“Dr. Cooke?” the redhead said. “I’m Detective Burke? I work with Georgia? Detective Mowbry? We’re on the hostage negotiating…”
“Yes, how are you?” Sharyn said warmly, and extended her hand.
“Detective Kling,” the blond one said, and extended his hand in turn. They both seemed extremely nervous. Sharyn guessed they were anticipating bad news they didn’t really want to hear.
“How is she?”
This from the blond one.
“She should be all right,” Sharyn said.
“Would…you like a cup of coffee or something?”
This from the redhead…“I was standing right next to her when she got shot, I’d really like to…”
“Of course,” Sharyn said.
THE REDHEAD’S first name was Eileen.
The blond was Bert.
They were on a first-name basis and apparently knew each other well. Although Sharyn was a one-star chief, she never wore the uniform and didn’t much go for the paramilitary bullshit of the police force. As they walked to the diner, she asked them to please call her Sharyn.
Kling thought he’d heard Sharon.
In his mind, he registered her name as Sharon.
The diner at sevenA .M. that Monday morning was packed when the three of them walked in. It was starting out to be a nice day, the sun shining, all traces of yesterday’s snow and rain gone, the temperature still quite low, though, considering that spring was already ten days old. Forty-two degrees Fahrenheit didn’t feel like spring, even if the sun was shining. Neither did five or six degrees above zero centigrade.
Sharyn and Kling were wearing overcoats. No mufflers, no gloves, just the overcoats they’d worn in yesterday’s miserable rain and snow, looking a bit rumpled now. Eileen was wearing the jeans and blue jacket she’d been wearing when Georgia got hit, the big wordPOLICE across the back of the jacket in white letters. All three of them looked somewhat tired and drawn as they found a leatherette booth toward the rear of the diner, the only one available, too close to the kitchen and the men’s room. They took off their coats, hung them on wall hooks where they could keep an eye on them.
Kling ordered eggs over easy with home fries and bacon. Eileen ordered a Western omelet with the fries and country sausages. Sharyn ordered the Belgian waffles. All three of them ordered coffee.
“We’ve been getting calls all night long,” Sharyn said. “She has a lot of friends.”
“How is she?” Eileen asked.“Really.”
“Well…we won’t really know for a few days yet. She’ll be in the recovery room for the better part of the week, we’ll be watching her carefully all that time. If there’s the slightest sign that anything’s wrong…”
“Is anything wrong now ?” Kling asked.
He kept staring at Sharyn intently, but she assumed that was because he was so interested in what she had to tell them about Georgia Mowbry.
“Her condition is stable at the moment,” she said.
“But she’s in coma, isn’t she?” Eileen asked. “Isn’t that bad?”
“Inducedcoma,” Sharyn said. “To reduce brain activity. This was a very serious injury, you know, the trauma was severe. She’s lost the eye….”
“Oh Jesus,” Eileen said.
“There was nothing we could do for it.”
Eileen nodded.
“How long will she be in the recovery room?” Kling asked.
“Better part of the week, I’d say. As soon as she comes around, we’ll move her into…”
“Willshe come around?” Eileen asked.
“That’s our expectation. As I’m sure you know, the gun was fired at relatively close range….”
“How close?” Kling asked.
“Four to five feet,” Eileen said.
“No tattooing or burn marks,” Sharyn said. “Not much bleeding.”
“What kind of gun?” Kling asked.
“Twenty-two caliber Llama,” Sharyn said. “I’ll be honest with you, in cases such as this…skull injury, severe trauma, hemorrhaging…”
“I thought you said there wasn’t much bleeding,” Eileen said.
“At the site of the wound. But when we went in, we found an open vein in the brain. What I’m saying is we’re lucky she made it alive to the hospital. That she survived the initial shock—the forcible entry of the missile, the shattering of bone, the brain penetration…well, that in itself is impressive. But until we know how severe the damage to the brain was…well.”
Brain damage, Eileen thought. Jesus.
“The Commish is a bit sensitive about this one,” Sharyn said. “He had to acknowledge what happened on Cumberland—there was a television truck at the scene, covering the hostage situation—but he didn’t want anyone to know that the wounded cop was a woman, shot in the eye , no less. He wouldn’t let me release her name till this morning. Brady’s been calling, too…Inspector Brady, commander of…”
“Yes.”
“…been calling every ten minutes. I don’t know which he’s more worried about, her or his program. He lost a female negotiator some time back….”
“Yes,” Eileen said.
“Well, you know then.”
“Yes. Dr. Cooke…”
“Sharyn, please.”
“Sharyn…what’s the prognosis?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.”
“When will you know?” Kling asked.
“When she comes around. When we can make some tests.”
“We don’t want to lose her,” Eileen said.
“Neither does anyone, believe me,” Sharyn said. “That’s why I’m here.”
THAT NIGHT at twenty minutes to eleven—some thirty-five hours after Georgia was shot—the nurse who came into her room for a routine check noticed that she was having difficulty breathing, this despite the fact that she was on a respirator. Alarmed, she reported this to the resident, who examined her briefly and then asked one of his superiors to come have a look at her.
An hour later, just as the midnight shift was coming on, it was concluded that Georgia had contracted aspiration pneumonia. It was the doctors’ surmise that she had breathed vomit into her lungs sometime during the first few minutes after the shooting. The vomiting had been an involuntary reaction to a bullet penetrating the brain. She had undoubtedly sucked in a deep breath, pulling vomit into her nostrils and subsequently into her lungs. The vomit contained stomach acids, which were corrosive. Chemical pneumonia had inevitably and swiftly led to bacterial pneumonia.
They sucked the vomit out of her lungs mechanically.
They began treating her with antibiotics, and they put her on the Positive End Expirator Pressure machine, familiarly called the PEEP and designed to keep the lungs slightly expanded under pressure.
Georgia Mowbry’s postoperative problems were just beginning.
THE MEETING had started at tenP .M., but this was a matter of life or death to them, and so the writers were still talking and arguing at ten minutes past midnight.
The writers called themselves an “alliance.”
The Park Place Writers Alliance.
Park Place was the street on which they met, a little cul-de-sac off Grover Park. Henry Bright, the president of the Alliance, lived in an apartment on Park Place, which was a shitty little street lined with tenements and spindly soot-covered trees. Henry had decorated the walls of the apartment with spray paint. Talk about your top to bottoms, Henry Bright’s apartment was a riot of color. Henry was twenty-two years old and knew just where he wanted to go in this city. Where he wanted to go was to the very top. He wanted to be known through all eternity as the writer who’d thrown up the most tags ever.