“No, no, I didn’t.”
Sherwood looked at Lucas and said, “We should check. Carefully. She could have colored her hair.”
“Not much time to do that,” Lucas said doubtfully. “She was blond at the airport.”
“Then a wig?”
“I guess we gotta check,” Lucas said.
“Could you show us the room she’s in?” Sherwood asked the desk clerks.
“I can,” the woman clerk said. She took a minute to look up the registration, then said, “Come along.”
They trailed her into one of the two wings. They turned a corner as a group, with the clerk leading, Sherwood next to her, Lucas trailing. The clerk was in the adjacent hall, Sherwood on her shoulder, turning, Lucas coming up behind them, turning…
BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG!
They were met with a blizzard of bullets, sprayed down the hall; Lucas lurched backward, saw the clerk get hit at least twice, blood spraying from her hip, and Sherwood yelped and fell backward, tangling in Lucas’s legs, and Lucas grabbed both of them by their shirts and dragged them out of the hallway.
The bullets kept coming, spraying him with plaster, and the woman was screaming and he just didn’t have time to look at her and he peeked and saw the exit door at the end of the hall swinging shut and Sherwood shouted, “Go, go get them…” and the woman was still screaming, a long shrill scream that sounded like the dying wail of a steam engine and Lucas ran down the long hallway with his gun in front of him and pushed the door open but took a step back in case somebody was aiming a gun at it. Nothing happened and he peeked out, carefully, into a parking lot.
In which nothing moved.
They were gone. He ran to the corner of the building and looked past it to the street: nothing moving there. He turned and ran back and down the hallway and asked Sherwood, “How bad?”
Sherwood had a phone in his hand and was shouting, “It’s the onewith two wings, it’s right off 494, south side, La Quinta, maybe two miles west of the mall…Well, look on a fuckin’ map…”
Lucas realized he was talking to a 9-1-1 operator and knelt next to the clerk who was making sobbing screams, flailing at her hip and leg with one hand as blood blossomed on her slacks, upper chest, and one arm.
He shouted at her, “I’m going to rip your pants,” and she didn’t reply but stared at him, her eyes sliding away until he could see almost nothing of them but the whites, as she continued to do the odd, gasping screams as if she were running out of air.
Lucas had a tiny razor-sharp knife on his car key chain and he opened it and cut away her pants where he found two wounds an inch or two away from each other, one near her hip and one on her inner thigh, and he saw the pulsing blood from her leg and said to Sherwood, “Got an artery, could be the femoral…Can you put pressure on it or are you…?”
“I don’t think I’m so bad,” Sherwood said. He was on the floor, still clutching his cell phone. “Show me where to push…”
Lucas, on his knees, showed him where to put pressure and then cut away the woman’s blouse and a bra strap and found another wound, but high on her chest and out toward her side, a small entry and another large exit that was bleeding hard, and he said to the woman, “I need to roll you up,” and without waiting for her to say anything, rolled her up high enough that he could gather a wad of her blouse and push it into the exit wound.
The smell of blood was thick in the hallway, his pants soaking up blood from the floor as he worked over her, and when he’d done what he could, he asked Sherwood, “Where were you hit?”
“Left side.”
Sherwood struggled to keep pressure on the woman’s leg, and Lucas asked, “Ambulance coming?”
“That’s what they tell me, and some cops…”
“Let me see where you were hit…” Lucas cut away Sherwood’s shirt and found a narrow wound on the outer edge of his rib cage; no penetration.
The woman was still gasping and occasionally screaming and then moaning, and she reached out and grabbed Lucas’s jacket and pulled at it, looking up at him. “Am I going to die? I have a daughter.”
“You’ll be fine,” Lucas said, though he didn’t know that.
There were suddenly people in the hallway shouting at each other and the balding desk clerk was running toward them and Lucas shouted, “Get outside and direct the cops and an ambulance, they’re on the way.”
Sherwood asked, “How bad am I?”
“I’ve been hurt worse playing hockey. The coach put me back in,” Lucas said.
Sherwood laughed for a half second and then said, “Jesus, that hurt when I laughed.”
