Endorphin Conspiracy, The (3 page)

Karen Choy gladly deferred to Geoff.

“Probable basal skull fracture, brain swelling due to diffuse head injury. We’ll know for sure after his scans. Numerous contusions, lacerations, and probable internal injuries. His neck’s been stabilized with a cervical collar in the unlikely event there’s a spinal fracture. Plan is to take him to the OR for an exploratory laparotomy, place a head bolt to monitor his intracranial pressure, then when he recovers, take him to neuroimaging for his PET and MRI scans. If he makes it, he’ll be spending at least several days in the ICU. Did I miss anything?”

Spiros wore his usual deadpan expression. “No.”

“Then we’ll be taking him now. Can we borrow a nurse for the trip to the OR?” asked Geoff. He raised the bedrails and unlocked the wheels.       Spiros nodded his head affirmatively, turned to leave, then paused. “Good job, Dr. Davis, but try and get here more quickly next time.” He left the trauma room.

Karen exhaled. “So that’s
the
Dr. Spiros.”

“Astute observation, Karen. You’ll go far. Stay here with the patient. I’ll go find a nurse to help.”

Geoff stood at the nursing station, listening to the scramble of activity around him. The interminable electronic ringing of telephones, overhead pages, sirens of police vans and aid cars, the voices of patients, families, and staff. While he had been working it had been tuned out of his conscious awareness by that part of the brain responsible for selective attention. The cacophonous agglomeration of sounds had melded together, nothing more than a symphony of background sound, white noise.

“Any nurses free to help transport a patient?” asked Geoff.

“Only one free is Nurse Creighton,” said Bea Mendelssohn, the ER clerk, gazing up at Geoff over her reading glasses.

“That’s okay, I don’t want to take her away from her more important duties here,” replied Geoff. “Dr. Choy and I will take care of it ourselves.”

“That’s probably the wisest decision you’ve made in your two hours as chief resident, Dr. Davis.” Bea smiled knowingly.

“Thanks Bea. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Oh, Dr. Davis, one more thing. There’s a message from Dr. Howard Kapinsky. He wants to know if he should start rounds without you. He says the team’s been waiting for an hour.”

Chapter 3

Detective Donald O’Malley steadied his elbows on the makeshift command post in the Central Park Zoo and peered through the high power binoculars for the tenth time in the last hour. He scanned the red brick facade of the Penguin Building, then focused on the doorway, watching for the slightest hint of movement. Nothing. Four hours broiling in the midday sun, breathing the stench of filthy animals, and not a goddamned thing.

The trumpeting of an elephant cut through the heavy air. The splash of a sea lion in the mammal pool nearby made him flinch. He felt like he was on a fucking safari, instead of a stakeout.

O’Malley lifted the binoculars from around his neck and resolutely placed them on top of the stand. He removed his dusty NYPD baseball cap, wiped the beads of sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. Reaching into his pants pocket, he removed what had been a large pack of Juicy Fruit and stuffed another stick of gum in his mouth—number ten to be exact—adding it to the wad that already produced a large bulge in his cheek. O’Malley’s ritual. The binoculars, the cap, the Juicy Fruit. He had repeated it ten times in the last hour. It usually made him feel secure, in control, though the latter state had thus far eluded him today.

Donald O’Malley, decorated veteran of the NYPD and Commander of the City’s Tactical Response Unit had been involved in scores of stakeouts before, but the waiting still drove him crazy. Next week he would write his last chapter on the TRU after ten years as unit commander. Though he had a perfect record, it was time to hang it up. His ulcer and his wife, Stella, had convinced him of that. He wouldn’t miss the waiting, that’s for sure.

The TRU was ready to be handed over to a young buck like Valdez. For O’Malley, it was back to homicide. Not exactly what Stella had in mind, but she’d live with it as she had with his entire career. Some of his best years on the force had been on homicide, and he had decided that was where he would finish out. Three fucking years to go! He couldn’t believe it.

“Get the full background check yet? We got a sheet on him?” asked O’Malley as he turned toward Lieutenant Valdez, who had just returned to the command post.

“Best we can tell, sir, he’s clean. Nothing, not even a parking ticket. Married, five kids, goes to church on Sundays, worked in the Parks Department for fifteen years. Same place, right here in the Zoo. Personnel record’s clean, too.”

O’Malley shook his head in disbelief. “You mean this loony tune’s been chugging along on the straight and narrow for the last forty-nine years of his life and all of a sudden he goes bananas?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t seem to, sir.”

“Check the city hospital logs?”

