by Noel Hynd
Janet gasped and swore.
“Move!” Alex said. “We got to get going.”
Janet dropped her basket. The two women moved back up the aisle toward the door. Then in front of them, one of the two men from the street came around the aisle. He stopped and stared.
Alex froze first, then Janet.
The man was ten feet away, grinning, his hands in a position to indicate that under his overcoat he had firepower.
Alex looked behind her. As if by instinct, she felt the eyes on her back. She saw that the second man was behind her, about thirty feet away at the end of a long aisle.
“Just give Janet to us,” the man in front of Alex said.
“Not a chance!” Alex said. She kept her Glock hard by her leg, out of sight. No point to tip them.
“You both want to get killed?” the man asked. He had an accent.
Middle Eastern. Maybe.
“I should ask you the same,” Alex answered. With her free hand, she pulled out her bureau ID. “I’m FBI. Get out of our way and get out of the store!”
The man spat at her. The spit hit on the floor three feet in front of Alex. Alex knew: it was a diversion. She wasn’t falling for it.
Then, bedlam.
The man in front of Alex used both hands to swing up an automatic pistol and wheel it toward them. From behind her, she heard the second man retreat hastily for cover. Alex shoved Janet to the ground with one arm, following her into a low crouch. Once again Alex’s quick reflexes saved her, along with having her own weapon already in her hand and set to fire. Precious seconds saved now meant precious decades longer to live.
Alex’s right hand came up shooting. Her pistol thundered once with an enormous intimidating bang and then a second one. Her mind was lucid and her reactions crisp, as if the danger to her and Janet clarified her thoughts at the same time.
The gunman sprayed the area. But Alex’s first shot hit the man in the upper shoulder. He staggered backward. His coat quickly discolored with a dark crimson. His own pistol fired wildly thanks to the impact of Alex’s shot on his body. Five or six shots sprayed from the floor to the shelves to the ceiling.
Alex’s second shot had ripped into the right arm of the gunman, just at the inside of the elbow where the forearm met the upper arm. The sleeve soaked with the evidence of a clear hit. The gun flew from the shooter’s hand. It hit the floor hard, spun, and skidded.
The man bellowed, then followed with a long, monotonous stream of vicious obscenities. There was a slow-motion reddish explosion of blood and smashed bone from that section of his arm. It sputtered forth. The fabric of the coat had been shredded by the tumble of Alex’s bullet.
More chaos. Somewhere in the store, an alarm whooped like a fire siren. From the neighboring aisles, Alex could hear the screams of other shoppers and their frenzied, panicked footsteps as they sought an exit.
Janet crouched low behind Alex. Alex knew that the danger was far from over. The man she had wounded was scrambling backward, groping for his weapon with his left hand as he flailed and knocked dozens of items off the nearest shelves. Then he lost balance and was on his knees, chest heaving, still swearing viciously, profanely vowing to kill both women if he could get to his weapon.
His partner came around the corner behind him, his weapon already out, ducking low, trying to bring the nose of his own pistol in the right direction and aim it toward their female victims.
Alex jerked her Glock toward the second assailant before he could get his bearings. “FBI! Freeze!” she screamed.
He swung around his hand that held his weapon.
Alex fired three times. At the same time, the gunman poured a volley of shots toward her.
Janet hit the floor, flat and screaming. Alex felt and heard two shots hit the floor to her right with horrible loud skidding ricochets. Another smashed into the shelf display over her head, dispatching shampoo bottles and hairspray in every direction. But her own shots, one of them at least, had found its mark.
The second gunman staggered. Alex had hit him in the upper chest, not mortally, but enough to take him out of the fight.
He kept his weapon in his left hand and could have fired again. Instead, with his right hand he grabbed his partner and tried to hoist him to his feet.
Alex screamed again. “Freeze! FBI! Freeze!” she howled.
