by Bill Mason
I crash into the door and keep going, flying across the top of the staircase and downward before my feet finally find a step and I can grab the banister. I take the stairs four and five at a time, swinging wildly around the landings, expecting another shot any second.
Nothing happens. By the time I hit the bottom floor I’m dizzy from spinning down all those flights, but I’ve made it to the door leading outside and I’m not being followed. I try to remember: Are there windows in the stairwell? Is the shooter up there standing at one of them, just waiting for me to emerge so he can pick me off?
But he’s fifteen stories above me and surely armed with a handgun rather than a rifle. Nobody can hit a moving, weaving target from that distance with a handgun, right? Especially not at night.
There’s not much of a decision to be made. Sure as hell I’m not staying inside to be trapped like an animal, and I’m not going to start a search for another exit, either. Besides, how fast could the guy have made the decision to get to a window rather than chase me, and then actually gotten himself positioned there?
I don’t even slow down but throw the door open and start running, fighting the temptation to go as fast as I can in a straight line, taking the time to move from side to side, wincing in terrified expectation of another shot, or a whole volley of them, because the more shots he fires, the better his odds of hitting me.
Still nothing. No sounds from behind. I’m sweating so hard, my entire middle feels soaked, but finally I’m around another building and out of the guy’s sight. My next worry is how many people that shot must have woken, and that’s when I thank whatever deity might be watching over me that I brought a bicycle and not a car.
I no longer give a shit who sees me. No way they can identify me in the dark, at a distance, and there won’t be any license plate number to jot down, either. I’ve never wanted to be someplace else so badly in my life.
The bike is leaning against a telephone pole. It looks locked but isn’t, the hasp not fully snapped into place. I yank the chain away, grab the handlebars and push the bike forward, jump on while it’s moving and start pedaling furiously. I’m spinning like crazy but don’t want to pause even for the short time it would take to shift to a higher gear. I just want to pedal as hard as I possibly can and put some real distance between me and that building.
It’s at least a mile before I finally slow down to catch my breath. I can’t believe how much I’m sweating. I can feel it dripping down my belly. I can also feel the bullet’s path across my stomach and wonder what that’s going to look like, and how the hell I’m going to explain it to Barbara. It isn’t painful, exactly, just kind of warm and strange.
Then I run out of adrenaline and my legs and arms suddenly turn to jelly. I barely make it off the bike without falling over, I’m so weak and uncoordinated.
I sit down on the sidewalk and pretend to tie my shoes as I wait for control over my limbs to return, my fingers fumbling uselessly at the laces. Some minutes pass and then I struggle clumsily to my feet, walk the bike for about a block, then get on and slowly pedal for home. I stop to stash the goods in Chuck and Jean’s garage across the street. He’s the retired New York City cop I told you about earlier; they’re away for the holidays and I’m keeping an eye on the house for them. I don’t want to turn the overhead light on, so I hide the stuff as best I can in the dark.
I head for my garage and it’s not until I’m inside and turn on the light that I realize I haven’t been sweating. My shirt and pants are full of blood. As I stand there, staring down in disbelief, it’s running onto the floor and slowly pooling at my feet.
Later in the bathroom, after loading my clothes into a plastic bag and finding the spent bullet in my jacket lining, I mopped up the garage floor and took stock. There was a clean round hole just below my lowest left rib and a more jagged one on my right side, and things were starting to hurt. I realized I hadn’t been quite as fortunate as I’d first thought, but I was still damned lucky. The round had passed clean through without hitting anything vital. I’d seen plenty of old Westerns, so I knew I’d be okay.
The bleeding had slowed considerably and I set about cleaning up the wounds, trying desperately to stop myself from crying out as I dabbed at the holes with antiseptic. The pain was getting real bad, real fast, and I realized trying to do this myself wasn’t going to work. Reluctantly, I woke up Barbara.
“What’s the matter?” she murmured groggily.