“Yeah. No psych admissions. Hit by a car going home from work a few months ago. Spent a week in the intensive care unit at the Trauma Center, but I guess he came out okay.”

“Except for his scrambled brains.” O’Malley glanced at his watch. “When’s his old lady getting here? It’s already 1310.”

“The guys at the service entrance are expecting her any minute.”

What better way to smoke out a hot-headed, crazy man than to bring in his
esposa
. Get his emotions revved up, cloud his thinking, force him to make a careless move. The wife was O’Malley’s catalyst.

“If she doesn’t arrive soon, my men are in a good position to take him out—”

“Goddamnit, Valdez!” O’Malley crumbled up the wrapper from the last stick of Juicy Fruit and threw it to the ground. “When I’m ready to sacrifice that little girl, I’ll know who to call! That lunatic has a grenade and is loco enough to blow up both himself and the girl. We have to let him think he’s making the first move. Get it straight
now
, Valdez. Next week you’re on your own!”

Although angry at Valdez’ impatience, O’Malley had been in enough of these situations to sense there was a healthy tension building. Something would happen soon. The impasse was nearing an end.

“Commander O’Malley,” crackled the voice over the walkie-talkie, “Señora Romero is at the gate.”

“Well, Rispoli, roll out the red carpet.” O’Malley replaced the radio in his holster. “Valdez, alert the sharpshooters. No one moves until I give the word.” O’Malley watched the woman approach with her police escort.

“And, Valdez, get on the radio and tell the men to let her walk to us alone. We don’t need to make Jesus any more paranoid than he already is.”

“Yes,sir!”

O’Malley and the men of the TRU tracked Maria Romero as she turned right and passed between the weathered stone eagles on her way to the makeshift command post, which had been just four-and-a- half hours ago merely another hot dog stand at the zoo.

O’Malley knew the Romero woman was forty-eight, but she looked ten years older. Her bright yellow tent dress rippled with each step as she walked anxiously past the sea lion pool and headed toward them.

The shrill call of a macaw pierced the air.

Señora Romero was speaking in Spanish—a language O’Malley never quite grasped and therefore considered babble—rapidly and loudly. Her plump face was beaded with sweat, her hair flying wildly as she walked past them, not to them. She dropped to her knees in a position of prayer.

“Jesus,
mimosa
, what’s gotten into you? Let the
pobrecita
go, please! Think of our own little Juanita!”

O’Malley was worried. His catalyst had turned out to be more of a runaway nuclear reaction. There would be a goddamn meltdown if they didn’t control the situation now.

“Grab her, Valdez! Say something to her in Spanish and shut her up! She’ll blow the whole thing open.”

Even as she spoke, O’Malley knew it was too late. Jesus Romero had heard his wife’s unexpected plea. How he’d react was anyone’s guess. O’Malley had to make a move. His mind whirred into high gear as he grabbed the megaphone from Valdez.

“Jesus, your wife Maria is here. She wants to talk to you.”   An eternal second passed.

“Man, you get that
cochina
out of here, or I blow myself up and take the girl with me! Time’s running out, you know man? You got five minutes, then it’s bye-bye!”

O’Malley heard Jessica’s whimper echoing inside the Penguin Building. He’d never even seen the girl, but her pitiful cry triggered an emotional association in his brain and summoned deep feelings of sadness.

Filthy animal
. Donald O’Malley, the ultimate professional, tried his best to suppress his simmering emotions. Donald O’Malley, the grandfather, unfortunately could not.

“Jesus, we’ve got the money, but you know we can’t land a plane here.”

“You just deliver what you said, man, or it’s over. You got that?”

Maria broke loose and ran toward the Penguin Building, her fists stabbing the air in defiance. “You son-of-a-bitch, I’m no
cochina
!”

The men in black fatigues on the rooftops and behind the columns were ready, laser sights trained on the entryway to the building.
Goddamn meltdown
, thought O’Malley.

To everyone’s astonishment, Jesus appeared in the doorway, his green Parks Department uniform hanging over his corpulent frame like a soggy sheet, drenched with the sweat of the oppressive New York summer and his raging emotions. His beefy arms were wrapped tightly around little Jessica. Between his hands he clasped the grenade. His dark brown eyes danced wildly.

“I told you to get the bitch away from here. Now! Or I pull the pin!”

Maria stopped dead in her tracks, barely ten feet from the doorway. “
Dios mio
—”

O’Malley saw an opening. “Take him. Now!”

The first shot came from the sharpshooter stationed on the roof of the restaurant. The bullet hit Jesus just above the right brow, blew out the back of his head and splattered bloody fragments of brain tissue on the stone facade of the building behind him.

