“Where did all this come from?”
“In my opinion, it came from Remington. These guys play rough and they are very worried about losing this contract. So they hired a security firm to monitor the process, and one of their guys evidently came up with it.”
“So, Memphis is dirty. The Bureau can’t stay with him then, right? He’s out, he’s gone, he’s history.”
“He’s definitely history.”
“And the Times will run this story?”
“They’re way out ahead of everyone, and in that business, that’s the greatest thing. They can feel it so close it’s driving them nuts with desire. A scoop. A big, government-humiliating, career-wrecking scoop. That’s how Pulitzers are won. Corruption and misjudgment, sniffed out by a vigilant press-it’s the cocaine that makes them insane. You’re damn right they’ll run it.”
“So that’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or the rifle that shot out the camel’s spine.”
“That’s right, Tom. When Banjax gets the photo and it’s vetted by the photo experts the Times hires, we’ll have him. Memphis has to go. And I’ll make sure the next guy is more cooperative.”
28
Swagger hit the floor hard amid a spray of glass sleet from the windshield as the burst atomized the glass, a bullet flying so close by his neck he felt the breeze. He wedged himself low into the cave under the dash, thanking God he’d forgotten to buckle up for safety, hearing the bullets bang hard off the hood, the engine block, back again to the windshield as the gunner dumped his mag into the vehicle. He blinked hard to force himself to face the reality of what was happening, knowing that if he stayed there in the fetal curl on the floor, the gun boy would come out, stick the snout of his subgun through the window, and dump the next mag entirely into Mr. B. L. Swagger, late of planet Earth.
Inspiration came from-well, who knows? God? Intelligent design? A hundred previous gunfights? The obviousness of what was before his nose, which was Denny’s gigantic foot resting on the gas pedal? Swagger craned upward, spun the wheel against Denny’s dead hands hard to the left, then elbowed Denny’s dead foot, pushing pedal to floor. The car leaped and, as the distance was short, built no killing momentum, but still it hit the killers’ car on the oblique with a clanging charge of energy, enough to spin Bob himself almost backward against the seat.
But now he had a plan, and a man with a plan is a man with a chance. He reached up, pushing Denny’s jacket aside, and plucked the Sig 229 from his hip holster, unsnapping it and making sure to pull it straight out, duplicating the draw angle so that the sights wouldn’t get caught in the holster and no security device would pin it. Out it slid, and now he had a plan and a gun, and he had his opponents possibly in a daze from the unexpected smash of car one into car two. He squirmed back to his own off-driver’s-side door, hit the latch, and tumbled out. Crawling madly down the length of the car, ripping knees and hands to shreds on the pavement, he emerged over the right front wheel well, putting tire and heavy axle and brake system as well as engine block between him and the killers, and saw the enemy car at an angle, slightly askew, its door caved and wearing his own car’s left front as its new fashion accessory. A figure behind the wheel struggled with his seat belt, clumsy from the shock of the collision, mind a stew of confusions.
Bob found the Sig a blocky little piece of guncraft that fit his hands glove-smooth and went to target hungrily; he locked his elbows as he put the front sight smack on the target twelve-odd feet away, fired four times on the angle and watched as the windshield fogged into quicksilver as the penetrating bullets left their legacy of fractured abstraction. Behind those smears, the dark figure kicked taut, then slumped sideways.
Bob withdrew, and a good thing too, as in seconds, maybe nanoseconds, a burst of automatic fire came hurtling his way to spall off the hood and spray randomly into the air, chewing up metallic debris, paint dust, and friction-driven sparks. He saw now what was so strange about all this-the absence of the other man’s percussions, as his weapon was clearly suppressed. The bursts had a low, wet, rattly sound, as if made by a child playing at tommy gun with a throatful of phlegm.
Swagger started to rotate right, to get around the bumpers of both cars, flank the shooter, and take him down from the low defilade, even as he knew that if the guy was no idiot, he too would now be on the move, rotating also to the right. So he stopped, reversed his direction, and began a journey to the left, the long way around, to find and kill his man.
Rat watched the bullets take out the windshield and all behind them in a long sparkly rip, right to left, horizontal, but had a kind of inkling of disaster as the dancing web of punctures didn’t seem to catch up quite to the rapidly disappearing number two target. He realized he should have gone left to right, goddamnit, and cursed himself for fearing the cop’s handgun more than the agility and quickness of the unarmed but highly experienced man. He ate up the rest of the magazine-once you start shooting these things it’s hard to stop, so seductive is the rhythm, the power of the recoil, the imagery of the world dissolving before the godlike reach of your bullet stream-shooting out more windshield glass, tearing up the hood, hoping to start a fire or send something through to take out the quick mover, but he knew: Houston, we have a problem.
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.