“Don’t worry, I’m okay,” I said quickly, which was when she realized I probably wasn’t and came fully awake. “I had a little accident.”
“What kind of accident?” She was already peeling back the covers and sitting up.
“I got shot.”
She knew better than to waste time asking questions. She was scared half to death but kept a tight grip on herself as she finished cleaning up the wounds and put on bandages, tightly in case more bleeding was on the way. I threw down a couple of shots of vodka and got into bed, trying to sleep even while Barbara quivered in anxiety beside me. But it hurt too bad to lie down, and the only way I could get a little relief was to sit upright in a chair.
Barb called her brother Augie, who had recently moved to Florida and lived nearby, and he came to the house right away. The unusual sounds in the middle of the night woke Suzi and Laura up, and they came padding down the hall just as Augie walked in. Barb intercepted them before they could reach our bedroom and told them that Daddy had a little bellyache.
“Why is Uncle Augie here for just a bellyache?” Laura wanted to know. You could never get anything past that kid.
“In case we need something from the drugstore,” Barb answered.
“How come he didn’t get it on his way over?” Suzi chimed in.
Barb hustled them back to bed and then came back to the bedroom. There was really nothing for Augie to do at the moment, but he understood why Barb would want him to be there, and he eventually fell asleep at the foot of the bed. Barb stayed up with me for the rest of the night, both of us hoping that my misery would subside after a few hours.
It only got worse. As the sun came up, I was in terrible pain and couldn’t begin to think about going to work or even eating. Mark knocked on the bedroom door, wanting to know what was going on. He’d slept through the previous night’s commotion.
“You answer him,” Barb said, a wise piece of advice.
“Bellyache,” I replied, as lightly as I could. “Something I ate.” The pain of calling out like that was so bad, I almost passed out.
Barb and Augie went to the kitchen to make breakfast for the kids, who knew from the way their mother and uncle were behaving that it was more than an upset stomach.
After going across the street to see if any blood had gotten onto Chuck and Jean’s garage floor, Augie went to get me some antibiotics, but they didn’t make any difference I could notice. I stayed in the bedroom all day so the kids couldn’t see me, then took something strong that night that forced me into a fitful sleep. I awoke about four A.M. in agony I never would have believed possible. It felt like someone was waving a blowtorch around inside my gut. I started thrashing and left the bedroom in order not to awaken Barbara, and found myself alone with feverish thoughts whirling around in my head.
Had the crime been reported? The apartment’s occupants had been out of town, although I didn’t know exactly how long they’d be gone. Had the shooter, who was probably a security guard, seen which unit I’d come out of? Did he even know a burglary had been committed? Maybe not! Except who the hell would shoot some guy who was just walking around, even if he didn’t live there? So he must have seen me coming out of the apartment, must have concluded I’d robbed it, and therefore must have reported it.
Wait a minute. How could he tell if anything had been taken if it wasn’t his place? Well, even if he didn’t know for sure there had been a robbery, he knew for damned sure he’d fired that shot at somebody, and he probably traced my steps and saw blood. So he must have alerted the
authorities to be on the lookout for someone seeking medical attention for a gunshot wound. Damn!
Wait again. Maybe he didn’t know how bad it had been. Hell, even I hadn’t known until later. Except he’d seen the blood, probably a lot of it, so he knew he’d hit me good. Or had my clothes soaked it up so thoroughly at first that none had dripped off? On the other hand, wasn’t it illegal to shoot at a fleeing suspect? Did that apply to civilians protecting their own property? Except it probably wasn’t his. Would he therefore keep quiet about the whole thing to protect himself?
Was I even thinking about all of this coherently?
Limp with fatigue after hours of struggling against the awful pain, I came back to bed but was writhing uncontrollably within minutes. The light snapped on and Barbara sat up, pulling the covers off me before I had a chance to snatch them back.
“Jesus Christ!” she cried after one look.
