THE TRAUMA CENTER CLOSEST to where it happened was about a half mile due south of Wrigley Field, and I knew it well. When I got close, there were police cars swarming all over the neighborhood, many of them unmarked—although perfectly obvious to anyone with a vested interest. Blue-and-white squads, strobe lights flashing, blocked off traffic at intersections. So I had to park on Belmont Avenue, just slightly intruding into a bus stop, and hoof it four bitterly cold blocks to the hospital. I made my way unmolested all the way to the main entrance, where a security guard blocked the way. Another guard stood just inside the plate glass doors, head down, talking into the radio attached to his collar.
The outside guard, young, probably Puerto Rican, raised a gloved hand. “You need a city star or hospital ID to get in. Sorry, sir.”
“But a social worker called. My friend—”
“Can’t help it, sir. There’s too much going on right now.”
Just then the other guard, a middle-aged, pleasant-faced man who would have looked like the neighborhood grocer if there still were such a creature, pushed through the door toward us. When he saw me his face lit up. “Hey, big guy!” he said. “Long time no see.”
Sometimes the gods do smile on us.
I couldn’t recall his name, and even if he knew mine he’d have called me “big guy,” like he called every other male person in the universe, regardless of size.
“Long time,” I said, “three years, anyway.”
“But hey, you’re lookin’ great, big guy.” He turned to his partner. “This here guy’s an okay guy. He was a patient here. You shoulda seen him in the ER. Him on one stretcher, half his damn body parts on another.”
“Not exactly,” I said, but before I knew it he was escorting me down the corridor, bringing me up-to-date on his baseball card collection along the way.
In the emergency room, it turned out Lambert Fleming was already old news and the trauma team’s attention had turned to a pair of shooting victims who’d arrived together within the last hour. That’s what all the excitement was about. The victims were members of rival street gangs—one a Latino group, one a mixed bag. The army of cops had been mobilized to keep both victims’ outraged and oh-so-courageous fellow gang-bangers from storming the hospital and shooting at each other inside, where it was warm.
The guard got Lammy’s room number and steered me to the proper elevator. “A medical floor,” he said, “not intensive care or anything.”
I rode up and stopped at the nurses’ station, thinking maybe it was too late for visitors and someone might challenge me. But the ward clerk found my name listed on Lammy’s chart under “next of kin.” She said he might be drowsy—from painkillers—but pointed me down the hall.
One of the two beds in the room was empty, and pictures flickered and flitted eerily across the screen of a soundless TV set high on the wall. The head of Lammy’s bed was raised, propping him into a sitting position. Both his arms lay motionless on top of the thin white bedspread, the left one wrapped in bandages from above the elbow down to his hand, with just the fingertips sticking out, and held in a slightly bent position. His right arm, pudgy and hairless and pale—except for the bruises and scrapes and ragged cuts—stuck out below the short wide sleeve of a hospital gown. An IV line was taped to that arm.
I stood there silently a while and stared at him. They’d shaved off his eyebrows, and most of the hair from his skull. The facial and scalp lacerations were too many to count, with a few that had needed multiple stitching. The upper half of his face was already turning purple and yellow, the flesh puffed with fluid and the eyes like slits in the smooth swollen flesh of a terribly discolored lump of bread dough.
Finally, I cleared my throat and his head jerked as though he’d been dozing. He must have seen me through the slits, because he opened his mouth. But he closed it again, and if he said anything it was drowned out by the chorus of adolescent male voices that had risen up inside my head, uninvited, in a jeering, sing-song chant I’d replayed too many times over the years: Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL! Dough-GIRL!
Anger tightened up in my chest at whoever had done this, and along with it came apprehension, the urge to forget about the whole thing, to just turn around and go home. But there’d be no more comfort at the coach house now than there’d been the last time I ran away from Lammy’s problems. So I just stood there and let the hard, hot desire to retaliate fight it out with the urge to walk away.
“I’m sorry.” Lammy’s voice had a far-off sound and took a while to break into my consciousness. “I mean I just went out to get—”
“For chrissake,” I said, my own voice tight and harsh. “You should have expected something like this. Going outside alone, at night. What the hell were you thinking about?”
