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 secondworst 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 non-practicing 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.
