Chapter 18 #2
Lex and I walk down the three flights of stairs to the SUVs. I look straight ahead. If I look at him, I am going to cry, and I cannot cry on the way to grand jury prep, because the AUSA will smell it, and the AUSA cannot smell it.
On the second-floor landing, I stop.
Lex stops one step below me.
He turns. The gold eyes are level with mine because of the step. He puts his hand on the side of my face. He doesn’t say anything.
I lean my forehead against his for one second.
Then I straighten up.
"Let's go," I say.
? ? ?
We are halfway through the route.
Petrov has cleared a varied path through Beacon Hill. The motorcade is four vehicles. Lex and I are in the third. Declan is driving the second. Cormac is in the lead. Petrov is rear.
The route was chosen at 3:55 PM, run for clearance at 3:58 PM, and we are on it at 4:04 PM. At 4:11 PM, a black sedan rolls through a stop sign at the intersection of Mount Vernon and Walnut and slams broadside into Declan's SUV at thirty-five miles per hour.
The SUV pivots.
My head hits the inside of the door.
Lex is shouting something.
The shooters come out of the alley a half-second later.
Two of them. AR-pattern rifles. They are not aiming at the windows. They are aiming at the doors. They are not trying to kill us through the glass. They are trying to flush us out.
Lex has three seconds to make a choice.
"DOWN!” he roars.
He throws me to the floor of the SUV. His body comes down over mine.
His sidearm is in his right hand, and his right hand has come up over my head to the window, and he’s returning fire through the bulletproof glass, which is rated for three rounds before it compromises, and he’s making each round count.
Glass cracks above me. Not breaks. Cracks.
I cannot see anything. My face is pressed into the floor mat.
I can smell the rubber and the dust. This vehicle has been cleaned recently.
I can hear gunfire. I can hear Declan shouting in a register I have not heard from him before.
I can both hear and feel Lex's heart against my back through the layer of his coat, his shirt, and his vest.
The skirmish lasts ninety seconds.
It ends with three Reznikov soldiers dead in the street, a Konstantinos guard named Andros wounded in the shoulder, the shooters' bodies pulled off Mount Vernon by Petrov's team before BPD arrives, and the sedan that hit Declan abandoned with the driver dead behind the wheel from a round Cormac put through the windshield.
Lex is still over me.
"Maeve."
"I am here."
"Are you hit?"
“No.”
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure."
He gets off me and helps me sit up. The world is very loud and then very quiet. My ears are ringing. My hands are shaking. I am not crying, no time for that now. The motorcade is moving again.
"We are not going to the courthouse," Lex says.
"No."
"Petrov is rerouting."
"Where?"
"Konstantinos safe house. Charlestown."
"All right."
? ? ?
Inside the safe house, the door locks behind us.
It is a small unit on the third floor of a converted warehouse building. The kitchen is to the left. The bedroom is to the right. The windows are blacked. Petrov is on the phone with someone in the front room. Declan is in the hallway speaking to Cormac on a secured line.
Lex closes the bedroom door behind us.
He says, "Sit down."
"You sit down. You have been shot."
"It is a graze."
"You are bleeding."
"It is still a graze."
"Lex Konstantinos. Sit your ass down and let me look at it."
He sits down on the edge of the bed.
I find a medical kit under the bathroom sink. The Konstantinos family stocks every safe house with the same kit. This one has gauze, butterfly closures, antiseptic wash, suture thread, and lidocaine. I take it back to the bedroom.
Lex has taken his coat off.
His left sleeve is dark with blood that has soaked through the shirt at the upper arm. He’s holding the arm out from his body. I can tell he is in pain.
I cut the sleeve off with the medical scissors.
The wound is, in fact, a graze. The round went through the meat of his upper bicep and out the back. There is no exit fragment. The bleeding is moderate. The damage is real but not life-threatening.
I know this because I am the daughter of a Galway-born mother who taught me to read a wound the same year she taught me to read a recipe. I file my gratitude for my mother in the corner of my brain, and I focus on Lex's arm.
"This is going to hurt."
"Do it."
I clean it. I irrigate it. I close the entry and exit with butterfly closures because suturing is more than I can do here, and the wound doesn’t require it. I dress it and tape it. The whole process takes nineteen minutes. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t speak. He watches my face the whole time.
My hands shake exactly once.
It is when I am pulling the second butterfly closure tight that the closure draws the skin together over the entry wound.
Lex makes a small sound at the back of his throat.
The sound is the smallest possible piece of evidence that the man on the bed has been shot today and is, despite the ‘graze’ he’s been claiming, in pain.
I take a breath. I keep working.
When I am done, I tape the bandage, and I sit back on my heels, and I look at his arm to make sure I have not missed anything.
Then I look up.
Lex is gazing at me.
The look is unbearable.
It is the look of a man who, ninety minutes ago, threw himself between a woman he cares for and a rifle. It is the look of a man who met his daughter for the first time days ago.
"Don't," I say.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that. Not yet. I am holding it together by my fingernails, and if you look at me like that for one more second, I am going to come apart."
"Come apart on me."
I drop the bandage scissors. I climb into his lap.