Rather than go straight into the bar, however, Louis kept us on the opposite side of the intersection, walking north across the Rue Sainte-Croix and then west across the Rue des Archives. In front of the Agora bookstore, I panned the crowd and looked right past Kim Kopchinski at first and second glance.
Then she turned and I caught her in profile, sitting at a table by the club entrance. Her shoulder-length brown hair was gone in favor of short spikes dyed the color of straw. She wore no makeup, a black T-shirt, and pants. If I hadn’t just spent time with her, I might have thought she was an effeminate-looking guy.
“You see her?” Louis said, still searching.
“Yes,” I said. “Let me do the talking.”
Crossing the street, I felt many eyes in the crowd turn toward me, sizing me up. I’m over six feet with a football player’s build. The men ogling me looked as though they’d never seen a gym, but one came at me straightaway and started propositioning me.
I told him I was flattered, but straight, and on my way to meet a friend. He said something unflattering that I didn’t catch and turned his shoulder.
Kim lit a cigarette with that lighter she kept on a chain around her neck. She was chatting with a man in a white tennis sweater who had his back to me. I was trying to close the last few feet to her table when an older Brit got in my way.
“Don’t you even think of not talking to me, cowboy,” he said loudly.
“I’m straight,” I said again, trying to get around him, only to bump into a waiter, who dropped a tray.
The sound of breaking glass was enough to split the crowd and draw Kim’s attention. She took one look at me and got to her feet fast.
Her wineglass exploded.
Hit by flying glass, she panicked and pivoted right to get inside the club, but another waiter holding a tray at shoulder height blocked her path.
She ducked as if to go under his arm. The waiter jerked, dropped his tray. A plume of bright blood appeared on his white shirt, and he collapsed.
“Shooter, Jack!” Louis shouted.
I dove to the ground, twisted, and saw that pale, gaunt guy from the night before crouched in a combat shooting stance and aiming a suppressed pistol from twenty-five feet away.
Kaboom!
That shot was Louis’s. He roared, “Everyone down!”
The crowd threw themselves to the street and sidewalk, leaving Louis to my right leveling his Glock at the pale guy who still faced me.
The gunman must have caught sight of Louis in his peripheral vision, and his reflexes had to have been astounding, because in a move that was as quick as a cobra strike he dropped to his knees, pivoted the gun, and fired, hitting Louis square in the chest and blowing the big man off his feet.
Chapter 29
THE GUNMAN SWUNG his weapon back my way, and then looked past me into the club. A split second later, he took off west on the Rue Sainte-Croix.
My marine training kicked in.
Lurching to my feet, I charged toward Louis, who sprawled in the gutter. Sirens wailed in the distance when I crouched beside him, expecting the worst.
“Get him,” Louis croaked.
“You’re hit,” I said. “I’m staying right here.”
“Armor,” he croaked. “I’m fine.”
I stared a second at the hole in his loose shirt and the blue ballistic vest showing beneath it before I jumped back up to start after the gunman. But he was gone. And after I searched the nightclub, I knew that so was Wilkerson’s granddaughter.
Michele Herbert came running to me when I exited.
“Mon Dieu,” she cried, looking at Louis still lying there, trying to get his breath back. “I heard the shot. Is he…?”
“He’s good,” I said. “Just had the wind knocked out of him.”
The same could not be said of the waiter who’d taken the second bullet. He died before the ambulances got there. The police were on the scene quicker and soon cordoned off the area until La Crim could arrive.
To our chagrin, Investigateur Hoskins was the first to arrive. She took one look at us and groaned.
“All of it!” she shouted. “I want all of it. Right now!”
It took us twenty minutes to tell her everything-the phone call from Sherman Wilkerson, the trip to Les Bosquets, the car chase and gun battle the evening before, Kim’s escape and the way we tracked her.
I said, “Because of the break-in at Sherman’s house back in Malibu, I think the pale guy must have had access to the same bank and credit card accounts that we had. When she paid for those drinks, she brought him in as well as us.”
The investigator chewed on that for a few moments, and then said, “A shoot-out last night on the A5 and you don’t report it?”
“Discretion is often the better part of valor,” Louis replied.
That seemed to annoy her, because she said, “Your license to carry is still up to date?”
“Of course,” he said wearily.
“Why are you hassling him?” I said. “If it wasn’t for Louis standing up and taking the hit, who knows how many people that guy might have killed?”
Hoskins appeared to struggle with that, but then let it out in a sharp exhalation. “You’re right, Monsieur Morgan. I apologize, Louis.”
“Accepted,” Louis grunted, and rubbed at his chest.
The investigator turned her attention to Michele Herbert. “You are the art expert they went to see?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So where’s the art in all this?” Hoskins asked.
“No, no,” Louis said a little too quickly. “A different case entirely. Michele had merely joined us for a drink.”
I hated to think what would happen if Michele mentioned that her expertise was in graffiti art. Me deported. Louis tossed in some dungeon.
“True?” Hoskins asked the artist.
Michele nodded. “Just as they said.”
Clearly exasperated, the investigator said, “And you have no idea why the pale guy wants to kill her?”
“None,” Louis said.
“What about the man she was sitting with? The one with the curly brown hair and the white tennis sweater?”
“I didn’t get a good look at him,” I replied. “And I haven’t seen him since. Believe me, I looked.”
“I saw him,” Michele said. “He ran right by me after the shooting stopped.”
“Which way was he going?” Hoskins asked.
“South on Rue des Archives.”
We were kept on the scene for another two hours and then brought to La Crim, where we made formal statements. Because he had discharged his weapon in the city, Louis was still giving his statement when Michele and I were released.
We were both hungry, so she took me to a bistro near her flat in the 8th Arrondissement.
“The best frites you have ever had,” she said on the way in, and she was right. They were shoestring, hot, salted, and crispy.
“These could be addicting,” I said.
Michele smiled. “I try to stay away, but I can’t. I must have them at least once a week.”
“If I lived in Paris, I think I’d be here every other day.”
“Your job,” she said after we’d finished and were drinking coffee. “It is always dangerous like today?”
“No,” I said. “Well, sometimes.”
She made a throwaway gesture with her hand. “It makes me think that what I do is-how do you say?-trivial.”
“Oh, I don’t think that at all. Artists help us explain the world to ourselves.”
“I like that,” she said later, when I was walking her back to her apartment.
“What?”
“What you said about artists,” she replied.
“I think I read it somewhere, but it makes sense.”
We got to her building. “Thank you for the most exciting day I think I have ever had,” Michele said.