Striking Out (3 page)

A couple of hours later, I sat on the back porch steps taking a cigarette break and watching T.C. dig out some roots that had invaded my garden from the neighbour’s and wouldn’t stop sending out noxious shoots. The radio was still tuned to the sports station on which we had listened to the thoroughly depressing baseball press conference. Now the airwaves were full of fans whining to the know-nothing phone-in host.

Andy had gone to the office to meet with his partner, Jim Wells. They’re under a lot of pressure on a high-profile case, a teenaged girl shot and killed during the robbery of her parents’ convenience store. I recruited T.C. for the heavy work.

It suddenly struck me as I watched him digging, shirt off and sweating, that he is almost a man. His back, once sweetly frail and delicate, is broadening. His shoulders are gaining definition and his legs are bulking up, too, probably from a summer of bike riding and rollerblading.

He’s been taller than Sally for a year now and is closing in fast on my five-foot-nine, but until that moment I hadn’t realized how much he has left his boyhood behind.

“Stupid, stupid root,” he grunted, stabbing the spade into the hole he had dug. “It’s huge. I’ll have to get the axe.”

I butted my smoke and went to look.

“Sorry, but you’ll have to hold off on the mighty woodsman imitation. I can handle that with my old bread knife.”

I went and got it out of the garage, then came back and hunkered down over the hole.

“Kate, can I ask you something?” T.C. said, overly casual.

“Ask away,” I said, sawing with the knife. “Just don’t let go of the root.”

“You know tomorrow, there’s this demonstration downtown? About the police? And the kid who got shot?”

“I heard about it,” I said.

“Well, I was thinking of going. What do you think? Do you think Andy would get mad?”

“Watch out, I’m almost through,” I said, stalling for time. “Don’t pull too hard or you’ll fall on your bum.”

We finished the operation and tossed the root into the compost. I stood looking at him.

“To answer your question, no, I don’t think Andy would get mad if you went to the demonstration,” I said. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid to ask him because you think you might offend him?”

“Yeah. But it’s not like I’m saying I think Andy would do something like that. He’s a good cop. But someone has to stop the bad cops, too.”

I sat back on the top porch step. T.C. picked up Elwy and sat with him on the step below.

“This is what is known as a conflict,” I said. “Part of growing up. You think the police have behaved badly, so you want to protest. But you also know that not all police act that way. Andy for one.”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to disrespect Andy.”

“Maybe you’d feel better if you talked to him and explained why you were doing it.”

“Well, maybe.”

“That’s not that hard to do, is it? He’s not an unreasonable man. If your reasons are sound, he’ll respect them.”

“I guess.”

“It’s not that big a deal,” I said. “In other circumstances, I’d probably go with you.”

“So you think I should go?”

“No, I didn’t say that.” I laughed. “I’m saying you’re old enough to make up your own mind.”

T.C. looked at the ground gloomily, stroking Elwy, who purred loudly enough to be heard a block away.

“Look, if he wasn’t in the picture, you wouldn’t hesitate, right?”

“Well, a lot of my friends are going, and if I don’t maybe they’ll think I’m on the cops’ side.”

“This is Anthony?”

“Yeah, and Trevor, too, and some of the other guys. And some of the girls in my class, too. We talk about it a lot. Like, Anthony says his cousins get hassled all the time by the police when they’re just hanging out at the mall or something. And his dad’s car gets stopped all the time by the cops. He’s, like, a lawyer, drives a Mercedes. Anthony says it’s because the cops can’t believe a black man could afford a car like that.”

“You mean they think he’s drug dealer or a pimp or something.”

“Yeah. Or that he stole it,” T.C. added. “Like Anthony’s father was some kind of car thief, right? Like he didn’t have a zillion degrees from Harvard and shit like that.”

“And
what
like that?” I laughed. T.C. blushed.

“Come on, Kate, you’ve heard worse language than that.”

“I’ve
used
worse language than that, but that’s not the point. Your mother would have a bird if she heard you.”

“Well, I’ll be a teenager next week,” he said. “Then I can talk any way I want.”

