“Maybe whacked a rib. That hurts when you laugh. Ask me how I know,” Lucas said. And, “Keep the pressure on her, keep the pressure on. Where in the fuck is the ambulance?”
He didn’t know it when he asked, but only four minutes had passed since the shooting started.
Sherwood didn’t know that either, so Lucas got on his own phone and called the 9-1-1 operator and shouted, “U.S. Marshal, we have two down at the La Quinta…”
“Everything’s on the way, Marshal,” the operator said, in a voice that seemed almost bored. “Is there an escape vehicle, do you have a description? Are there still armed perpetrators in the motel?”
“I never saw a car, I think they’re all gone, the Russians everybody is looking for, these are the Russians,” Lucas said. “I can’t leave where I am, we’re plugging holes in one of the victims, when the cops get here tell them to look for witnesses right away, check for video…”
“We’ll do that,” the woman said. And she said, “Hold one,” and after ten seconds of mostly dead air—Lucas could hear voices talking, but not make out what they were saying—she came back and said, “The ambulance is one or two minutes out, police should be there in the next minute. Hold where you’re at, they’re coming.”
“Yeah, not like I’m going any other fuckin’ place,” Lucas said.
The 9-1-1 operator, who heard all kinds of language from hurt and frightened people, said, “That’s good.”
• • •
Then they didnothing but wait; the woman had stopped screaming, but was still moaning, still gasping, and Sherwood was putting all his weight on her leg until finally a cop came running down the hall, looking panicked.
He asked, “Are they still here?”
“I don’t think so,” Lucas said. “They were coming out of the second door from the end, on the right. If there are any of them left, that’s probably where they’d be. But they could have another room, a bailout room, so take it easy.”
Another cop came running down the hall, and there was a flurry of words and sentences that eventually took the two cops down the hall, where one stood by the door with his gun out while the otherran outside. The cop by the door shouted, “Tommy’s checking the window.”
“Careful, careful,” Lucas shouted.
Thirty seconds later, Tommy the cop hustled back inside and said, “I couldn’t see anyone. Should we kick the door?”
Lucas shouted, “No hurry. Watch the window and watch the door and wait until we get more people here…”
The ambulance arrived, and more cops, and the paramedics loaded up the woman and Sherwood and took them away. Lucas stood up to catch his breath, and a man in the hallway, one of the motel guests, said, “Your pants are all bloody. You’re dripping blood.”
Lucas said, “Ah, jeez,” and leaned back against the wall, feeling the blood-wetted pants clinging to his leg hair. After a minute, trying to talk his blood pressure down, he took out his phone again and called St. Vincent.
“Well…we found them,” he said.
• • •
St. Vincent wasbeyond furious. “What in the hell were you two thinking? If you had any thought at all, you’d have waited for reinforcements…”
“They wereleaving, they wererunning,” Lucas said. “If we’d gotten to that hallway one minute later, we never would have seen them at all.”
“You don’t know that. You said they just rented the room this morning, maybe they were going out for lunch and we could have ambushed them when they came back.”
“But we wouldn’t even have known they were there…”
St. Vincent was having none of that. “This is now an FBI operationand you can take your CIA guy with you. I don’t want to see your ass anywhere around this. You screwed this up…”
“Fuck you, David. We’re the only ones who’ve found anything…”
The rest of the conversation didn’t go any better.
The motel room down the hall was eventually opened and found to be empty except for two couch cushions spotted with dried blood.
• • •
Lucas had tostay around and make a statement for the Bloomington cops and promise to make an even more extensive statement when needed. That done, he drove to Fairview Southdale Hospital, where the La Quinta desk clerk and Sherwood had been taken. When he arrived, he was told that the clerk was in surgery, and her condition was not known to anyone outside the surgical suite.
