Chapter 12
They’d almost finished when St. Vincent called: “We got the right house, but they’re gone.
Couple of bloody sheets on the floor and some medical litter.
We’re definitely looking for a black Jeep, and a neighbor tells us that he spoke to a man living here and he thought the guy was an American.
Sounded like he came from Iowa. He only saw that one person. ”
Sherwood put the phone on speaker and said, “Probably a sleeper, somebody who’s been living here for years, brought in to back up the team. That’ll make them harder to find, with that guy fronting for them.”
“Yeah. We’ll get the neighbor to talk to an artist, get a facial image done, but the neighbor said he was an average-looking guy. No particularly notable facial characteristics,” St. Vincent said. “What are you two doing? Still checking motels?”
“Yeah. We can’t tell from the maps whether there are thirteen or fourteen motels on this strip, on this side of the highway. We’ve done eleven. Absolutely nothing,” Lucas said. “Two more and we punt.”
“Might as well finish up,” St. Vincent said. “If you’re interested, we’ll have another briefing at three o’clock, put together everything we know.”
“We should be done here in half an hour,” Lucas said.
· · ·
The La Quinta was the twelfth motel, a sprawling place with two long wings and parking scattered around them.
A diner occupied a connecting lot with even more cars.
They went inside to the motel’s front desk, where they were met by a tall balding man and a short chunky woman.
Lucas identified himself and the man said, “Well…uh, we did have a woman here early this morning with an accent. Quite pretty, but she wasn’t blond. She had brown hair. Reddish-brown.”
“Well-dressed?”
“Nicely dressed, I guess. A businesswoman. She took the room for a week. She has family here…”
“See her car?”
“No, no, I didn’t.”
Sherwood looked at Lucas and said, “We should check. Carefully. She could have colored her hair.”
“Not much time to do that,” Lucas said doubtfully. “She was blond at the airport.”
“Then a wig?”
“I guess we gotta check,” Lucas said.
“Could you show us the room she’s in?” Sherwood asked the desk clerks.
“I can,” the woman clerk said. She took a minute to look up the registration, then said, “Come along.”
They trailed her into one of the two wings. They turned a corner as a group, with the clerk leading, Sherwood next to her, Lucas trailing. The clerk was in the adjacent hall, Sherwood on her shoulder, turning, Lucas coming up behind them, turning…
BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG!BANG!
They were met with a blizzard of bullets, sprayed down the hall; Lucas lurched backward, saw the clerk get hit at least twice, blood spraying from her hip, and Sherwood yelped and fell backward, tangling in Lucas’s legs, and Lucas grabbed both of them by their shirts and dragged them out of the hallway.
The bullets kept coming, spraying him with plaster, and the woman was screaming and he just didn’t have time to look at her and he peeked and saw the exit door at the end of the hall swinging shut and Sherwood shouted, “Go, go get them…” and the woman was still screaming, a long shrill scream that sounded like the dying wail of a steam engine and Lucas ran down the long hallway with his gun in front of him and pushed the door open but took a step back in case somebody was aiming a gun at it.
Nothing happened and he peeked out, carefully, into a parking lot.
In which nothing moved.
They were gone. He ran to the corner of the building and looked past it to the street: nothing moving there. He turned and ran back and down the hallway and asked Sherwood, “How bad?”
Sherwood had a phone in his hand and was shouting, “It’s the one with two wings, it’s right off 494, south side, La Quinta, maybe two miles west of the mall…Well, look on a fuckin’ map…”
Lucas realized he was talking to a 9-1-1 operator and knelt next to the clerk who was making sobbing screams, flailing at her hip and leg with one hand as blood blossomed on her slacks, upper chest, and one arm.
He shouted at her, “I’m going to rip your pants,” and she didn’t reply but stared at him, her eyes sliding away until he could see almost nothing of them but the whites, as she continued to do the odd, gasping screams as if she were running out of air.
Lucas had a tiny razor-sharp knife on his car key chain and he opened it and cut away her pants where he found two wounds an inch or two away from each other, one near her hip and one on her inner thigh, and he saw the pulsing blood from her leg and said to Sherwood, “Got an artery, could be the femoral…Can you put pressure on it or are you…?”
