Percy had been lucky.
His hand was only injured by the periphery of the shotgun pellet spread, the outer edge of the scattered blast. Had his hand suffered the full force of the discharge, the hand would have been completely destroyed together with much of his lower arm.
Luckily the shot, fired by the gunman without aim or thought, had not hit anybody else and mostly struck the wall of the bank just below a large window. Had the blast hit that window, c*****e could have ensued with substantial, possibly fatal, injuries from the flying plate glass.
Even so, the damage to Percy’s hand was still serious. the shotgun pellets had completely torn away the distal phalange, i.e. the topmost bone of his little finger and caused such severe damage to the next bone, the intermediate phalange, that
