The gun ran dry. If he’d more experience, he could have dumped the empty in a second and been back on target in the next, but he wasn’t sure where the mag release was, and by the time he got it tripped to drop the empty box, found another, heavier box, got it inserted and locked into place, he raised his eyes just in time to experience astonishment.
The Impala piled into their car. The clang sent him thundering against the door, and the gun slipped from his grip. Holy fuck, where’d that come from? Spangles, fireworks, flashbulbs, all kinds of optic disturbance filled his tiny, concentrated mind, and he had to head-shake hard to get himself back to reality. He reached, felt for the gun, got it up, checked intelligently to see if the mag was still locked in place, checked again that the bolt was back and locked open, and came up to rejoin the fight just in time to blow his night vision on the four fast, bright muzzle flashes of his guy firing across both hoods through his front windshield, where dazed Tino struggled with seat- belt confusion. Too late for Tino; the bullets found him in chest and head, and Rat felt the hot spray of blood splattering from a high-velocity impact on flesh as Tino made some indecipherable sound of regret and slumped to the left like a sack of apples. Rat got the subgun-now it seemed so long-up and oriented in that direction and squeezed off a burst that ripped hell out of at least three panes of thick auto glass-his own right front, the guy’s left front and, going through and out, what remained of the windshield; the bullets left a galaxy of spatter-pattern fissures as they flew, and many hit the hood where the other shooter had been but was no longer, spanging off in a spray of sparks and pulverized auto paint.
With his elbow he knocked the handle on the door behind him and spilled out. He hit the ground, gathered himself quickly into a shooter’s crouch, and looked for targets. It was so quiet. All street sounds had died, all traffic had stopped, the many civilians had frozen or slunk away to let the players work out their gun drama on their own. For the first time in his life, Rat felt fear. His bowels almost came loose and the ice water that he’d thought filled his veins churned into his lower colon instead.
This guy was a pro. He was so fucking good. How could he get to guns so fast? Usually when the bullets flew, even the most hardened cops went into a kind of daze and it took seconds, sometimes minutes, before they were functioning efficiently, and it was in that gap that Rat made his living.
But not tonight.
Move! he ordered himself, rising slightly, again peering over the horizon of shattered glass, bullet-pierced vehicles, drifting smoke, and lights diffused in the drizzle for a target and saw none. He realized: he’s coming to get me, meaning he’ll be coming around the front of the locked cars, and when he gets to my bumper, he’s got cover and I don’t.
That got his ass moving. He scrambled left down the side of the car, dipped behind its tail, and felt vaguely secure, when the second brilliant idea hit him.
Shoot under the car.
He dropped to his knees, inserted the K under the car horizontally and squeezed out an arc of 9-mil, the gun spurting, the muzzle flaring, the bullets digging up dust and earth from the pavement as they swept right to left in search of the legs of the other man. Surely they’d take him down hard, and Rat could advance from the rear, put some finishers into him, and disappear down an alleyway. He wondered, Will I get Tino’s ten long?
But the gunman wasn’t crouched behind the car. His legs were not available for Rat’s strategy. Instead, guessing it, he’d climbed upon his own hood, and in six agile steps bounded over his own roof to his trunk, where he stood above Rat, whose gun remained planted underneath the vehicle.
“Drop it,” he said, though both were aware that Rat could no more drop it than he could drop his trousers, and as Rat pulled back to free his weapon, the tall cowboy shot him three times expertly in the chest so fast it sounded like he was the machine gunner.
The shots hit like hammer blows and scattered Rat’s mind. He thought of all kinds of extraneous bullshit and had a kind of memory dump as half- or quarter-images from his twenty-six years fluttered through his brain like a fast shuffle of cards, and the next thing he knew he was choking on blood and looking into the close-up face of his slayer, who pressed the gun muzzle hard into his throat, to fire the spine breaker if that were necessary, though both realized by now it wasn’t.
“Go to hell,” said Rat.
“No doubt,” Rat heard the reply, “but not before you.”
Gunsmoke and silence hung in the air.
Swagger kicked the machine pistol further under the car, where the cops would find it.
He walked around the tilted Impala, looked in and saw Denny, ruined head back against the headrest, eyes unblinkingly open, blood like a broken bottle of wine down his shirt.
“I’m so sorry, Captain,” he said to nobody. “You were the best; you deserved so much more. I swear to God there will be justice for this.”
Then he reached into his pocket, made sure the plastic bag with Ward Bonson’s coded letter to Ozzie Harris was still secure.
He stood. All along the street people were emerging from shadows.
Now what?
If I stay, I’m hung up in Chicago cop paperwork for a week, and these bad guys hunting my ass know exactly where I am. I have to give up the letter and wait for the Bureau to save my ass, assuming the Bureau, meaning Nick, can save my ass.
If I disappear, I have no resources, I am probably wanted as a witness, I am fleeing the scene of a crime, though I didn’t commit it, and there will be questions to answer for months when and if we finally get this goddamn mess settled.
But there is one thing I can do on my own that I can’t do in police custody.
I can hunt.
With that, he fired a shot in the air, to drive the peepers back to cover, turned down an alley, and was on the next block in total darkness before he heard the first siren.
29
Late night DC, traffic down, the city full of shadows, even parking available, most of the food joints that depended on lunch trade closed, few pedestrians. David Banjax found a space on the street, wandered around the buildings along Fifteenth Street between M and K, noted that the one on the southeast corner belonged to the competition. It was some seventies monstrosity, characteristic of the horrors of Big Paper architecture the world over. The places, even his own, all looked like midrange insurance agencies, both inside and out these days. At any rate, he kidded himself that they were working late at the Washington Post, maybe trying to keep up with him and the Sniper scandal. But they never would. He was so far ahead.
He walked around the corner, past a Radio Shack and a Korean lunch joint, and turned into a parking lot entrance, a wide, descending driveway, in the corner building, which adjoined the Post. It was deserted but not dark, and he wound down the spiral two levels, past a helter-skelter of the medium-price sedans that reporters and copy editors preferred, until he finally reached the bottom. He didn’t like it: no escapes, not that there should be any danger. Still, his breath came hard, the air tasted icy, his lungs felt too small. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. Are you sure this is how Bob Woodward got his start?