Then the guy in the garage yelled, '… you're shooting up your own car. You're shooting up your car, Carl…'
A wave of rage went through him. He worked at the fuckin' pizza place every night for six months to buy that car, then he got screwed on the car, it was a piece of junk. But it was his car, and these people…
He picked up the gun and headed for the door.
Then Carl came out, the front door slamming behind him. He walked, striding, angry, swift, toward the garage.
Lucas said, 'Oh, shit, stay down…'
Carl had the rifle, held low, pointed into the garage. He screamed, 'Get away from my car, get away from my fuckin' car…'
Lucas pulled his pistol and shouted, 'Don't come in here, put down your gun, I don't want to have to shoot you.'
'Fuck you,' Carl shouted back.
'Carl, don't do this,' Nadya screamed.
Carl was moving across the front of the garage, and Lucas and Nadya tried to move back, so they could get around the back fender, but Lucas thought he was coming too fast, that he wouldn't make it, and braced his shoulder against the back door and pointed the.45…
Boom. Carl fired the rifle, and the bullet went through the car's windshield, Lucas thought; and maybe the back window. He heard the glass crack, not shatter, but pop with a funny glass sound, and Carl was still coming and then,
Crack.
The shot came from the woods and Carl went down, screaming, lost the gun. Lucas was around the car in three quick running steps, kicked the rifle, the kid twisting in the dirt like a broken-back dog.
The sniper was running down the hill with his rifle, and Lucas yelled to the radio guy, 'Call an ambulance, tell them we need an ambulance…'
He pushed Carl down, the kid moaning in pain, checked his belt for a gun, found nothing, picked up the rifle, carried it out of arm's reach, and put it down again.
The sniper had stopped and was talking into his shoulder microphone; Wolfe was in the woods, standing, looking down at them. Another deputy was running in from the other side of the house.
Carl started crying. He looked very young, lying on the ground, with his slender blond face and pink cheeks. Lucas bent over him and asked, 'Where are you hit, where are you hit?' and Carl began stuttering incoherently. The sniper came up and said, 'I tried to take him in the butt. I was sure he was going to get you.'
'Okay,' Lucas said. 'Help me roll him.'
Another deputy came up, and Wolfe, and then the third deputy, and they rolled Carl up on one hip and Lucas saw the blood soaking into his jeans. 'Let's get his jeans off, make sure it's not arterial.'
Nadya helped, held Carl's hand, and Lucas noticed that she was bleeding; she had three or four small cuts on her face. She said to Carl, 'You will be okay, you will be okay,' and stroked his hair as a mother would.
The single, copper-jacketed bullet had penetrated the top of Carl's left buttock, angling down, then went through his right buttock and exited. Blood was flowing from all four wounds, but the flow wasn't too heavy. 'I got a first-aid kit in the car; I'll bring it over,' one of the deputies said. He left his rifle behind and ran off through the woods for the cars.
'Am I gonna die?' Carl asked.
'No, but you're gonna spend some time in the hospital,' Lucas said. 'Hell of a lot better than what you did to Oleshev or Jerry Reasons.'
Carl, in pain, opened his mouth to say something, then a light came on in his eyes and he looked at Lucas and said, 'I want a lawyer.'
'Fuck you,' Lucas said. He stood up and said to Nadya, 'What happened to you? Let me look.'
She stood up and Lucas took her chin between two fingers, turned her face. 'You have four small cuts, probably from glass. There may still be glass… here. Here's a piece.' He could see a small sliver of glass protruding from one of the cuts. He caught it between the fingernails of his two index fingers, and lifted it out. Blood tricked down her face. 'That's what happens when you don't behave.'
'Bad?' she asked.
'Nah. You might have to have some glass picked out, but nobody'll even see the cuts after they heal up. You'll still be gorgeous.'
He looked back at the kid, and Nadya walked away, back into the garage and behind the car. He turned back in time to see her pick up a long, thin piece of glass from the car's trunk. 'Careful with that…' he called.
She fit it between two fingers and then lightly slapped herself twice on the forehead. Blood trickled from two long new cuts, running across her fair skin into her eyebrows.
'What the fuck are you doing?'
'Politics,' she said.
Chapter 34
The ambulance took a full half hour to get to the shooting scene. Carl had slipped into shock, and while the wounds were serious, they weren't life threatening, an EMT told them-Carl was young, in good shape, and should recover quickly. Before they took off in the ambulance, the EMT looked at Nadya's face, and found one additional small shard of glass, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.
When he'd finished, Nadya asked Lucas to take a picture of her with the blood on her face: 'This I can use,' she said. She posed next to the ambulance, with Carl's feet visible on a gurney, her face smeared with blood.
Two days later, she was gone. Lucas dropped her at Minneapolis-St. Paul International, and said, 'Well: it's been real.'
'What is this 'real'?'
'I mean, it's been interesting.'
'I think I have been a pain in your ass,' she said, smiling at him.
'Ah, well…'
'I'm so sorry about Jerry…' Her smile disappeared. 'This will not go away.'
'Nothing you could do. You did nothing wrong-except run into a crazy kid.'
'Who thought he was working for Mother Russia.' They were coming up to the security screening, and she sighed, stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek. 'If you ever come to Russia…'
'Right.'
She smiled again. 'I know-you won't. But if you do…' She patted him on the chest. 'Say good-bye to Weather for me. I like her very much. And I think she has a very good husband.'
The day after that, he'd gotten comfortable with his couch again.
He was lying on it, reading GQ, an article about a specially spun wool used by an Italian tailor, for suits that cost six thousand dollars. He would not pay six thousand dollars for a suit under any conditions, he decided. Well. It'd have to be a really good suit.
He was reading about bespoke shoes when heard a car enter the driveway, and then a quick beep on a horn. He'd been waiting for it. He dropped the magazine, rolled off the couch, and headed out the front door. Weather was there, standing back, looking at her new red BMW 330 sedan. 'It's not as good-looking as the Prelude,' she fretted.
'It's better-looking than the Prelude,' Lucas said, walking around the car. 'It's just different.'
'More practical,' she said. 'All-wheel drive and you can carry more stuff.'
'I got your practical right here,' Lucas said. 'You don't buy a forty-thousand-dollar car to haul celery.' He patted the car on the ass. 'You buy it because it's an artwork. Just don't drive it through the fuckin' garage door.'
She looked at the new garage door, then said, 'What about Carl?'
