could fire the second. I could see two fist-sized dimples in the paint of the Chevy. For a second I thought I’d managed to hit Maddox, but apparently, I’d just attracted his attention. Bullets hit the front of the Charger. A piece of plastic trim flew off and hit me in the helmet.
I turned and ran to the back of the car. I passed Grogan, who had collapsed and was bleeding pretty badly. I wanted to help her, but before I could stop the bleeding, I had to stop the shooting.
Alex had dragged Byrd to the rear bumper and was lying over him, shooting at the Chevy with her pistol. I hadn’t even heard the shots until now. Maddox was still firing. I felt like I was in the movies where the guns never run out of ammo. Every time he would pause between bursts, I thought he was out, then another one would come.
Finally, there was a long pause, and I made myself stand up all the way. I could see Maddox still in the car, stuffing a new magazine in his rifle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bolle crawling out of the window of his own BMW, only a car width away from Maddox. If he caught Maddox’s eye, he’d be cut to ribbons.
Now I didn’t have to guess where to put the slug. I could see the outline of Maddox’s body and head, and the only thing between me and him was the seat of the car. I settled the dot and pulled the trigger two more times.
When I recovered from the recoil of the second shot, Maddox was no longer in view. After the deafening roar of the shots, the scene was strangely quiet except for the ringing in my ears.
I reloaded the shotgun by feel. I couldn’t recall exactly how many shots I’d fired, but it only held five rounds. I could reload it with my eyes closed, so I let my hands do their work while I scanned the scene.
Bolle had made it over the hood of Eddie’s car. They both crouched behind it, and as far as I could tell, neither one of them had a gun in their hands. Alex was kneeling beside Byrd, who was making some very final sounding gurgling noises.
Down the street, I saw our surveillance van moving towards us at a crawl. Holding the shotgun by its pistol grip with my right hand, I keyed my radio microphone with my left.
“Casey. Stop right there and cover the black Chevy with your rifle.”
The van jerked to a stop, and Casey hopped out wearing her full kit. A second later Henry jumped out wearing armor too. Apparently, me, Alex and the computer nerds were the only ones smart enough to show up properly dressed for a gunfight. We’d had trouble finding armor small enough to fit Casey, so she looked like a turtle with the vest up almost to her ears and the helmet almost covering her eyes, but she braced her Heckler and Koch rifle against the door frame with authority. She’d been practicing and I knew if Maddox popped up she’d smoke him.
Alex was cutting away Byrd’s clothes with a pair of EMT shears. Grogan was crawling towards the back of the car, mumbling something.
I keyed my radio again. “Casey, I’m moving up. Maddox is in the black car. Bloem fell to the ground in front of it”
“I don’t see him from my angle,” she said.
I steeled myself, and moved forward, dreading crossing the open ground between me and the Chevy. I had a tattoo on my chest that said “Front Towards Enemy.” That had been my general philosophy towards life for a long time, but I wondered how long I could keep rolling the dice before they came up snake-eyes.
I walked forward, shotgun at the ready, my feet crunching on bits of broken glass and plastic. The engine of the Chevy was still running, the burbling sound of the big V-8 engine competing with the sirens of the police cars that were headed towards us. Both the reverse lights were shot out, so I made sure I didn’t walk up directly behind it. The last thing I needed was for Maddox to gun the engine in reverse and flatten me like a bug.
I stopped when I could see in. The inside of the car was littered with shell casings and I saw two drum magazines for the AK. That explained the volume of fire. The damn things were heavy and cumbersome but they held fifty rounds.
I took another step and could see Maddox. He was laying across the front seats with his head almost in the passenger side footwell. There was blood and bits of tissue all over the front dash. The AK lay across his legs, a giant hole from a twelve gauge slug blown through the receiver. I realized his chest was rising and falling in quick panting breaths. He shifted his head and looked me in the eye.
“Show me your hands!” I yelled.
He quivered for a second, and I had a half-second to register the big Dan Wesson revolver he was trying to lift in my direction before I put the red dot on the bridge of his nose and pulled the trigger.
There wasn’t any need for a second shot.
I hopped up on the trunk of the car to the right. I could see a smear of blood on the hood, courtesy of Grogan’s shot into Bloem.
“It’s clear!” I yelled. “Bloem ran into the apartment complex.”
Everyone converged on me, except Alex, who was still tending to Byrd. Grogan rose to her feet and staggered around with blood pouring out of her face. She held her pistol in her hand still.
