Eileen, Kling thought.
Don’t let it be her, he thought.
“In Majesta this morning,” the announcer said, “two young men flying pigeons on a rooftop…”
He got up from the table at once, turned off the radio, went into the bedroom, picked up the receiver from the bedside phone, and immediately dialed Buenavista, the best hospital in the vicinity of Cumberland. They’d have taken her there in a patrol car with the siren screaming, a radioed 10-13 alerting any other car or beat officer on the route to block traffic, expedite transport to the hospital, and provide a motor escort where possible. Nobody knew how to take care of their own like cops.
“Buenavista Hospital, good afternoon,” a woman said.
“This is Detective Bert Kling,” he said, “Eighty-Seventh Precinct. A shooting victim was just brought in, an officer on the hostage negotiating…”
“One moment, please.”
He waited.
“Emergency Room,” a man’s voice said.
“Yes, this is Detective Bert Kling, I’m looking for information on the shooting victim that was just brought in.”
“Which shooting victim did you want?” the man asked, making it sound as if a dozen of them were lying around there.
“This one’s a police negotiator,” Kling said.
“You’ll have to talk to your own people about that,” the man said abruptly, and hung up.
Kling looked at the phone receiver. He put it back on its cradle, took off his pajamas, and—without bothering to shower or shave—pulled on a pair of Jockey shorts, jeans, a T-shirt that had the words 87TH PRECINCT SOFTBALL TEAMlettered on the front in green, a pair of loafers without socks, and an overcoat, and then immediately left the apartment.
THE FIRST PERSON he saw when he walked into the waiting room was Eileen Burke. He went to her at once.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she said.
In that brief exchange, any bystander would have known immediately that these two had once been lovers.
“I thought it was you,” he said. “I came right over.”
Confirming it.
“Georgia Mowbry,” she said.
“How bad is it?”
“I think it’s pretty bad.”
There were other police officers in the waiting room. First Deputy Commissioner Anderson and Chief of Detectives Fremont were standing near the nurse’s station, talking earnestly to Inspector Brady. The First Dep was wondering out loud what they should put out to the media. He was concerned because the injured police officer was a woman. He wanted to make certain they didn’t get any negative feedback about placing female officers in extremely dangerous situations. After recent disclosures of what had happened to women members of the armed forces during Desert Storm, everybody was suddenly wondering whether women could cut the mustard. This was why they hadn’t yet released the officer’s name. Georgia Mowbry was a wife and a mother. If the department wasn’t careful, the media would have a field day with this one. They were still wondering what to do when Adderley came into the room, Sharyn at his side. He didn’t have to signal for attention. All eyes turned to him the moment he made his entrance.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and then, seeing that there were women present as well, “ladies, we now have the results of the CAT scan, and I’d like to pass those on to you. There’s a bullet wound and concomitant skull fracture in the right temporoparietal region. The orbit of the eye was blown out, there’s orbit fracture and hematoma in the orbit. The eye itself has collapsed. At the moment, it’s hanging by the optic nerve and some minor blood vessels in the canal. The scan gave us a good blueprint, and Detective Mowbry will be moved into the operating room for craniotomy as soon as she’s been prepped. I think that’s everything, unless Dr. Cooke has something to add.”
“I just wanted to say that Dr. Adderley and I will be joining the others in the O.R. as soon as we’re finished with the briefing here,” Sharyn said. “I must caution you,” she said, and hesitated. “This is a hazardous procedure, it might be touch and go all the way.”
Touch and go, Eileen thought.
“How long will the operation take?” Brady asked.
“Depends,” Sharyn said. “Five, six hours, wouldn’t you say?” she asked Adderley.
“At least,” Adderley said.
“What are her chances?” the First Dep asked.
“In a trauma of this sort, all bets are off,” Adderley said.
“Let me put it this way,” Sharyn said. “Withoutthe surgery, her chances are nil.”
Kling was staring at her.
T/P/O meant Time and Place of Occurrence.
MOS meant Member of the Service.
GSW meant Gun Shot Wound.
VS meant Vital Signs.
By the time this report was filed, Georgia Mowbry had already been on the operating table for three hours.
THEY HAD REMOVED a portion of her skull to allow for expansion of the brain. The pistol Jimmy had used first on his sister-in-law and next on Georgia was a .22 caliber Llama. It could have been worse; he could have used a .357 Magnum. But the trauma was severe nonetheless, and in all such cases blood rushes to the injured area, causing swelling that, if it is not decompressed, can result either in death or irreparable damage to the brain. This was one of the risks Adderley hadn’t been willing to discuss.
As Sharyn had told the gathered cops, the procedure was hazardous; but it was nonetheless commonplace: You went in, you stopped the bleeding, and you repaired the damage. But a big vein was open, and it took a long time to clip it, and tie it, and control the major bleeding, by which time Georgia’s pulse rate had dropped to forty, and then thirty, and her blood pressure had fallen alarmingly. When her vital signs were stable again, the surgeons were confronted with the choice of either digging for the bullet fragments in the brain or else leaving them in, and decided that probing for them presented the greater risk. They chose, however, to try getting the dead bone out rather than chancing possible later abscess and infection. They had lowered the temperature of the brain with a cold saline solution; the swelling seemed to be under control.
The eye presented problems of its own.
The bullet had punctured it and caused the gel to leak out, collapsing the eye like a deflated balloon. Blown back into the skull, it now hung precariously in the canal, waiting for the eye surgeon’s decision. He determined that the eye was completely destroyed and therefore unsalvageable; there was nothing to do but sever the connecting nerve and blood vessels and surgically remove it. The plastic surgeon was there to reinforce the back of the orbit and to patch the broken bones around the eye and the zygoma, the bone supporting the cheek.
All of this was painstaking, delicate, risky, and time-consuming work. At twenty minutes past midnight, some twelve hours after she’d been shot, Georgia, in a barbiturate-induced coma, was wheeled into the recovery room. She had been on the table for more than ten hours. Now there was an oxygen tube in her mouth to help her breathe, and a tube in her nose to draw out stomach contents, and a catheter going to her bladder, and tubes and lines feeding her intravenously and monitoring all her vital signs.
Early on the morning of March thirtieth, another note was added to the sick-desk report:
**0515 hours. Dep Ch Cooke advises MOS in recovery room listed as Critical/Stable. Prognosis guarded for recovery.
8.
THE PAIR OF THEM were waiting outside the hospital when Sharyn came out at six-thirty that morning. Big blond guy who looked like Kansas, beautiful redheaded woman with him. Sharyn figured them for relatives of the cop who’d got shot.