I hear a sound that reminds me of thunder, which makes no sense, and before my brain can register anything the glass on the rear window has shattered, and Ellis lets out a wail and his shoulder is spouting blood and he falls forward, his jaw crashing into the steering wheel, and I start to reach for him but a torrent of gunfire tears across the dashboard and then Ellis pounds his foot on the accelerator and we burst forward, heading into the intersection against the light and cars are screeching to a halt and Ellis is shouting but I can’t make out any words. He’s using his left hand to steer and we’re both crouched down and rocking back and forth with the zigzag of the car and then his gun drops onto the seat cushion and he says, “Use it, use…it!” So I pick it up and have no idea how to fire this thing and then the gunfire starts again and glass is shattering everywhere and the body of the car is taking hit after hit
“Are you okay?” I shout.
“Shoot!” Ellis yells.
– and I lift my head up high enough to see out the window just barely and there’s a black SUV and I see the muzzle of some machine gun and I point my gun and shoot one, two, three times, blasting out my own window, and then the return fire comes, bullets buzzing over my head, and then something warm sprays onto my neck and hands and I turn and see Ellis’s face, or what’s left of it-
– and then we veer sharply to the left and something smacks my face and snaps my head back and all I’m thinking, the only thing I’m thinking before everything goes dark, is
The paramedic completes her tests on me and announces that I’m going to be okay, whatever that means. I’m seated in the back of an open ambulance in the middle of 12th Street, which has been shut down following the shooting.
“Probably just a concussion from the impact when the air bag deployed, Mr. Casper. You’re lucky.”
Luckier than my friend Ellis Burk.
“You might want to spend a night in the hospital,” she says. “I know these police officers are eager to talk to you, but we can have you put under observation if you’d like-”
“That’s okay,” I say. “They need to talk to me.”
She looks over her shoulder. There are probably a dozen squad cars and some unmarked vehicles as well. “Yeah, it’s bad. Y’know, losing one of their own. That’s a pretty big deal.”
I figured out the pretty-big-deal part all by myself. News vans are lining the police perimeter, and copters are flying overhead. It’s not every day there’s a shoot-out at a populated intersection in the middle of the nation’s capital, at least on this side of town. It’s not every day a cop is murdered.
I close my eyes and try to wish this whole thing away. Ellis was my friend, someone who was trying to help me beyond what his job required. And look what it got him.
“Mr. Casper, Detective Liz Larkin.”
I open my eyes. Detective Liz Larkin is my height, over six feet tall, and wider than me. She has a towering presence on a bad day, and judging from her expression, this is one of those days.
“Get down off that ambulance, turn around, and place your hands behind your back,” she says.
I comply. “You’re…cuffing me?”
“Give the man a prize.” She places the cuffs over my wrists about as gently as she would rope a steer.
“I’m under arrest?”
“You’re two for two.”
“What’s the charge?”
“I’ll think of something,” she says. She leads me to a car, pushes down on my head, and shoves me into the backseat.
Turns out Liz Larkin is not as warm and fuzzy as she appeared at first blush.
I’ve been in this tiny room at the First District station going on three hours now. My head is ringing and I’m getting incredibly tired from answering the same questions over and over again and repeating my story several times.
I want to help them. I want them to figure out who did this, because Ellis deserves that. But Liz Larkin, I can see, is not treating this conversation similarly. This is no mutual information hunt.
“Let me see if I got all this.” Larkin places her hands on the table in front of me and leans on her arms. She’s within a couple feet of me, which I can live with, but I’d really prefer she use a breath mint.
“Your friend Diana Hotchkiss falls from a balcony. There’s reason to believe she was pushed. You think maybe it wasn’t Diana at all. It was someone else, a body double, because of a missing tattoo above her ankle.”
Right. But really, a Tic Tac, a stick of gum-something.
“
I don’t know if I’d go with
“Then someone shoots up your cottage on Lake Anna with so many bullet holes it looks like the O.K. Corral-but again, you miraculously survive.”
Only because I saw them coming first. It’s called the element of surprise-
