Kelly let the inertia of the door swing it open against the coupe’s breaking effort, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He immediately tumbled, balling his head and limbs against his torso to save himself serious injury from the unintended somersaults. Only to the agent’s speeded-up senses had the car stopped. It and he were still moving at about ten miles an hour when his foot hit the concrete, and the small contact patch provided by his right heel could not possibly bring to a halt his hundred and eighty pound mass as he intended.
The 280 SL accelerated away, surely enough to save the door’s hinges though not to latch it firmly again. Kelly skidded to a stop on his back, the suit coat bunched beneath his shoulders. He rolled to his feet and stood, looking back toward the alley they had left.
Men in sweaters or baggy suits who had run to help him up scattered when they saw the big pistol in Kelly’s hand. There was holster wear at the muzzle and the squared-off edges of the slide, and the external bar that was part of the trigger mechanism had polished a patch of bluing from the frame. That only meant that the P-38 had been used, however, and guns were meant to be used.
Horns and tires competed in cacaphony behind Kelly, with the insistent note of rubber skidding on concrete probably the winner of the contest. He spun, bracing his left palm against the blistered paint of a light pole. He had expected the Audi which was their immediate pursuit to exit the alley momentarily; headlights already blazed from its mouth across the intersecting street.
But another of the German sedans had expertly circled the whole warren of alleys on Sport Street – named because of the stadium – and had been speeding north on Macka Street past the Technical School when the driver caught sight of Gisela heading in the other direction.
The way the Audi changed front and scrubbed off velocity in an all-wheel drift was testimony both to the driver’s skill and the tact that the sedan had four-wheel drive. Otherwise, the weight shift during braking would have unloaded the rear wheels and thrown the vehicle into an uncontrollable spin as the driver tried to change direction.
Gisela had made room for herself in the southbound lane by bluff and audacity. The Audi sedan was a 5000, heavy and as close to a full-sized car as anything made in Europe save for six-door limousines. It simply brushed aside a Skoda pickup which crashed to a halt against the barred front of an apothecary’s shop twenty feet south of the agent.
A man Kelly did not recognize from behind was hanging out of the passenger-side window as the Audi regained forward momentum in its new direction. The P-38’s thin front sightblade and its U-notch rear were almost useless in the bad lighting, but the Walther pointed like his own finger as Kelly squeezed the trigger through its first long double-action pull. The muzzle blast of the 9 mm, even from a relatively long barrel, was a deafening crash more painful than that of larger and more powerful cartridges operating at lower levels of pressure.
Handgun recoil was always more a matter of perception than physical punishment, and the P-38’s was mild by reasonable standards in any case. The barrel had a right-hand twist, giving the gun a torque opposite to what a shooter expected as it recoiled and returned to battery, but neither that nor the lift of the light barrel kept Kelly from putting out a second aimed shot within a fraction of a second of the first. Ears ringing and his retinas flooded by purple afterimages of the huge flashes from the muzzle of his weapon, Kelly rotated back to the Audi which he had intended for his initial target when he jumped from the coupe.
Kelly had aimed not at the passenger, though the man presumably had a submachinegun, but rather at the side window behind him. Reflection from the smooth glass made the empty rectangle a good aiming point, and Kelly’s quartering angle on the sedan meant that the bullets would snap across the tonneau and the space most likely to be occupied by the driver’s head.