for a second, the adrenaline coursing through me, and realized that the cameraman—all of the newsies, in fact—didn’t even know what had just happened.
It made a creepy kind of sense. I hadn’t heard anything. The assassin must have been using a suppressor. There hadn’t been any flashes, so he must have done it right, aiming at me through the car window while sitting far enough back to make sure the barrel of his gun didn’t poke out suspiciously—and that he never became a highly visible target. I had helped, too, by denying the onlookers the subtle clue of a dead body with little holes in the front of it and big ones in the back. No sound, no sight, and no victim. Why should they think that murder had just been attempted?
“Move!” I said, hauling myself up by the cameraman’s paw. I struggled to get higher, to look over the crowd and get a plate off of the dark sedan. It didn’t take much more than stepping around a couple of people and standing on tiptoe to get a view of the shooter’s vehicle, cruising calmly away, without roaring engines, without crashing up onto the sidewalk or running red lights. It just vanished into the traffic like a shark disappearing into the depths. I never got a clear look at the plates.
“Dammit,” I growled. Pain was starting to register on me now, especially in my arm. The protective spells I’d woven over my duster had held out against the bullets, but the leather had been pulled pretty tight over my skin and as a result it felt like someone had smashed a baseball bat into my forearm. The fingers of my left hand were tingling and refused to do more than twitch. I felt similar throbs from the other two hits, and ran my hands over the duster, just to be sure none of them had gone through without my noticing.
I found a bullet caught in the leather of my left sleeve. It hadn’t penetrated more than maybe a quarter of an inch, but it was trapped in the leather and deformed from the impact. I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket, wrapped the bullet in it, and put it back again, managing to do the whole thing unnoticed while about a dozen people looked at me like I was a lunatic.
From the street came a wheezy little beep-beep! The Blue Beetle came slowly down the street and stopped in front of the building. Molly was behind the wheel, waving at me frantically.
I hurried down to the street and got in before the mismatched color scheme of my car sent the obsessive-compulsive federal personnel in the building behind me into a conniption. As Molly pulled away, I buckled up, then got a sloppy kiss on the face from Mouse, who sat in the backseat, his tail going thump-thump-thump against the back of the driver’s seat.
“Ick!” I told him. “My lips touched dog lips! Get me some mouthwash! Get me some iodine!”
His tail kept wagging and he smooched me again before settling down and looking content.
I sagged back into my seat and closed my eyes.
Maybe two minutes passed. “You’re welcome,” Molly said abruptly, her tone frustrated. “No problem, Harry. Whatever I can do to help.”
“Sorry, padawan,” I said. “This has been a long day already.”
“I came back from the church and saw a bunch of guys and cops were going in and out of your apartment. The door was broken down and the whole place looked like it had been ransacked.” She shuddered and clenched the wheel. “God. I was sure you were dead or in trouble.”
“You were about ninety percent right,” I said. “Someone told the feds I was the one who blew up the office building. They wanted to talk to me.”
Molly’s eyes grew wide. “What about the Swords? We’ve got to tell my dad, right away, or—”
“Relax,” I said. “I stashed them. They should be safe for now.”
Molly puffed out a breath and subsided in relief. “You look terrible,” she said, after a minute. “Did they beat you up or something?”
I swept my eyes left and right as we went on, searching. “Giant centipede.”
“Oh,” Molly said, drawing the word out, as though I had explained everything. “What are you looking for?”
I’d been scanning the traffic around us for a dark sedan. I’d found about thirty of them so far, being a master detective and all. “The car of the guy who just shot at me.” I produced