“To coin a phrase,” I said, “yeah, right.”

Sally came out on the porch while we were laughing. She had her cordless phone in her hand, and held it out to me.

“It’s Jim Wells.”

“On your phone.”

“He got your machine.”

I stood up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and took the receiver from her.

“Geez, Jim, can’t I even escape you in the privacy of my own garden?” I laughed.

“Kate, it’s about Andy.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s going to be all right, Kate.”

“What do you mean he’s going to be all right? What happened to Andy?”

I lost my breath and leaned on the porch railing. Sally moved to me and put her arm around my shoulders. T.C. stared at us both.

“He’s been shot. The doctors are with him now. He’s not going to die.”

“Where is he? What hospital?”

“Toronto Hospital. The old General,” he said. “Kate, listen, they’re sure he’s going to be all right.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Come to Emergency. I’ll be waiting.” Jim said.

I hung up without saying goodbye.

“I’ve got to go.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“Andy’s been shot.” I could hardly say the words.

“I know. I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

“No, I can do it. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll just find my keys. You’ve got other things to do.”

“Just wait here.” Sally said. “I’ll get your keys.”

She ran up the back stairs. I fumbled in my pocket for a cigarette. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t work my lighter. T.C. took it from me and lit it.

“Now I’m corrupting you,” I said, trying to laugh. “Making you light my evil weeds for me.”

“It’s okay, Kate. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I looked at him. He looked as scared as I felt, but he was trying to be strong for me. I started to cry. To stop myself, I crossed my arms across my stomach and rocked back and forth. Then Sally was there, and the two of them led me to the car.

I was out of the car before it stopped. Jim was waiting at the Emergency entrance. I lost it when I saw his face, drawn and pale, and the blood on his clothes. There was a lot of blood.

He led me around a corner to a chair in the waiting area, then got me a coffee from the battered vending machine against the wall. It was foul, but it gave me something to focus on.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“We got a tip. A guy on the drug squad got a call from one of his snitches to check out this guy Jerome Kinton. We went to his place but he wasn’t there. Just his kid brother. Just a little guy. A little guy with an attitude.”

He drew a shaky breath.

“He went into the next room, said he had to use the washroom, came back with a gun. Walked in shooting. Andy didn’t have a chance. By the time I got my gun out it was too late.”

I closed my eyes.

“Where?” I asked.

“An apartment on Jarvis south of Gerrard.”

“No, where was he hit?”

“Oh. In the chest.”

I took a deep breath.

“They’ve got the best chest guy in the city working on him,” Jim said.

“How long has he been in there?”

Jim looked at his watch.

“About an hour,” he said. “They should be able to tell us something soon.”

“Can I see him?”

“They won’t let anyone in,” he said. “I tried.”

“What about the one who shot him? What happened to him?”

“He’s in there too. They don’t think he’s going to make it.”

I looked at him. He looked scared.

“First time in fifteen years I’ve fired a gun,” he said.

“Are you okay?”

He shrugged, then got up from his chair. He walked over to a trash can and threw his coffee cup in, then came back and sat down, heavily. I took his hand.

“What about Carol?” His wife.

He nodded.

“I called. She knows that I’ve got to be here. At least until we know something more. The investigators are on their way, too. To question me. See if I should be charged.”

We both watched an ambulance pull out of the driveway as a cab came in. Two black women got out. The younger of the two, who looked grim and angry, had her arms wrapped around the older one, who was crying. Sally and T.C. came in behind them. They saw us and crossed the room. The two women went to the reception desk.

“Is there any more word?” Sally asked.

I shook my head.

“I’ve got to see him, Jim.”

“Just hang on,” Jim said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I could see him,” I said. “I could see with my own eyes that he’s still alive.”

Tears stopped me. Jim put his arm around my shoulder. Sally sat down on the other side of me and took my hand.

The big swinging doors by the reception desk opened, and a doctor came out, looking grave. I got to my feet, but he went to the two women by the desk and spoke to them. The older one wailed, hands over her face, and stumbled, as if she would swoon. The doctor looked across the room at us as he held the door for them to go inside.