Bolle looked ashen. His face was covered in scratches and there were chunks of broken glass in his hair. Blood ran from both nostrils, courtesy of the airbag that had deployed when he crashed the car. Wordlessly, he held up his pistol, an expensive, long slide SIG. I could see a bullet hole in the slide where one of Maddox’s rounds had struck it.
“Do you see any bullet holes in me?” he asked. “I feel like there should be some but I can’t find any.”
I took a minute to look him up a
nd down. It wasn’t unheard of for people to get shot and not realize it.
“Looks good to me. Why don’t you see if you can help Alex with Grogan and Byrd?”
“Ok,” he said, and shambled off. I didn’t know if he was concussed from the crash and airbag, or if he was just shell-shocked by having Maddox unload a rifle at him from ten feet away, but he didn’t look like he was about to die. I had bigger things on my mind, so I just let him go.
“I put my gun on the seat next to me,” Eddie said. “After the crash, I couldn’t find it.”
Wordlessly, I shucked my Glock out of its holster and handed it to him. Eddie didn’t look shell shocked. He looked like somebody who was deeply pissed at himself for losing his pistol before getting in a gunfight.
Henry and Casey trotted up. Henry looked in the car at what was left of Maddox and was noisily sick on the pavement.
Casey looked in the car too, but when she looked back at me her face was dispassionate, like she was watching a tv show or something.
“You good?” I asked her.
“Yep,” she said, and I believed her. For a computer nerd and electronic security consultant, Casey had proved herself to have nerves of steel more than once. She’d never been in a gunfight before, but the way things were looking, this might be her chance.
“Ok. Casey and Eddie. You’re with me. Henry, go help Alex with the wounded.”
He looked like he was going to argue with me, but didn’t. Henry pulled his weight on the team, but I wasn’t sure now was the right time to have him behind me with a rifle.
I followed the trail of blood at a slow trot. Behind us, the sirens were getting closer. I wanted to find Bloem before the Portland Police arrived. They were a good agency, but coordinating with them was bound to complicate things.
Bloem was leaving a noticeable blood trail on the pavement. The apartments here were in little buildings with four apartments each, two downstairs, two up. On the door of the first building we came to, I saw a big smear of blood on the door handle. Apparently, Bloem was trying doors in the hopes of finding one unlocked.
“Shotgun in the bushes,” Casey said.
She had a keen eye. I saw the stock of a long gun sticking out from the bushes by the door. I pulled it out. It was empty and covered in blood. My inner gun nerd noted that it was a Smith and Wesson 3000, kind of an obscure model.
“He’s probably still got a pistol,” I said. “Stay sharp.”
We kept moving, following the blood trail. The drops were getting smaller and farther apart. I doubted the gunshot wound was getting better on its own. Maybe he’d found some way to bandage himself.
We came to an intersection and the blood dried up completely. I looked up and down the streets, which were full of parked cars. The complex was huge. I could see dozens of buildings from where I was standing.
“Can you hear that?” Casey asked. “The woman’s voice?”
Truthfully, I couldn’t. Between explosions and gunfire, my ears had been taking a pounding lately, and I was living with a constant low hum in my head that drove me crazy at night when I was trying to sleep.
I shook my head, straining to hear.
“That way,” Casey said, pointing to our right.
We moved down the street. Up ahead I saw an apartment door that was open.
Now I could clearly hear a man’s voice. “Just give me the fucking keys!”
A heard a muffled reply, a woman’s voice.
I kept my shotgun trained on the open door as we moved up the sidewalk. It was bright outside, and dark inside, so I couldn’t see much. I considered flipping on the powerful light attached but I didn’t want to give away my position.
As we got closer to the threshold of the doorway, I could see an empty foyer. A pair of sandals was the only thing inside. There was an opening to the right, and another to the left. Both the voices and the smell of something burning came from the left.
I moved as quietly as I could, careful not to let the bulky vest brush up against the door frame. I slowly peeked around the corner. I saw a stove, with a wok full of what looked like burning stir-fry on top.
“Just take the keys,” the woman half said, half sobbed. “It’s the green Volvo out front. I don’t have any cash.”
I remembered passing a green Volvo with a dented fender and a “Visualize World Peace” bumper sticker.
“Put them on the counter.” I recognized the man’s voice as Bloem’s. “Turn around and face away from me.”
The alarm bells started ringing. The best way for Bloem to get a head start would be to make sure the woman couldn’t call the cops and give a description of her car.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. Apparently, she was smart enough to know what was coming.
