his weapon with his left hand as he flailed and knocked dozens of items off the nearest shelves. Then he lost balance and was on his knees, chest heaving, still swearing viciously, profanely vowing to kill both women if he could get to his weapon.
His partner came around the corner behind him, his weapon already out, ducking low, trying to bring the nose of his own pistol in the right direction and aim it toward their female victims.
Alex jerked her Glock toward the second assailant before he could get his bearings. “FBI! Freeze!” she screamed.
He swung around his hand that held his weapon.
Alex fired three times. At the same time, the gunman poured a volley of shots toward her.
Janet hit the floor, flat and screaming. Alex felt and heard two shots hit the floor to her right with horrible loud skidding ricochets. Another smashed into the shelf display over her head, dispatching shampoo bottles and hairspray in every direction. But her own shots, one of them at least, had found its mark.
The second gunman staggered. Alex had hit him in the upper chest, not mortally, but enough to take him out of the fight.
He kept his weapon in his left hand and could have fired again. Instead, with his right hand he grabbed his partner and tried to hoist him to his feet.
Alex screamed again. “Freeze! FBI! Freeze!” she howled.
The gunman neither froze nor fired again. The fallen man rocked forward to his feet. If he had lunged for his gun, Alex would have shot him. Instead, the second man pulled the first man to his feet. They turned over the remaining part of an aisle candy display. They lurched and staggered toward the door, colliding with other panicked people trying to flee.
Alex whirled and eyeballed Janet, who remained curled on the floor and who was shielding her face and eyes. Alex saw no blood. Neither of them had been hit.
“You all right?” Alex blurted.
Janet gave her a terrified nod. There were tears in her eyes. Her face was white.
Alex made a decision to pursue the attackers.
“Stay here!” she said.
Alex rose to her feet and ran down the aisle. With her free hand, she dropped her FBI ID around her neck on its chain. There were customers down and cringing, and displays were turned over across the floor. Alex pushed and shoved past them.
The cashiers were still ducking low behind the counter. The footing was treacherous, but Alex ran after the gunmen.
She skidded and nearly fell. She hit the entranceway and turned the corner. The more severely wounded man had crashed into the backseat of the car and the second gunman was ducking into the driver’s seat. But he held his position.
He was waiting for her. The gun was trained right at her.
Again, Alex was quick and elusive. She dropped down immediately, hit the sidewalk hard, and rolled to her right, bringing her almost parallel to the car. The bullets crashed into the brick and glass of the store structure and window.
An entire pane of glass shattered and fell behind her. The gunman ducked down into the driver’s side of the front seat. She felt something cut across her left shoulder and assumed she’d been hit with a chunk of glass. It hurt like a hot knife.
On the getaway car, the driver’s side door slammed. The engine roared to life and the vehicle skidded into a brutal backup.
The rain fell in torrents now. The gunman in the driver’s seat took one final shot at Alex, firing through the glass. The front window on the passenger’s side exploded with the impact of a shot from within the car. The bullet hit closest of all to Alex, about two feet over her left shoulder. If it had found its intended mark, it would have killed her. But it didn’t.
In the distance there were already police sirens.
The tires of the escape car skidded in place. Then the car burst forward and smashed into the car in front of it. Alex had a free sight line so she fired her own weapon twice at the car’s right tire, but missed. She raised the weapon and fired twice more into the car, trying to hit the driver.
She missed again. She fumbled with her own weapon and it slipped from her hand to the sidewalk.
And then, to her horror, the back door of the car flew open. The man she had wounded, blood all over his face and upper chest, his eyes alive with hatred and pain, raised another automatic weapon in her direction and prepared to kill her.
He was no more than ten feet away, the car door wide open. He lurched out, bracing himself with one leg. But the motion of the car dislodged him. He fumbled wildly, forced to use his “wrong” hand for his weapon.
The car continued to move and knocked him off balance. He fired again at her, and the bullets flew wide over her head as Alex lunged for her Glock.
