The Audi spun broadside as the driver’s hands flung the wheel away and his foot came off the gas before he had quite compensated for the momentum of the vehicle’s drift. An oncoming bus smashed into the right side of the Audi just as an Anadol hit the sedan from what would have been behind a fraction of a second earlier. The man leaning from the right-hand window rebounded twice between the door and window posts before sprawling, as limp as an official explanation, against the door.
It hadn’t mattered to Kelly – and probably not to the driver bouncing inside the crumpling sedan – whether or not he actually hit the man at the wheel. The 9 mm bullets were supersonic. Their ballistic crack within inches at most of the driver’s ears and the way the windshield exploded into webbed opacity as they exited were enough to throw the best wheelman in the world into a disastrous error in this traffic.
The people in the second Audi had seen enough of what happened to target Kelly even as he turned back to face them. The passenger opened up with an automatic weapon as the sedan, its side streaked surreally by the battering it had taken in the alley, pulled halfway up on the curb with a snarl of low-end power as it came toward Kelly.
God himself couldn’t count on hitting anything from a moving car. That was why Kelly had jumped from the Mercedes when it became obvious that they were not going to shake the pursuit. The Audi gunner’s long burst lifted the muzzle so that bullets spalled concrete from the sidewalk halfway between weapon and target, riddled the neon tobacconist’s sign above Kelly’s head, and sparked from a rooftop flagpole halfway down the block.
One ricochet gouged ten inches of fabric from the left tail of Kelly’s coat unnoticed, and the spray of hot glass from above made him flinch and send an unintended third shot after the two he aimed at the Audi’s windshield, at the place where the gunner’s torso should be if his head was behind the blinding muzzle flashes of the submachinegun.
If the windshield was bulletproof, Kelly was shit outa luck – but surely no one could drive at night with the skill these men had shown if there was a thick plate of Lexan between their eyes and the road.
The submachinegun fell, banging off one more round as it hit the concrete and skittered. The gunner slumped back, his right forearm flopping against the outside of the door. The two bullets through the windshield had crazed most of it into a milky smear.
Kelly had stepped away from the light pole when he switched targets. The halogen headlights of the sedan bearing down on him flamed the plate glass of shop windows into dazzling facets and threw shadows like curtains over the door alcoves the lights did not penetrate.
The quartz-iodide lights did not blind Kelly as he shifted his left foot a half step to swing his gun and rigid arm. He fired pistols one-handed, not because he thought it was better than modern two-hand grips but because it was the way he had first learned – and thus was better for him. The car, twenty feet away and jouncing closer, was too near for the lights to interfere with his sight line toward the driver.
The Audi slammed to a stop so abrupt that the nose dipped and the undamaged portion of the windshield reflected flashes of advertising signs like a heliograph. The car lurched into reverse and, with its right front wheel still on the sidewalk, crunched again to a halt against some unfortunate econobox in the traffic lane.
Kelly held his fire, shielding his eyes now with his free left hand. The sedan was cocked upward, lights on and motor racing as the driver leaped out.
“No!” he screamed to Kelly, throwing his own hands out before him in unintended mimickry. It was the first time Kelly had actually seen one of the men from the Audis.
It was George, the balding member of Elaine’s team, who apparently handled driving chores as well as sweeping for bugs. Christ on a crutch.