by Greg Rucka
Firing like this—skip-firing—relied on the inherent strangeness of ballistics. Bullets don’t behave like billiard balls. Despite what movies and television portray, they don’t ricochet at perfect angles. This is why soldiers and cops don’t press themselves against walls for cover; if the angle is right and the surface hard enough, the bullet won’t bounce away, but rather will ride along the plane, sometimes as high as an inch or an inch and a half above its point of impact. If you’re leaning against the wall the round is riding when that happens, you can end up with a very nasty, very lethal surprise.
I didn’t like doing it, and I didn’t have terrific faith that it would work, but I didn’t see any other choice. I was bleeding badly, I knew it, maybe even bleeding out. I had an MP5 with eighteen rounds versus an AR-15 with quite possibly a reloaded magazine. Even if I had been able to stand for a straight-on fight, I was pretty certain I’d lose.
C’mon, I thought. C’mon, come and get me, you bastard.
It was what he had to do. His night, like mine, had become a total clusterfuck, and now he had to end it, one way or another. From the setup for the ambush, it was clear they hadn’t expected that I would make them. But I had, and now Mark was down two buddies and all alone, and the last he’d heard had been Grant’s shots and mine, and now he didn’t know what was what. Like me, he was running out of moves and out of time. He could either climb back into his Cherokee and bolt, or he could approach the Ford and finish the job. And since I hadn’t heard the Cherokee starting up again, it was going to be the latter.
Distantly, somewhere ahead and in front, I heard the clack of a magazine being fitted into place, a bolt being slid back. He’d made his decision; he was coming to finish me, reloaded and ready. Probably swinging around behind the rear end of the Civic, using it for cover.
The ocean was rising once more in my ears, and the edges of my vision were beginning to lose color again. Sitting the way I was hurt, and I was sure it made the bleeding worse. If I waited any longer, the chance that I’d pass out seemed more and more likely.
My finger was slippery on the MP5’s trigger, but I got it down, laid a spray at the pavement, sweeping the barrel in a slight arc in front of me. I tried to count the shots, let up when I hit ten, but I was probably off by one or two.
There was an immediate scream of pain, and I heard first the AR-15, then Mark, hit the ground. He continued to scream, and he was loud, and I didn’t blame him for that. One of the rounds must have found a foot, maybe destroying a toe, maybe coming at him a little higher. There are a lot of bones in the foot, most of them small, and all of them delicate. There was a reason he was screaming.
I readjusted my grip on the MP5, pulled the trigger again, sprayed at the ground again, but this time I kept the trigger down until the weapon went dry.
Mark stopped screaming.
I tried very hard not to start as I began lurching towards the Cherokee.
CHAPTER
FOUR
To this day, I’m still unsure as to how I got into the Cherokee, how I got it turned around and headed the right way on County Route 10. I have a vague, distorted memory of reminding myself to breathe, and that getting to the vehicle itself was agonizing, not just because I was hurt, but because I had to do it quickly. My right leg had become beyond useless, and my left had been desperately trying to follow suit. How I managed to drive the vehicle at all remains a mystery; I must have used my left foot to work the pedals.
But there were things that I knew, and the most important among them was that I had to get back to the safe house, and I had to do it fast. The whole gunfight couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, maybe two minutes, tops, but with the noise and the coming dawn, I was certain that what passed for law enforcement in Putnam County generally, and Cold Spring specifically, would be arriving soon. While the cop who found me might very well get me to a hospital, he or she wouldn’t get me to the safe house, and the safe house was where I needed to go.
The first truly clear thing I remember is almost overshooting the entrance to Foreman Road, wrenching the wheel too hard and almost too late, and nearly sending the Cherokee and myself into the trees. I remember seeing that the sky was starting to burn with red, that daylight was beginning to illuminate the car, and that I seemed to have gotten my blood everywhere.
And I remember turning down Deer Hollow Road, seeing two big black Chevy Suburbans parked in the street almost directly in front of the house, each facing it. Dan and Alena and one of the Russians were all at the minivan, and the Russian I didn’t know was holding a rifle in one hand, and somehow I knew that he had to be Vadim, Dan’s son. Miata was jumping into the minivan’s back as I lurched to a stop, and all of them had turned to watch me arriving, and all three of them were pointing guns at me. I was just lucid enough to realize why they were doing that, that they didn’t know it was me behind the wheel, that they’d never seen the vehicle before.
Dan had a shotgun at his shoulder, and I could see blood spatter on his left cheek, and Alena had a pistol, a .45, and there were two bodies lying in front of the house, the legs of a third just visible through the door. Smoke was drifting lazily from somewhere inside, catching on the slight breeze outdoors. The two bodies that I could see wore tactical vests over their body armor, black pants and black boots. Each of them was missing most of his head. Two more MP5s rested on the ground, close to where each of them had fallen, and they were suppressed models, identical in all ways to the ones I’d encountered at the gas station.
Whoever had tried to do me had sent a team to the house, as well, probably within minutes of my departure.
I stopped the Cherokee maybe twenty feet away from where they were all pointing their guns at me, and I actually turned the engine off before moving to open the door. The Cherokee was an automatic, too, and I didn’t want it to roll into anyone.