I took a deep breath. The rounds I’d loaded into the shotgun a couple of minutes ago were buckshot. Each shell held eight lead balls about a third of an inch across. Contrary to popular myth, they wouldn’t spread out and spray the entire room. At the ranges in the apartment, the cloud of shot would barely spread out to a pattern bigger than my closed fist, and leave a giant rat hole sized wound.
I’d hoped to take Bloem alive. It looked like that wasn’t in the cards for today.
I took a step around the doorway, button-hooking my way into the room. I had a flash of Bloem standing a few feet behind the woman, with his pistol pointed at the back of her head. I settled the red dot on his ear, but at the last second, I changed my mind.
Please don’t let me fuck this up, I thought. I wasn’t sure who I was asking. I hadn’t thought about God in a long time. Maybe it was an appeal to myself, maybe it was to some other power in the universe.
I settled the red dot on Bloem’s elbow and gently stroked the trigger. I was so hyper-focused I only heard a muffled pop when the shotgun went off.
When I came down from recoil, I saw the pistol on the floor, and Bloem’s forearm dangling from a few strips of flesh. As I watched, they stretched like taffy, then snapped. His arm hit the ground and both he and the woman started screaming.
Bloem clapped his hand over the jet of blood coming from the stump of his arm and started running around the kitchen in circles. Eddie moved from behind me and kicked his legs out from under him, then straddled him and pulled a tourniquet out of his pocket.
Casey slung her rifle over her back and pulled the woman out of the room.
Bolle’s voice crackled in my earpiece.
“Dent, what’s your status?”
I keyed my microphone. “We got Bloem?”
“Is he alive?”
Eddie cinched the tourniquet tight and the flow of blood decreased dramatically. Alex had drilled us so many times we could all put one on in the dark.
“Yeah,” I said. “I disarmed him.”
Chapter 3
Later we would figure out that the whole thing took just over five minutes. 145 rounds were fired.
The aftermath and recriminations took the rest of the day. We managed to keep Bloem from bleeding to death, so we could say we got our man, but no sane person could say it was worth it.
Byrd was dead. The soft body armor he’d been wearing didn’t even slow down the pair of rifle rounds that scrambled his guts. Alex had done everything she could, but he died before the ambulance even arrived. The paramedics did everything they could to breathe life back into his inert body on the way to the hospital, but the trauma surgeon took a look at the mess inside, shook his head, and pronounced him dead.
Grogan had taken several shotgun pellets in the face. The range had been long enough to slow the pellets down some before they hit her, which was the only reason she was still alive. Still, her cheekbone was cracked, several teeth were blown out, and she was in danger of losing an eye. The fact that she’d managed to put a bullet in Bloem bordered on the superhuman. When she woke up, I was tempted to buy her a beer, but I didn’t even know her well enough to know if she drank.
Eddie was fine, but I could tell he was beating hi
mself up for losing his gun at the beginning of the fight. Life and death often hinged on small decisions, and I knew he would spend the rest of his life wondering if he’d kept his pistol in the holster if things would have turned out different.
There was no way we could see this as anything other than an unmitigated disaster, and I could tell Bolle knew it. We had one agent dead, and another permanently injured and all we had to show for it was a guy who we weren’t even sure could tell us anything we didn’t already know.
As a young Army Ranger in 1993, I’d participated in a raid in Mogadishu, Somalia. By the end of the day, eighteen of us were dead. They were men I’d eaten with, trained with and drank with. Some people tried to focus on the fact that we’d captured our target, a Somali warlord, but I’d found that cold comfort. Today reminded me of that day more than I cared to admit.
Our unit was supposed to be keeping a low profile. A month or so ago, we’d very narrowly foiled a pair of terrorist attacks here in Portland, leaving a trail of dead bodies in our wake. You’d think that would make us heroes, but we’d been operating below the radar of both the Portland Police Bureau and the local field office of the FBI. They wound up with egg on their faces, and no amount of heroics was going to make them forgive us for that.
Bolle was still technically an FBI agent, but our task force was off the books, a secret Justice Department operation. I had a set of credentials in my pocket that deemed me a Special Investigator for the US Government, but the activities of our unit were unmistakably criminal at times. I’d done things I that could put me in prison, and that kept me up at night.
A raging gunfight in a Portland residential neighborhood would have been bad at any time, but the cherry on top of the shit sundae was the fact that we’d just shot a Portland police officer. Even though he was suspended, under investigation and probably on his way to prison himself, he was still a cop, and blowing his arm off hadn’t made us any friends with the locals.