Nothing like blaming the victim.
“They’re gonna keep me at least overnight,” he said, ignoring my attack as though criticism and blame like that were just part of the everyday air he breathed. “I was unconscious for a while. I guess I lost a lotta blood.” His words came as a dull monotone, and it was impossible to tell if he was looking at me or not. “But I’m okay,” he added.
Not that I’d bothered to ask.
“Has your sister—”
“I told ’em I don’t have any relatives. They kept asking for a name. Finally I gave ’em yours.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Well, I suppose I’m glad you did. I … I’m glad you’re okay, too.” My anger was dropping down from boil to simmer. “What happened? You were gonna stay inside. Keep the doors locked.”
“There was hardly nothing to eat at home. So I was goin’ to the White Hen for some milk and stuff and—”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“You didn’t tell me I could. You said you’d be calling me. But then you didn’t, and I thought—”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. I forgot to call. But didn’t you think someone might try to hurt you? I mean, after that dog and all?”
“Yeah. I was scared. About goin’ outside. But I was hungry and…” His voice trailed off.
“And what?” I asked.
He took a breath. “And I decided you weren’t gonna help me after all ’cause you didn’t call and I was on my own and I hadda just go out whether I was scared or—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I’m sorry.” His voice cracked like an adolescent’s.
“Stop saying that. I’m not mad. Not at you, anyway.” Moving closer, I picked up a glass of water from the bedside and held the bent straw to his lips. “Here. Have a drink. Then tell me what happened.”
* * *
A HALF HOUR LATER I rode down the elevator with a dour-faced young Latino whose dark blue lab coat said “Transport” above the breast pocket and who was pushing an empty wheelchair. The car stopped once before ground level and when the doors slid open there were two beefy, hard-breathing Chicago cops standing there, with a short, thin man in handcuffs propped up between them. The prisoner wore a khaki-colored cloth overcoat that ended below his knees, a baseball cap turned backward, and lots of bright red blood all over his face. When the cops saw us one of them just shook his head in disgust and the other vaguely waved us on with a shotgun he was holding by its sawed-off barrels. The doors closed again, leaving the cops there with their gang-banger and the weapon they must have found hidden under his coat.
A sign on the elevator wall said “A Smile and a Cheerful Word Just Might Make Someone’s Day!” So I smiled and gave it a try. “Never a dull moment around here, huh?”
He looked up at me. “Fuckin’ gangs,” he said, his sad expression deepening into a sour frown. “Ask me, they oughta just fuckin’ let ’em inside the building, man. Evacuate everybody else and throw in some extra fuckin’ ammo. Then they could lock the doors from outside and come back in a goddamn week. Haul the motherfuckers off, man, in fuckin’ refrigerator trucks.”
Sanitize the language just a bit, and he could have been quoting from any number of election campaign speeches I’d spent the previous autumn trying not to listen to.
I hustled back to my car, planning to drive straight home and call Renata Carroway for another little chat about “witness intimidation.” When I got to Belmont, though, there was a blue-and-white squad car double-parked beside the Cavalier, and a cop was sticking a parking ticket on the windshield.
“Hey!” I called, breaking into a trot. “I’m moving it right now.”
“Too late,” the cop said, heading toward the squad car. “Shouldn’t park in a bus stop. Shows a disregard for the common good.”
“Yeah, I know. But what about the Cadillac?” I pointed to the shiny black Fleetwood that took up most of the rest of the bus stop. It looked freshly washed, not yet covered with sprayed salt, and its rear bumper was backed up snug against the front of the Cavalier. “Why not give that guy a ticket, too?”
The only response was the slam of the squad car door and the roar of its motor as it left the scene, emergency lights flashing. And as it did, a very large man climbed out of the front passenger seat of the Fleetwood, opened the rear door, and invited me to get into the backseat.
I did.
And so did the other very large man, who’d appeared from somewhere behind me and taken me firmly by the arm.