"You're useless," I told him. "If I showed you a hundred-dollar bill you'd swear Ben Franklin hired you."
I put the sketches away. He said, "I am hurting bad, mon. Now you take me to the hospital?"
I looked at him for a moment, and then I got to my feet. "No," I said.
"No! What are you telling me, mon?"
"You son of a bitch," I said. "You just tried to kill me and now you expect me to save your life? You killed a friend of mine, you son of a bitch."
"What are you going to do with me?"
"I'm going to leave you here in your blood."
"But I will die!"
"Good," I said. "You can be on the list."
"You would leave me to die?"
"Why not?"
"Fuck you, mon! You hear what I'm saying to you? Fuck your mother and fuck you!"
"Well, fuck you too."
"Fuck you! I hope you die!"
"Everybody dies," I said. "So fuck you."
I turned at a sound. Like a cough, but not a cough.
TJ was down, his back against the wall. His skin was gray, his face twisted in pain. He had both hands pressed to his left thigh, and blood, nearly black in that light, seeped between his splayed fingers.
"Direct pressure on the wound," I said. I'd torn the pocket off my shirt, and now I placed his fingers on the wad I'd made of it. "Can you hold it there good and tight?"
"Think so."
"You're not gushing blood," I said. "It didn't hit an artery. How do you feel?"
"Hurts."
"Try to hang on," I said. "Try to keep pressure on the wound."
"'Kay."
I took a quick tour around the room, running the sleeve of my jacket over any surfaces where we might have left prints. It didn't seem to me we'd touched anything. The squalid little room didn't invite touching.
Chilton Purvis lay where he'd fallen. There was a pink froth bubbling out of the corner of his mouth, and I guessed that one bullet had hit a lung. His eyes stared accusingly at me and his lips worked but no words got past them.
His gun had caromed off a wall and landed on top of his mattress. I thought, That's the gun that killed Jim. But of course it wasn't, he'd dropped that one at the scene. I left this one where it lay, left the little portable radio playing reggae, left everything where it was, including Chilton Purvis. I knelt down, got one hand under TJ's legs and the other beneath the small of his back, and got him up over my shoulder in a fireman's carry.
"Keep the pressure on the wound," I said.
"We goin'?"
"Unless you like it here."
"We just leavin' him?"
"One's all I can carry," I said.
I made it down the stairs and onto the street. Light still showed under the doors of some of the other apartments, but none of the doors flew open, and no one rushed out to see what all the shooting was about. I guess you learn to keep a damper on your curiosity when you're living in an abandoned building.
We weren't going to find a cab cruising on Tapscott Street. I headed for East New York Avenue, a block and a half away, but at the corner of Sutter I caught sight of a gypsy cab and hollered at it.
The car was an old Ford, the driver a Bangladeshi. TJ was at my side when the cab pulled up to us, keeping all his weight on the uninjured leg, maintaining pressure on the wound. I had an arm around him to steady him as I reached for the cab door with the other hand.
"What is the matter with that man?" the driver demanded. "Is he sick?"
"I have to get him to a doctor," I said, and lifted TJ into the back seat and crawled in after him. "I want to go to Manhattan, to Fifty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue. The best way to go- "
"But look at him! He is injured. Look! He is bleeding!"
"Yes, and you're wasting time."
"This is impossible," he said. "I cannot have this man bleeding in my cab. It will stain the upholstery. It is impossible."
"I'll give you a hundred dollars to drive us to Manhattan," I said. I showed him the gun. "Or I'll shoot you in the head and drive us there myself. You decide."
I guess he believed I'd do it, and for all I know he was right. He put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. I told him to take the Manhattan Bridge.
We were on Flatbush Avenue crossing Atlantic when he said, "How did he hurt himself, your friend?"
"He cut himself shaving."
"I think he was shot, yes?"
"And if he was?"
"He should be in a hospital."
"That's where we're going."
"There is a hospital there?"
Roosevelt is at Tenth and Fifty-eighth, but that wasn't where we were going. "A private hospital," I said.
"Sir, there are hospitals in Brooklyn. There is Methodist Hospital quite near here, there is Brooklyn Jewish."
"Just go where I said."
"Yes, sir. Sir, you will try to keep the blood to a minimum? The cab is my wife's brother's, it does not belong to me."
I got out a hundred-dollar bill and passed it to him. "Just so you know you're getting this," I said.
"Oh, thank you, sir. Some people, they say they will pay extra, you know, and then they do not. Thank you, sir."
"If there is any blood on the seat, that should pay for cleaning it."
"Most certainly, sir."
I had my fingers on top of TJ's and kept pressure on the wound. I felt his grip slacken as I took over. He was in shock, and that can be as dangerous as the wound itself. I tried to remember what you did for shock victims. Elevate the feet, I seemed to recall, and keep the patient warm. I didn't see how I could manage either of those things for the time being.
The driver was right, he belonged in a hospital, and I wondered if I had the right to keep him away from them. Bellevue was probably tops for gunshot trauma, and we were on the bridge approach now. Easy enough to redirect the driver to First Avenue and Twenty-fifth.
For that matter, Roosevelt's ER was first-rate, and closer to home. And I could delay the decision until we got uptown.
I managed to delay it all the way to the Parc Vendôme. When the cab pulled up in front of our entrance I gave him a second $100. "This is so you can forget all about us," I told him.
"You are very generous, sir. I assure you, I have no memory at all. Can I help you with your friend?"
"I've got him. Just hold the door."
"Certainly. And sir?" I turned. "My card. Call me anytime, any hour, day or night. Anytime, sir!"
The doctor was a spare, trim gentleman with perfect posture. His hair and mustache were white but his eyebrows were still dark. He came out of the bedroom carrying his disposable Pliofilm gloves and some other sickroom debris, and Elaine pointed him to a wastebasket.
"Wait now," he said, and fished around in the basket. He straightened up, holding a chunk of lead between his thumb and forefinger. "The young man may want this," he said. "For a souvenir."
Elaine took it, weighed it on her palm. "It's not very big," she said.
"No, and he can be grateful for that. A larger bullet would have done more damage. If you're going to get shot, always go for small caliber and low muzzle velocity. A BB from an air rifle would be best, but they always seem to find their way into children's eyes."
Elaine had known whom to call, as I'd guessed she would. What we needed was a doctor who wouldn't insist on moving TJ to a hospital, a doctor prepared to ignore the regulation requiring him to report all gunshot wounds to the authorities. I knew that Mick had a tame physician, if he was still alive since he patched up Tom Heaney a few years back, and if a few more years on the booze had left him with hands still capable of keeping a grip on his forceps and scalpel. But Mick's doctor was upstate. I needed somebody here in the city.
Elaine had called Dr. Jerome Froelich, who I gathered had performed more than his share of abortions in the pre-Roe v. Wade days, even as he'd written more than his share of morphine and Dexedrine prescriptions. It was around two in the morning when she called him, and he grumbled but he came.
She asked him how bad it was.
"He's resting comfortably," he said. "I sedated him and dressed the wound. He probably ought to be in a hospital. On the other hand, maybe he's lucky he's not. He's lost some blood, and they'd most likely give him a unit or two of whole blood, and you know what? If it was me, I'd just as soon not have some stranger's blood dripping into my veins, thank you just the same."