more than one healthy young man to bring him down, and I’ll bet he inflicted some damage of his own before he fell.
Sitting in Orlando traffic, I call the prison for the fourth time and ask to speak to the warden. There is no way he’ll take my call, but I want him to know I’ll be there soon enough. I make a dozen calls. Vicki is hounding the hospital for information, of which there is little, and she relays this to me. I call Frankie and tell him to head south. I finally get Quincy’s brother, Marvis, who is working construction in Miami and can’t get away. He is the only relative who cares about Quincy and has visited him regularly for the past twenty-three years. He is shaken and wants to know who would do this to Quincy. I have no answers.
The collar usually works in hospitals so I put it on in the parking deck. ICU is on the second floor and I bluff my way past a busy nurse. Two huge young men—one white, the other black—are sitting on stools next to a room with glass walls. They are prison guards and wear the gaudy black-and-tan uniforms that I’ve seen around the Garvin Correctional Institute. They are bored and seriously out of place. I decide to be nice and introduce myself as Quincy’s lawyer.
Not surprisingly, they know virtually nothing. They were not at the scene, did not see the victim until he was in the ambulance, and were ordered to follow the ambulance and make sure the prisoner remains secure.
Quincy Miller is certainly secure. He is strapped down to a bed that sits high in the center of the room, surrounded by tubes, monitors, drips, machines. A ventilator hums away as it pumps oxygen through a tracheotomy tube and keeps him alive. His face is covered with thick gauze with tubes poked through it.
The white guard is telling me that he has flatlined three times in the past two hours. Folks came running from all directions. The black guard confirms this and adds that it’s just a matter of time, at least in his opinion.
Our small talk quickly runs out of gas. These boys don’t know if they are supposed to sleep on the floor, find a motel room, or go back to the prison. The office is closed there and they can’t find their boss. I offer the shrewd observation that the prisoner is going nowhere.
One of the doctors happens by and notices my collar. We step away for a quiet word. I try to quickly explain that the patient has no family, that he has been in prison for almost twenty-three years for someone else’s crime, and that as his lawyer I’m sort of in charge. He’s in a hurry and doesn’t need all this. He says the patient received multiple injuries, the most serious of which is severe trauma to the brain. Using pentobarbital, they put him in a medically induced coma to relieve pressure on the brain. If he survives, he faces a lot of surgery. The upper left jaw, collarbones, and left shoulder will be rebuilt. Maybe his nose. One knife wound pierced a lung. His right eye could be badly damaged. At this early moment, there is no way to predict the level of permanent brain impairment, though it will probably be “substantial—if he makes it.”
I get the uneducated impression that the doctor is clicking through a mental checklist of Quincy’s injuries, and since he’ll die anyway, why name them all?
I ask about his chances, and the doctor shrugs and says, “One in a hundred.” Like a gambler in Vegas.
* * *
—
AFTER DARK, MY two buddies in uniform have had enough. They are tired of doing nothing, tired of getting in the way, tired of the frowns from the nurses, and tired of guarding a prisoner who couldn’t possibly make a run for it. They’re also hungry, and judging by their bulging waistlines their dinner hour is not to be trifled with. I convince them that I plan to spend the night in the visitors’ lounge down the hall, and if anything happens to Quincy I’ll call their cell phones. I say goodbye with the promise that their prisoner is locked away for the night.
There are no seats or chairs near the beds in ICU. Visitors are not welcome. It’s okay to stop by for a look, or a word if the loved one is able to talk,