The gunman neither froze nor fired again. The fallen man rocked forward to his feet. If he had lunged for his gun, Alex would have shot him. Instead, the second man pulled the first man to his feet. They turned over the remaining part of an aisle candy display. They lurched and staggered toward the door, colliding with other panicked people trying to flee.
Alex whirled and eyeballed Janet, who remained curled on the floor and who was shielding her face and eyes. Alex saw no blood. Neither of them had been hit.
“You all right?” Alex blurted.
Janet gave her a terrified nod. There were tears in her eyes. Her face was white.
Alex made a decision to pursue the attackers.
“Stay here!” she said.
Alex rose to her feet and ran down the aisle. With her free hand, she dropped her FBI ID around her neck on its chain. There were customers down and cringing, and displays were turned over across the floor. Alex pushed and shoved past them.
The cashiers were still ducking low behind the counter. The footing was treacherous, but Alex ran after the gunmen.
She skidded and nearly fell. She hit the entranceway and turned the corner. The more severely wounded man had crashed into the backseat of the car and the second gunman was ducking into the driver’s seat. But he held his position.
He was waiting for her. The gun was trained right at her.
Again, Alex was quick and elusive. She dropped down immediately, hit the sidewalk hard, and rolled to her right, bringing her almost parallel to the car. The bullets crashed into the brick and glass of the store structure and window.
An entire pane of glass shattered and fell behind her. The gunman ducked down into the driver’s side of the front seat. She felt something cut across her left shoulder and assumed she’d been hit with a chunk of glass. It hurt like a hot knife.
On the getaway car, the driver’s side door slammed. The engine roared to life and the vehicle skidded into a brutal backup.
The rain fell in torrents now. The gunman in the driver’s seat took one final shot at Alex, firing through the glass. The front window on the passenger’s side exploded with the impact of a shot from within the car. The bullet hit closest of all to Alex, about two feet over her left shoulder. If it had found its intended mark, it would have killed her. But it didn’t.
In the distance there were already police sirens.
The tires of the escape car skidded in place. Then the car burst forward and smashed into the car in front of it. Alex had a free sight line so she fired her own weapon twice at the car’s right tire, but missed. She raised the weapon and fired twice more into the car, trying to hit the driver.
She missed again. She fumbled with her own weapon and it slipped from her hand to the sidewalk.
And then, to her horror, the back door of the car flew open. The man she had wounded, blood all over his face and upper chest, his eyes alive with hatred and pain, raised another automatic weapon in her direction and prepared to kill her.
He was no more than ten feet away, the car door wide open. He lurched out, bracing himself with one leg. But the motion of the car dislodged him. He fumbled wildly, forced to use his “wrong” hand for his weapon.
The car continued to move and knocked him off balance. He fired again at her, and the bullets flew wide over her head as Alex lunged for her Glock.
She grabbed it and raised it, coming up firing point blank with the final three shots of a ten-round clip. Her volley of bullets smashed the man directly in the center of the chest. He spun wildly and fell backward toward the car. Then as the car swerved, swayed, skidded, and cut out into the street, his huge body spilled away from the vehicle for a
final time. He was on one knee. There was still life in him and he tried to raise the weapon again.
Alex knew she was out of bullets. She scrambled to her feet, bolted forward and threw a vicious kick at the man’s head. Her foot smashed across the lower part of his face and jaw, as if she were drop-kicking a rugby ball.
As the gunman on the sidewalk tumbled backward, the car swerved erratically a final time, careened, fishtailed and went out onto the road, its rear door flying loose until it slammed shut from momentum. The car disappeared down the block and turned the corner with a long screech of the tires as it spun out of control.
Seconds later, Alex heard a crash. Then she heard the police sirens grow louder as they approached, and she looked at the lifeless body of the man she had shot. She picked up his weapon from the sidewalk to safeguard it.
She tried to feel compassion. She felt none. She felt sick instead. Sick, and surprised to be alive.