Alena shouted my name when I tumbled out of the car, but it was Dan who ran to help me up.
“I can’t stand,” I told him from the ground.
He swore in Russian, trying to get me back to my feet. There were powder burns on his face, along with the blood spatter, and that meant he’d been firing at close range, indoors. Whoever it was who’d come after them, they’d managed to breach the house.
“All right,” Dan said, hooking an arm under me and carrying more than supporting me in the direction of the minivan. “We’re going. You’re losing blood, we have to do something about your bleeding.”
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked him.
“She’s not coming.”
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked him.
“She’s not coming, Atticus. We discuss this later, okay?”
I looked at him, and it was difficult to focus.
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked him.
Dan shook his head, said something to Alena in Russian. They were trying to get me into the van; Miata was worriedly snuffling around the interior. The other Russian, Vadim, was already moving around to the driver’s side, ready to climb behind the wheel.
“I’m going to sanitize,” Dan told Alena, then turned and sprinted back into the house.
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked Alena.
“They hit us maybe a minute, two minutes after you left,” Alena said, and she had a knife in her hand, a switchblade, I didn’t know where it had come from. The blade snapped out, shining in the thready dawn light. She began cutting my jacket off me.
“Two teams, front and back. Illya rabbited; it looks like he set us up.”
“Where’s Natalie?” I asked again.
Alena finished cutting the jacket off me, closed the switchblade, then started on the straps to my vest. I watched her working, her mouth closed tight, lips pressed together as if to seal in any potentially dangerous words. When she pulled the vest free from my body, something fell onto the running board, and I looked down, saw that it was a bullet, and guessed it was the one that had been inside me, that it had caught between my back and the vest. Looki
ng down made me dizzier, so I looked up again, back to Alena.
“We have to stop this bleeding.” She took a piece of my torn jacket, wadding it quickly in her hand and then pressing it against my belly. With her other hand, she moved mine on top of it. “Hold this here, don’t let it go.”
“Alena,” I said. “Where’s Natalie?”
She looked up from where I was spilling blood and met my eyes, hers deep and brown and full of the sadness they seemed to always hold. After a moment, she turned her head slightly to Vadim, spoke to him in Russian. Vadim responded, and from his inflection I knew he was asking a question, possibly about her sanity. She repeated what she’d said before, and he answered quietly, and I heard him opening the door, climbing out of the van once more.
“Where’s Nata—” I started to ask.
“Vadim will take you to her,” Alena said.
Natalie was in the yard behind the house.
She lay on her side, about eight feet from the rear door. The Sig Sauer she had given me and that I had returned to her earlier that night lay on the ground, maybe six inches from her thigh, near her outstretched fingers. The backyard had once had a lawn, but the lawn had long since overgrown, and with autumn, that overgrowth had gained a layer of fallen leaves. The rising sunlight brought out their color, made their oranges and reds and browns bright and beautiful. The reds almost matched the red of her hair.
They didn’t go with the blood around her body at all.
Vadim held me steady while I looked down at my friend’s body, and Alena stood on my other side, close enough to touch me but not doing so.
“Who?” I asked her. I could hear the ocean noise beginning to rise in my ears once more, feel the edges of my vision starting to contract.
She pointed with the hand that wasn’t holding her cane, and I saw the body of a man, perhaps forty, maybe fifty feet away, lying facedown, beside one of the trees that framed the narrow yard. He was white, his hair shorn close to the scalp. He wore the same gear that the others in the front wore, but instead of an MP5, he’d been carrying a rifle.
“Vadim killed him,” Alena told me.
There were another two bodies, these closer, off to the right. One of them was missing most of his throat. The other had been shot multiple times in the head and neck.
I shook my head, and the world didn’t stop spinning when I was finished doing it.
“No,” I said, and it was getting harder to make the words. “Who did this? Who made this happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going to kill whoever did this.” I think I told it to Natalie. I might have been saying it to Alena.
“I know.”
I could hardly hear her over the sound of waves filling my ears. I forced myself to look away from the body of my friend.
“I’m going to kill whoever did this,” I repeated.
Alena nodded, blurring in my sight. Her mouth moved, and I saw Dan step into my dwindling periphery, then start forward, one hand shooting out to catch me before I fell. Vadim tightened his grip on my arm, but it wasn’t enough, and the last thing I saw before I couldn’t see more was the face of Natalie Trent, of my last friend, beautiful as she had ever been, as she slept forever on a blanket of leaves in the New England fall.
CHAPTER
FIVE
I woke up twice before the flight.
The first time, I was lying on my back on something cold and hard, and I could smell garlic and onions and frying meat. When I opened my eyes, I saw two large colanders and a stockpot and what looked like a twelve-inch skillet hanging above me from various hooks. Between a tarnished copper saucier and a pasta steamer hung a bag of Ringer’s solution, and the line from the bag seemed to be running down and into my arm. Dan and Vadim were on one side of me, and there was a woman I’d never seen before on the other, and her nose looked like someone had trapped it in a vise and forgotten to ever release it. Dan still had powder burns on his face, but the blood spatter was gone.
