A Short Story
by John Westermann
I ran from the diner, fumbling with my hat, my walkie-talkie squawking additional requests and notifications. My sector man saw me jogging on the sidewalk and screeched to a halt. I dove into his front seat. With siren howling, we whizzed around a metastatic traffic jam, both human and automotive.
We rocked up onto the curb, and parked near the motionless bodies.
"Preserve the scene," he told me, as if I could change what I saw or ever forget it.
It happened under a flame red sunset in early September. On the asphalt street the young black mother was unconscious but still breathing, in the fetal position facing away from the curb, spun away from her intended destination. The little girl lay between Mom and the storm drain, face down in a pool of her mother's blood, not producing bubbles, nor laughter, nor joy.
Chantelle, her name was. I remember that. Chantelle McKay. DOB 2-21-88. DOD 9-23-94. Dressed in blue jeans and a Barney sweatshirt, her hair tied back in corn-rows.
I knelt on the pavement, helped a medical tech named Sue Castro-nuova turn the child face-up. Sue cleared the bloody mouth, bent low to blow air into the lifeless little chest. Once. Twice. "There's no back pressure," she said, looking up at nobody in particular.
"Picked 'em right out of my hand," the father was saying behind me. Duke, I knew him as, from the neighborhood. Shaved head, always wore black sweatsuits, black work boots, good guy, maybe twenty-two, worked on a fishing boat. Duke believed that since the cops were present, things would improve. "We had pizza and Carvel, and then we was walking home to do her homework, she's in first grade, then, bam, whoosh, ripped 'em out my hand." "We got a piece of the headlamp," said one of the cops.
"That's good, right?" asked Duke.
"We'll nail the bastard."
"Word up."
"What religion are you, Duke?" asked another cop with a clipboard.
"Catholic," said Duke. "Why?"
"Just a box I gotta fill in."
"You want a priest?" I asked, thinking I could use a little spiritual uplift myself.
"Yeah," he said, uncertain. "I guess."
"Later for that," said Sue. "Let's roll."
I drove Sue's noisy ambulance up the Meadowbrook Parkway to Hempstead Turnpike, turned east for the Nassau County Medical Center. Sue sat in the back, cradling the child. She was a mother herself, I knew, of a boy and a girl who were still of this world, and I could feel her ache through my Kevlar vest. "How'd the mother look?" I asked her.
Sue said, "If I were her, I wouldn't want to wake up."
We parked at Emergency. I opened the rear doors, and saw that Sue had cleaned the blood from the child's face, wrapped her body in clean, white blankets.
Orderlies waited on the apron, but Sue wouldn't give the child up, wouldn't let anyone else carry her into a hospital's false hope. "Stay and help the mother," she said. "They're right behind us."
I followed Sue inside to the trauma center, where she handed over the child to a nurse she trusted, Carol Malone, a burly redhead in white. Malone disappeared down a poorly lit corridor with the child. Sue collapsed on a bench, closed her eyes and wept.
Shaken, I walked outside for a smoke.
I was just lighting up when the mother's ambulance arrived, and I watched her rushed inside on a gurney to where the best young doctors that could be roused from cots were waiting, no doubt rubbing their eyes, sipping bad coffee.
"How's she doing?" I asked one of the techs as we passed through the open doors. "She wake up?"
"No such luck. They get the guy yet?"
"I don't know."
Sue had her memo book out, writing up the run. I sat at a desk intended for outside person-nel and called my precinct, gave them the particulars, was instructed to wait for the squad detectives, to see if they needed me for anything. "Get the ball rolling," said my desk officer. "They're running a little behind tonight."
"Really?" I asked, disappointed that he had not already sent a patrol car for me. The sooner I got back to my precinct--among my always sensitive co-workers--the sooner the awful present would ebb.
"Got a search party out now. I promise."
Which meant the dicks were off the air, maybe eating dinner, maybe doing whatever else dicks do when no one is watching.
I stayed at the desk and called for that priest I'd promised Duke, then I wrote up my Aided Cards and filled in my memo book. I helped Sue exchange the bloody sheets for fresh ones from the linen closet, walked her outside and watched her head off in the gathering fog to a Mineola cardiac arrest.
Just then Duke arrived, in the front seat of a patrol car driven by a sergeant. I ducked behind an empty am-bulance, seeing no reason why I should be the one to break them the news. They had experts for this kind of thing. Professionally friendly folks with fatter paychecks than mine.
What could I, or anybody else, tell him?
Your daughter is dead, and your wife is likely a stone frozen vegetable, and the bastard/bitch who ran them down was too cold/scared/drunk to interrupt his/her busy day. Fill in the box. I stomped my cigarette out on the tarmac, and noticed that it was dark out now, my tour half over. I started back inside again, but Duke's wail of grief, his cries of "No! No! No!," stopped me dead in the doorway, frozen in the cros-s-hairs of the electro-nic eye, making the sliding doors jerk open, shut, open, shut. I backed away. They shut in my face.