“I don’t think I’m so bad,” Sherwood said. He was on the floor, still clutching his cell phone. “Show me where to push…”
Lucas, on his knees, showed him where to put pressure and then cut away the woman’s blouse and a bra strap and found another wound, but high on her chest and out toward her side, a small entry and another large exit that was bleeding hard, and he said to the woman, “I need to roll you up,” and without waiting for her to say anything, rolled her up high enough that he could gather a wad of her blouse and push it into the exit wound.
The smell of blood was thick in the hallway, his pants soaking up blood from the floor as he worked over her, and when he’d done what he could, he asked Sherwood, “Where were you hit?”
“Left side.”
Sherwood struggled to keep pressure on the woman’s leg, and Lucas asked, “Ambulance coming?”
“That’s what they tell me, and some cops…”
“Let me see where you were hit…” Lucas cut away Sherwood’s shirt and found a narrow wound on the outer edge of his rib cage; no penetration.
The woman was still gasping and occasionally screaming and then moaning, and she reached out and grabbed Lucas’s jacket and pulled at it, looking up at him. “Am I going to die? I have a daughter.”
“You’ll be fine,” Lucas said, though he didn’t know that.
There were suddenly people in the hallway shouting at each other and the balding desk clerk was running toward them and Lucas shouted, “Get outside and direct the cops and an ambulance, they’re on the way.”
Sherwood asked, “How bad am I?”
“I’ve been hurt worse playing hockey. The coach put me back in,” Lucas said.
Sherwood laughed for a half second and then said, “Jesus, that hurt when I laughed.”
“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 did nothing 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 other ran 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 was beyond furious. “What in the hell were you two thinking? If you had any thought at all, you’d have waited for reinforcements…”
“They were leaving, they were running,” 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 operation and 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 to stay 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.
Sherwood, on the other hand, had his feet dangling off the side of a bed in the emergency department. He had been cleaned up, bandaged, given pain medication, and would be released as soon as his CIA insurance status was confirmed, which was taking a while.
“You never saw the car they’re in,” Sherwood said, when Lucas stepped inside the drape around his bed.
“Never did, and we got nothing on a camera. They’re gone,” Lucas said. “You good?”
“The doctors say I’m fine, I’m thinking more like mediocre,” Sherwood said.
“Ten years in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and I heard all kinds of shooting and shit blowing up, but the worst I got it was in Beirut. I went to the American University Medical Center to get a sliver taken out of my hand. I got the sliver from a hotel railing after I had too many Long Island iced teas at the bar with an Arab dude named Lanny. I come to fuckin’ Minneapolis, Minnesota, and some Russian durak shoots me.
In Minneapolis fuckin’ Minnesota. A fuckin’ Russian assassin. ”
After a moment, he added, “It was a big splinter. But here in fuckin’ Minneapolis…”
He might have gone on, but Lucas said, “We like to think of ourselves as cosmopolitan.” He didn’t know what a durak was, but he recognized the tone. “St. Vincent tells me the FBI is taking over the entire case and we are no longer invited to participate.”
Sherwood said, “Yeah, well, we’ll see. I’m not coordinating with the FBI, I’m coordinating with the Marshals Service. If the FBI doesn’t like it, they can go suck on it. Hey—where’s my car?”
“Still back at the motel,” Lucas said. “Listen, when they finish fixing your hangnail, or whatever it is…”
“Gunshot wound, suffered in the service of my country. If I play this right, I could get a month off. Maybe two.”
“Like I said, a hangnail. When we get you out of here, why don’t you come over to my place for dinner? I’ll do us a couple of steaks, martinis, you’d like my wife. She’s a doctor, she can probably slip you some extra drugs. We’ll call Washington to clarify our status here.”
“You had me at martinis,” Sherwood said. “I gotta wait for the goddamned insurance to clear me out. You apparently need to be pre-approved for a gunshot wound.”
The insurance came through, after a while.
Lucas supposed that there was a conference still going on at the FBI offices, but there wasn’t much that the FBI knew that he and Sherwood didn’t.
They went back to the motel and picked up Sherwood’s car, and to Lucas’s house, made phone calls, and eventually ate steaks and drank martinis.
Because that’s what you do when you can’t think of what else to do.