Greg Rucka: Patriot acts

To my left, the lights in the garage and the office were dark. If they'd been that way when Natalie had driven us past, on the way to the safe house, I couldn't recall. I hoped they had been. If not, it meant someone had been working but wasn't anymore.

The Cherokee passed the row of pumps, now turning slightly to the left about fifteen feet past the last one, coming to a stop, its driver's door angled roughly in my direction. Ford, Cherokee, and Civic now described a chevronlike shape, with me in the Civic at the apex. It was a strong firing solution; if I tried moving forward, the shooters would tighten their cones of fire. If I tried to run, they could cut me to ribbons from two angles.

The Cherokee came to a stop, and that was the go-signal. The driver reached for something on the seat beside him, his weapon, and then I had to ignore him, because the two at the Ford were more trouble, at least at the moment. Each of them had already turned in my direction, their hands coming up from where they'd been hidden behind their doors, and each held a submachine gun, an MP5, but the barrels were extended, suppressors fixed in place.

I tapped the accelerator lightly at the same time I opened my door, swung my legs around and slid out of the Civic, into a crouch, and I didn't hear the shots as they opened fire, but I heard the impacts, the sound like rocks being driven into the body of the car, the sound of the windshield cracking. The Civic was still in drive, and it kept rolling forward, doing no more than four, maybe five miles an hour, and I stayed with it, stayed low, using the open driver's door as a shield. Another battery of silent shots slammed into the car, but nothing penetrated, and that was as I'd hoped. Between the two panels and the window glass, it would take a meaner round than the suppressed nine-millimeter the MP5s could fire to cut its way through.

I kept moving with the Civic as it rolled steadily forward, staying low. If I'd done it right, the car would be on course to meet the Ford, though it would take the better part of a minute to get there. It was going to be a very long minute, especially with three people shooting at me.

I reached out for the door, pushed it fully open to give me the most cover I could manage, then released it and went to a two-handed grip on the Glock, and it was only then that I realized that I wasn't afraid. I was vaguely surprised to discover that I wasn't truly worried at all. It's not that I didn't recognize the danger I was in, and it wasn't that I didn't acknowledge how perilously close to my own death I was standing. But as I moved, as I shifted my weight and stutter-stepped to keep pace with the car, as I brought the Glock up to kill the one wearing the watch cap, I felt precise, sure, even certain. I had done everything I could to even the odds, I had a plan, and either it would work or it wouldn't, but there was only one way to find out.

I came out quick, sending five shots from the Glock at the shooter in the watch cap as fast as I could pull the trigger. He was the priority target; he was at the driver's door of the Ford, and that made him the driver, and I didn't want him getting behind the wheel and turning the tables on me.

My shots rang out, one atop the other, and the gunman wearing the watch cap jerked, then toppled back. The clatter of his MP5 hitting the ground rang across the lot, and I heard his partner, the bald one, call me a motherfucker, but I'd already hunkered back behind the cover of the Civic by then. Another battery of silent gunshots rattled the car.

"Fuck!" the bald one was shouting. "Fuck! Sean's down, fuck!"

The outburst surprised me, not for the profanity, but because I'd taken them for professionals, and I'd expected them to remain professionally silent. Then again, perhaps I'd surprised them. After all, they'd quite possibly thought they'd caught me dead-to-rights and I'd just put them on notice that, no, I wasn't planning on going quietly.

As if in answer to the outburst, the predawn filled with the bark of an automatic rifle. No suppression on this weapon, and the reports were angry and loud, and it had to be the shooter from the Cherokee getting into the act now. This time, glass shattered rather than cracking, and in my periphery I saw the instrument gauge explode inside the Civic. Past my left shoulder, a gasoline pump sparked, the LEDs on its face shorting out.

"Where is he? Where the fuck is he?" the bald one shouted. "Mark! Do you have a shot? Do you have a shot?"

"Shut the fuck up!"

"I can't see him! I can't-"

"Grant! Shut up, he's-"

I pivoted in my crouch to face the Civic, letting it roll past me. As the rear panel came even, I leaned right and snapped off two shots in the direction of the Cherokee. Its driver, Mark, was at the rear of the Jeep, using it both as a brace for his rifle and as cover for himself. He'd probably exited from the passenger's side, coming around as far from me as possible, and I had been right, the rifle was an automatic, an AR-15.

Both of my shots missed, smacked into the SUV, and I barely managed to tumble back behind my moving cover before Mark returned the favor, sending another battery of rounds my way. The trunk on the Civic snapped open, the latch destroyed by a penetrating round, and brake lights exploded, and behind me I heard glass shattering in the office, or maybe it was in the garage.

"You get him?" The bald one sounded shrill, his voice pinched and overloud with adrenaline. "Son of a bitch! Mark! Mark, you get the cocksucker?"

"Dammit, Grant!" Mark shouted in response. "Shut the fuck up!"

"Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!"

Grant's voice descended into muttering, then silence, and there was a pause, a moment of almost silence that might have lasted three seconds or maybe lasted ten, as each of us with a gun tried to figure out what to do next. The Civic was still tenaciously rolling forward, but slowing, losing momentum, and the engine was beginning to cough and splutter. A radio crackled from the direction of the Ford, but I couldn't make out the transmission, or if anything was actually being said at all.

The Civic and I were coming parallel to the Cherokee, and I was going to have to do something about that. Maybe the MP5 in Grant's hand couldn't penetrate the Civic, but the AR-15 my new friend Mark was packing fired.223s, and it fired them quick, and at tremendous velocity. Cold-rolled steel or not, Mark's shots would have no trouble punching through my car.

"Wait for him!" Mark shouted, suddenly. "He's gonna break-"

I sidestepped along with the Civic, then broke cover again and pounded six rounds at Mark and his AR-15 as fast as I could, one after the other, pure suppression fire. It was a lot of bullets and a lot of noise, and it came at him fast, and it had the desired effect. He wrenched himself back, around the rear of the Cherokee, swearing furiously. Another rattle of rounds clattered against the Civic from the suppressed MP5.

The Glock had seventeen rounds, and I'd blown through thirteen of them. Or maybe fourteen. I wasn't sure. Optimistically I had four left. I swung back to face the inside of my open door, realized that the Civic had almost reached the end of its journey. I shoulder-rolled out from the cover of the door, this time going left, and as I came up I fired two shots at Grant and his bald head, less concerned with hitting him than with keeping him preoccupied. Both rounds smashed the Ford's windshield, beside where he stood, and he started to duck back behind his open door.

Then the Civic hit the Ford, and the Ford hit Grant, in the form of the door he was trying to use for cover. It wasn't a fast impact, and it wasn't-relatively-a hard impact, but it was still the impact of one car hitting another, and that was enough; that had been what I was after all along.