BODY SCISSORS
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I
shot down Interstate 35, veered off downtown and headed
west along Sixth Street. It was quiet for the downtown
barhopping street, this being a Tuesday, and the lights
and siren helped. I also had the FM radio blaring and
the window open, hoping to clear my head. I'd had two
margaritas at the restaurant—Rachel only knew about
one owing to a quick deal I worked with the hostess while
Rachel was in the ladies' room, before the Tierneys arrived—and
the second margarita was a double. Reformed party girl
Rachel got nervous watching me have more than one drink.
I
flipped channels. "...Persian Gulf. Beginning
at three o'clock this morning, an air assault on the city
of Baghdad..." Flip. Singing, "...I'm
all strung out on heroin, on the ou-outskirts of town." Off.
I
turned up West Lynn, looped left around the school and
turned right up tiny Confederate Avenue to see five patrol
cars, two ambulances and a fire truck, the FD always the
first on the scene. I parked as close as I could, adding
to the spectacle, and waded through the crowd of uniforms
and onlookers, my badge held high.
I
said, "Homicide." Two clusters of emergency
medical techs didn't blink. The five patrols spun around,
four white men and one black. I said, "Talk to me."
One
patrol said, "The neighbors heard shots—"
"One
shot," another one said.
"Whatever,
and this woman screaming bloody murder. They called 911.
No one was in a rush to get outside till they were sure
she was alone." I stepped into the house.
In
the far corner of the front room, four white-shirted EMTs
clustered around a petite black woman who was sitting
upright, sobbing. They'd wrapped her in a blanket. Her
skin was damp, and she was shaking. Periodically, she'd
stop crying and let out a gut-wrenching scream that stopped
everyone dead. A second EMT cluster kneeled on the rug
around what had to be a small body.
The
black patrolman said, "The woman, sir. It's Virginia
Key."
I
said, "Who?"
I peeked over the EMTs to get a look at the boy on the
golden carpet. They had a tube in his throat and a drip
in his ann, EKG beeping and the knock-and-wheeze of a
breathing machine. They pumped and pounded and shocked
him, watched his heart and his brain function on mobile
screens. I whispered to a patrol, "How long have
they been at this?"
"Since
before we got here."
Virginia
Key screamed out what may have been "Ruby!"
and tried to get up. The techs held her down in her chair,
and she broke into sobs again.
I
shifted close enough to get a better look at the boy's
face, round and pudgy with baby fat, black features and
the frightening gray-white pallor of shock and blood loss.
A baby ghost.
A
thousand factors hang in the balance when EMTs try to
save a life. Death, coma. Lack of oxygen to the brain
can cause pennanent brain damage, a living death. Maybe
the bullet hit his spine. He could lose mobility, be confined
to a wheelchair, lose the power to speak. His life from
this random moment on could be an endless sea of suffering.
Even a well-intended blood transfusion could kill him.
But
scariest of all is that while we say he's "dying,"
while his heart and lungs and brain are pulling with everything
they've got, while his crimson blood makes deepening puddles
on the amber carpet, he's still 100 percent alive. He
can be close to dead, near dead, but never partly dead.
All that's alive in him will do anything to stay alive.
And it won't give up smoothly.
Behind
that cluster of technicians, under a blanket I lifted
lay another body, even smaller. A baby-faced girl with
a bloody bullet hole in her forehead, the very spot where
she should have, just then, been getting a goodnight kiss.
Whatever heroic act the EMTs pulled off with the boy,
they'd still have lost one. Virginia Key sobbed.
The
EMTs loaded the boy onto a stretcher, oxygen and IVs and
EKGs and everything else short of a battery plugged into
him. I propped the door open and stepped outside in the
moonlit cold to let them pass. Another siren approached
the house, a light flashing from the dashboard of the
blue Chrysler of Lieutenant Miles Niederwald, my CO. I
moved away from the crowd and waved. Miles's car weaved
up the street, bounced up the curb and onto the lawn,
making me jump aside as he ripped to a halt, tearing up
grass where I'd been standing.
"What
the fuck?!" I shouted. "What are you doing here?
Go home."
He swung his door open and struggled to his feet. The
gradual shift over the last few years, from excessive
drinking to an all-liquid diet, had lost Miles maybe thirty
of his extra hundred pounds, making his remaining fat
hang on him like a half-empty mail sack. Burst blood vessels
reddened his nose and cheeks and the rims of his eyelids,
the lowers hanging open as if to catch rainwater. Sparse
white hair completed the picture of a decaying, sixty-five-year-old
drunk. He was forty-eight. But he'd looked out for me,
covered for me at the risk of looking bad himself, in
my screw-up months after my partner Joey's death. There
wasn't much I wouldn't do for Miles now. "We're shifting
the order," he said. "Torbett's in charge. You
get the next one."
"What?"
"Two-man
job," he said. "You're the second man. But Torbett's
in charge.
Miles looked around the front-yard crowd and eyeballed
the black patrol officer, who saw Miles and nodded toward
the house. A station wagon from the medical examiner's
office arrived to pick up the little girl's body.
In
the lit-up darkness, Torbett, the third detective on a
one- detective scene, rode up the street in a somber blue
Ford, driving a Sunday-straight line that put Miles's
serpentine trail to shame. He pulled up to a free stretch
of curb and got out, already suspicious. A blue zipper
jacket and slacks took the place of the conservative suit
he wore to work, twelve months a year, without fail. But
this was an emergency. "What's going on?"
I looked at Miles. "I get it."
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