Breathing heavily, Alex felt a pain and saw that her knee was bloody, even through the denim of her jeans. For an instant a jolt went through her like a electric shock. Staring at her injury, she realized that it was only a bad scrape, most likely from when she had hit the sidewalk outside. And her left shoulder started to sting again, this time hotter and deeper. She reholstered her own weapon.
An armada of DC police cars arrived, lights flashing, uniformed officers jumping out, weapons out.
By reflex, she reached again to her FBI ID, holding it aloft and open so the badge could easily be seen. She was shaken but alive and Janet, though terrified, was safe and physically unharmed.
But as police cars with strobelike flashing lights in red and blue continued to surround her, Alex already knew that the night would be as long as it had been violent. Then she looked at the left arm of her coat and saw that, beneath the rain, the sleeve was crimson from the shoulder down. She looked for the rip from a shard of glass from the store window but she saw none.
Instead, there was a much smaller hole, one made by a bullet. As the realization came upon her, her knees felt rubbery, then very weak.
Two DC cops were suddenly next to her, one male, one female. So was Janet.
One of the cops put an arm around her.
“We’ll get you an ambulance,” she said. “Or do you want to go in a sector car?”
“What are you talking about? Go where?”
Numbness was starting to sink in. Alex felt faint-headed.
“The hospital,” the male cop said.
“Why?” She thought it, but didn’t say it. Yet her expression must have asked the same question.
“You’ve been shot.”
TWENTY-THREE
You were lucky this time,” the doctor said softly, looking at the bandage.
“I know,” Alex said.
The physician, Dr. Christiashani, was a tall, thin man with a trim dark beard, a fastidious and fortyish Sikh in a turban, a blue tie, and an impeccable white lab coat. He had been in the emergency room when the police brought Alex and Janet in. Janet had phoned Ben, who had driven over, and the two of them now stayed quietly to the rear of the room as the doctor finished with his patient. Alex’s back was to her friends.
It was 2:00 a.m. and Alex was seated upright on the edge of a bed at George Washington University Medical Center. She still wore her jeans, but on top of that, her unhooked bra and a hospital robe. Right now, the robe was only half on, as was the bra. Her upper left side was completely exposed as the doctor carefully but authoritatively inspected the bandage on her gunshot wound. A nurse stood by also.
“Ow,” Alex said with a little wince.
“Could have been much worse,” the physician said.
Dr. Christiashani was indulgent, smart, and calming. His accent was clipped and sounded very last-days-of-the-Raj.
“If the bullet had struck six inches lower, it would have severed a major artery under your armpit,” he said. “Another few inches it would have hit you in the heart. More to the right and you get hit in the face. What can I say? You get off with a two-inch grazing to the outer muscle. God did not want you to die tonight.”
“Apparently not,” Alex said.
“Why do you not wear a bulletproof vest?” he scolded.
“A vest wouldn’t have protected my arm. And I wasn’t even on duty,” she said.
“You drew your weapon. Then you’re on duty. The bullet could have hit your heart as easily as your arm.”
“What was I supposed to do? Go home and change and come back?”
“I am just saying,” he insisted, “I am concerned. You were very lucky tonight. You can get dressed now.”
She slid the robe off and rehooked her bra.
Her arm hurt when she moved it, even though an anesthetic still gave it a tingly buzz. She turned and faced her friends. Ben had gone to an all-night pharmacy attached to the hospital and purchased Alex a sweatshirt to wear home. He tossed it to her now. In a way, she felt self-conscious in front of him in just a bra and a bandage, though it was less revealing than anything she wore to the beach.
The sweatshirt was one of those gaudy red, white, and blue things for the tourists, but it fit, and at least Alex was alive to wear it. She pulled it on.
“Do you play chess?” Dr. Christiashani asked.
“I haven’t played in years,” she said. “Why?”
“My father was a grand master. He used to say, ‘At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.’ My advice is, please be more careful.”
“Right,” she said.
“You are unconvinced?”
