The Last Dance (19 page)

“There's a gun!” Meyer shouted back to Willis, and ran through the doorway, firing in the direction of the muzzle flashes. The girl was screaming hysterically now. The guy in his underwear was blasting away at anything that came through that door, hitting nothing but the door and the doorjamb until Willis, the smallest of the targets, came in like a dancer and took a hit in his thigh where there was no vest to protect it. The slug spun him around. His leg slid out from under him.

The guy at the dresser suddenly realized there were five guys with heavy assault weapons here, and only one of them was down. He could keep firing away for the rest of the night, with that crazy bitch on the bed screaming and screaming, or he could call some kind of truce here before somebody riddled him like a polka dot pie.

“Cool it, boys,” he said, and threw down the gun.

Brown swatted him with an open hand that felt like a ten-pound hammer.

On the floor, Willis was trying to stanch the flow of blood from his thigh.

The one thing that could take all the joy out of police work was the sudden realization that it wasn't all fun and games. The graveyard shift had relieved at a quarter to midnight. The assault team had arrived a half hour later, to begin gearing up in the locker room. Now, at a little past four
A.M.
, almost every detective on the squad came to the building on Grover Avenue, wanting to know what the hell had happened. Men not due to relieve until eight that morning
came in because they'd “heard” something. Men who were supposed to be on vacation or out sick came drifting back to the squadroom, wanting to know all the details.

Sergeant Murchison told them Hal Willis had got shot, something all of them already knew or they wouldn't have flocked back here. What they wanted was
details,
man, but the only people who
had
the details were the four other cops who'd been along on the bust. Two of them, Kling and Brown, were locked in with the lieutenant and Maxie Blaine. The other two, Carella and Meyer, were at St. Mary's Hospital with Willis. There was no one accessible who seemed to have any hard information, and so the gathered detectives settled for speculation instead.

All they knew was that something had gone terribly wrong in that apartment. And since Bert Kling had been leading the assault, the musing cops began thinking perhaps he was the one who'd done something wrong and was therefore somehow responsible for Willis being in the hospital. On the other hand, some of the detectives began thinking that maybe Willis himself had been responsible for his “accident,” and this led to the further consideration that possibly he was a hard-luck cop. Because either he wasn't doing his job right—and this was merely whispered—or else he was jinxed. Either way, he was not a man to be partnered with. Police work was dangerous. You did not want to be riding with a hoodoo jinx of a cop who raised the odds. Or so some of the detectives on the squad began thinking, and a few actually began saying, on that bleak December morning. Loyalty among policemen was somewhat like loyalty among soldiers. When the shit was flying, it was all for one and one for all. But that didn't mean you had to go out drinking together after the battle was fought and won. Or lost, as seemed to be the case tonight, despite the fact that an arrest had been made. All in all, Willis getting shot cast a pall over the squadroom that made business as usual seem not as musketeerlike as it appeared on television.

In the squadroom that early morning, there was the usual collection
of miscreants dragged in the night before: your snatch of hookers, your stealth of burglars, your clutch of muggers, your dime bag of pushers. Hookers were normally treated with jolly forbearance, the cops copping an occasional feel when opportunity allowed, the girls engaging in mock barter for leniency though they knew from experience that none was in the offing. This morning, it was different. The girls rounded up the night before were brusquely herded into the wagons that would take them downtown to Central Booking, no Sally-and-Sue banter this morning; they were whores, and a cop had been shot, and there was no time for jovial bullshit.

Burglars—unless they were junkie burglars—were usually treated with some measure of respect. For reasons understood only by cops, a burglar was mysteriously considered to be some kind of gentleman, even though he invaded a person's home, violated his privacy, and ran off with his personal goods. Professional burglars were very rarely violent. Cops appreciated this. They would kick a
junkie
burglar's ass six times around the block, but they would treat a
pro
like an equal who merely happened to be on the opposite side of the law. Not this morning. This morning, a cop had been shot, and there was no Hello-George-When-Did-You-Get-Out familiarity. This morning, everybody was a fucking criminal and everybody was guilty.

This morning, the victimizers suffered most.

Assault was never a very popular crime, but this morning if you'd beaten up an old lady in the park and stolen her purse, you were in for it, man. A minor assault wasn't the same as shooting somebody, but to the cops of the Eighty-seventh Precinct, it came damn close on this morning when one of their own had been assaulted with a deadly weapon. But if you had to be detained at the Eight-Seven this morning, the
worst
thing to be was a narcotics peddler. Too many police officers had been shot and killed by men selling dope to school kids, and whereas such criminals were never made to feel welcome in any precinct in the city, this morning the association of
narcotics to murder and especially the murder of policemen was very keenly felt here at the Eight-Seven—especially when word had it that the perp being interrogated by Kling and Brown was an enforcer for the Colombian cartel.

Even aware of recent screaming headlines and protests and marches to City Hall, even cognizant of a public scrutiny that could escalate minor incidents into federal cases, the cops of the Eight-Seven were a mite careless this morning, if not downright reckless, shoving shackled prisoners into holding cells or vans when a mere invitation might have sufficed, using abusive and derisive language, acting-out all their personal fears, rages, and hatreds, treating criminals of any color or stripe exactly like the scumbags, shitheads, and evil sons of bitches they were, while at the same time themselves behaving like the brutal, detestable pricks the citizens of this city always
knew
they were.

Crime did not pay on this particular Thursday morning.

Not with a cop in St. Mary's Hospital.

She had known Kling was leading a No-Knock arrest early this morning and when she'd first answered the phone and was informed that there was a cop down and he'd been taken to St. Mary's with what was first reported as a stomach wound, she thought it might be Kling. She was relieved to learn that he hadn't been the victim, but any cop shot was a problem for Sharyn Cooke because she was a deputy chief surgeon in the police department and her job was to make sure any cop injured on her watch received the best treatment this city had to offer.

The unfortunate spelling of Sharyn's first name was due to the fact that her then thirteen-year-old, unwed mother didn't know how to spell Sharon. This same mother later put her 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 color ever appointed to the job she now held. Actually,
her skin was the color of burnt almond, her eyes the color of loam. Off the job, she often wore smoky blue eye shadow and lipstick the color of burgundy wine. To work, she wore no makeup at all. High cheekbones, a generous mouth, and black hair worn in a modified Afro gave her the look of a proud Masai woman. At five-nine, she always felt cramped in the compact automobile she drove and was constantly adjusting the front seat to accommodate her long legs. It took her forty minutes to drive from her apartment at the farther reaches of Calm's Point to St. Mary's Hospital in the depths of lower Isola, close by the apartment building in which Maxie Blaine had been captured. St. Mary's was perhaps the second-worst hospital in the city, but that was small consolation.

A visit to Willis in the ER assured Sharyn that this wasn't the stomach wound she'd been dreading, but some two to three percent of all fatal bullet wounds occurred in the lower extremities and the bullet was still lodged in his thigh, close to the femoral artery. She did not want some jackass fresh out of medical school in the Grenadines to be poking around in there and possibly causing severe hemorrhaging. She went immediately to the head of the hospital, a nonpracticing physician named Howard Langdon. Langdon was wearing a gray flannel suit with wide lapels that had gone out of style ten years ago. He was wearing a pink shirt and a knit tie a shade darker than the suit. He had white hair and a white goatee. He looked as if his picture should have been on a fried chicken carton.

Langdon had once been a very good surgeon, but that didn't excuse the way he now ran St. Mary's. Sharyn 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. Sharyn wasn't about to let one of them languish here at St. Mary's.

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 125.27 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-1 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.