The cup-pointed bullets had perforated the diaphragm and meandered upward through the gunman’s right kidney and lung. Neither nicked his heart, but the blood vessels they destroyed before they lodged under the skin of Peter’s upper chest were sufficient to pour his life into his body cavity in a matter of seconds.
Hunched over and mincing because his knees were bent, Peter tried to run along the front of the warehouse to escape the glare of the car’s headlights. Doug had stumbled back a pace when his employee released the Beretta. The blond man’s mouth was open in a snarl of disapproval. Kelly, still on his back, aimed for the center of Doug’s mass and fired twice more.
The muzzle flashes were red to the victim, bright gray to the shooter, and black swirls on the wall where the halogen beams were distorted into shadow by the balls of powder gases.
Doug’s wire-slim belt buckle pinged as a bullet scalloped a section through its upper rim, and there was a black hole marring the mauve-gray-and-white striping of his left shirt pocket. Minusculely later, blood spurted to distort the clean outline the wadcutter had punched in the shirt fabric.
The blond American started both to turn away and to lower the submachinegun. Gisela scissored her legs, catching Doug at the ankles, and sent the big man down in a sprawl.
The gasp of the car’s intake manifold trying to increase flow coincided with a sideways shift of the headlights, throwing shadows along the wall in an exaggerated reciprocal of the car’s motion. Doug scrabbled on all fours toward the vehicle, splashing dark blood on the gravel every time his damaged heart pulsed. When his arms failed him, his legs continued for several seconds to thrash and hump his buttocks.
As the car started to move, Kelly sat up and tried for the first time to aim his revolver. The short radius and tenth-inch blade sight would have made real accuracy impossible, even if the veteran himself had been up to it. He fired at the broadside of the vehicle as it turned. There was no clang or smack of glass to indicate that he had hit anything. About all Kelly gained by the shot, his last, was to learn from the flash that he was seeing in color again.
“Here,” said the dancer. She handed Kelly the submachinegun she had wrestled from Doug during the moment that she and the wounded American had threshed together on the ground.
The car was turning so sharply that the power steering belts rubbed and screamed. It was by European standards a large sedan, very probably another Audi 5000 Quattro, now in silhouette against the chain link fencing which its own lights illuminated. Kelly aimed, wishing that he had enough leisure to unlatch the stock and butt the weapon firmly against his shoulder.
There were two push-through selectors at the top of the rear handgrip. One of them was presumably the safety, while the other selected single shots or automatic fire. Kelly had no idea what combination would permit him to fire the bursts he wanted; but the best way to tell was to align the rear notch with the hooded front blade and squeeze the trigger.
Which gave him a three-round burst and a new respect for the Beretta because the front grip and the comfortably slow rate of fire made the weapon perfectly controllable at its rock-and-roll setting.
There were no tracers in the magazine, but Kelly caught the spark of one bullet beyond the muzzle flashes, snapping through the air a foot above the sedan’s roofline. He had been sighting instinctively on the fence, against which he could see the post and notch, for the car merged with the gunsights in a uniformly dark mass. As the Audi fish-tailed to center itself with the gate opening, Kelly lowered the muzzle a fraction of an inch and squeezed off again. He was smiling.
Glass flew up like early snowflakes, winking in the powder flashes and reflected headlights. The car, which had begun to straighten, went into a four-wheel drift to the left instead. Kelly gave the broadside fifty feet away a long burst. At least half the bullets appeared as red flecks on the door panels as friction heated both lead and sheet metal when the nine-millimeter rounds punched their way through the car body.