coming from.
“Did you find the body?” I asked.
They shook their heads in unison.
“No way,” Chip said. “We ran back over to the bank because there were some lights on in the
back, but nobody came to the door, so I went to the phone booth and called the police.”
I asked, “This person who ran away after the shooting, could you guess whether it was a man
or a woman?”
“Man,” they said simultaneously.
That was all they had. It was too foggy to waste any more time there. Stick and I left our cars
in the parking lot and headed for the hospital with Dutch. The lights in the back of the bank
were out when we left.
There were a couple of blue and whites parked at the hospital emergency entrance and one
car that could have been an unmarked police vehicle. The long, beige hallway inside the
emergency doors was empty, as was the emergency operating room. Raines was in ICU,
which was on the second floor.
Four uniformed cops and two plainclothes detectives held the unit captive.
“You taking this one on?” one of them asked Dutch.
“It?s personal” was all the big Dutchman said in return.
The chief surgeon and the resident were there but noncommunicative. They were waiting for
Raines? personal physician. An intern with the trauma unit, however, confirmed what we
already knew and added a few details: that Harry Raines had been shot once in the left
forehead by a large-calibre weapon, that it had been held close enough to cause heavy powder
burning, that he was beyond critical and, as far as the intern was concerned, was moribund.
“He?s a lot more dead than alive,” the young doctor said. “If he lives another hour, the
Catholics?ll probably sanctify the whole wing.”
“How?s that?” Dutch asked.
“Because it would be a miracle,” the young doctor said.
“Any idea what kind of gun did it??” I asked.
“1 don?t know about things like that,” he said. “That?s police work.”
The intensive care unit was a fairly small room with curtained cubicles around its perimeter
for patients and a control bank of machines and monitors at its core. Every cubicle was
monitored by closed-circuit TV. There were three nurses on duty, all of whom seemed very
busy. The two doctors retired to an empty cubicle and pulled the curtain behind them.
