Court closed his eyes for a moment, willing away the sight.
He knew he’d taken a bullet, but he was hoping it was nothing more than a slight graze. He’d seen enough gunshot wounds in his life to know sometimes rounds could just barely break the skin if they traveled along at the right angle, and these types of superficial wounds could nevertheless be incredibly painful.
But now that he’d seen the result of his latest near-death experience Court realized that even though he would not die from this wound, it was no mere superficial scrape. The bullet had failed to penetrate his rib cage, but it had definitely ripped skin, muscle, and other tissue away, all the way to the bone.
It burned and throbbed and stung and ached all at once, and now that he knew what it looked like, it hurt even more.
Court made himself look again. A smear of blood covered the right side of his torso all the way down to his waistband, and with help from the flashlight he could see plainly the dull gray white of bone in the wound—one of his lower ribs was exposed in the seeping hole.
He spoke slowly and softly. “Fu-uck.”
He couldn’t stitch this up. A half-inch-wide and one-and-a-half-inch-long swath of skin and muscle was gone, so there was nothing for the sutures to hang on to. Instead all he could do was clean the wound and cover it with a sterile compress, and tape that down nice and hard so the bleeding would stop. The compress would foul with the coagulating blood and he’d have to peel it away a couple times a day to clean the wound, an excruciating process he’d have to keep repeating for at least a week.
He’d hurt from this, to be sure, but he’d survive, and he told himself this wouldn’t slow him down. He’d compartmentalize the pain and keep going.
Court pushed it out of his mind now and thought about his situation. He had dumped the stolen taxi deep in the woods in Bethesda, near the Grosvenor metro station. It would be daylight before it was found; he was certain of this. Now he just had to get himself out of this ditch and make his way to an all-night bus stop, then use the mass transit system to get back to his Ford Escort.
His mind went back to the second shoot-out of the evening. He found himself astonished that a half dozen D.C. Metro police officers opened fire on him like that when he had no weapon in his hands, and without saying anything to him before the shooting began.
Cops don’t do that, do they?
For a brief moment he wondered if those men might have been SAD Ground Branch paramilitary officers disguised as police. No, that didn’t make sense to him. On occasion the Agency could be bold as hell when operating in other countries, but if they were chasing him here in the nation’s capital, there was no way they’d be playing by a rule book that allowed them to impersonate police in the course of an extrajudicial assassination.
That was just too ridiculous to contemplate.
Court lowered his shirt, closed his jacket, and looked at his watch.
It was nearly three a.m.
He had to move, he had to get someplace to get the supplies he needed to treat his injury, and he had to get home before first light.
“Move your ass, Gentry.” He said it to himself, and it worked. He pulled himself up into a sitting position and then, with one hand pressing on his right rib cage, he struggled to stand.
As a shock wave of pain jolted him with the movement, he managed to stifle a scream, but he could not manage to suppress a long low groan.
Once up, Court adjusted the position of the Smith and Wesson pistol in his waistband, slipped his backpack over his shoulder, and slowly climbed out of the ditch.
30
Catherine King and Andy Shoal stood on the shoulder of the Capital Beltway under the Rockville Pike overpass. Two of the three lanes of traffic had been pyloned off for the police cars, ambulance, and wreckers, so even though the two Washington Post reporters had to park up on Rockville Pike and then scoot down the concrete embankment, once they were here, at least, they were able to walk around the scene and observe the two dozen or so Maryland State Police at work.
A helicopter circled overhead, its spotlight scanning around the Beltway below, and this, along with passing headlights, flashing red and blue lights from the officers’ cars, and a burning flare in the road next to the jackknifed semi, gave a dreamy psychedelic feel to the scene.
The two reporters arrived directly from the scene in Chevy Chase twenty minutes earlier after being frustrated by police tape and unhelpful law enforcement there. They’d learned next to nothing about the murder of Leland Babbitt, but when Andy heard the call on his scanner about the violent carjacking on the Beltway, he gave Catherine his professional opinion that there was no way in hell both these things could happen in tranquil western Maryland on the same night without being related, so they set off for the second scene.