past when I'd found Alexa at Slade's house in Compton. Chooch's dark features were pinched. The fingers on his right hand were crossed as he waited for my answer.
'She's stable. The next forty-eight hours will tell.' 'But… is she? She got shot in the head. Is that…?' 'Serious,' I said. 'I won't lie to you, son. It's bad, but she's alive. Beyond that, I just don't know.'
We sat on the vinyl sofa and played eye tag with the thirty or more cops waiting with us. As before, they kept getting calls and leaving, new officers taking their place. I opened my cell and scanned the contact numbers looking for Luther Lexington, a neurosurgeon at UCLA. I had worked on his daughter Levonda's murder two years earlier.
Levonda had been visiting her grandmother in South Central when she accidentally became an innocent victim in a senseless drive-by. I'd worked the case for almost two months before getting a ballistics match on a liquor store shooting. I finally put the case down, busting two members of the Grape Street Crips in Watts. Luther said he'd never be able to pay me back. We were friends, but whenever we talked, I could feel sadness coming off of him in waves. Levonda's ghost was standing between us. No matter how hard we tried, I was a reminder of that tragic day.
I dialed his office in Westwood and his receptionist put me right through. 'Luther, it's Shane Scully,' I said after he picked up.
'I saw it on TV. I tried to call you at the office and at home,' he said. 'Your Lieutenant took a message. How's she doing?'
'She's in an induced coma. You know what the Glasgow Coma Scale is?' I asked, knowing he must.
'What's her number?'
'Between four and five,' I said. 'She's stable, kind of, and her brain stem is functioning.'
I got up and moved away from Chooch. I didn't want him to overhear any of this. I walked into the corridor, heading toward a small patio at the end of the hall. But some news crews were waiting there, so I turned and headed the other way.
'Did they also give you a GOS?' Luther asked.
'What the hell's that?'
'Glasgow Outcome Scale. It's determined by a lot of diagnostic stuff. If she's in an induced coma, it may still be too early to get an estimate. GOS measures ICP, pupil dilation, motor activity recovery. Regeneration of reflexes, stuff like that. It attempts to predict survival rates.'
'They didn't say,' I muttered. 'The trauma ward doc is a neurosurgeon named Romer. He told me it's a right side transverse injury, temporal lobe to parietal lobe, but that it didn't cross some plane.'
'The midcoronal plane,' Luther said. 'If the bullet didn't cross from the right side into the left, that's good. They'll probably line up a team. Neurologists, otolaryngologists, a vascular surgeon, some head and neck people.'
'Luther, I want you to take the case. I want to transfer her to UCLA where you are.'
'Let's not talk about that yet. Give me the doc's name again. I didn't have a pencil before. But you need to know she's in a good place. USC is a level-one trauma center and an excellent neurosurgical facility.'
After I gave him John Romer's name, there was a long pause. I filled the space and said, 'He made it sound pretty bad, Luther.'
'I won't kid you, Shane. A four or five GCS is hairy.'
'The doc here said I shouldn't hope for too much. That I should start preparing for the worst.'
'Okay, Shane. One thing you need to understand is the Glasgow Coma Scale is just a scale. It's not carved on stone tablets.'
'Yeah, but '
'Doctors use it to try and predict who will make it and who won't. If a case is deemed hopeless, then generally, treatment isn't advised. Obviously, if you don't treat a four or a five, you're gonna get a pretty shitty outcome. In other words, the scale itself can skew the results. You understand what I'm saying?'
'Yeah, I guess.'
'A couple more things to remember. When it comes to head injuries, nobody knows anything. The brain is a damned complicated organ and we don't understand exactly how it works. We have to remember that a person with a brain injury is a person first, and a patient second. Alexa is precious, so we're never gonna quit on her, okay? And that could affect her survival and recovery rate.'
'I understand. Thanks.'
'I'm not through. The next thing I want you to remember is, no two brain injuries are exactly the same. The effects vary greatly from person to person.'
I hoped he wasn't just trying to make me feel better.
'The effects of a brain injury depend on a zillion factors,' he continued, 'including location, track of the bullet, severity of the injury, as well as the age and health of the person involved. I had a patient last year who was a gunshot victim with a transverse injury. He was twenty-eight and in great shape. He was a four GOS when I got him. Thirty-two days later I shipped him home. Yesterday he was shooting baskets behind his garage.'
'Please make her better, Luther. I can't live without her.'
'Yes you can, Shane. Just like I learned to live without Levonda.'
'What do I do?'
'You hit your knees, babe. Get the Boss working on it.' So Chooch and I went down to the little chapel on the first floor, and prayed.
Chapter 21
Romer is a good doc.' Luther Lexington was standing in the hall outside the trauma ward speaking with Chooch and me. It was four-thirty that same afternoon. He was tall, with a muscular build, and had played halfback at Cal State in the eighties. Now he was the chief of neurosurgery at UCLA and, according to the Internet search I'd done two years earlier while investigating his daughter's case, was regarded as one of the foremost neurosurgeons in Los Angeles. A perfect inner-city success story, until his only daughter was killed by that stray bullet.
'Can she come back from this, Doctor Lexington?' Chooch asked.
'You and your dad have some tough decisions to make. I just completed a preliminary exam and checked her chart. She's not in good shape, but there is some positive stuff. As I already told you, we're lucky the bullet didn't cross the midline. But right now she's not responding to stimuli and her brain waves are not good.'
I was confused. 'But you said '
'I know what I said, Shane. I also said nobody knows anything. We can make all the skill moves and treat her with the best procedures and we will but the outcome is in God's hands.'
'I want to transfer her to UCLA,' I said. 'I want you to take over the case.'
'The only difference between this hospital and mine is I'm more familiar with the doctors I would put on the team at UCLA. But that has to be weighed against the risk of moving her. If we Medivac Alexa by ambulance or even helicopter, there's an hour, maybe more, where if she suffers a secondary brain insult, she'll be between ICUs and very vulnerable. But in the end, it's your call.'
'I want home field advantage. I want her with you in a place you're familiar with, with doctors you choose.'
'Okay, but I can't move her for a day or so, until she's more stable. For now we'll monitor her, keep her intracranial pressure down, watch for infection. In a day or so we can make another evaluation and see where that leads us.'
'Luther, thank you for being here.'
'Hey, Shane, you didn't have to keep working Levonda's case. You never quit until you found those guys. That's worth a lot to me.'
'It was my job.'
'And now, Alexa is mine.'
I shook his hand with both of mine.
'You two need to take turns sleeping here for the next day or two,' he said. Then he wrote a number on the