It was the second shot, though, O’Malley would live to regret. Fired from the Tropic House walkway, the bullet pierced Jesus’ right hand, the index finger of which had been wrapped securely around the grenade pin. The fiery explosion propelled Jessica violently backward. Her head smacked against the brick column by the entrance. Jessica Humphries lay on the cement like a limp ragdoll.

***

The blue and white Airlift Northeast helicopter maneuvered between the trees and landed with a blast of wind on the slate walkway in front of the Penguin Building. Medic Enrique Santos was the first out of the chopper door, followed closely by Rosey Ceravolo. Rick Davidson, the pilot, remained in the cockpit.

Santos and Ceravolo raced up the walkway, Ceravolo dragging the stretcher behind her. Now ten minutes since the explosion, Jessica had been left untouched by the police. Feeling frustrated and impotent, they knew better than to move a patient with serious head and neck injuries. Jessica’s head was cocked obliquely, resting in a pool of blood at the base of the column. Her extremities, no longer limp, had assumed a rigid, mannequin-like attitude, wrists and toes extended downward. Her skin was a pale, waxy yellow, her cheeks and lips drained of life-sustaining blood and oxygen.

The look of death. Santos had seen it all too many times before.

Her little chest heaved ever so slightly, but with great rapidity, as her brainstem automatically directed the muscles of respiration to suck every bit of precious air they could into her lungs. The two medics
knelt on either side of Jessica and went to work.

“Pulse 130 and thready, blood pressure 60/palp,” said Ceravolo as she released the Velcro on the undersized blood pressure cuff. “She must be hemorrhaging internally.”

“Good bet she is, but that may be the least of her problems.” Santos removed his flashlight from the red tackle box and gently pried her lids open. “Pupils are mid-dilated, barely reactive. Not a good sign. How are her breath sounds?”

“Okay on the right side, decreased on the left. She may have a collapsed lung. Could be from a rib fracture.” Ceravolo examined the large bruise over the child’s left rib cage.

“Large scalp laceration, but her skull seems all right,” said Santos, carefully wrapping her head with gauze.

Ceravolo started a saline IV and ran it in as fast as it would drip. She got the neck brace and the backboard out of the chopper.

Gently, they lifted their fragile cargo into the compact, high-tech quarters of the helicopter. As the chopper began its ascent, Santos and Ceravolo applied the electrodes that would monitor all of Jessica’s vital signs, including her heart rhythm. Rick momentarily glanced over his shoulder and signaled for them to put on their headsets. There was no other way to communicate easily over the thunderous noise of the helicopter.

“She gonna make it?” he asked.

“Too soon to tell, but her chances are better than they were ten minutes ago,” Ceravolo said.

“Her vitals seem to be stabilizing,” said Santos.

“Looks like you two have things under control. Don’t you think it’s time to call in? Wouldn’t want to piss off the boss on a Sunday night,” said Rick.

“Guess you’re right. I’m sure he’s going nuts waiting to hear from us. Patch us in. Tell him the radio was out for a while,” said Ceravolo.

“You tell him. He’s on the line now,” said Rick. “Good luck.”

“Shit,” muttered the medics in unison.

“What the hell’s been going on? How’s the girl?” boomed the voice of Dr. George Spiros.

“Vitals weak but stable. Probable closed head injury, pupils five millimeters and sluggish. May have a collapsed lung and internal hemorrhaging. This
pobrecita
has had better days, Dr. Spiros,” Santos said.

“Have you given her any dopamine?”

“No. Just normal saline, as much as her little vein can take. Her pulse is regular at 120, her BP 75 over 35. We’re bagging her at 24 breaths per minute.”

“Ceravolo, you there? I haven’t heard from you today. How’s the girl’s cardiac rhythm?”

“A little fast, but regular.”

“Sounds like we’ll need the neurosurgeons as well as the general surgeons on this one. What about that crazy Parks Department guy? Anything left of him?”

“The coroner’s picking up the pieces,” Santos said.

“Can’t say I’m upset about that. What’s your ETA, Davidson?”

“Two minutes, sir.”

“Good job. But call me sooner next time. See you at the landing pad in two.”

“Roger.”

They breathed a shared sigh of relief, and the helicopter thundered north, flying high above the once- majestic Hudson River.

Enrique Santos, seasoned medic, devout Catholic, and father of five, reached into his pocket, and clutched his rosary beads in one hand, caressed little Jessica’s blood-stained, bandaged forehead with the other.
Dios mediante—God willing—you will make it, pobrecita.