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She was aware of being dizzy, of Salazar coming toward her, and of sirens screaming far and wide.
CHAPTER 91
THE DETECTIVE SQUATTED NEXTto her, panting. “You just saved my life, Chief.”
“You saved mine first, Rosella,” Bree said, becoming less confused but also more acutely aware of the agony in her arm.
“You’re bleeding good,” Salazar said, helping her to her feet.
Bree’s vision went blurry for a moment but then cleared enough for her to see the crowd gathered and the third attacker, the one she’d shot, lying on the street, gun a few feet away. His leg moved.
“He’s alive!” Bree said.
Salazar left her, did a fast waddle over, and pushed the gun away with the side of her sneaker. Bree took a few tentative steps toward the detective and heard her say, “He’s wearing body armor, but you caught him good with that last shot.”
The shooter moaned.
Salazar grabbed the top of his hood and yanked it off. There was blood all over the side of his face from a deep gash on the side of his head.
“I’ll be damned,” the detective said.
Bree felt a little nauseated. “What? You know him?”
“It’s the wolf your husband was asking about,” the detective said, a sudden pained expression on her face. “Dusan Volkov.”
“The Russian? Tull’s Russian?”
Patrol cars and ambulances were arriving on the scene. Salazar did something on her phone and got an EMT to look at Bree. Two other medics worked on Volkov in the street.
Salazar’s boss, Lieutenant Ellen Larkin, arrived, saw Bree, recognized her from the massacre at Paula Watkins’s home, and became furious.
“Are you telling me a civilian was blazing away with her gun in the streets of New York and you let it happen, Salazar?”
The EMTs lifted the Russian onto a gurney and moved it toward the ambulance.
The detective pointed at him. “If I hadn’t, I’d be dead, and that guy? Dusan Volkov? He would have gotten away.”
Larkin’s attitude changed. “That’s Volkov?”
“He killed Frances Duchaine,” Bree said. “Right in front of us. The bodyguards too.”
Salazar said, “They’re back there on the sidewalk outside Cipriani.”
“Jesus Christ,” the lieutenant said. “Jesus H. Christ.” She pulled out her radio and walked off a few feet, barking orders into it.
The EMT said the bullet had passed through Bree’s arm and did not appear to have hit bone, but he wanted to take her to the ER to have it examined.
Salazar said, “After I’m done here, I’ll come see how you’re—” She stopped suddenly, that pained expression on her face again.
Lieutenant Larkin walked toward her. “Rosella, the chief and the chief of detectives want you to write up a full—”
Holding her palm up, Salazar said, “Can’t. I have to go to the hospital. Right now. With Chief Stone.”
“That’s a flesh wound, and you’re needed here, Detective.”
Salazar waddled away from her toward the rear of the ambulance, thumbing something on her phone again. “Sorry, Ellen, I’m needed somewhere else a whole lot more at the moment. My water just broke.”
CHAPTER 92
