Kelly fired, aiming between the Audi’s headlights, the clanging of his high-velocity bullet against metal an instant counterpoint to the muzzle blast. George leaped as though he had been hit and ran across the street, regardless of the cars trying to extricate themselves from the chaos of multiple collisions.
Maybe the ricochet or flecks of metal ripped from the bullet and the car had hit him. More likely it had been pure terror, an emotion Kelly could well appreciate. His own thighs were wet with something, probably sweat or blood and lymph where the fall from the car had scraped him. But he could’ve shit himself; it happened more often’n anybody who hadn’t been there’d believe.
And ‘there’ was a place Tom Kelly was back to this night for sure.
The right 9 mm loads had penetration up the ass, so it was possible that the bullet had holed the aluminum engine block. The steam that gushed from the sedan’s grill proved that Kelly had taken out at least the radiator, which made the car undrivable even if somebody shut off the motor before it melted itself down. There was still one car not accounted for, but Kelly intended to limit further pursuit as completely as he could.
Without killing additional friendlies. More or less friendly.
Gunfire had cleared the sidewalks almost as thoroughly as if all the pedestrians had been shot. Cars still moved or tried to, and the windows of apartments on upper floors were thrown open by curious occupants.
Kelly was trying to look down the street, shielding his eyes from the Audi’s halogen glare with his left forearm, when what had been the shadowed side of the pilastered wall before him brightened with light from a new direction. He spun.
The indicator pin told him there was still a cartridge in the chamber; but he couldn’t remember how many shots he had fired, nor did he know whether the piece had originally been loaded to its full nine-round capacity. The snubbie was still where Kelly had dropped it on clearing the Walther, in the side pocket of his coat – and thank the dear Lord that he hadn’t found time to refix it at the base of his spine before skidding down the sidewalk on his back. The short-barreled revolver was as bad a choice for shooting at vehicles as the P-38 was a good one.
A car was driving up the sidewalk toward him, opposite to the flow of traffic which the nearer lane would have had if George’s Audi had not blocked it. A net bag full of soccer balls, dropped by some shopper or peddler to the sidewalk, burst and spewed its contents in all directions as the car neared at twenty miles an hour.
The car had only one headlight, the left one. Gisela had come back to fetch him, despite the tangle and the bloody violence that anybody with sense would’ve driven like hell to avoid. One thing about having the shit hit the fan: it taught you who you wanted to keep among the people you knew.
Kelly stepped off the curb to let the Mercedes by and flung open the door of the coupe that squealed to a halt beside him.
“There’s another one out there,” Kelly said, meaning the Audi and too wired to wonder whether or not he was understood. He flopped onto the low seat and pulled the door closed after him. “Hope to god it doesn’t find us.”
The dancer pulled around the tangled Audi and the car it had backed into, then cramped her wheel hard and bumped off the curb again with a clang from the low undercarriage. The vehicle immediately behind the cars paired by the collision had begun to back clear to skirt the obstacle. Gisela accelerated through the momentary gap, ignoring both the screamed curses and the clack as she smashed off her outside mirror against the fender of the higher car.
“I’m taking you to the pickup point,” she said in German. They had spoken in English before, but stress had thrown the dancer back to her birth language. Kelly was fluent enough in German that the change didn’t matter to him, but the fact of it was a datum to file. “We – we’ve needed somebody like you, for the people you know. This has proven how little time there is.”