Georgia Mowbry was coming down the hall toward her. Brady’s top female negotiator, on the job long before Eileen joined the team. Was he pulling her from the door? Turn it over to someone more experienced? She hoped not. Georgia was a big rangy woman who’d recently frizzed and bleached her hair a sort of honey-blonde color. She was wearing jeans and the same blue department jacket Eileen was wearing. Stopping to say hello to one of the E.S. men, she exchanged a few words with him, and then continued down the hall to where the door to 409 was still adamantly closed.
“Lieutenant wants to know if you need anything,” she said.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Cup of coffee, anything?”
“Thanks, I’m okay, Georgia.”
“How about the ladies’ room? You want to go down the hall, I can…”
Both women heard the click of the lock. They both turned toward the door. It opened a crack. The night chain caught it. What happened next happened so quickly that neither of them even had time to catch her breath. There was suddenly the blunt muzzle of a pistol in the crack between door and jamb, and then there was a sudden flash of yellow at the muzzle, and the shocking sound of the gun’s explosion, and the bullet took Georgia in the right eye and sent her flying backward into the corridor. Moments later, unconscious, she began vomiting.
THE POLICE DEPARTMENT’S deputy chief surgeon was a woman named Sharyn Cooke. The unfortunate spelling of her name was due to the fact that her then sixteen-year-old, unwed mother didn’t know how to spell Sharon. This same mother later put Sharyn through college and then medical school on money earned scrubbing floors in white men’s offices after dark. Sharyn Cooke was black, the first woman of her color ever to be appointed to the job she now held.
Her skin was the color of burnt almond, her eyes the color of loam. She wore her black hair in a modified Afro, her high cheekbones and generous mouth giving her the look of a proud Masai woman. She had turned forty this past October fifteenth, birth date of great men—and women, too—and was still getting accustomed to the fact. At five-nine, she always felt cramped in the new compact automobile she’d bought, and was constantly adjusting the front seat to accommodate her long legs. She was fiddling with the seat again on her way home from church that Sunday at twelve-twenty, when the police radio erupted with the words “Cop shot, cop down, confirmed shooting, going to Buenavista!” She hit the hammer and slammed her foot down on the accelerator. A moment later, her beeper went off. She lifted it from the seat, glanced at the number calling, punched it into her car phone, hit the SEND button and—still racing through the streets of Isola at seventy miles an hour—got Deputy Inspector Brady.
“Yes, hello, Inspector,” she said.
“Doc,” he said. “I’ve got a cop shot.”
It was common knowledge in the department that the commander of the hostage negotiating team had lost his very first female negotiator to a woman who was wielding a meat cleaver. There’d been a hell of a fuss downtown over the fatal string of events—one of the taker’s kids dead even before the negotiating team got there, then a police officer killed, and then the taker herself killed when the E.S. stormed the door. For a while, the entire program was in jeopardy, all the hard work Chief McCleary had done getting it started, all the advances Brady had made when he took over, everything almost went up the chimney in smoke. Took Brady a long time to get over it. Even when he felt confident that the program wouldn’t be scratched, it was forever before he put another woman on the team. There were two women working for him now, an old pro—well, thirty-six years old—named Georgia Mowbry, and Eileen Burke, a new addition.
What had happened in the building at 310 South Cumberland was almost a replay of what had happened all those years back when Brady lost Julie Gunnison to a murderer with a cleaver in her hands. TheE.S. cops had rushed the door the moment the guy inside fired at Georgia. They asked no questions. They knocked the door off its hinges and then six of them opened fire simultaneously with their heavy-caliber guns, blowing the guy halfway across the apartment. In the bedroom, they found his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law handcuffed to the bed and bleeding from two bullet wounds in her chest. She was dead. Probably had been dead long before the negotiating team even got there.
Hostage dead, taker dead, police officer critically wounded.
Almost a replay.
Except that back then, the police officer had died, too.
Brady didn’t want to lose Georgia Mowbry now.
He told Sharyn to make damn sure they didn’t lose her.
Sharyn told him she’d make sure everybody did the best job possible. She herself was a board-certified surgeon—which meant she’d gone through four years of medical school, and then five years as a resident surgeon in a hospital, after which she’d been approved for board certification by the American College of Surgeons. She still had her own private practice, but as a uniformed one-star chief she worked fifteen to eighteen hours a week in the Chief Surgeon’s Office for an annual salary of $68,000. In this city, some twenty to thirty police officers were shot every year. Part of Sharyn’s job was to make certain these injured officers received the best possible hospital care.
Georgia was in coma when Sharyn arrived at Buenavista Hospital at twelve-thirty-two that afternoon. She strode into the emergency room, identified herself, and then asked, “Who’s in charge?”—the way she always did. The brass hadn’t yet assembled. They would be here later, she knew, everyone from the Commish on down if this turned out to be a serious one. For now, there was a battery of nurses, the trauma team, a doctor named Harold Adderley, who introduced himself as the chief resident surgeon, and a junior resident surgeon named Anthony Bonifacio.
Adderley told her that Detective Mowbry had been shot in the right eye, the bullet exiting on the right lateral side of the skull. X rays showed bullet fragments in the brain and fracture on the right side of the skull. She’d been sedated with phenobarbital, and they were administering Decadron intravenously to prevent brain swelling. They were now waiting for her blood pressure and vital signs to stabilize before they did a CAT scan. Adderley expected this would be in the next ten to fifteen minutes.
“Is the O.R. ready for her?” Sharyn asked.
“We’ll move her in as soon as we get the results.”
“Who’s standing by?”
“Pair of neurosurgeons, an ophthalmologist, and a plastic surgeon.”
“How does the eye look?” Sharyn asked.
“Bad,” Adderley said.
BERT KLING was sitting in his pajamas at the small round table in his tiny kitchen, eating bran flakes with strawberries that had cost him an arm and a leg at the Korean market around the corner, listening to music on the radio, when the news came on at one o’clock that Sunday afternoon. An announcer said that a police officer had been seriously wounded not half an hour ago…
Kling glanced up from his bowl of cereal.
…and was now in critical condition at Buenavista Hospital.
He looked at the radio.
“The officer, a member of the hostage negotiating team…”
He put down his spoon.
“…was shot in the head while negotiating with a man inside an apartment on Cumberland Avenue.”