“Damn,” Jim said. “That’s got to be the kid’s mother.”

I sat back down. We waited in silence, willing the clock to move faster. After a few minutes, a couple of guys I vaguely recognized from parties I’d been to with Andy came in the front door. They crossed to us, looking miserable.

“Sorry, Jim,” the older one said. Jim shrugged.

“Is there any news?”

“Nothing. I guess you’re here to talk to me.”

“There’s no rush.”

“I just want to wait until the doctor comes back.”

“That’s fine,” he said, then turned to me. “Ms. Henry, we’ve met before. I’m Staff Inspector Walt Stimac. And this is Bob Flanagan, who is working with me on this investigation.”

He shook my hand. Flanagan nodded at me. I remembered him now, a drunken boor who had made racist and sexist remarks to me at a squad party. Andy and I had fought about it later when he tried to defend the guy on the grounds that he was a good cop, just a bit rough around the edges.

“I’m sorry about Andy,” said Stimac. “And I’m sorry to intrude. We have to follow procedures.”

“I understand.”

“I’ve arranged for a room here,” he said to Jim. “As soon as you’re ready, we’ll take your statement and get your clothes to the lab.”

“I said I wanted to wait until the doctor comes.”

“Fine. Is there anyone you want us to call? Carol?”

“She’s coming over with my clothes as soon as she takes the kids to her mother’s.”

“Good. Fine. Is there anything else you want?”

“A little room, if you don’t mind,” Jim said, the muscles of his jaw tense.

Stimac patted him on the shoulder and sat down a couple of seats away. Flanagan wandered over to the vending machines. He put in a coin and got a candy bar. He unwrapped it and walked to the chairs farthest from us, picked up a copy of the tabloid
Mirror
and proceeded to read it as if it was written in Latin, frowning over it as he chewed his candy, both big feet flat on the ground.

I checked out Stimac. In contrast to the beefy Flanagan, whom no one would mistake for anything but a cop, he didn’t fit any stereotypes. He was in his fifties, probably, slim and balding, with a thin military moustache and a fastidious cast to his face. He looked like a department-store floorwalker from a forties movie, except he wasn’t comedic. His posture was still, but somehow aware. His eyes never lost focus with the boredom of the wait.

“I gave my gun and Andy’s to the officer in charge at the crime scene,” Jim said.

“We got them,” Stimac said.

“I wish I’d seen it coming.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Jim closed his eyes and put his face in his hands. It was my turn to comfort him.

When the doctor appeared ten minutes later, he had two kinds of news. Andy was alive. The boy was dead. Marcus Kinton, sixteen years old, dead. Dead and black and sixteen years old.

The doctor, a resident who looked to be not much older than T.C., had introduced himself as Dr. Usman—they never let on that they have first names. As if knowing that their friends call them Bill or Ted would make them less credible in patients’ eyes.

He talked in medi-speak: haemopneumo thorax, haemorrhagic shock. They were terrifying words, baffling words.

“Can you try this in English?” I asked. “What has happened to Andy so far, and what will happen in the immediate future?”

He sighed, and gave in.

“Basically, he was shot in the chest. The bullet missed the heart, but hit his left lung and nicked the bronchus, or airway.”

He pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper and drew a clumsy diagram. I studied it as if it were a map to buried treasure.

“One consequence of this kind of injury is that air and blood leak into the pleural space, between the lungs and the chest wall. This puts pressure on the lung, so he was having trouble breathing. He also lost a great deal of blood, leading to some shock. So far, we have simply been pumping stuff in to stabilize him while we assess the damage. Now we’re taking him into surgery to repair it.”

“Is he going to be all right?” Jim asked.

“Physically, I don’t see why not,” said the doctor. “It’s a straightforward procedure, and the surgeon is the best in the country. The only worry we have right now is what effect the loss of blood might have on his brain function. There’s a small chance that it could be impaired.”

He stood up, as if to go. I stood, too.

“Can I see him now?”

“I’m sorry. He’s already on his way up to the operating floor. It’s better if you don’t see him right now, anyway. Just let us do what we do best and try not to worry.”