She slid off the bed. Her arm buzzed when she used it. As a counterpoint, her head pounded. She also had a bandage on her knee and various other points on her body that had obviously taken some sort of hits.
The wound to her arm would have buzzed worse but she knew she was on a major painkiller. She had a prescription to continue it, along with antibiotics against a possible infection.
“No, I’m not unconvinced,” she said. “I appreciate your concern. As well as your care tonight. Thank you. And I hope your father didn’t carry a gun for a living like I do so that he lived to a ripe old age.”
Ben stepped forward, and Janet rose.
“He’s ninety-two and lives in Mumbai,” the doctor said. “He was a soldier for fifty years in the Indian National Army. He retired as a general.”
“Bless him,” Alex said.
“God already has,” replied the doctor.
TWENTY-FOUR
Alex had phoned Mike Gamburian in the middle of the night from the hospital to bring him up to speed. She returned home by 5:00 a.m., Janet with her. Janet slept over at her apartment, the door carefully bolted.
Alex and Janet spent the better part of the next morning at the local police precinct, explaining what had happened and what they had seen. Other witnesses from the mini-mart verified Alex’s testimony. The story blazed all over the local news, but without Alex’s name attached to it. The public spin: a female off-duty FBI agent had intervened in a crime in progress, and a blazing “Old West-style” gun battle had ensued. The shooting was considered justified. More than justified, in fact. Yet viewers would shake their heads and wonder what was going on even in the capital’s better neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Alex could already see what was going to happen. There would be a lot of sound and fury for a day, it would recede a little the next day, and gradually more immediate local stories would eclipse the investigation.
But for Alex, like the long scar on her arm and the twenty-two stitches that had closed it, the story was not likely to go away.
Alex would need to take the rest of the next afternoon to further assist the local police with their initial inquest. Her appointment with a CIA representative was pushed back a day.
The two men who had been killed had yet to be identified conclusively, though an initial investigation suggested that they were both in the United States illegally. A trace on their firearms led to a Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia
, gun dealer who had accepted fake driver’s licenses.
Late the next afternoon, Alex slipped away and sat in a rear pew in St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square. She found the four walls of her adopted local parish again giving her solace when she needed it, an island of tranquility.
Her thoughts drifted inward. So often in life, people had reacted to her as too perfect; her easy fluency with so many languages, her mastery of so many volumes of literature, her athleticism in high school and college, her looks way above average, and her career paths that always seemed quick. Yet her father had died before she was ten, her mother when she was twenty. Her fiance had died tragically, and now the scar on her arm was another stinging reminder of her own mortality.
But could anyone ever see the turmoil within?
She felt so vulnerable, so alone sometimes. Increasingly, she found solace in alcohol and felt a subtle attraction for men who probably ought to be locked up. She had a best friend, Ben, but only had him because she had been on the doorstep of suicide one night.
Where was it all going? Above all, as she sat in a pew in St. John’s, she asked herself questions, asked God questions, and was waiting for answers.
There are moments in the life of every human being, she knew, when one had the choice to go forward or retreat, to continue on one’s path or divert and choose another one. As a teenager away at boarding school in Connecticut, she had first been introduced to the poetry of Robert Frost, and she had always been fascinated by one poem in particular about a path through the woods. The poet had stopped to consider which way to go when the path diverged; he could not see where either new path led. He had chosen the one least traveled, and that choice had made all the difference.
Which path was she on? A good and righteous path? Would she be able to look back on her life in twenty years, or thirty, or fifty years, and be convinced that she had done the right things, that she had obeyed the principles of her faith and been a good and godly person?
She wondered. More and more, projects like Venezuela pulled at her-the chance to work against poverty, disease, and ignorance. And yet on a professional level, she was asked to carry a weapon, be an investigator, be a protector of the innocent. Eventually, she knew, the song became the singer, and she would become not who she wanted to be but what her job and her assignments had turned her into.