Night Swimming
THE NURSE at the hospital was sort of cute, Brady thought absently. Slightly built, blond, and blue eyed, he had a sweet, reassuring smile, even for baffled police officers checking on bank robbers.
“Well,” said Nurse G. Carmichael, “I’m not sure what to tell you.
All of the men needed some sort of surgery, and we’re a ten-bed hospital!
Two of the guys had head injuries—concussions and broken jaws—and one of them had his forearm broken by a bullet.
Another guy had a bullet in his shoulder muscle”—Nurse Carmichael indicated the fatty upper part of the arm—“and a knife wound in his lower abdomen. And don’t get me started on the guy with the knife wound through his hand into one of the concussion’s shoulder.
It was a clusterfuck involving guns, knives, and a size fourteen…
.” The nurse’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Oh fuck,” he muttered.
Brady glanced at the nurse in confusion. “Is something wrong here?”
Nurse Carmichael shook his head no and then squinted at Brady’s uniform nametag in concentration. “Oh fuck,” he said again, shaking his head.
“What?” Brady asked, his voice rising. “What—are these guys going to die?”
“No,” Carmichael said. “Even the guy with the gut wound is going to be okay—you called in the ambulances and the wounds soon enough for us to get a trauma surgeon here, stat. I just… goddammit.” He shook his head like he was mad at something else entirely.
“George!” called another nurse, as slight as the blond one, but with the liquid dark eyes and gold-toned brown skin that indicated either Indian or Pakistani lineage. His nametag read A. Dara, and George Carmichael glanced up at him.
“I’m answering the policeman’s questions,” he said patiently. “This is officer Brady Carnegie.” He said Brady’s name with a subtle emphasis, and Brady tried to remember if he’d told this man his whole name.
Nurse Dara must have heard it because his eyes widened. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “What do you need to know?”
“What happened,” Brady said, trying not to let his desperation show.
“The bank cameras all blanked out about five minutes before these guys walked in. I’ve interviewed half the bank patrons, and they can tell me the robbers went by the names Fucker One, Fucker Two, Fucker Three, and Fucker Four, but you know what they can’t tell me? ”
“How all these fuckers ended up in the hospital?” Nurse Dara asked, head cocked sideways like he was taking a guess.
“Yes!” Brady was trying not to wail here, but this was insane.
“I… I got a call to a bank robbery and was reassured I’d have backup, and no backup showed.
None. And there I was, thinking, ‘It’s me and my department issue, and I’m going to die,’ and suddenly hell breaks loose inside and…
.” He remembered Eric, next to him, telling him the bank robbers were waiting for something, and Brady’s arrival had been it.
And then Ace, waving with bloody hands from a powder-blue Crown Vic that Brady had just seen at breakfast.
And a man very much like Jai in the front of the Crown Vic.
He shook his head. “A bank patron had to stick his head out and tell me it was safe.” He sighed. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing that is?”
Nurse Carmichael patted his shoulder, sympathy written all over his face. “Well, sugarpuff, it’s better than getting shot, right?” he said.
Brady stared at him. “Yes,” he admitted.
“But….” He shook his head. “Never mind.” He didn’t want to talk about how the ambulances had been loading up the injured bank robbers before any other police officers rolled up on scene.
He’d called dispatch several times, asking where his backup was, and the woman at the switchboard had gotten bitchy with him.
“Well, if they’re not there yet, maybe it’s not that important, Carnegie! ”
He’d given up then, only to be reamed by his captain on an open channel about letting shit go down in front of his eyes without having the stones to step into it.
Brady had screamed, “Where in the fuck was my backup!” into his radio until the feedback loop had the entire precinct shutting off their radios, and then he’d….
Walked away. Switched off his radio and come to the hospital to see if he could talk to any of the injured men.
And while the staff had been kind and helpful, they had also been….
Well, vague.
“Look,” he said after a moment, “I have to go back to my station house and fill out paperwork. Can I at least get everybody’s name?”
“Sure,” said Nurse Dara. He handed Brady a clipboard with four driver’s licenses on it and tapped his finger against the one on top.
“This one? Bobby Persons? He’s the one with the hand wound, which should be stitched up about now.
He’s also got a concussion, but he’s been conscious for about two hours.
He’s noncritical, and they gave him some pain meds, so you can go talk to him now. ”
Oh. Okay. “That would be great,” Brady said. “Thank you.”
