McGarvey raised up in time to see the Mercedes round the corner to the right on 31st Street, the wrong direction, he thought, if they were trying to get across the river on Key Bridge. They would have to double back on South Street.
Two police officers trailed by a civilian came running across the street. Jacqueline was gone, the spot where she’d been standing nothing but a smoking crater two feet deep.
“Oh God, Daddy?” Liz cried weakly and McGarvey turned to her.
Her right side from the waist up was a mass of blood and gashed flesh, glass sticking out of dozens of wounds, and a six-inch piece of smoking metal was jutting from her side just below her left armpit. She was looking up at him, her eyes wide.
“The bastards were after you,” she said through clenched teeth.
“Here!” McGarvey shouted. He was at the edge of panic. “Over here!”
“How’s Jacqueline—” Elizabeth tried to raise up.
“Take it easy, Liz.” McGarvey held her down. “Over here!” he shouted. “We need help!”
Elizabeth looked down at her wounds. “I’m okay, Daddy. Did they get away?”
The civilian reached them. “I’m a doctor,” he said, pushing McGarvey aside. “Over here,” he called to one of the cops carrying a first aid kit.
Elizabeth looked up into her father’s eyes. “Is Jacqueline dead?”
He nodded.
“Get the bastards.” She mouthed the words.
McGarvey was torn by indecision. Jacqueline was dead, his own flesh and blood lay gravely wounded at his feet and there was nothing he could do about it. But then a black rage rose up inside of him. Once again his little girl had been put in harm’s way because of him. This time the bastards had hurt her badly. They’d torn her body, shed her blood. But for a split second she would be dead like Jacqueline, her body torn into a million pieces of flesh and bone.
All of that from the instant of the explosion was less than thirty seconds. Already the doctor was opening the paramedics’ kit and was attending to Liz. Other people were coming to help.
McGarvey stepped back, Liz’s eyes still locked with his. She nodded and smiled grimly. “Go,” she whispered.
McGarvey turned and sprinted out of the restaurant, slipping and nearly falling on the glass and gore. He reached the street and raced toward Wisconsin Avenue, the opposite direction the killers had taken. At the corner, traffic had slowed, and in the distance he could hear sirens. Some people had gotten out of their cars to see what was happening.
The Mercedes was nowhere in sight. But it had to come back this way, because there was no other route out other than the ferry terminal under the freeway at the foot of Wisconsin Avenue. Unless it had made a U-turn on 31st Street, in which case he’d lost them already.
Taking out his pistol as he ran, he switched the safety off. A half block away, just before the canal bridge, he moved out into the street between parked cars. The farther away from the blast, the more normally traffic flowed. Most people a block away from the restaurant had no idea what had happened, except that a man with blood on his side and carrying a gun was running up Wisconsin Avenue.
Traffic parted as he crossed the bridge, and then the Mercedes was heading directly toward him.
McGarvey stepped into the middle of the street and raised his gun. People on the bridge stopped to stare, scarcely believing what they were witnessing.
“Get down!” McGarvey shouted at them. “Get down!”
The Mercedes accelerated directly toward him. McGarvey walked toward it, firing at the windshield, one measured shot at a time, like a bullfighter calmly walking into the charge of a two-ton animal bent on his destruction.
He could see the glass starring, then shattering. Fifty feet away the car suddenly swerved left and smashed into a bridge stanchion, then careened right, crossed both lanes and finally crashed into the concrete railing.
The front passenger door popped open and a slightly built Asian man dressed in a dark shirt and slacks leaped out. He had a pistol. McGarvey fired three shots, all of them catching the man in the chest, driving him backwards half into the car.
The driver was dead and the rear-seat passenger jumped out the other side. McGarvey crossed behind the car and fired one shot, missing as the man ducked down behind the fender. McGarvey’s gun was empty, the slide locked in the open position. Still moving around the back of the car, McGarvey ejected the spent magazine with one hand while pulling out a spare magazine from his pocket with his other. He rammed it home and released the ejector slide as the second man suddenly leaped up, smashing a karate blow to McGarvey’s right collarbone, making him drop the gun, his arm and hand instantly numb.
He parried the Asian’s next blow with his left forearm, and before the killer could come around to the right, McGarvey hooked his foot behind the man’s right ankle, pulling him completely off balance and pitching him backward to the pavement.
Before he could recover, McGarvey dropped down hard, his knee in the man’s groin, his forefinger and middle finger in the man’s eyes.
“Who sent you?” McGarvey demanded, the blackness threatening to block out all sanity. He couldn’t see anything but his daughter’s bloody body and the smoking crater where Jacqueline had been standing.
The man clapped his hands against the sides of McGarvey’s head, a fierce pain shooting through his ears into his skull. McGarvey drove his fingers through the killer’s eyes, deep into the man’s skull, then picked his head up by the eye sockets, blood spurting out, and slammed his head against the pavement, once, twice, a third time until the man’s body went limp.
“Christ!” McGarvey pulled his bloody hand away, the black rage slowly dissipating. People at the sides of the street looked at him in horror. Traffic had backed up on both sides of the canal bridge, and sirens were coming from all over the city. He wiped his hand on the dead man’s shirt front. He’d gone berserk, completely out of control. No force on earth could have stopped him from destroying the three men who’d hurt his child. Now nothing mattered except getting back to her.
He stumbled backward off the killer’s body, retrieved his gun and holstered it at the small of his back as he headed back to the restaurant.
The first of the police units were arriving at the canal bridge as McGarvey rounded the corner onto Canal Street into a scene of utter bedlam. Dozens of ambulances, fire-rescue units and police cars had already arrived, and others were coming in as the first of the wounded were being taken away. A pall of smoke and dust still hung in the air. Glass littered the entire street from shop and office windows that had been blown out by the blast. People were everywhere, some of them rescue workers, onlookers gawking at the carnage and others affected by the explosion wandering around in a daze.
“Hey, you can’t go in there,” a cop shouted as McGarvey pushed his way through the crowd.
“My daughter is in there,” McGarvey said.
“She’ll be okay, buddy, people are taking care of it.” The cop tried to steer McGarvey toward one of the paramedic trucks, but McGarvey pulled away.
“My daughter’s in there,” he repeated himself, and he shoved the cop aside. “She’s hurt. I’m going to her, okay?”
The cop saw something dangerous in McGarvey’s eyes, and he backed down. “Suit yourself.” He turned away.
Elizabeth, strapped onto an ambulance gurney, was just being wheeled out of the devastated remains of the restaurant as McGarvey reached the spot where the exit had been. She was unconscious, her face pale, her blond hair matted with blood.
“She’s my daughter. Where are you taking her?” McGarvey asked the paramedics.
“Columbia.”
“You’re taking her to Georgetown. It’s almost as close and it’s better,” McGarvey said. He was having trouble focusing.