Rick Castle's body reacts to the bullet before his brain is aware it is there.
He throws himself down. His breath leaves him in a rush as he lands chest first on the carpet. He manages to half-roll, half-flop over onto his side and pin himself hard against a couch. He can't hear anything, as his ears are filled with the rushing sound of his own blood and the cracking of gunshots. He tries to look around the end table, only to have to duck his head back down as a bullet careens overhead, shattering a lamp and raining porcelain down on his head.
"Who are they shooting at?" This comes as a shout from his partner, Detective Kate Beckett, who he can't see, but seems to be behind the recliner in the corner. Even though he's in the middle of a firefight, the interior decorator in his brain notes that the fabric on the recliner doesn't go at all well with the couch.
"Does it matter?" he yells in reply. Fabric criticism can wait until later.
"You, they are shooting at you," comes another voice. Castle recognizes it as the voice of the man who'd been pointing a gun at them, just a few seconds ago. Castle looks up, sees that the man has at least moved his gun from them to the people outside the window.
"How can you tell?"
"We're still alive," Gun-guy replies. Castle shakes his head, not sure what gun-guy means. He tries again to look around the end of the couch. He is able to catch Kate's eye - she is unarmed and tucked into the back of the recliner - but she gives him a small shake of the head. Stay put, she seems to say with her shake.
Screw that, Castle thinks, and starts to crawl towards her. How the hell have they gotten into a gunfight in the living room of a small row house in West Philadelphia? Esposito had sent them to this house under the premise that it held a supposed friend. But neither he nor Kate had gotten much more than a hello out to the small man that had answered the door before a gun was being pointed in their faces by a taller, very haggard, and paranoid looking man. The tall man had led them back into the living room, being talked down unsuccessfully by Esposito's friend the whole time. Castle had spotted another person the room, a tall woman of vague familiarity, right before the front window shattered and they all found themselves in the middle of a siege.
Two more shots came in through the window, one hitting near him, the other ... he can't tell where it has gone, but he doesn't think anyone is hit. He freezes nonetheless, stuck in a no man's land in the middle of the living room. He looks back at the window where the bullets are coming from. Two men - Esposito's fat friend and the tall man he thinks of as gun guy stand on either side of the window, pressed hard against the brickwork. The one on the left, the one they have come to meet, is short, fat, and primly dressed all in black, while the other is tall, trim and disheveled, but both have the same balletic precision as they, in concert, bring their guns up and around the window sill, firing out into the late afternoon air. Castle hears eight shots - four from each man in two short bursts he knows to be a double tap - followed by both men returning to crouched and ready positions behind the bricks.
Castle hears something - human and primal and pained - come from outside, followed by the screeching of car tires, and then nothing, nothing at all, just a silence that could be the end, or could just be a pause.
Sergeant Allan Dwzytowski, the Quartermaster friend of Espo's that they'd come to meet, leans his bulk out and over the sill again, looking into the street in front of his house. "It appears you hit one of em," he says to the tall man opposite him. "They look like they're beatin' a strategic retreat." Gun guy nods, tucking his gun into the back of his waistband.
Castle rolls onto his back. None of this is as fun to live as it is to write about and he is feeling achy and lightheaded.
A tall woman comes to stand over him. He leans forward, wanting to see his girlfriend's face, but while similar, the woman standing over him is definitely not Kate Beckett.
"It appears you've been shot in the left medial deltoid. We should examine that as soon as possible," the woman says in a clinical, detached fashion, as if she's announcing movie times.
Shit, he thinks. I recognize that voice.
Then: I've been shot?
She bends down and starts probing his arm with nothing that resembles a bedside manner. He wants to point that out to her, but he finds that it is getting very hard to think. Besides, where are his manners?
He tilts his head back, so that he can see Kate, who is looking rather pale as she kneels down next to him. "Kate," he says, trying to ignore the slight slur in his speech, "I'd like you to meet Temperance Brennan. She's like me..."
But whatever he was going to say was lost as the blood loss catches up with him, and he passes out.