These muzzle blasts were less shocking than the first had been. In part, that was a matter of psychology, but the earlier shots had been literally deafening, and Kelly’s back was now to the warehouse wall that had acted as a sounding board initially.
The headlights swung across Kelly and the dancer once more; then the Audi came to a stop with the driver’s door to them. The engine had died, but bits of metal cooling at differential rates hissed and pinged.
Kelly walked a final burst across both front and rear doors, aiming six inches above the rocker panels to catch anyone cowering on the floor. Then for a moment, nothing moved at all.
Gisela dusted herself briskly with her palms, started for her Mercedes, and stumbled.
“Wait,” said Kelly, and he began to walk toward the Audi, whose headlights seemed already to be yellowing as they drained the battery, though that might have been an illusion. He couldn’t hear properly. There was a high-pitched ringing in his right ear, and cocoons of white noise blurred the edges of all the ordinary sounds, his voice or the scrunch of feet on the gravel.
Because of the pain, each step the veteran took threatened to topple him onto the ground. It wasn’t the blow to his chest, though sharp prickles warned that at best the muscles there were cramping, while at worst they were being savaged by the edges of broken ribs. The battering his head had taken, from the leaded glove and the steel tube of the receiver, was a different order of problem. The brain has no pain receptors of its own, but it has ways of making its displeasure known. Kelly’s stomach and throat contracted with transferred discomfort every time his heel touched the ground.
Holding the Beretta by the back grip as if it were a pistol, Kelly tried to open the driver’s door. It resisted; though the door was unlocked, one of its edges had been riveted into the frame by a bullet. There was a sharp whiff of gasoline near the car which cut the sweetish, nauseating odor of nitro powders and the chemicals which coated them.
Nothing gurgled from a punctured tank, and the smell of gas was vagrant enough to result from the way the car had stalled rather even than a clipped fuel line. Whatever the cause, thank the Lord that the Audi hadn’t ignited. They were too far from the highway for the shots to have been noticed, but twenty gallons of gasoline flaring up would arouse interest for sure.
The courtesy light shone directly on the face of a man Kelly had never seen before. His feet were tangled with the gas and brake pedals, but his upper body lay on the floor of the passenger side. The bullet hole above his left eye could have been either an entrance or an exit wound. Its greenish edges had puckered back over the puncture.
No one else was in the tonneau of the car.
Kelly turned and closed the door. Gisela stood ten feet away, rubbing her jaw and waiting.
The waiting was over for Doug Blakeley, who lay belly-down on the gravel with his limbs splayed into a broad X. The huddle beside the sheet-metal wall, twenty feet from the place shooting had started, was Peter. That one was too dangerous to have been safely forgotten, but there’d been no time to worry about him when the worries would have been justified.
And the poor anonymous bastard in the car, who might have reported to somebody if a jacketed bullet hadn’t churned his brain to jelly . . .
The veteran knelt down. Being hit on the head was making him feel nauseated.
Bits of safety glass which had shattered into irregular prisms now glittered at Kelly amid the crushed granite. Then his stomach heaved and splashed most of its contents onto the ground. A second spasm followed, with just enough of an interval for Kelly to move the submachinegun ‘ he still held a little farther away from his stomach’s target area.
He couldn’t say that he felt good as he panted on all fours, trying to catch his breath; but he felt a lot better.