But there were things that I knew, and the most important among them was that I had to get back to the safe house, and I had to do it fast. The whole gunfight couldn't have lasted more than a minute, maybe two minutes, tops, but with the noise and the coming dawn, I was certain that what passed for law enforcement in Putnam County generally, and Cold Spring specifically, would be arriving soon. While the cop who found me might very well get me to a hospital, he or she wouldn't get me to the safe house, and the safe house was where I needed to go.
The first truly clear thing I remember is almost overshooting the entrance to Foreman Road, wrenching the wheel too hard and almost too late, and nearly sending the Cherokee and myself into the trees. I remember seeing that the sky was starting to burn with red, that daylight was beginning to illuminate the car, and that I seemed to have gotten my blood everywhere.
And I remember turning down Deer Hollow Road, seeing two big black Chevy Suburbans parked in the street almost directly in front of the house, each facing it. Dan and Alena and one of the Russians were all at the minivan, and the Russian I didn't know was holding a rifle in one hand, and somehow I knew that he had to be Vadim, Dan's son. Miata was jumping into the minivan's back as I lurched to a stop, and all of them had turned to watch me arriving, and all three of them were pointing guns at me. I was just lucid enough to realize why they were doing that, that they didn't know it was me behind the wheel, that they'd never seen the vehicle before.
Dan had a shotgun at his shoulder, and I could see blood spatter on his left cheek, and Alena had a pistol, a.45, and there were two bodies lying in front of the house, the legs of a third just visible through the door. Smoke was drifting lazily from somewhere inside, catching on the slight breeze outdoors. The two bodies that I could see wore tactical vests over their body armor, black pants and black boots. Each of them was missing most of his head. Two more MP5s rested on the ground, close to where each of them had fallen, and they were suppressed models, identical in all ways to the ones I'd encountered at the gas station.
Whoever had tried to do me had sent a team to the house, as well, probably within minutes of my departure.
I stopped the Cherokee maybe twenty feet away from where they were all pointing their guns at me, and I actually turned the engine off before moving to open the door. The Cherokee was an automatic, too, and I didn't want it to roll into anyone.
Alena shouted my name when I tumbled out of the car, but it was Dan who ran to help me up.
"I can't stand," I told him from the ground.
He swore in Russian, trying to get me back to my feet. There were powder burns on his face, along with the blood spatter, and that meant he'd been firing at close range, indoors. Whoever it was who'd come after them, they'd managed to breach the house.
"All right," Dan said, hooking an arm under me and carrying more than supporting me in the direction of the minivan. "We're going. You're losing blood, we have to do something about your bleeding."
"Where's Natalie?" I asked him.
"She's not coming."
"Where's Natalie?" I asked him.
"She's not coming, Atticus. We discuss this later, okay?"
I looked at him, and it was difficult to focus.
"Where's Natalie?" I asked him.
Dan shook his head, said something to Alena in Russian. They were trying to get me into the van; Miata was worriedly snuffling around the interior. The other Russian, Vadim, was already moving around to the driver's side, ready to climb behind the wheel.
"I'm going to sanitize," Dan told Alena, then turned and sprinted back into the house.
"Where's Natalie?" I asked Alena.
"They hit us maybe a minute, two minutes after you left," Alena said, and she had a knife in her hand, a switchblade, I didn't know where it had come from. The blade snapped out, shining in the thready dawn light. She began cutting my jacket off me.
"Two teams, front and back. Illya rabbited; it looks like he set us up."
"Where's Natalie?" I asked again.
Alena finished cutting the jacket off me, closed the switchblade, then started on the straps to my vest. I watched her working, her mouth closed tight, lips pressed together as if to seal in any potentially dangerous words. When she pulled the vest free from my body, something fell onto the running board, and I looked down, saw that it was a bullet, and guessed it was the one that had been inside me, that it had caught between my back and the vest. Looking down made me dizzier, so I looked up again, back to Alena.
"We have to stop this bleeding." She took a piece of my torn jacket, wadding it quickly in her hand and then pressing it against my belly. With her other hand, she moved mine on top of it. "Hold this here, don't let it go."
"Alena," I said. "Where's Natalie?"
She looked up from where I was spilling blood and met my eyes, hers deep and brown and full of the sadness they seemed to always hold. After a moment, she turned her head slightly to Vadim, spoke to him in Russian. Vadim responded, and from his inflection I knew he was asking a question, possibly about her sanity. She repeated what she'd said before, and he answered quietly, and I heard him opening the door, climbing out of the van once more.
"Where's Nata-" I started to ask.
"Vadim will take you to her," Alena said. Natalie was in the yard behind the house.
She lay on her side, about eight feet from the rear door. The Sig Sauer she had given me and that I had returned to her earlier that night lay on the ground, maybe six inches from her thigh, near her outstretched fingers. The backyard had once had a lawn, but the lawn had long since overgrown, and with autumn, that overgrowth had gained a layer of fallen leaves. The rising sunlight brought out their color, made their oranges and reds and browns bright and beautiful. The reds almost matched the red of her hair.
They didn't go with the blood around her body at all.
Vadim held me steady while I looked down at my friend's body, and Alena stood on my other side, close enough to touch me but not doing so.
"Who?" I asked her. I could hear the ocean noise beginning to rise in my ears once more, feel the edges of my vision starting to contract.
She pointed with the hand that wasn't holding her cane, and I saw the body of a man, perhaps forty, maybe fifty feet away, lying facedown, beside one of the trees that framed the narrow yard. He was white, his hair shorn close to the scalp. He wore the same gear that the others in the front wore, but instead of an MP5, he'd been carrying a rifle.
"Vadim killed him," Alena told me.
There were another two bodies, these closer, off to the right. One of them was missing most of his throat. The other had been shot multiple times in the head and neck.
I shook my head, and the world didn't stop spinning when I was finished doing it.
"No," I said, and it was getting harder to make the words. "Who did this? Who made this happen?"
"I don't know."
"I'm going to kill whoever did this." I think I told it to Natalie. I might have been saying it to Alena.
"I know."
I could hardly hear her over the sound of waves filling my ears. I forced myself to look away from the body of my friend.
"I'm going to kill whoever did this," I repeated.
Alena nodded, blurring in my sight. Her mouth moved, and I saw Dan step into my dwindling periphery, then start forward, one hand shooting out to catch me before I fell. Vadim tightened his grip on my arm, but it wasn't enough, and the last thing I saw before I couldn't see more was the face of Natalie Trent, of my last friend, beautiful as she had ever been, as she slept forever on a blanket of leaves in the New England fall.