Black wind

looked up from the floor in a twisted angle, where she forced a smile through a painful grimace.
    “I think my right leg is broken,” she said calmly, ” but otherwise I’m okay.”
    Dirk lifted her out of the car and gently set her on the deck as a crowd of passengers crept in to offer assistance. In front of them, a
    door flung open on the VW bus and out popped its overage hippie driver, complete with ponytail and beer belly half-hidden under a tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt. His eyes bulged as he surveyed the scene behind him. Smoke oozed from the smoldering wreckage of the Chrysler, tainting the air with the odor of burned oil and rubber. The car’s metal skin was festooned with bullet holes from front to back, while broken glass and shreds of leather upholstery littered the interior. The front tires were splayed out from bursting on impact, while a metal guardrail poked out oddly from one of the rear wheel wells. A deep gash in the deck tailed back from the wreck like some sort of violent bread crumb trail. Dirk smiled weakly at the man as he wandered closer while surveying the scene.
    Shaking his head, the old hippie finally quipped, “Far out, man. I sure hope you have insurance.”
    It took only a few hours for the authorities to commandeer a nearby work barge and position it off the ferry landing. Its twenty-ton crane easily hoisted the crushed Cadillac from the bottom and dumped it on the greasy deck of the old barge. A paramedic crew carefully extricated the mashed bodies from the vehicle and transferred them to the county morgue. Their cause of death was cited simply as blunt injury from motor vehicle accident.
    At NUMA’s request, the FBI interceded and opened a federal investigation into the incident. Initial attempts to identify the gunmen came up empty when no forms of ID were found on the bodies, and the Cadillac was discovered to be a stolen rental car. Immigration finally ascertained that the men were Japanese nationals who had entered the country illegally through Canada.
    At the Seattle/ King County morgue, the chief coroner shook his head in irritation as yet another investigator arrived to examine the bodies.
    “Can’t get any work done around here as long as we’re holding these so-called Japanese gangsters,” he grumbled to an underling, as yet another pair of Feds left the storage facility.
    The assistant medical examiner, an ex-Army doctor who had once been stationed in Seoul for a year, nodded in agreement.
    “We might as well install a revolving door on the ice room,” he joked.
    “I’ll just be happy when the paperwork arrives to release them for transport back to Japan.”
    “I hope that’s their right home,” the assistant pathologist said, slowly sliding the bodies back into a refrigerated locker. “If you ask me, I still say they look like a couple of Koreans.”
    After twelve hours at Sarah’s hospital bedside, Dirk finally convinced the doctors at Seattle’s Swedish Providence Medical Center to release Sarah the following morning. Though a broken leg didn’t normally warrant an overnight stay, the cautious medical staff was concerned about trauma from the accident and kept her there for observation. She was fortunate in that the break to her tibia, or shin-bone, did not require any rods or screws to align. The doctors wrapped her leg in a heavy plaster cast and pumped her full of painkillers, then signed her release.
    “Guess I can’t take you dancing anytime soon,” Dirk joked as he pushed her out the hospital exit in a wheelchair.
    “Not unless you want a black-and-blue foot,” she replied, grimacing at the heavy cast around her lower leg.
    Despite insisting that she was well enough to work, Dirk took Sarah home to her stylish apartment in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. Gently assisting her to a leather couch, he propped her broken leg up on a large pillow.
    “Afraid I’ve been called back to Washington,” he said, stroking her silky hair as she adjusted the pillows behind her back. “Have to leave tonight. I’ll make sure Sandy checks in on you.”
    “I probably won’t be able to keep her away,” she grinned. “But what about the sick crew members of the Deep Endeavor? We need to find out if they are all right,” she said, struggling to rise from the couch. The drugs made her feel as if her mind and body were enshrouded in a coat of honey and she fought to remain lucid against the overwhelming desire to sleep.
    “Okay,” he said, gently