My belly had swollen up so much, I looked six months pregnant. The bandages were soaked with blood and some had seeped onto the bedsheets. Barbara’s eyes were huge and horror-stricken as her hand flew to her mouth. She was paralyzed with fright, and tears began to run down her face. I rolled over and tried to stand up, but it was absurd even to try, and I fell back onto the bed.
Barbara unfroze and reached for the phone on her nightstand.
“What’re you doing?” I croaked with no small effort.
“Calling an ambulance,” she replied as she picked up the receiver.
“No!” Despite the pain, I stretched across her and pressed the receiver back onto the cradle. “Are you crazy?”
“Are you?” she shot back.
I couldn’t let her call for an ambulance. This wasn’t a cut from slicing bagels, it was a gunshot wound, and you don’t get gunshot wounds fixed up without people asking a lot of questions. Doctors have a legal obligation to report such cases immediately.
A lot of people in dangerous criminal occupations—bank robbers, Mob buttons and the like—have lines into crooked doctors who get paid enormous sums of money to treat injuries suffered in the commission of crimes. I’d never inquired into those sources because there was no way to do so without giving an awful lot away, and that would have violated my self-protection strategy. Besides, it never really occurred to me that I might get hurt on a score, except for maybe falling or cutting myself, injuries that could easily be explained and passed off as routine. I wasn’t a violent criminal, I didn’t carry a weapon and I never did a job when people were present, at least not on purpose. There was always the possibility of getting caught, of course, and it would be my intention to do everything possible to get away, but I’d never envisioned hurting anyone to do it.
Now I was in a serious fix. I could no longer pretend this was a flesh wound that would pass, given time. My gut was badly infected and seemed to be getting worse by the second. The pain was unbelievable, and no amount of alcohol or home therapy was going to help me deal with it.
Barbara wisely stayed quiet and let me come to the inevitable conclusion rather than provoke me into a useless debate. It was fairly self-evident: If I didn’t get some help, I was going to die.
On the other hand, if I went to the hospital, I was definitely going to jail.
“What’s it going to be?” Barbara finally demanded.
“Help me up,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to Cleveland.”
It wasn’t some damned fool notion of going home to die. Uncle Rudy’s son, who was not just my cousin but a good friend as well, was a surgeon in a prestigious hospital in Cleveland. He was also part-owner of some of the buildings I managed. Barbara called him and told him what was going on, as vaguely as possible but enough for him to know it was a genuine emergency. They made some arrangements, then she pulled two suitcases out of a closet and brought them into the bedroom.
I shook my head at the larger one. “I’m going alone,” I told her.
She didn’t take me seriously, probably thinking it was some kind of obligatory protest I didn’t mean. She hoisted the suitcases onto the bed and flipped them open. “You can’t go,” I said, and this time she stopped moving and asked me again if I was crazy.
Maybe, but I knew what I was doing. “Christmas,” I said, trying to minimize my words because it was too painful to talk. “The kids . . . we can’t both be gone.”
“You can’t go alone,” she replied, waving a hand at me as though taking in the totality of my condition. “You can barely stand up. You won’t make it.”
But I knew I’d won that argument before it had barely begun. The kids still didn’t know the truth about what had happened, and it was important that we not alarm them any more than they already were. In a family as tight as ours, for even one of us not to be home with them over Christmas was unheard of. For both of us to be gone was unthinkable.
“We can take the kids with us,” Barb said, but it was perfunctory and halfhearted and the decision had already been made.
Barb tried telling the kids that it was just another business trip to Cleveland, but that didn’t fool them for a second. I always knew in advance when those trips were coming up and made a lot of extra fuss over the kids for a day or two before I left. This time I hadn’t even said good-bye. Barb finally told them I was very sick with a stomach ailment and wanted to go to a doctor I trusted back home. Laura was only five and might not have understood the specifics, but she understood her mother’s voice and sensed the fear in it. Suzi and Mark, despite their own anxiety, did their best to console her, but at thirteen and eleven years of age, they still had a few days of school before the holiday break, which left Laura at home with Augie while Barb took me to the airport. His somber mood and the muffled phone calls all day long would only contribute to our youngest daughter’s growing unease.
