As politely as she could, she told Langdon she wanted Detective Willis ambed over to Hoch Memorial, half a mile uptown—and three hundred light years away in terms of service and skill, which she did not mention. Langdon looked her dead in the eye and asked, "Why?" "I'd like him to be there," she said. Again, Langdon asked, "Why?" "Because that's where I feel he'll receive the sort of care I want him to have."
"He'll receive excellent care here as well," Langdon said.
"Doctor," Sharyn said, "I really don't want to argue this. The detective needs immediate surgery. I want him ambed over to Hoch Memorial right this minute." "I'm afraid I can't discharge him," Langdon said. "It's not your call to make," Sharyn said. "I run this hospital."
"You don't run the police department," she said. "Either you have an ambulance at the ER door in three minutes flat, or I'll have him nine-elevened out of here. Say, Doctor."
"I can't let you do this," Langdon said.
"Doctor, I'm in charge here," Sharyn said. "This is my job and my mandate. That detective is moving out of here now"
"They'll think it's because St Mary's isn't a good hospital."
"Who are you talking about, Doctor?"
"The media," Langdon said. "They'll think that's why you moved him."
"That is why I'm moving him," Sharyn said coldly and cruelly and mercilessly. "I'm calling Hoch," she said, and turned on her heel, walked to the nurses' station, and snapped her fingers at a telephone. The nurse behind the counter handed it to her at once. Langdon was still floating in the background, looking angry and defeated and sad and somehow pitiable. Dialing, Sharyn told the nurse, "Get an ambulance around to the back door, and wheel the detective out. I'm moving him." Into the phone she said, "Dr Gerardi, please," and waited. "Jim," she said, "this is Sharyn Cooke. I've got a cop with a thigh wound, he's being transferred right this minute from St Mary's." She listened, said, "Tangential," listened again, said, "Nonperforating. It's still in there, Jim, can you prepare an OR and a surgical team, we'll be there in five minutes. See you," she said, and hung up, and looked at the nurse who was standing there motionless. "Is there a problem, Nurse?" she asked.
"It's just . . .," the nurse said, and looked helplessly across the counter to where Langdon was standing. "Dr Langdon?" she asked. "Is it all right to order an ambulance?"
Langdon said nothing for several moments.
Then he said, "Order it," and walked away swiftly, down the long polished tile corridor, not looking back, turning a corner, out of sight.
Sharyn went to Willis where he lay on a wheeled table
behind ER curtains, an oxygen tube in his nose, an IV in his arm.
"I'm getting you out of here," she said.
He nodded.
"You'll be uptown in five minutes."
He nodded again.
"I'll be with you. Do you need anything?"
He shook his head.
Then, quite unexpectedly, he said, "It wasn't Bert's fault."
Section . of the Penal Law stated that a person was guilty of murder in the first degree when he caused the death of a police officer engaged in the course of performing his official duties. Maxie Blaine hadn't killed anyone, but he'd opened fire indiscriminately on a roomful of cops armed with an arrest warrant. This meant they had him cold on five counts of attempted murder one, a Class A- felony punishable by fifteen to life as a minimum on each count. In this city, you didn't shoot a cop and walk. No self-respecting D.A. would even consider a plea when he had four other police officers ready to testify that ole Maxie Blaine here had repeatedly pulled the trigger of the gun that downed a fellow police officer. If they needed civilian corroboration, they were sure they could get that from the eighteen-year-old girl who'd been screaming in Maxie's bed, and whose lawyer had advised her to remain silent until he saw which way the wind was blowing here. The girl's lawyer—whose name was Rudy Ehrlich— didn't yet know the wind was blowing toward lethal injection, the penalty for first-degree murder in this state. So far, all Ehrlich knew was that his client's "friend" had wounded a police detective, and that she'd been a possible witness to the shooting. In such cases, Ehrlich's motto was "Speech is silver, silence is golden." As a matter of fact,
this was Ehrlich's motto in any criminal case. He got a lot of money for this advice, which was only common knowledge to any schoolyard kid who'd ever been frisked for a firearm.
Maxie Blaine knew instinctively and through bitter experience on his meteoric rise through Georgia's criminal justice system that "Silence Is Golden" was really and truly a terrific rule to follow whenever you were dealing with law enforcement types. He also knew that he had just now popped a cop, and he knew in his secret heart of hearts that a month or so ago he had killed a man the media had later identified as a police informer, so long, Ratso. He suspected the reason the cops had come a-rappin on his door at two in the morning was they needed desperately to know had he really done that little rat bastard. Which he wasn't ready to admit since he wasn't pining just yet for a massive dose of Valium.
In an instance such as this, where they already had him on inadvertently plugging a cop in a moment of panic, the damn girl shrieking like a banshee and all, Blaine shrewdly calculated that maybe there was a deal to be made if he played his cards right. So whereas he asked for a lawyer— no experienced felon ever did not ask for a lawyer when he was in custody—he nonetheless figured he'd answer their questions until he saw where they were going. The minute he figured out what they really had here—he didn' t see how they could possibly tie him to the pizzeria shooting—why that was when he could maybe squirm his way out of this, maybe talk the D.A. into covering everything he'd done including the Guido' s thing for a plea that might grant him parole in twenty years, maybe even fifteen. In other words, he thought the way many criminals think: he thought he could outsmart two experienced detectives, a lieutenant who' d seen it all and heard it all, and even his own attorney, a man named Pierce Reynolds, a transplanted good ole boy from Tennessee, who naturally urged silence.
The interrogation started in the lieutenant's office at six o'clock on that morning of December , by which time Blaine's attorney had arrived and consulted with him, and Blaine had been read his rights and verified that he understood them. To protect his own ass in any subsequent client-lawyer law suit, Reynolds went on record as having advised Blaine to remain silent and Blaine went on record as having been so advised. All the bullshit out of the way, the questioning proper began at six-fifteen a.m. with Detective-Lieutenant Peter Byrnes himself eliciting from Maxwell Corey Blaine his full name, address, and place of employment, which was a pool parlor in Hightown, or so he said, but then again he wasn't under oath.
If Blaine was in reality breaking heads for someone linked to the Colombian cartel, as Betty Young had informed them, he couldn't very well tell the cops this was his occupation. Not if he hoped to outfox them and cut a deal later. There was no official police stenographer here as yet, and no one from the District Attorney's Office. Blaine figured the deck was stacked in his favor. The cops figured they could nail him on shooting Willis whenever the spirit moved them. Getting someone to ride uptown from the D.A.'s Office was a simple matter of making a phone call. But they were angling for bigger fish. They were looking for Murder One.
Byrnes opened with a laser beam straight to the forehead.
"Know anyone named Enrique Ramirez?"
Blaine blinked.
"Nossir," he said, "I surely do not."