James Patterson - 11th hour

Cindy was lost in her thoughts, came back to the present only when the cab pulled up to a side entrance of the hospital.

“Faster for you if I drop you here,” the driver said. “Twenty-Second is jammed.”

That’s when Cindy found that she didn’t have her purse, her wallet, had nothing but her phone.

“Tell me your name. I’ll send you a check and a really good tip, I promise that I will.”

“That’s great,” the driver said, meaning the opposite. “No, listen. Forget it. Don’t worry about it. Good luck.”

Cindy had been to this hospital many times before. She walked through the lobby, passed the elevator bank, and headed down the long hallway, past radiology and the cafeteria; she followed the arrows pointing toward the ER.

The waiting room outside the ER was dirty beige and crowded with people with all kinds of injuries. She found Yuki balled up in a chair in the corner of the room. Cindy called out to her, and Yuki stood up and flung herself into Cindy’s open arms.

Yuki was sobbing and Cindy just held on to her, dying inside because she couldn’t make out anything Yuki was saying.

“Yuki, what happened? Is Richie okay? Is he okay? ”

It had been a night like no other I’d ever experienced. It felt like a military firestorm, gunshots cracking, bullets flying in all directions.

A sixty-year-old shop owner fell at my feet; never said a word, just died.

A drug dealer had been shot dead at point-blank range by an active cop who’d gone completely fucking rogue, and then there were other cops, my friends and my partner, who’d been injured in the line of duty.

I’d fired my gun, shooting to kill.

Maybe I was the one who brought Randall down.

I came out of the ER and found Cindy, Claire, and Yuki huddled together in the small, crowded waiting room. Cindy looked stunned. Yuki had been crying and now seemed distracted, as if she’d turned entirely inward.

Claire had the worn-down look of a person who hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and had not yet gotten a second wind.

My clothing was blood soaked. I wasn’t injured, but I was scared, and I’m pretty sure I’d never looked worse.

When Yuki saw me, she jumped out of her chair and asked, “What did they tell you?”

Brady had caught a bullet in his lung and had taken another through his inner thigh. That shot had hit an artery, and thank God the EMTs had arrived as fast as they had. Still, Brady’s condition was grave. He’d lost a lot of blood.

“He’s in surgery,” I told Yuki. “Claire, you know Dr. Miller.”

“Boyd Miller?”

“That’s him.”

Claire said to Yuki, “Miller is a fantastic surgeon, Yuki. The best of the best.”

Yuki said to me, “They told me that it’s touch and go. Touch and go! ”

“He’s strong, Yuki. He’s young,” Claire was saying.

Conklin came into the waiting room from the hallway. His left arm was in a sling. He opened his right arm to Cindy, who threw herself at him. He hugged her hard, kissed the top of her head as she wept, then said to me, “I put Randall’s wife in the chapel.”

I left the waiting room and went down the corridor to the chapel, a sad-looking place that tried to give solace on a financially strapped city hospital’s budget. An ecumenical altar was backlit with subdued lights, and comforting sayings had been written in script along the walls.

Becky Randall sat in a pew with a little girl in her lap, three other kids hanging on to her arms, waist, and legs. She disentangled herself from her children, stood up, and said, “Willie, you’re in charge.”

She and I walked together into the hallway.

“No one will tell me anything,” she said. “Please, Sergeant. What happened? Tell me everything.”

Tell her everything?

I didn’t know everything yet myself, and considering what I did know, I had to edit my comments with compassion.

Could I tell Becky Randall that it looked like her husband had shot several people before he shot Chaz Smith dead in the men’s room of a school with a hundred kids all around? Could I tell her that following the shooting of Chaz Smith, her husband had shot and killed even more people and that because of him my lieutenant might lose his life?

Could I tell her that some of the five bullets inside her husband’s body had probably come from my gun?

Will Randall was alive, but he was on a ventilator and going into surgery. If he survived, he was looking at multiple charges of murder in the first degree.

Even if he lived, life as he had known it was over. “Your husband shot a drug dealer tonight, Becky. The man’s name was Jimmy Lesko. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“No,” she said. “Why did he shoot him? It must have been in self-defense.”

An hour later, all I knew from Becky Randall was that she had no idea about her husband’s secret life and in fact denied that he had one. What was it Joe had said?

Do we ever really know anyone?

I’ll never forget that hour in the corridor outside the chapel. Kids skated on the linoleum hallway on socked feet, asked for quarters for the vending machines, fooled around with wheelchairs while Becky sat in shock, denial, disbelief.

“Will is a wonderful, decent man,” Becky told me. “What’s going to happen if my husband dies?”

The TV was on in the waiting room.

Jason Blayney was on the screen, standing outside Metropolitan Hospital in a smart jacket and tie, telling the network news what had gone down on Haight Street.

He looked and sounded authoritative, as if he knew what he was talking about. But Blayney was doing what he always did. He didn’t know what happened, so he made up the facts.

As Blayney told it, the cops had come onto Haight Street and started firing.

“William Randall, a ten-year veteran in Vice, was pursuing a drug dealer named Jimmy Lesko,” Blayney said. “Lesko was a small-time drug dealer, and according to witnesses, Lesko was unarmed. Randall fired at Lesko without provocation, kept firing until Lesko was dead.

“Homicide detectives were alerted to the shooting and tore onto Haight Street, where they began firing at anything that moved.

“Sergeant Randall was seriously wounded and is now in surgery at Metropolitan Hospital, fighting for his life.

“Nicholas Kiernan, age sixty-two, was a resident of the Lower Haight, an innocent bystander who stepped outside his home and was caught in the cross fire,” Blayney went on. “Mr. Kiernan, father of three, died at the scene.

“Two other police officers were shot in the blistering hail of gunfire. Lieutenant Jackson Brady, head of the Southern District Homicide Division, and Inspector Richard Conklin are in surgery right now, their lives hanging by threads.

“This is a shameful night for the San Francisco Police Department, which can truly be described as the gang who couldn’t shoot straight.”

It was a nasty story, the worst of Blayney. There was no mention of Randall’s being a bona fide rogue cop, no hint that the SFPD had warned Randall to drop his weapon, no indication that the police had fired on him only when he refused to drop his gun. And Blayney’s biased reporting was now flashing around the world as truth.

I grabbed the remote control and turned off the set.

Randall was still in surgery, and from what I’d been told, the odds were against his coming out of the OR alive. Brady was also fighting terrible odds. As he was being cut and stitched, a whole lot of prayers came his way from the waiting room.

At around two in the morning, Cindy took Richie home to bed, and Claire let me walk her out to the parking lot. She made me promise to call her when Brady was out of surgery.