Barb had booked me on a midmorning flight. It was one of the worst days of my life. The pain was utterly unbearable, but I had to put on a good front so as not to arouse any suspicion or prompt some well-intentioned airline employee into offering too much assistance. Barb had packed a small carry-on for me, with the lightest stuff she could find, but I would have been better off traveling with nothing. Just lifting it off the ground was torture, and getting it into an overhead bin was out of the question. Rather than ask for assistance, I kicked it under my seat.
As the plane rose, the pain got even worse, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was because the lessening cabin pressure caused the trapped gases from the infection to expand, swelling me up even more. The slightest bit of turbulence that other passengers barely noticed—even someone in the same row shifting around and jostling the seats—was like a spear jabbed into my inflamed belly, and when the plane dropped heavily onto the tarmac at Cleveland’s Hopkins International, I felt myself starting to faint.
My cousin Dan Renner was waiting at the gate. When he spotted me, he broke into a smile and raised his hand, but in a few short seconds the smile disappeared and his hand came down slowly, as though he’d forgotten about it. From the way he looked, I could only imagine how I must have looked.
Dan had left his car at the curb, which you could still do in those days, and if your car sported M.D. plates, you could let it sit there as long as you wanted. Once we were in it, instead of immediately driving off, he twisted to the side and reached for my shirt. His fingertips merely grazing the fabric caused a stab of pain to shoot through me, and I pushed his hand away. He waited while I unbuttoned the shirt myself, then he took a look.
“Holy fuck,” he muttered, which is not something you want to hear from a physician who’s seen it all and isn’t supposed to get fazed by anything anymore. Then he said, “Don’t move,” and got out of the car. I watched him go to a pay phone, dial a number, wait a few seconds, then begin talking and gesturing with his hands. He looked at his watch a few times during the conversation, then hung up and came back to the car. I asked him what that was all about.
“Getting an O.R. set up,”
he answered.
Surgery? “How bad is it?”
He didn’t answer right away, probably thinking about how to put it into layman’s terms. “You’re ripped to shreds inside,” he finally answered, and let it go at that.
So much for old Westerns and bullets passing clean through. “It’s a gunshot wound,” I said, worried about his reputation and professional standing. “You’re going to have to report it.”
He shook his head, then pointed to the places on my shirt that sat over the two holes on either side of my rib cage. “Damnedest speargun accident I’ve ever seen.”
Less than an hour later I was on the table.
At some point while I was under in the O.R., something extraordinary happened to me. I dreamed that I was in a long tunnel heading toward a blinding white light. I felt more at peace than I ever had in my life, perfectly at ease, perfectly content. I was drawn by that light but in no particular hurry to reach it. Then, without warning, the light began to dim and I felt my tranquility waver. The light kept dropping in intensity, the tunnel began to dissolve, and that was all I could remember.
I told Barbara about it by phone that night from the ICU, and she passed it off as a nice anesthesia-induced dream after two days of nonstop suffering.
Once I was safely out of the woods, Dan revealed something to me about how the surgery had gone. “You were clinically dead for a few seconds,” he said. “We couldn’t get a heartbeat. Gave us a helluva scare.” It wasn’t until years later that I put those two things together and realized I’d had an absolutely classic near-death experience.
In forty-eight hours I was out of the ICU but stayed in the hospital for another eight days, missing both Christmas and New Year’s with my wife and kids. My good buddy Bill Welling and his wife went to our house to help out. I had a lot of time to think, and one of the things that struck me was that all of a sudden my little hobby wasn’t quite so much fun anymore. With all the good luck I’d had, it had only taken one tiny turn of events, a two-second accident of timing, for me to get smacked across the face with the reality of what kind of danger I’d been subjecting myself to.