The other man spun as he was shot, rolling over as he hit the ground and pulling up his own weapon, forcing Taylor to duck behind the car again to avoid getting hit. Bullets began ricocheting off the pavement as the gunman tried shooting under the car to get Taylor, who was forced to move further back to put a wheel between himself and the shooter.
The men were firing in synchronization, timing each’s need to reload, and still keep up a steady stream of bullets. An impressive feat, even when one of the shooters was not wounded. Taylor hunkered down and tried to work out his options. Sticking the gun up and taking some blind shots would make him feel like he was doing something, but he did not know if Graf had any magazines ready as reloads and even if he did, he would not have very much.
The shooters, on the other hand, had obviously come prepared. Since he had taken out one of the three shooters, the other two had already reloaded once and did not seem prepared to slow down any time soon.
Taylor leaned down and took a shot from under the car, roughly in the shooter's direction. What he needed was to just keep them at bay until Graf's reinforcements arrived, which could be in two minutes or twenty. Taylor was forced to retreat behind the wheel again as the gunmen redirected their fire towards the bottom of the car, sending bullets skipping across the asphalt.
That was the response Taylor was waiting for. He popped up and assessed the situation quickly, bringing his weapon to bear on the first person he saw. That turned out to be the man still standing. The injured gunman had picked himself off the ground and was rounding the corner as Taylor drew a bead on his friend.
The remaining gunman saw Taylor, but his weapon was still pointed at a downward angle in an attempt to keep Taylor from firing across the bottom of the car. He started to bring his weapon up, but Taylor had the drop on him and fired, slamming the man back into the door of the storage locker whose edge he had been trying to use as cover.
Taylor did not have time to assess the situation further, as the gunman, who had made it around the side of the building, stuck his weapon around the edge and fired twice. One of the bullets passed worrying close to Taylor’s head, the sound of it cutting through the air filling his right ear.
When the man did not fire again, Taylor leaned out to the right of the car and fired one round at the edge of the building, chipping off some concrete that made up the corner of the building, to send a message that Taylor was still there and to deter the man from trying to come forward again.
Unfortunately, that was when the slide of the pistol locked open as the magazine ran dry.
“Shit,” Taylor said, moving back to the front of the car next to Graf as another bullet smashed into the car’s trunk. “Do you have another magazine?”
“In the car,” Graf said, his voice tight with pain.
Taylor was considering the best way to get into the car without getting shot when he heard the sound of sirens. The last gunman must have heard them too because the firing stopped and did not start again.
Taylor slumped on the ground next to Graf, putting the empty pistol back in the German officer's hand.
“If people are going to be shooting at us, I need to find a gun.”
Chapter 4
Once Graf’s backup arrived, but before the ambulance that they then called to tend to Graf’s wound, Taylor moved to check out the scene while they dealt with their brother officer. The new arrivals seemed concerned at first that Taylor, a civilian, was wandering around the scene until Graf waved them off. The only thing Taylor understood of their brief conversation was the use of the agency abbreviation FBI, which Taylor took to mean Graf was explaining why Taylor was there.
The first thing Taylor looked at was the body of the two fallen gunmen. Taylor knew better than to check the bodies, something Whitaker had reminded him on multiple occasions was a giant no-no at a crime scene, at least until the coroner or someone from the medical examiner's office and forensic teams had a chance to go over the area. This left Taylor with only a visual inspection, which did tell him a few things.
Both men were middle-aged and looked weathered with a collection of scars, one of which Taylor recognized as a healed over bullet wound. Something did catch Taylor’s attention, however. One of the men had a tattoo on his right hand that Taylor recognized as a symbol used by the Bratva, a group that Taylor had several less than pleasant run-ins in the past. The tattoo was a circle with four non-symmetrical points coming out of it, kind of like a star if the person drawing it didn’t care about balancing the image. The symbol identified the man as a soldier for the Bratva who had killed someone under orders, with each point of the star representing a successful hit.
While it seemed a far-fetched coincidence that either the shooters themselves or all of the events surrounding Whitaker’s relative's murder and her subsequent disappearance would be connected to the group, Taylor couldn’t rule it out. While not known for elaborate planning, he’d messed with their operations twice, including killing the son of a fairly major figure in the organization. That level of enmity could lead some members of the organization to change their normal tactics.
Taylor looked back to make sure the officers were all otherwise engaged before pulling out his cell phone and taking pictures of both the tattoos and