There were voices all around me, some very soft, all of them speaking Russian, and the woman with the fascinating nose was wearing surgical gloves, and the gloves were stained with blood. It took me a moment to recognize that it was likely my blood that stained them, that she was probably working on me as I watched, and that explained the extraordinary amount of pain I was feeling.
“Please tell me I’m not getting surgery in a kitchen,” I said.
Dan and Vadim and the woman all looked down at me in surprise.
Then the woman looked at Dan and began shrieking at him, clearly berating him, and Dan shouted back at her, and Vadim reached for something out of my sight. I felt a needle breaking through my skin, felt something warm and heavy filling my veins, and I fell gratefully back into darkness.
The second time I awoke, I was in a bed, in a room, in the dark. Light filtered in from the street through windows somewhere behind me, but it was weak, street lighting, and I thought it must be late in the night. The sound of music thumped up through the floor and then through the bed from someplace beneath me, a bass line more felt than heard, and behind that, barely audible, I could make out the susurration of traffic running along streets that sounded slicked and puddled with rain.
The bed was a big one, maybe a king, and I was beneath the covers, and my clothes were gone. Alena lay beside me, sleeping above the sheets, and she had her clothes on, but had removed her boots. A pistol rested on the nightstand nearest her, along with a cell phone, and I tried reading the time on its display, but couldn’t focus my eyes, couldn’t manage to make things stop looking so blurry. It took me another few seconds to realize that was because someone had removed my contact lenses.
I wondered where I was going to get a new set of glasses.
Paws came scratching across the hardwood floor, Miata making his way to me, and I felt his breath against the back of my hand. I raised my arm and stroked his neck for a few seconds, and then he pulled away, and I listened to the sound of him settling once more on the floor nearby. I shifted experimentally in the bed, trying to reposition myself, and the pain that erupted from my right side, from my gut down through my knee, made me gasp, and filled my eyes with water.
Beside me, Alena made a noise in her sleep, perhaps responding to me, but more likely experiencing, once again, the nightmares that were her youth.
The pain lasted for several seconds before it drifted away reluctantly, and it must have been a minute or more before I was willing to try moving again. This time, I limited myself to moving only my right leg, and the pain returned as intense and hateful as before. Maybe because I’d known it was coming, I managed to remain silent.
The hurt retreated, taking its time to do it. When I finally closed my eyes again, I saw Natalie’s body, lying in the leaves.
I stared at her until sleep took me back where I belonged.
The plane was a Gulfstream V, and it was waiting on a piece-of-shit runway in Montauk, on the ass-end of Long Island, and I didn’t get a good look at it from the outside, because Dan and Vadim had to carry me on a stretcher into the plane. Once inside, I had a great view of the ceiling, which was painted a robin’s egg blue. It seemed an oddly cheerful choice, and I supposed whoever designed these kinds of things had gone with the color to conjure a greater sense of flying free in the wild blue yonder.
The pilot stood at the door of the cockpit as I was loaded inside, a long stick of a man with a two-day growth of gray and black beard on his face, wearing a suit with a wide array of wrinkles. Our eyes met as I was carried past him, and the boredom he showed me was so absolute I wondered if he wasn’t loaded up with painkillers the same way I was.
They carried me almost the whole length of the plane, then settled me on a leather-covered bench near the galley. As soon as I was down and safe, Vadim slipped past his father, heading back the way he came. Dan looked down at me with a frown for a moment, then sighed and sat down on the bench opposite me.
“I want to sit up,” I told him
.
“Atticus,” Dan said. “You really don’t.”
I rolled my head to the side to look at him. He looked tired, and I imagined he hadn’t grabbed much sleep since everything had gone to hell at the safe house, however long ago that had been. I didn’t know. My sense of where I stood in the passage of time had been almost entirely destroyed. It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced the sensation, and each time it happened to me, I liked it less and less.
“Help me sit up,” I told him.
Dan sighed heavily, but moved to assist me. If he did it because he was still afraid of me, I couldn’t imagine why. The condition I was in, I couldn’t have convincingly threatened a wet paper towel.
It took effort, and more help than I had hoped I would need, but together we got me propped into a nearly upright position, with my back to the galley wall, and a view of the length of the plane. I swore a couple of times while we did it.
“Don’t swear,” Alena said, limping down the aisle, Miata following at her heels. She had a duffel bag, gray canvas, over her shoulder, and it must have made moving with the cane difficult, but she gave no sign of it. “You can’t breathe properly if you’re swearing, and why the hell is he sitting up?”
The last was directed at Dan, and for a moment, I thought he would actually throw up his hands in exasperation. “He tells me he wants to sit!”
Alena dropped the duffel onto one of the leather-covered seats, then dropped herself into the one across from it, facing me. She scowled. Miata continued past us, snuffling his way into the galley.
“The bullet creased the iliac crest on your right side as it exited. The bone needs time and rest to heal. If you insist on moving, you will prolong recovery, and potentially do greater damage. Bad enough that I’m half lame; now you’re trying to cripple yourself, as well?”
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” I said.