6. Flashbang

What happened next took only seconds, and people don’t cogitate in seconds. They act, then figure out the whys and wherefores later.

The SUV driver raised a hand with something in it, something lost in the shadows of the cabin.

Katz thrust her hand into her messenger bag.

My hand went for the glove compartment door of its own accord. To hell with ‘unlikely’—it was Hail Mary time. The compartment door opened, but my eyes were locked on the SUV driver’s. I grabbed for whatever there was. Something hard and flat.

The man tossed the thing in his hand toward my open window, an easy five foot lob. The afterimage of the tumbling cylinder came later. All I could process then was that we didn’t want whatever it was in our car.

The flat thing in my hand was the car owner’s manual, still in shrink-wrap. But that understanding came later, too. Old tennis muscles raised the book to smack the thing in the air. It was a lot heavier than a tennis ball, but the book was thick. The impact knocked the cylinder up and back through the SUV’s window.

The driver let out a yell.

A terrific bang. The world flashed white.

Maybe I yelled in surprise, maybe Katz did too, but for a few seconds we could hear nothing, and for a brief instant, I could see nothing. When my vision returned, the first thing I saw was the SUV’s front windshield falling into the SUV in a cascade of Lego-like shards. The first thing I heard was the driver screaming.

“Flashbang!” shouted Katz. A stun grenade.

Luckily for me, the grenade had fallen below the inner edge of the SUV’s door when it blew, so I hadn’t caught the full effect. But the driver had—it had fallen into his lap. I got out. All I could see of him through the smoke in the cabin was his hunched back.

Katz ran around to my side, behind the driver. The SUV was so tall, she had to stand on tiptoes to cover him with her gun. “Hands on the steering wheel!” she yelled. Her voice sounded faint to my ringing ears.

I didn’t think the guy could hear her. I was turning my head to say that when a second bang rocked the SUV. Then more flash-bangs at close intervals.

Katz closed her eyes, grimaced, and put a hand to the side of her head. This time, she’d taken the bigger dose. I steered her backwards out of the slot between our two cars.

Seven bangs. It was one of those multi-flash grenades, designed to look and sound like exaggerated gunfire.

When it was over, the Hawaiian shirt guy was still howling, a hoarse, wounded-animal noise. Then the gray smoke drifting from the cabin turned thick and ugly, like a movie effect of a genie boiling out of its bottle. The stuff caught at my throat and burned my eyes.

“Teargas,” croaked Katz, her gun pointed unsteadily at the SUV.

“Jesus. How much ordnance does the guy have in there?” I imagined the car blowing skyward in a fireball. “We gotta get him out. You cover me.”

“Shit. Okay.”

We ran back into the gap between cars. Acrid smoke billowed from the windows of the SUV. My eyes streaming and half-blinded, I yanked open the driver’s door, while Katz, blinking rapidly, kept her gun leveled at Hawaiian Shirt.

I grabbed the guy’s arm and hauled. Luckily, his seatbelt was undone. I braced my foot on the side and finally he tumbled out, curled up. He was so heavy I don’t think I could have managed more than that, had not another man just as big as Hawaiian Shirt suddenly squeezed between me and Katz. It was the semi’s driver. He and I each grabbed a foot. Together, we dragged the wounded man out from between the cars.

We’d got him a safe distance away when the cloud of smoke flickered blue and red. A patrol car with its flashers on nosed up the alley and a few cops ran toward us with their guns drawn.

I looked blearily at Katz. She was leaning against the warehouse wall, her face gray in that light. The hand that held her shield-badge high for the cops to see was trembling.

She blinked at me, then huffed out a shaky breath that might have been a laugh. “You’re pretty good with a measuring tool and a book, Dr. Arklow. They’re not in the agent training manual.”

“Special weapons and tactics, Agent Katz—watch and learn,” was the best I could do in response.