Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [41]
A roiling mass of people—agents, police officers, journalists, and spectators—converged on McCarthy, Granger, and the gunman, many of them screaming or shouting.
“Get out of the way!”
“Back up, back up!”
“Get me a squad car!”
“You motherfucker!”
“Call an ambulance!”
A police car appeared, and a scrum of agents and police surrounded the would-be assassin and surged toward the car’s rear door. McCarthy punched a man who stepped in their way. Another agent scrambled inside the squad car but couldn’t get the right rear door to open. Outside the car, officers couldn’t budge the door either—it was jammed.
“Let’s move him to another car,” McCarthy yelled. They hustled their suspect toward another police car that had just stopped on T Street, and after McCarthy opened the right rear door he jumped inside, dragging the gunman behind him by his handcuffed wrists.
A second later, they were joined by Dennis McCarthy’s partner, Agent Danny Spriggs. He too was thinking about Oswald. They had to get the gunman away from the scene, but they needed to find someplace safe. Where to go? Spriggs ruled out the service’s Washington field office—located on busy L Street, it would be too crowded with civilians, and escorting the shooter through the office’s public lobby would be a nightmare. No, they should go to D.C. police headquarters. It was built like a fortress, and it had an underground garage and a secure cell area. “Head to police headquarters,” Spriggs told the officer driving the cruiser.
McCarthy thrust his prisoner’s hands onto the grate that separated the front and back seats. He wanted to keep those hands where he could see them.
“I think my wrist is broken,” the man said. “Can you loosen the handcuffs?”
McCarthy exploded. “You are fuckin’ lucky that’s the only god-damned thing that is broken!”
* * *
AT THE FIRST sound of gunfire, Agent Jim Varey watched Reagan being thrown into the limousine and then turned to find the gunman. But when he saw that the assailant was already under a pile of agents and officers, his attention shifted to the three men lying on the ground. One was his friend Tim McCarthy; another was a police officer. The third was Jim Brady, the president’s press secretary, who lay at the agent’s feet. Brady was moaning and blood was already pooling on the concrete by his head.
Varey dropped to his knees and put his face right up to Brady’s where it lay on the sidewalk. “Can you hear me?” he asked.
Brady twitched, and Varey thought he heard him say yes.
“Don’t move,” Varey said. “Help is coming.”
Rick Ahearn, the presidential advance man, had been standing near Reagan when the shooting started. Now he rushed to Brady’s side and helped apply pressure to the press secretary’s wounds. Stunned, Ahearn felt blood and bits of brain oozing into his hands. He felt as if he were holding his friend’s head together.
* * *
AGENT MARY ANN Gordon leaped from the front passenger seat in the lead police cruiser when the shooting started and sprinted toward the president. She stopped when she realized that the Lincoln’s doors were shut and the limousine was already speeding off. She turned and started back toward the lead police car, but it was now too far away. She looked around and saw the spare limousine right in front of her. She opened the left rear door and darted inside. “Let’s go!” she yelled to the driver.
Dan Ruge, who was standing near the spare limousine when the gunfire erupted, moved toward the scene of the shooting and carefully studied the clothing of each of the three wounded men. He was looking for the president’s blue suit: every morning, he committed the president’s wardrobe to memory in case of an emergency like this one. Ruge didn’t see the suit.
A Secret Service agent was shouting at him. “Doctor, get in that car!” The agent pointed to the spare limousine,