She grabbed it and raised it, coming up firing point blank with the final three shots of a ten-round clip. Her volley of bullets smashed the man directly in the center of the chest. He spun wildly and fell backward toward the car. Then as the car swerved, swayed, skidded, and cut out into the street, his huge body spilled away from the vehicle for a final time. He was on one knee. There was still life in him and he tried to raise the weapon again.
Alex knew she was out of bullets. She scrambled to her feet, bolted forward and threw a vicious kick at the man’s head. Her foot smashed across the lower part of his face and jaw, as if she were drop-kicking a rugby ball.
As the gunman on the sidewalk tumbled backward, the car swerved erratically a final time, careened, fishtailed and went out onto the road, its rear door flying loose until it slammed shut from momentum. The car disappeared down the block and turned the corner with a long screech of the tires as it spun out of control.
Seconds later, Alex heard a crash. Then she heard the police sirens grow louder as they approached, and she looked at the lifeless body of the man she had shot. She picked up his weapon from the sidewalk to safeguard it.
She tried to feel compassion. She felt none. She felt sick instead. Sick, and surprised to be alive.
Breathing heavily, Alex felt a pain and saw that her knee was bloody, even through the denim of her jeans. For an instant a jolt went through her like a electric shock. Staring at her injury, she realized that it was only a bad scrape, most likely from when she had hit the sidewalk outside. And her left shoulder started to sting again, this time hotter and deeper. She reholstered her own weapon.
An armada of DC police cars arrived, lights flashing, uniformed officers jumping out, weapons out.
By reflex, she reached again to her FBI ID, holding it aloft and open so the badge could easily be seen. She was shaken but alive and Janet, though terrified, was safe and physically unharmed.
But as police cars with strobelike flashing lights in red and blue continued to surround her, Alex already knew that the night would be as long as it had been violent. Then she looked at the left arm of her coat and saw that, beneath the rain, the sleeve was crimson from the shoulder down. She looked for the rip from a shard of glass from the store window but she saw none.
Instead, there was a much smaller hole, one made by a bullet. As the realization came upon her, her knees felt rubbery, then very weak.
Two DC cops were suddenly next to her, one male, one female. So was Janet.
One of the cops put an arm around her.
“We’ll get you an ambulance,” she said. “Or do you want to go in a sector car?”
“What are you talking about? Go where?”
Numbness was starting to sink in. Alex felt faint-headed.
“The hospital,” the male cop said.
“Why?” She thought it, but didn’t say it. Yet her expression must have asked the same question.
“You’ve been shot.”
TWENTY-THREE
You were lucky this time,” the doctor said softly, looking at the bandage.
“I know,” Alex said.
The physician, Dr. Christiashani, was a tall, thin man with a trim dark beard, a fastidious and fortyish Sikh in a turban, a blue tie, and an impeccable white lab coat. He had been in the emergency room when the police brought Alex and Janet in. Janet had phoned Ben, who had driven over, and the two of them now stayed quietly to the rear of the room as the doctor finished with his patient. Alex’s back was to her friends.
It was 2:00 a.m. and Alex was seated upright on the edge of a bed at George Washington University Medical Center. She still wore her jeans, but on top of that, her unhooked bra and a hospital robe. Right now, the robe was only half on, as was the bra. Her upper left side was completely exposed as the doctor carefully but authoritatively inspected the bandage on her gunshot wound. A nurse stood by also.
“Ow,” Alex said with a little wince.
“Could have been much worse,” the physician said.
Dr. Christiashani was indulgent, smart, and calming. His accent was clipped and sounded very last-days-of-the-Raj.
“If the bullet had struck six inches lower, it would have severed a major artery under your armpit,” he said. “Another few inches it would have hit you in the heart. More to the right and you get hit in the face. What can I say? You get off with a two-inch grazing to the outer muscle. God did not want you to die tonight.”
“Apparently not,” Alex said.
“Why do you not wear a bulletproof vest?” he scolded.
“A vest wouldn’t have protected my arm. And I wasn’t even on duty,” she said.
“You drew your weapon. Then you’re on duty. The bullet could have hit your heart as easily as your arm.”
