He slapped another magazine into his Beretta, and Abramova handed him the second Beretta and swerved to the curb and Nikitinwas out, with both guns, hosing down the oncoming Cadillac. The sedan kept coming until it was only fifty feet away then swerved across the curb and into a tree. Nikitin turned back to the truck, but one of the agents in the Cadillac rolled out of the car with the impact on the tree, and fired three shots at him, wildly, but one shot hit Nikitin between the shoulder blades, and he went to the ground.
Abramova screamed, “Up, up,” but Nikitin cried, “I’m done. Go! Go!”
She went, passenger door still open as the truck lurched forward. Just as she turned onto the next street in their evasion route, she saw another car, a small SUV, turn onto the street behind them.
• • •
Lucas yelled, “That’sthem, that’s the surveillance team,” as a Cadillac sedan flashed through an intersection a block ahead of them, flashers in the grille and on the back bumper. “They know where they’re going.”
Sherwood wrestled the car around the corner just in time to see the feds’ car take another turn. Sherwood followed, and skidding through the next turn, they saw the federal sedan on the side of the street and a pickup disappearing around the corner a block ahead, but in the next instant registered what appeared to be two, and then three, bodies in the street.
Lucas: “We got guys down, we got guys down.”
Sherwood spotted them and took the car to the opposite side of the street, pulled even with the first two bodies and stopped and Lucas popped his door and hit the ground running. The first downed man he recognized from the hospital; the man had two bullet wounds in his face and was gone. He left him and hurried to the next man,who was bleeding and who reached up and grabbed Lucas’s parka and tried to say something, but failed, and Lucas shouted at Sherwood, “He’s alive, we gotta get…”
Sherwood was already on his phone and called, “I got 9-1-1, but where do I tell them where we’re at?”
“It’s automatic, they can tell where we’re at within fifty meters,” Lucas shouted back. “Tell them to look for a black pickup running hard.”
A man was staggering toward them, pistol in hand: “Who are you?”
“U.S. Marshal, you FBI?”
“I’m shot, I’m shot,” the man said, and he fell down.
Sherwood ran over to him: “Where are you hit? Where?”
“Leg, leg.” Sherwood looked and found the area of the bullet wound and he called to Lucas, “I’m putting pressure on this one, what are you…”
The agent who’d fallen screamed as Sherwood put the pressure on the wound, and Sherwood said, “I think he’s got a busted bone…” and the man screamed again and cried, “Don’t, don’t.”
Sherwood pressed anyway and said, “You’re bleeding a lot man, I got to keep the pressure on.”
The man groaned, and then said, “I shot one of the sonofabitches. He’s down on the street. He had an automatic rifle or something, we didn’t have a chance.”
Lucas looked and saw Nikitin trying to push up onto all fours, and said, “He’s still moving.”
The next moment, three civilians appeared, tentatively, looking at the bodies. A woman yelled, “I called 9-1-1, they said police and ambulances are already on the way.” A compact SUV, a Toyota, turned acorner and accelerated toward them, the other part of the surveillance box. The truck went sideways and two agents jumped out and ran toward them, and one of them called, “How bad, how bad?”
Lucas said, “Bad, they’re running in a black pickup…”
Lucas had pulled open the coat of the second agent, pulled his sweater up. With one of the two late-arriving agents crouched over him, he found a bloody wound on the left side of the man’s chest, another one lower, in his stomach, a third one on his thigh. He couldn’t do anything about the stomach wound but gathered part of the man’s coat and put pressure on the chest and leg wounds, as best he could, which wasn’t very good. “We need to get some pressure on his exit wounds, we need to roll him up on his side so he doesn’t drown from the chest wound…”
They fumbled around getting that done, heard sirens in the distance. One of the agents moved over to the first man Lucas had looked at, the dead man, and he said, “Dave is gone, Dave is gone.”
The wounded agent from the Cadillac said, “So’s Jerry. Jerry’s dead, he’s in the car. I shot that sonofabitch who killed him, he’s lying on the ground the sonofabitch, the sonofabitch.”
“Are you sure about Jerry?”
“His head is gone, man, his head is gone.”
The agent turned toward the body at the end of the street and suddenly began running toward it. He swerved right to the Cadillac, looked in the driver’s side, then went on to the body in the street. The agent who was helping Lucas said, “If that man isn’t dead, he will be in one minute.”
“I want him alive,” Sherwood said, looking after the running agent. He shouted, “Don’t do that, don’t do that.”
The agent got to Nikitin, prodded him with a toe. Nikitin lookedup at the end of a nine-millimeter and said, “Do it,” because he didn’t care about anyone’s life, including his own. The agent shot him in the forehead, took a minute to kick the two Berettas away from the body, then turned and jogged back to the others. When he got to Lucas and Sherwood, he looked down at the wounded agent from the Cadillac and said, “You did good. Knocked that asshole down.”
Sherwood said, “You shot him.”
