face of Arthur Moran wavered in front of me. I waved at him, and tried to smile. Crawford stood next to him, peering down at me with a concerned look on his face, his hands on his hips and his gun back in the shoulder holster. There was blood smeared across the front of his starched white oxford shirt. When he saw that my eyes were open, he leaned in to talk to me. “They’re taking you to Mercy. I’ll meet you over there.”
I was wheeled out and put into the ambulance for a bumpy ride across the Bronx to Mercy Hospital. I was in pain, but not as much pain as shock at the fact that someone had tried to shoot me. I think. I may have just been an innocent bystander, but even to me, that explanation sounded pretty thin.
Embarrassingly enough, my wound, a graze, was only serious enough to warrant ten stitches. From the way I had been crying and carrying on, and the amount of pain I was in, I was sure it was an amputation situation.
I was sitting in the emergency room in a curtained-off area, looking at the pile of gauze that wound around my upper arm. I begged the doctor for a painkiller and he finally relented and gave me a prescription for something called Vicodin. He handed me two in a tiny Ziploc bag and instructed me to take one now and one later. He then told me to fill the prescription at home, warning me not to take any unless I was in severe pain. Otherwise, I was to take Tylenol. I didn’t mention that I take four Advil at a time when I have cramps. A bullet wound? Bring on the hard stuff.
When he had left the room, I swallowed both of them with a gulp of water from a flimsy paper cup.
I saw Crawford’s shadow on the other side of the curtain. “You decent?” he called in.
I was rather indecent, truth be told, but I didn’t think that was the question. I told him to come in.
“Ten stitches, huh?” he asked, and came over to survey the wound. The doctor had cut off the sleeve of my sweater to stitch me up, so the gauze was clearly visible. Crawford gingerly took my arm in his hand and turned it so he could get a full view. “I was expecting you to have a prosthetic arm with the way you were carrying on.” He smoothed my sweat-soaked hair from my forehead. “Good news. We found the slug on the street. Ballistics has it now.”
“That’s good news?” I asked and attempted to slide off the bed. “What would bad news be?” The Vicodin was already taking effect and my legs felt a little wobbly. He grabbed me before I slid all the way to the floor. With all of the drinking I had done in the last several days, you’d think a painkiller would be a day at the beach. But I had the feeling that my body was filled with helium and that I’d float away if I didn’t hang on to his arm for dear life. “Can you take me home or do you have to go see Alex?”
“Who?” he asked.
“Alex. The guy you were cursing at on the phone and threatening with an ass-kicking.”
“Oh, him,” he said, the synapses firing again. “I’ll call him and cancel. He wasn’t going to show up anyway. And then I’d just have to find him and kick his ass. I’m too tired for all of that.” He looked at the wound again. “Are you in any pain?”
“Not since I took painkillers,” I admitted, my tongue thick and virtually unusable in my mouth. I held on to him and walked through the emergency room and out into the parking lot. I didn’t have a jacket anymore—it had been bagged as evidence, even though I wasn’t sure what kind of forensics could be performed on a ripped-up jacket—so Crawford took off his blazer and put it around my shoulders. The temperature had dropped by a few degrees and I was now shivering, so I was grateful for his act of chivalry. He grabbed my good arm as I wandered off in another direction.
“This way,” he said, and pointed to my car. He pointed the key tag at the car and unlocked it. After I was safely inside, my seat belt across my chest, he started the car and drove out of the lot and