I flopped over on my side, clawed at the back of the sofa with one hand and swiped the other across my chest. That hand came away bloody — bright primary red glistening, dripping. But there was no pain; the entire upper half of my body felt numb, as if I had been pumped full of a local anesthetic.
Jesus he shot me I’m shot.
Eberhardt, lying over there...
I tried to climb the back of the sofa but my legs wouldn’t support my weight, the bones and sinew had all melted, my hand kept slipping off the fabric because of the blood, oh, the blood. I slid down again, still with that sensation of melting, as if all of me was dissolving into a puddle of crimson fluid. Outside, far away, people were yelling. My vision turned cloudy; shadows swirled into the room and swallowed the sunlight. But the air stank of burnt gunpowder and spilled blood — I was sharply aware of that.
I crawled out from behind the sofa, swimming through blood and shadow. People were still yelling outside; more footsteps pounded on the porch. And I kept crawling, kept swimming, dragging myself on forearms and knees. I could see Eberhardt in front of me, his body seemed to be the only thing left now in the room. Blood and shadow, blood and shadow. Hole in his belly, wound on the side of his head: torn flesh, scorched flesh. He wasn’t moving. Move, Eb, move! And I kept crawling, and his face was the color of ashes.
God, I thought when I got to him — a clear, cold, savage thought — God, he looks dead.
And then there were hands on me, voices all around me, and I let go of the last threads of perception and melted away into the blood and shadow.
Two
The first time I struggled up into consciousness, the room was empty.
It was a hospital room, not the living room in Eberhardt’s house. White, sterile, windows with night on the other side; shadows, but no blood. No pain, either — a kind of tingling numbness all over. I moved my feet, moved my right arm, but I could not move my left arm. Fuzziness in my head, as if it had been stuffed with cotton, and a thought pushed its way through and lay in the cotton like something red and pulsing: They cut off my arm. Moment of panic. I struggled on the bed, struggled for more awareness. Then I saw my left arm lying there on the sheet and the panic went away. I kept trying to move my fingers, only nothing happened; the arm just lay there stiff and lifeless.
Another thought: At least I’m alive.
Another: But what about Eberhardt?
I think I called his name. But I was sliding by then, backward down a long chute, and I couldn’t stop myself because my arm was dead, and I yelled without voice until the blackness at the bottom of the chute closed over me.
When I came out of it the second time, there was a nurse in a starched white uniform leaning over the bed. She was fat and homely and had a mouth as wide as a child’s red sand bucket; she looked a little like Bella Abzug. There was daylight beyond the windows now — cold, gray. I remembered my left arm and tried to move the fingers again. They twitched, spasming, but I could not raise them off the sheet. For the first time I was aware of a dull pain in my left shoulder, in the upper arm all the way to the elbow.
“Don’t try to move,” the nurse said. “Just lie still.”
“Where am I?” It came out in a croak, like somebody trying to imitate a frog — somebody else, not my voice at all.
“San Francisco General.”
“My arm... I can’t move it...”
“Don’t try. You’re going to be fine.”
“Eberhardt,” I said. “Is he alive?”
“I’ll get Doctor Abrams,” she said.
She went out and I lay there trying to think. My mind wouldn’t work right; thoughts kept bumping into each other, veering off, breaking up into fragments. Metallic taste in my mouth, but I could not seem to bring up any saliva to wash it away. In my shoulder and arm, the pain thudded arhythmically in cadence with the beat of my heart.
Bella Abzug came back with a thin, cadaverous-looking doctor. He walked over and peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a pencil flashlight into the eye; then he did the same thing with the other eye. He did not have much hair and his forehead and the front part of his scalp were a mass of wrinkles, as if he had too much skin and somebody had grabbed a handful of it and bunched it up on his head. It made him look like a scrawny hound.
He said, “How are your faculties? Can you think clearly, remember what happened to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We’ve had you pretty heavily sedated.”
“Eberhardt,” I said, as I had to the nurse. “Is he alive?”
“Yes. But his condition is critical.”
“How critical?”
“He’s in a coma,” Abrams said.
“Jesus. Will he make it?”
“I can’t answer that. He was shot once in the stomach and once under the right ear. It’s still touch and go.”
“The head wound — how serious is that?”
“Head wounds are always serious.”
“Brain damage?”
“Evidently not. But we can’t be certain yet.”
“What about the stomach wound?”
“Severe internal damage; the bullet struck the sternum and fragmented.” He pursed his lips. “We’re doing all we can,” he said.
“The man who shot us,” I said. “Did the police get him?”
“No, not yet. I’ll let them talk to you, if you feel up to it.”
“Any time.”
Abrams nodded. “You don’t seem very concerned about yourself,” he said then.
“I’m concerned. But the nurse said I’ll be all right.”
“You will be. The bullet penetrated the fleshy part of your shoulder and lodged near the scapula. We had no real problem in removing it.”
“I can’t move my arm or my fingers,” I said.
“Traumatic neuritis,” he said. “Which means there was some damage to the motor nerve, resulting in partial paralysis.”
“Temporary or permanent?”
“Temporary. You should regain full use of the arm in time.” He paused. “It is possible, though, that there’ll be some chronic stiffness, particularly in the thumb and the first three fingers. But I wouldn’t worry about it.”
No, I thought, it’s not your arm. I said, “How long will I be in here?”
“That depends. Another four or five days, I should think.”
“What day is it? Monday?”
“Yes. Monday morning.”
“Will you let me know as soon as there’s any change in Lieutenant Eberhardt’s condition?”
“Of course,” Abrams said. “I’ll send the police in now; they’re anxious to talk to you.”
I wish I had something to tell them, I thought. But I didn’t say that, either.
He took Bella Abzug away with him. I moved my head and looked out through the window at the cold gray light, at the red brick of another hospital wing across the way. Eberhardt. Head shot, gut shot, severe internal damage, lying in a coma somewhere nearby. Doorbell rings on a Sunday afternoon, he goes and opens up, and somebody puts two bullets in him and one in me. Why? For God’s sake, why?
The door opened again. I swiveled my head on the pillow and watched two men come into the room: Greg Marcus and Ben Klein. Marcus was a lieutenant attached to Homicide, just as Eberhardt was; I knew him slightly. Klein was an old-timer on the force, a sergeant now, a foot-slogger back in the days when I was working at the old Hall of Justice on Kearney and Washington. Like me, he was a good friend of Eb’s.
They took the two metal chairs in the room, pulled them up on the left side of the bed. Both of them wore grim expressions and had red-rimmed eyes; they looked as though they had been up all night, and they probably had. When a police officer gets shot, nobody in the investigative end of the Department gets much sleep.