There was a commotion behind us. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man in a leather jacket coming in the door, followed by a camera with the Citytv logo. Ace crime reporter Darren Donnolly, hot on the heels of his favourite kind of story. Nothing like a downed cop to get City’s juices flowing.

“Is there somewhere else we can wait?” I asked.

“There’s a waiting area on the second floor, next to the O.R. I’ll take you up.”

Stimac got to his feet, ready for action.

“Leave those guys to me,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

All I could do was nod. I could feel the camera’s eye on us as we followed the doctor to the elevator, which, mercifully, arrived almost immediately.

It was cold and sterile, stainless steel, and big enough to carry stretchers. There were a couple of white-coats gossiping inside, who looked us over with some curiosity. We must have made a strange picture, especially me. I suddenly realized that I was filthy from gardening. I even had muddy knees.

We got off on the second floor, and Dr. Usman took us to a small area in a corner, with a few chairs. It was pretty bare-bones. There weren’t even any stale magazines.

“I’m going into the O.R. now. It’s going to take at least a couple of hours, if you want to go and get something to eat.”

We thanked him, then sat down, silent, each of us wrung out. Jim couldn’t let the bloodstains on his clothes alone. He kept scrubbing at one on his knee with his right hand.

“Shouldn’t you change?”

“Carol will be here soon,” he said.

“I should call Andy’s mother before it gets on the news.”

She lives in Peterborough with her second husband, a retired police chief. Andy’s father, also a cop, was killed, shot on duty when Andy was in his teens. I didn’t relish making the call to tell her that her son was in the operating room.

“I’ll do it if you like,” Jim said. “I’ll call Meredith, too. The kids shouldn’t hear from the radio either.”

Meredith is Andy’s ex-wife. I thanked Jim, realizing that I wasn’t capable of dealing with either one of them.

After he left, I turned to Sally and T.C.

“You guys go home. There’s no point in us all sitting here. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”

I didn’t really want to be alone, but I was worried about T.C. This was no place for a kid.

“Listen,” I said to him. “Go feed Elwy, and then you can watch the videos Andy and I got. There’s even a Steve Martin movie.”

T.C. and I share the same warped sense of humour.

“Really,” I said. “I’d rather you left. You heard the doctor. Andy’s going to make it. Besides, Elwy’s out and you know he’ll be howling for dinner. I’ll phone the minute I have news.”

“If you’re sure,” Sally said.

“I’m sure.”

I got up and hugged them both, then walked them to the elevator. Once they were gone, I went looking for a place to smoke. On the next floor up I found a washroom down a corridor with a lot of closed offices, where I figured I wouldn’t be bothered. I checked for smoke detectors, then locked myself into a cubicle for the next twenty minutes, perched on the toilet, sobbing and smoking.

I’ve talked to other women involved with cops. Each responds differently to loving a man who carries a gun to work and spends his days trying to put bad guys in jail. Some deny the fear, others carry it everywhere. I’m somewhere in between.

I figure that there’s no use worrying about something over which I have no control. Statistically, I’m more likely to be hit by a bus than Andy is to be killed on duty. Most days, I figure he’s a good bet to die in bed at eighty of something mundane.

It’s a kind of denial, I suppose. In refuse to think about the violence of his work, it will never touch him, or me.

Fat lot of use that philosophy was dealing with the panic that had me in its grip in that stupid washroom.

Finally, I calmed down and splashed my face with cold water. I used paper towels dipped in warm water and soap to scrub the garden grime off my hands and knees as best I could.

When I got back to the second floor, Flanagan was sitting there, staring into middle distance, picking his nose. I sat one chair away from him.

“Where’s Jim?”

“He’s down talking to Stimac. Carol brought his clothes. She said she’d be back to see you later.”

“What’s he talking to Stimac about?”

“It’s just procedure. There’s got to be an investigation to keep the civilians off our backs. I figure, he takes out one more punk, he deserves a medal.”

“How come you’re not there? Aren’t you part of the team?”

“I’m assigned to Andy. I’m with you until he comes to and can talk.”

I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.