Nurse Carmichael escorted him—not to a bed in a room, or even a cubicle, but to a hospital bed parked on an out-of-the-way corridor, where a scruffy white man in his early forties was zip-tied to a gurney, squinting against the fluorescent light.
“Fuck,” the nurse muttered. Then, to Brady, “I’m going to try to dim the switch for him—he’s got to have a hell of a headache in spite of the painkillers.”
A quarter of the man’s face was a massive bruise, Brady assumed from being kicked in the head.
A part of him was sympathetic, but a part of him was thinking Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
He tried to quash that part down. Criminals were human beings too.
Brady pulled up a nurse’s stool and waited until the lights were dimmed before trying to get the man’s attention.
“Mr. Persons?” he queried gently.
“Who wants to know?” The voice was groggy but also sort of…
naturally defensive. Brady recalled that the witnesses he’d interviewed had told him that the leader had been the one who’d ended up with a knife through his hand.
He hadn’t been able to get a description of the knife thrower out of anybody—average white guy, built, wearing an OD green T-shirt and jeans, both of which had seen better days.
“Didn’t even see the first throw,” said one of the cashiers. “Knife sailed out of nowhere, pinned the two guys together, and all hell broke loose.”
“I’m Officer Brady Carnegie of the Southern California Police Department—”
To his surprise, the man broke into a sort of cackle. “And you’re here to arrest me? Fuckin’ figures.”
“You were, in fact, read your Miranda rights when you were handcuffed to the stretcher in the ambulance,” Brady told him, because he’d done that for all four of the men in the red zip-up hoodies piled near the front door in puddles of blood.
He Mirandized Persons again and continued, “I’m just here to clarify some things. ”
“Should I ask for my lawyer?”
Brady grunted. “If this were an official interrogation as to your doings, yes. But since we can’t do that until you’re no longer concussed, this isn’t about you, but rather about the person or persons who wounded you and your… associates as you stood at the entrance of the bank.”
Persons moaned a little. “We were waiting,” he mumbled. “Brady, the faggot cop, was supposed to show up. We’d blow out of there, kill him in the crossfire, walk away with the take.”
Brady wondered if his lungs still worked. It was like somebody had dropped an ice-water porcupine from the sky, and still he sat there, every inch of his skin both skewered and frozen in shock.
From behind him, he heard a little gasp, but that was in a whole other world.
“So the whole robbery?” he asked and then had to ask again because his voice wasn’t working. “The whole robbery was to kill a cop that had been set up?”
The bank robber made a disgusted sound. “Robbery was the robbery,” he said. “We was planning it one minute, and the next some fucker’s telling us he’ll double our money if we do the other thing too.”
“Where were you planning it?” Brady asked, fighting the urge to grab Bobby Persons by his bloody shirt and shake him until his head popped off.
“Collard’s Bar.”
“I know the place,” Brady said. It was a tiny dive bar in Baker. Whole town had probably been there at one time or another. He imagined that throwing up in one of their tiny bathrooms was a rite of passage. “Who promised to double your money?”
Bobby moaned. “Cop. Fuckin’ cop. Promised. Promised all the other fuckin’ cops wouldn’t be there. We just had to come roaring out of the bank… one dead cop, all the fuckin’ money.”
Brady thought coldly of all of that backup that didn’t show up. Had it all been waiting somewhere? Oh yeah, poor Brady, got killed in the line of duty, but we killed the cop killers as they got away.
“Buddy,” he said, trying to keep his breaths steady and failing. “I think that knife in your hand was probably the best thing to happen to you today.”
The robber groaned. “Who even did that?” he whined. “Just out of fucking nowhere. Hurt like fuck, and I don’t even remember him ripping it out.”
“I have no idea who,” Brady lied.
His head hurt. His heart hurt. He didn’t have one friend in this miserable hellhole who would stand up for him?
He thought about his fellow officers, running them behind his eyes like a slideshow, and he stopped on Tony Navarro, the sweet little desk sergeant with the wife and three kids.
He’d had Brady over to his house a couple of times.
He’d been sent on mandatory vacation. Brady had taken him out for a send-off beer the night before he’d had dinner at Ace’s.
Tony might’ve had his back, Brady thought, trying to fight off the despair.
But then, maybe Tony’s vacation had been orchestrated for a reason.
“Who?” Brady asked, finally finding a question, a moment, a direction, now that he knew that his entire department didn’t want him dead. “Do you remember what this cop looked like?”