Private Paris (Private 10)

Figuring the women had gone to the main route, I jumped the gate and ran through the lot to a large traffic rotary with a park at the center.

The bus stop was to my left, along with an Asian grocery store and a clothing shop, both closed, and a pharmacy, still open. When I looked right, I was surprised to see another police car, and more surprised to realize that I was right in front of the Sevran police station.

Had they gone in there? Did I have this all wrong?

I hurried inside to check. The officer behind a pane of bulletproof glass was on the phone but lowered it when I adopted a prayer pose. When I asked in halting French if two Muslim women had come inside, she looked down her nose, shook her head, and immediately lifted the phone to her ear again.

I tried to talk again, but she held up her finger and turned away from me.

Frustrated, I went out onto the sidewalk. Where the hell had they gone?

There were three people at the bus stop now: an elderly man wearing a turban, a young Vietnamese girl, and a woman with long, braided reddish hair. She wore a laborer’s clothes, leather boots, tan canvas pants, and a denim shirt. She had her back to me and was smoking.

A heavyset blond woman wearing heavy makeup, a white pantsuit, and carrying a large black purse was coming down the sidewalk toward me. A mother and child exited the pharmacy, and I headed their way. As I walked by the bus stop, the woman with the reddish braids flicked her cigarette into the gutter, and squatted to rummage in a stonemason’s bag at her feet.

I kept going. The blonde in the pantsuit passed, giving me a quick, bright smile. Sweet perfume lingered in her wake. The lights in the pharmacy went dark. A bus approached. I wanted to punch something.

Had they circled me? Gone back to the car? I could go there and sit on it, or just go back to the police station and make the officer understand the situation.

Changing direction, I followed the bus to the stop, seeing the four people board and wondering if the Muslim women had gotten on the first bus I’d seen leaving the area.

I thought about the pale blue gravel that had fallen off the Suzuki’s bumper. It was definitely ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I’d tasted and smelled remnants of the stuff in the air after IED explosions back in Kandahar.

But if they’d left the area with the bags…

Oh, Jesus. I had it wrong.

I took off toward the police station. The bus doors closed. As I came abreast of the bus, it began to pull away. I happened to glance at the windows.

The woman in the work clothes, the one with the reddish braids, was sitting in the third row from the front, looking out the window at me. She was exotically beautiful, with haunting nickel-gray eyes and high cheekbones across which stretched burnished, dusky skin.

As the bus drove off, I was puzzled by the sense that I had seen her somewhere before…

I began to sprint after the bus, trying to get a better look at her. But crossing the mouth of the narrow parking lot next to the Sevran police station, I understood that I was too late. I’d never catch up.

I staggered to a stop just beyond the entrance to the parking lot, right in front of the station, and was sucking wind, cursing, and watching the bus disappear into the dusk when the car bomb erupted.

Chapter 86

THE BLAST THREW me off my feet and to the pavement. Shock waves pounded through my back, deafened me, and rattled my brain for several minutes. And I took some body shots from falling debris.

But thanks to the northwest corner of the Sevran police station, which stood between me and the parking lot and the Catholic churchyard where the robed women had left the Suzuki, I was otherwise uninjured.

There was dust and debris everywhere, and that acidic fertilizer smell permeated the air like humidity on a stiflingly hot day.

Struggling to my feet, I saw that all traffic on the roundabout had come to a halt. People were outside their cars, covering their mouths, or stretching them wide to scream. But I could barely hear them. Their voices were drowned out by a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

Still in a daze, I stumbled a few steps and looked into the parking lot. Through the thick cloud of dust, I could see that the entire front of the church had been blown inward, collapsing the roof. A large jagged hole had been opened in the rear sidewall of the police station.

A policeman staggered from it, covered head to boots in dust and plaster. His face showed blood from a nasty scalp gash.

I went to him, tried to talk to him. But he looked at me as if I were a creature in a nightmare, and walked dumbly past me. I looked into the hole, into the dark hull of the police station, seeing human silhouettes amid the wreckage.

I threw my sleeve across my chest and fought my way in across the debris, finding an officer dead at his desk and the pieces of a dead man in a holding cell. Then I spotted the desk officer who’d ignored me minutes before.

She was trying feebly to get up from the floor. I went to her, got her in a fireman’s sling, and got her outside. Her face was a mess. Blood soaked her right leg and I could see the bulge of bone sticking from her thigh.

I ripped off my belt and cinched it tight around her upper thigh. If I was right, the blast had broken her femur and probably nicked her femoral artery. Had the bone fully cut the blood vessel, she would have been dead where I had found her.