The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [1]
“Repeat, Agent Vail?”
“I said, ‘A lot of sittin’ for the next six minutes.’” The last thing she needed was to have her radio transmission played back in front of everyone; she’d be ridiculed for weeks.
“Unit Five approaching, Queens Boulevard and Forty-eighth.” Mike Hartman’s voice sounded unusually confident over the radio. Vail was surprised Mike and his new partner were responding to this call. She’d worked with Mike for six months and found him decent enough, but a marginal agent in terms of execution. At the moment, she’d take marginal execution . . . the more firepower the good guys had, the more likely the gunmen inside the bank would be intimidated, and the greater the odds of resolving this in the Bureau’s favor. Translation: she’d come out of this in one piece and the slimeballs would be wearing silver bracelets . . . tightened that one extra notch—just enough to make them wince when she ratcheted them down around their wrist bones, for all the trouble they caused her.
Dispatch replied: “Roger, Unit Five.”
Mike’s unit was a block away and would be here in seconds.
With her eyes focused on the bank’s windows, she heard Mike Hartman’s Bureau car screech to a stop to her left, about thirty feet from the front door. But as her head swung toward the BuCar to make eye contact with Mike, she heard the clank of metal on metal and she pivoted back toward the bank—
—where she saw the three armed men in black sweats blowing through the front door, large submachine guns tucked beneath their arms, and damned if she didn’t think she’d called it right, they were carrying MAC10s. But in the next split second, as she ducked down and as glass shattered and rained all over her back, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Mike Hartman lying on the ground, face up, his right arm tracing the pavement as if searching for something. A glimpse of his face showed raw pain and she knew instantly that he’d not lost anything but rather gained something—a few rounds of lead in his body. Still, Mike fared better than his partner, whose head hung limp, slumped back over the seat.
The bank robbers, machine guns and all, were arrayed in a triangle but not going anywhere, strategically positioned behind a mailbox and a row of metal newspaper dispensers, a pretty damn good bit of cover and a huge stroke of luck for them. But they’d just killed a cop—why weren’t they getting the hell out of Dodge?
Lying on the ground, with a bird’s-eye view of the pavement and Mike’s writhing body, Vail spied the cockeyed tires and sky blue rims of another vehicle, to the left of Mike’s BuCar. A local NYPD cruiser responding to the call. And where the hell was SWAT? Oh, yeah, six lonnnng minutes away. What did that make it, another four before they showed up? I told them a lot of shit can happen in six minutes.
Rounds continued popping all around her. Vail tried to stand—probably not the smartest thing to do while projectiles were zipping through the air at 950 feet per second, but she needed to do something.
As she rose, a couple of thumps struck her in the left thigh. The deep burn of a gunshot wound was instantly upon her, and a wide bloody circle spread through the nylon fibers of the stretch fabric of her tan pants. She didn’t have time for pain, not now. She grabbed the back of her leg and felt two tears in the fabric, indicating the rounds had gone right through. Assuming they didn’t hit a major artery, she’d be okay for a bit. But shit, right time or not, it sure hurt like hell.
She slithered to her left to gain a better view of what was happening in front of the bank—just as two of the slimebags dropped to the pavement . . . hit by the cops’ fire, no doubt. But the remaining asshole kept blowing rounds from his submachine gun, holding it like fucking Rambo, shooting from his waist and leaning back, hot brass jackets leaping from the weapon like they were angry at being expelled for something as mundane as murder.
The final cop went down—she could see him fall from her ground-level vantage point