go any further or I’m going to kill you. Big black guy. And I say to the woman, ‘Are you hungry?’ And she says, ‘Yeah.’ And I say, ‘I sure could go for a couple of Egg McMuffins right now. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?’ And her mouth’s practically watering. I mean, they’ve been there all night, and they haven’t given her anything to eat. So I ask her a couple more questions, and it turns out her brother and mother have had the flu recently. So I tell her it doesn’t look like anything serious. If she had appendicitis, she wouldn’t be hungry. That’s one of the symptoms. And meanwhile, as I’m explaining all this, I want to fucking kill Allison.”
Allison is an attending physician, a gastrointestinal surgeon a few years younger than Kim and Cogan.
“Did you say something to her?”
“Hell yeah. Right after I got through with the woman, I went up to Allison and I said, ‘Why are you pulling me in on this bullshit stuff? If someone had taken five minutes to talk to this woman, I wouldn’t be wasting my time. This is shit a first-year could handle and you’ve got me in on it because you’re too fucking lazy to ask a couple of questions. The woman’s hungry. She’s ready to slam down five Big Macs. What does that tell you?’”
“Consider yourself lucky,” says Kim. “She’s got me in on shit like that all the time. I mean, all the fucking time.”
“It’s just lazy. I hate it.”
“Dr. Cogan?”
Cogan looks over. It’s Janine, a young nurse who only started last week.
“Yes.”
“There are two men asking for you. Police officers.”
“What are their names?”
She looks at him, a little puzzled. “Oh, I don’t know. They said they were police officers.”
“Are they wearing uniforms?”
“No. Just regular clothes.”
He turns to Kim. “Detectives,” he says. “Probably Reed.” Then to the nurse, “Did they say what they want?”
“To ask you a couple of questions.”
“OK, thanks. Tell them I’ll be right there.”
Cogan reluctantly gets up, groaning a little as he does so. He hates to be interrupted during a nice relaxed session of coffee and venting.
“You think they want to talk to you about that old lady?” Kim asks after the nurse has gone.
“Maybe. They caught the guy who did it, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, two days ago.”
The police occasionally interview him about victims he’s treated, especially the ones who died (“Did she ever regain consciousness, say anything to you?”), and by now he knows many of the cops by name and has his favorites. Usually, they come to the hospital shortly after the victim arrives and sometimes at the same time. But every once in a while they show up later.
Cogan downs the little coffee he has left and tosses the cup into a garbage can. “All right, Dr. Kim. We’ll resume our bitching later. I’ll see you tomorrow at the club.”
“See ya.”
The cops are sitting in the surgery waiting room. There are only five people in the room, including the receptionist, and it isn’t hard to pick out the two detectives: both are wearing dark sport jackets and ties. What surprises Cogan is that he hasn’t seen either of them before. For a second he wonders if he has seen them and just forgot. But he’s good with faces and neither registers. One is older, a slight, balding guy with glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache. The other, an earnest, clean-cut black guy, looks like he could be a Jehovah’s Witness. He has a warm, friendly smile.
“Hello, gentlemen. Ted Cogan.”
They stand up and introduce themselves—Detectives Madden and Burns.
“Come on back,” Cogan says. “My office isn’t very big, but I think we’ll all fit.”
As he leads them down the hall, he notices that the older guy, Madden, is limping. And then he notices he’s wearing a special shoe—he has a dropfoot. Strange, Cogan thinks. He’s never seen a handicapped cop. He has an urge to ask about it, but before the urge gets too strong they reach his office.
The room is small, about the size of a jail cell. It has a minimal amount of furniture: a desk, two chairs, filing cabinet, waste bin, and a desktop computer and printer. Really, all he uses the room for is to make phone calls, do paperwork, and check his email. He’s rarely in his office for more than twenty or thirty minutes at a time, so it doesn’t bother him that it’s small. But it gets a little tight when he receives multiple visitors.
Cogan