A black Plymouth four-door swerved into the lot behind me, and two dicks in trench coats lumbered out. Ronnie Bloom and Ox Stasion, brooms who tanked cases rather than work them. But they couldn't tank this one, or sew it up with a couple of stitches. The victims didn't know their assailant, they weren't married to him/her. They weren't prostitutes/homeless. Just citizens.
"What do we got, guy?" asked Ox.
"You don't know?"
"We was at Carney's. Mickey Meehan's pulling the pin. Got himself a no-show job with the Board of Elections."
Carney's was known for steaks and wakes, assistance with the house accounts of public servants. Generous cocktails. A piano bar that featured groin grinders for aging detectives and their dates to moon over, spoon after. Ronnie Bloom was having trouble lighting his cigarette, fumbling with the match, finally closing one eye to accomplish this feat.
I said, "We got a fatal Leaving The Scene. I got everything started that I could."
Ox said to Ronnie, "Okay, let's grab some coffee and knock this out."
"The family's here," I said. "Maybe later for that coffee."
"Maybe you could get it?"
"Right."
I led them to a trauma treatment room, where a dark-skinned resident in a bloody white coat was examining a screaming white woman whose ear had been severed.
"Please," said a resident. "You will go. We are busy here."
Ox Stasion hiked up his belt and loaded up on air, about to blast the swarthy little man clear back to Bombay when I nudged the Ox and said, "Wrong room."
"No shit?"
"None."
We backed out, closed the door.
"'We are busy here.' I mean, do you believe the nerve of that effing sand nigger?" Ox groused as we barged into the right room.
"Excuse me?" said Nurse Malone.
The two detectives instantly observed that our victims were black, as was one of the nurses.
Nurse Malone put down an X-ray of the mother's skull. "I said, excuse me?"
Ronnie looked at Duke McKay, then the black nurse, and said, "I didn't mean you people. Seriously. So what do we got here? She gonna pull through?"
"Five minutes," said Malone. "We'll get back to you."
We members of the force retreated to the hallway, where an elderly black man in a worn brown suit and tie was sitting on a bench, rocking. A young white nurse opened the door to a room at the end of the hall. She said to the man, "You want to see her, sir?"
"Please," said the man.
"Officers?" said the nurse.
We all crowded into a small room and circled a single bed on which Chantelle McKay had been laid out in a gown so painfully white she looked as she would have had she lived to make her first communion.
"That's the only grandchild I'm ever gonna have."
"What?" said Bloom.
The old man repeated himself, made the sign of the cross and, weeping, offered his life for the child's, asking God why he had to swipe an angel.
Ronnie Bloom folded his hands in front of his fly and lowered his head, then burst into tears.
Ox Stasion looked at him, at me, and rolled his eyes.
I fought back my own sick laughter, as Malone marched in and saw what was happening, saw that Bloom was blubbering, maudlin drunk. She poked me in the gut. "I was you, rookie," she said through clenched teeth, "I'd check their front bumper."
I wiped the stupid smile off my face.
"Now," she said coolly.
"Yes, Ma'am."
And I did, right then. I walked outside and poked around the detective's unmarked Plymouth in the fog, glad to be nobody, dismissed, as it were. Innocent.
The front end was mud-spattered and rusty, dinged in twenty places, none of them recent. The interior smelled like a saloon. I found a silver flask wedged under the briefcase on the back seat.
"Looking for something, officer?"
I stood up with the flask in my hand and faced over the roof an old priest in the fog, the holy man unexpected, a sniper's round.
"Not really," I said, heart pounding.
"I'm here for the little girl," he explained in a soothing voice as he walked around the squad car. "I understand she didn't make it...They find the driver yet?"
"I don't think so."
"Have faith."
The priest put his arm around my shoulders, as if to steer me back to my duties, away from the flask. But I was wrong. He didn't give a damn what I poured down my throat, as long as I shared. "Did you know Mickey Meehan was retiring?" he asked, wiping the whiskey from his lips. "That's quite a shindig they're having at Carney's. Everyone who is anyone is there."
"Yes," I said. "So I've heard."
"Now where's this poor, suffering family?"
I took the flask from him, swallowed my fair share, and stuffed it back where I'd found it, then I led the old priest by his withered arm to the Emergency doors. We passed directly under the electronic eye, which this time failed to operate, which left the silver doors closed in our faces, the eye stubbornly refusing to recognize two spiritually uplifted public servants, no matter how much we jumped and waved and complained.
(This Short Story Won The Blaggard Award For Best Short Story 1999)
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