by Ed McBain
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 THEMwere 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.
“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’Sfirst 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 sunwas 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’treally 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 wrongnow ?” 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 theeye , 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 NIGHTat twenty minutes to eleven—some thirty-five hours after Georgia was shot—the nurse who c
ame 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 MEETINGhad 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.
In the old days, these writers’ associations prided themselves on the scope of their artwork. Some of them even achieved a small measure of fame. One of them even had his work, such as it was, hanging in museums. Althoughsome people thought it strange that a graffiti writer would be so honored, sincemost people felt these vandals should be hanged by their thumbs in the marketplace. But at least, back then, these writers—with a little encouragement from writers of quite another sort—reallydid consider themselves artists. So when they got together to form these writers’ groups or associations or leagues or unions, as the organizations were variously called, they were doing so to protect their work.
The Park Place Writers Alliance did not use spray paint anymore. They did not throw up any big two-tone pieces or color-blended burners because nowadays either there was paint-resistant material that would cause the paint to run as if it were crying, or else the piece you worked on all night would be taken off with acid the next day, it just didn’t pay anymore. Besides, paint wasn’t for posterity.
What was for posterity was scratching the marker into glass. You used either a key or a ring with a hard stone, if you could afford one, and you scratched the marker into the glass or the plastic, HB for Henry Bright, if you happened to be Henry. If you were one of theother three guys in the Alliance, you scratched either LR or JC or EB. If you worked on abig plate-glass window together, all four of you in the Alliance, then in addition to throwing up your personal marker, you put in the identifying Alliance tag, PPWA, in a corner of the window. This past Saturday night, they’d done a big jewelry store window on Hall Avenue downtown, all four of them etching their markers into the glass, and then throwing up the Alliance tag in the lower right-hand corner. Replace that window, it’d cost the store thousands of dollars. Be easier to leave it there, let the people look in at the jewelry through the initials scratched into the plate glass.
Henry had called the meeting tonight—lastnight, actually, since it was already a quarter past twelve now—because he’d detected that some of the others in the Alliance were running scared. Larry especially—who was only sixteen, but who was an industrious writer, throwing up the LR marker all over town, Larry Rutherford, LR, scratching in the tag with a diamond ring his grandfather had left him—Larry seemed very scared. When, for example, Henry suggested that they all go down to Hall Avenue again thiscoming weekend—“Do the bookstore across the street from the big jewelry store, make it like AllianceAlley , what do you think?”—all Larry said was, “And get ourselveskilled ?”
What they were here discussing tonight was whether they were going to let some fuckin lunatic stand in the way of immortality. Because Henry didn’t care how the others felt about getting the marker out, that was a matter of their own personal aspirations or lack of them, although some measure of Alliance pride was also involved. But his own burning ambition was to become famous all over this city, and then to branch out across the river maybe, make his way west across the entire U.S. of A., throwing up the HB marker on every piece of glass or plastic in the country. HB. For Henry Bright. Ah, yes, the famouswriter , do you mean?
“What I think,” Ephraim said—EB was his marker, for Ephraim Beame, the only black kid in the Alliance—“is we should wait a while before going out again, venturing out, you know, because I like agree with Larry that this person is really some kind of vigilante nut who’s out to get us all, eliminate us, you know, cleanse the city, purify it, is what I think. Of writers, that is,” he added. “Cleanse it of writers.”
“So suppose this guy continues for a month, two months, a year, whatever ,” Henry said, “are we supposed tohide from him all that time? Stayunderground all that time? I really find that extremely chickenshit, Eph, I really do.”
“Thing is,” Ephraim said, “he’s like going aroundshooting people, Henry. It’s one thing to take a stand for what you know is right…”
“Throwing up the markeris right, you’re damn right,” Henry said.
“Am I saying no?” Ephraim asked. “I’m saying what’s right is right, is what I’m saying. But I’malso sayingmight makes right, you know, and this man is out there shootingreal bullets. And dead is dead,” he added.
“The thing we’re discussing here,” Joey said…
Joseph Croatto, whose marker was JC, though sometimes he felt sacrilegious throwing it up.
“…is not whether we’rebrave enough to go out there in the middle of the night to get stalked by some madman who doesn’t recognize what we’re trying toaccomplish in this city…”
“Hear, hear,” Ephraim said.
“…but whether it’s wiser towait a little whilebefore we continue the work.”
“Hear, hear.”
“Because I personally don’t want to wake up with a bullet in my head, thank you,” Joey said, and nodded at Larry, who nodded back.
“Here’s the way I see it,” Larry said.
Sixteen years old with peach fuzz on his face, bright blue eyes, cheeks like a Cabbage Patch doll.
“I think you’re the only one who doesn’t want to cool it awhile, Henry,” he said, and hastily added, “and Iadmire that, I really do. But this man isn’t playing around. And what’s been happening the past week or so has been scaring other writers off the streets. So if this man is out therelooking for writers, and there aren’t any out there, wouldn’t it bedumb of the Alliance to give him exactly what he’slooking for? To provide him with thetargets he wants? We go down to Hall Avenue, like you suggested…”
“I cantaste that fuckin bookstore window,” Henry said.
“Me, too,” Larry said, “don’t you think weall want to do that window? That window isaching to be done. Just across the street from the jewelry store? One of the busiest corners downtown? We do that window you’reright , it’ll be AllianceAlley down there, we’ll befamous! But notnow , Henry. Give this guy a little time to burn himself out….”
“I don’t see any sign of that happening,” Henry said.
“Then give thecops time to catch him….”
“Ha!”
/>
“He’s killed three people already, the cops must havesome kind of line on him,” Ephraim said.
“Just give it a little time,” Joey said.
Henry shook his head and shoved his glasses up higher on his nose. Behind the glasses, his eyes expressed disappointment more than they did anger. He’d been depending on these people, hoping that their vision would match his own. As the oldest person in the Alliance, he had become their natural leader, even if he was shorter than any of the others. Short and a bit squat. In fact, with his spiky hair and his rotund shape, he somewhat resembled a startled porcupine. Sixteen-year-old Larry was taller and much handsomer than Henry was. And now it seemed that he had swayed the others into thinking the way he did.
“If you won’t come with me, I’ll do the window alone,” he said.
They all looked at him.
“And I’m not waiting till the weekend. I’m doing it tonight.” They kept looking at him.
“So who’s with me?” he asked.
No one said a word.
“Okay, the meeting’s over,” Henry said.
It never occurred to him that wanting to carve his name all over the world had something to do with being only five feet six inches tall.
SHE WAS RIGHT,of course, there had to be another one.
He had planned to stop at three, but as usual she was right. You stop at three, she said, they’ll zero in right away. Why would anyone do three and then suddenly quit? This isn’t like deciding toretire after you’ve won three Academy Awards or spent three years on the best-seller list. This is killinggraffiti writers, don’t forget. That’s yourmission , remember? And a person with amission doesn’t stop after the third one.
This was in bed last night.
Lying in bed talking about what they would do after the final murder. Her wondering out loud if there should be five, maybe six of them. Lying there in the purple baby-doll nightgown he’d given her for Christmas, no panties under it, one leg straight out, the other bent, lying on her side that way.