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
Ed McBam
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' tknow 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 Yf&kk!ft.t coo cS.sM^ywS^ ^we,. To ^j otk, stae, ^ ore to 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 second-worst 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 nonpracticing 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 $,. 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.
As politely as she could, she told Langdon she wanted Detective Willis ambed over to Hoch Memorial, half a mile uptown—and three hundred light years away in terms of service and skill, which she did not mention. Langdon looked her dead in the eye and asked, 'Why?' 'I'd like him to be there,' she said. Again, Langdon asked, 'Why?' 'Because that's where I feel he'll receive the sort of care I want him to have.'
'He'll receive excellent care here as well,' Langdon said.
'Doctor,' Sharyn said, 'I really don't want to argue this. The detective needs immediate surgery. I want him ambed over to Hoch Memorial right this minute.' 'I'm afraid I can't discharge him,' Langdon said. 'It's not your call to make,' Sharyn said. 'I run this hospital.'
'You don't run the police department,' she said. 'Either you have an ambulance at the ER door in three minutes flat, or I'll have him nine-elevened out of here. Say, Doctor.'
'I can't let you do this,' Langdon said.
'Doctor, I'm in charge here,' Sharyn said. 'This is my job and my mandate. That detective is moving out of here now'
'They'll think it's because St Mary's isn't a good hospital.'
'Who are you talking about, Doctor?'
'The media,' Langdon said. 'They'll think that's why you moved him.'
'That is why I'm moving him,' Sharyn said coldly and cruelly and mercilessly. 'I'm calling Hoch,' she said, and turned on her heel, walked to the nurses' station, and snapped her fingers at a telephone. The nurse behind the counter handed it to her at once. Langdon was still floating in the background, looking angry and defeated and sad and somehow pitiable. Dialing, Sharyn told the nurse, 'Get an ambulance around to the back door, and wheel the detective out. I'm moving him.' Into the phone she said, 'Dr Gerardi, please,' and waited. 'Jim,' she said, 'this is Sharyn Cooke. I've got a cop with a thigh wound, he's being transferred right this minute from St Mary's.' She listened, said, 'Tangential,' listened again, said, 'Nonperforating. It's still in there, Jim, can you prepare an OR and a surgical team, we'll be there in five minutes. See you,' she said, and hung up, and looked at the nurse who was standing there motionless. 'Is there a problem, Nurse?' she asked.
'It's just . . .,' the nurse said, and looked helplessly across the counter to where Langdon was standing. 'Dr Langdon?' she asked. 'Is it all right to order an ambulance?'
Langdon said nothing for several moments.
Then he said, 'Order it,' and walked away swiftly, down the long polished tile corridor, not looking back, turning a corner, out of sight.
Sharyn went to Willis where he lay on a wheeled table
behind ER curtains, an oxygen tube in his nose, an IV in his arm.
'I'm getting you out of here,' she said.
He nodded.
'You'll be uptown in five minutes.'
He nodded again.
'I'll be with you. Do you need anything?'
He shook his head.
Then, quite unexpectedly, he said, 'It wasn't Bert's fault.'
Section . of the Penal Law stated that a person was guilty of murder in the first degree when he caused the death of a police officer engaged in the course of performing his official duties. Maxie Blaine hadn't killed anyone, but he'd opened fire indiscriminately on a roomful of cops armed with an arrest warrant. This meant they had him cold on five counts of attempted murder one, a Class A- felony punishable by fifteen to life as a minimum on each count. In this city, you didn't shoot a cop and walk. No self-respecting D.A. would even consider a plea when he had four other police officers ready to testify that ole Maxie Blaine here had repeatedly pulled the trigger of the gun that downed a fellow police officer. If they needed civilian corroboration, they were sure they could get that from the eighteen-year-old girl who'd been screaming in Maxie's bed, and whose lawyer had advised her to remain silent until he saw which way the wind was blowing here. The girl's lawyer—whose name was Rudy Ehrlich— didn't yet know the wind was blowing toward lethal injection, the penalty for first-degree murder in this state. So far, all Ehrlich knew was that his client's 'friend' had wounded a police detective, and that she'd been a possible witness to the shooting. In such cases, Ehrlich's motto was 'Speech is silver, silence is golden.' As a matter of fact,
this was Ehrlich's motto in any criminal case. He got a lot of money for this advice, which was only common
