Chapter 2

They hooked me up with some fluids in the ambulance, but I couldn’t get anything for the pain until we got to the ER. At least I was wearing the uniform, which meant they pushed me through the line, since a simple bullet wound in New York City doesn’t always get you fixed up right away.

They took some x-rays and determined that the bullet was a through and through, but they didn’t like what they saw on it and scheduled me for surgery. Once I’d heard that the bullet passed through and wasn’t still there, I’d assumed they’d just clean the wound, stitch me up and send me home, since that’s what happened to the guys on the force who’d gotten hit somewhere non-vital. They admitted me and transferred me up to the pre-op ward, but it took almost an hour and a half for someone to explain to me why I needed surgery. Thankfully, they’d given me pain meds, so I wasn’t being tortured while I waited.

I also had visits from my shift commander and some of the guys from work, partially to check on me and partially to get what they needed to fill out reports. They assigned it to a detective, but other than Julian’s and my descriptions of the kid, they didn’t have anything else on him.

He wasn’t a regular in the store and the cameras in the bodega were all for show, so everyone knew they’d never find him. This would just end up as one more unsolved shooting. A reporter came by and got some statements and snapped some pictures, but I wasn’t seriously wounded and the story wasn’t all that compelling, so no one was overly excited. If this had been a smaller jurisdiction it might have been a big deal, but a non-fatal leg wound was just a statistic in New York City, not an actual story.

“Officer Brewer?” the doctor said when he came into my hospital room.

“Yeah,” I said. “No one would tell me downstairs why I needed to get surgery. It’s been a while so I’m guessing it isn’t urgent. Can you tell me what’s happening?”

“I can. The surgeon who did the consult on your x-rays was concerned by a deformation on the bone where it looks like the bullet hit and changed trajectory before it left your leg. Have you had surgery in the past on this leg?”

“Yes. I played very briefly in the NFL and took a bad hit that shattered a section of the bone. They had to reconstruct that section of the bone and put a plate in to hold it all together.”

“That makes sense. It looks like the bullet clipped the plate as it passed through and deformed it. We’re concerned about the long-term damage of that deformed plate, especially since it looks like the bullet sheared off a bit which might cause it to be cutting into the muscle near it. We want to go in and at the very least replace that plate so you aren’t continually tearing your muscle every time you walk.”

“Yeah, I would prefer not to have that. Will I be able to walk like normal after this?”

It had taken a bunch of physical therapy, almost a year, to be able to walk without support after my initial injury and it still hurt like a bitch in cold weather.

“We aren’t seeing any major damage to any of your connective tissue or the bone, so baring any shearing damage or spidering from the connection points of the plate, you should be okay. You’ll probably be on crutches for a few weeks and a cane for a month or two while your muscle heals, but after that everything should return to normal.”

They ran some tests and were in and out all day, but apparently, they weren’t that concerned about it, because I didn’t end up going into surgery until almost nine that night, with a different surgeon than the guy I’d seen that morning.

Since I was on pain meds, I was mostly bored more than anything else. I wasn’t surprised my wife never came by. Odds were she never went home after storming out the night before and didn’t know anything had happened to me, and it was doubtful she’d come and check on me even if she did. She’d always been kind of heartless with very little caring for people that couldn’t do something for her, but I’d been able to ignore that personality trait when it had been directed at other people.

The doctors said the surgery went well, but all the memories of discomfort and annoyance I had after my football injury came rushing back as they discharged me from the hospital.

I got back to my apartment around lunch the next day to find it completely cleaned out. I’d like to say I was surprised that Terri would have used my hospital stay as an opportunity to take everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the apartment, but I wasn’t. This was exactly as petty as she could be.

She’d taken everything from the bed and TV all the way down to the shampoo out of the shower and the silverware out of the drawers. Hell, she’d taken all the hangers, leaving my clothes in a pile on the floor.

The worst part was, she hated most of the stuff we had. She always complained it was cheap and ugly, which was generally true, but New York City was crazy expensive and neither of us made enough to really afford anything that didn’t come flat in a box for us to build ourselves.

This was all a problem for tomorrow, really. I was exhausted and was supposed to go by the precinct in the morning for a meeting with my union rep and my lieutenant to find out how this would affect my position on the force. The couple of guys that stopped by told me word had already traveled the entire precinct that a small child got the drop on me and there’d even been a small story about it in one of the local rags, and it wasn’t going over well.

I knew Julian didn’t have any working cameras and the very brief report I’d written up at the request of my PBA rep had been extremely dry and to the point, which meant the only other person who could have talked about what happened was Julian himself. Considering I’d done him a pretty big favor, since the kid had shot me before he could rob the place or hurt Julian, I’d hoped he’d keep me from looking too bad when he’d retold the story and was a little pissed he hadn’t.

That was New York City for you.

I hobbled into the precinct the next morning for my meeting. It would be another week of healing before they started any serious PT and I’d picked up enough experience on crutches after my football injury that it wasn’t slowing me down too much, but it was still a pain in the ass, especially making my way up the steps to the station, which were really not ADA compliant.

“Hey, look who it is. I think a Boy Scout troop is coming through later, so keep your head down,” the desk sergeant said when I walked it.

Cops have a dark sense of humor at the best of times, so I’d expected something. If I had died, they would have all looked properly remorseful and held a big parade for their ‘fallen brother,’ but since I lived I was a target for mocking and ridicule.

“Funny. Has Lieutenant Folson made it in yet?”

“I think I saw him. You must have stirred up some shit for him to come in before second shift.”