Going Home - Chapter 2

They hooked me up with some fluids in the ambulance, but I couldn’t get anything for the pain until we got to the ER. At least I was wearing the uniform, which meant they pushed me through the line, since a simple bullet wound in New York doesn’t always get you fixed up right away.

They took some X-Ray’s and the bullet was a through and through, but they didn’t like what they saw on it and scheduled me for surgery. Once I’d heard that the bullet passed through and wasn’t still there, I’d assumed they’d just clean the wound, stitch me up and send me home, since that’s what happened to the guys on the force who’d gotten hit somewhere non-vital. They admitted me and transferred me up to the pre-op ward but it took almost an hour and a half for someone to explain to me why I needed surgery. Thankfully, they’d given me pain meds so I wasn’t being tortured while I waited.

I also had visits from my shift commander and some of the guys from work, partially to check on me and partially to get what they needed to fill out reports. They assigned it to a detective, but other than Julian’s and my descriptions of the kid, they didn’t have anything else on him.

He wasn’t a regular in the store and the cameras in the bodega were all for show, so everyone knew they’d never find him. This would just end up as one more unsolved shooting. A reporter came by and got some statements and snapped some pictures, but I wasn’t seriously wounded and the story wasn’t all that compelling, so no one was overly excited. If this had been a smaller jurisdiction it might have been a big deal, but a non-fatal leg wound was just a statistic in New York, not an actual story.

“Officer Brewer?” the doctor said when he came into my hospital room.

“Yeah,” I said. “No one would tell me downstairs why I needed to get surgery. It’s been a while so I’m guessing it isn’t urgent. Can you tell me what’s happening?”

“I can. The surgeon who did the consult on your x-rays was concerned by a deformation on the bone where it looks like the bullet hit and changed trajectory before it left your leg. Have you had surgery in the past on this leg?”

“Yes. I played very briefly in the NFL and took a bad hit that shattered a section of the bone. They had to reconstruct that section of the bone and put a plate in to hold it all together.”

“That makes sense. It looks like the bullet clipped the plate as it passed through and deformed it. We’re concerned about the long-term damage of that deformed plate, especially since it looks like the bullet sheared off a bit that might be cutting into the muscle near it. We want to go in and at the very least replace that plate so you aren’t continually tearing your muscle every time you walk.”

“Yeah, I would prefer not to have that. Will I be able to walk like normal after this?”

It had taken a bunch of physical therapy to be able to walk without support after my initial injury, for almost a year, and it still hurt like a bitch in cold weather.

“We aren’t seeing any major damage to any of your connective tissue or the bone, so baring any shearing damage or spidering from the connection points of the plate, you should be okay. You’ll probably be on crutches for a few weeks and a cane for a month or two while your muscle heals, but after that everything should return to normal.”

They ran some tests and were in and out all day, but apparently, they weren’t that concerned about it, because I didn’t end up going into surgery until almost nine that night, with a different surgeon than the guy I’d seen that morning.

Since I was on pain meds, I was mostly bored more than anything else. I wasn’t surprised my wife never came by. Odds were she never went home after storming out the night before and didn’t know anything had happened to me, and it was doubtful she’d come and check on me even if she did. She’d always been kind of heartless with very little caring for people that couldn’t do something for her, but I’d been able to ignore that personality trait when it had been directed at other people.

The doctors said the surgery went well, but all the memories of discomfort and annoyance I had after my football injury came rushing back as they discharged me from the hospital.

I got back to my apartment around lunch the next day to find it completely cleaned out. I’d like to say I was surprised that Terri would have used my hospital stay as an opportunity to take everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the apartment, but I wasn’t. This was exactly as petty as she could be.

She’d taken everything from the bed and TV all the way down to the shampoo out of the shower and the silverware out of the drawers. Hell, she’d taken all of the hangers, leaving my clothes in a pile on the floor.

The worst part was, she hated most of the stuff we had. She always complained it was cheap and ugly, which was generally true, but New York was crazy expensive and neither of us made enough to really afford anything that didn’t come flat in a box for us to build ourselves.

This was all a problem for tomorrow, really. I was exhausted and was supposed to go by the precinct in the morning for a meeting with my union rep and my lieutenant to find out how this would affect my position on the force. The couple of guys that stopped by told me word had already traveled the entire precinct that a small child got the drop on me and there’d even been a small story about it in one of the local rags, and it wasn’t going over well.

I knew Julian didn’t have any working cameras and my very brief report I’d had written up at the request of my PBA rep had been extremely dry and to the point, which meant the only other person who could have talked about what happened was Julian himself. Considering I’d done him a pretty big favor, since the kid had shot me before he could rob the place or hurt Julian, I’d hoped he’d keep me from looking too bad when he’d retold the story, and was a little pissed he hadn’t.

That was New York for you.

I hobbled into the precinct the next morning for my meeting. It would be another week of healing before they started any serious PT and I’d picked up enough experience on crutches after my football injury that it wasn’t slowing me down too much, but it was still a pain in the ass, especially making my way up the steps to the station, which were really not ADA compliant.

“Hey, look who it is. I think a Boy Scout troop is coming through later, so keep your head down,” the desk sergeant said when I walked it.

Cops have a dark sense of humor at the best of times, so I’d expected something. If I had died, they would have all looked properly remorseful and held a big parade for their ‘fallen brother,’ but since I lived I was a target for mocking and ridicule.

“Funny. Lieutenant Folson made it in yet?”

“I think I saw him. You must have stirred up some shit for him to come in before second shift.”

The Lieutenant was famously not a morning person, to the point that he’d worked out a deal with the captain to get permanently assigned to the second patrol shift. While it would probably hurt his long-term career goals, he’d apparently decided that getting up in the late morning was worth the tradeoff.

“Getting shot by a child will do that,” I said, as he buzzed me through the door that led into the rest of the station.

The first shift had already gone out for the day, so this end of the station was pretty empty at the moment. The detectives would be getting into their various departments but wouldn’t be to the point in their morning where they’d need to come down and review some statement or another, and the first shift hadn’t been out long enough to start bringing in perps that required enough paperwork to do it here instead of in a patrol car or save it for later in the shift.

All that meant was that the station was really quiet, which was the kind of message that was hard not to notice. I could only think of one reason they’d want to bring me in to talk when no one was in, and it didn’t say a lot of great things for my career.

I hobbled down the hall past the locker rooms and the briefing room to the shared patrol lieutenants’ office and knocked on the door.

“Enter,” he said, after looking up through the window and seeing me.

I opened the door and saw my PBA rep was already inside waiting for me.

“How are you feeling, Henry?”

“Not bad, actually. They said the only real damage was to the plate on my leg from back in my football days. Other than that, it was a through and through and should heal pretty well.”

“What did they say about your long-term recovery?”

“It should be good. They replaced the plate, so now I just have to wait for it and the bullet wound to heal. They said two months in the boot plus another month in physical therapy to get motion back and I should be good.”

“That fast?”

“Yeah. The plate really protected me from any serious injury beyond muscle and nerve damage, and they were able to remove most of the dead tissue caused by the bullet while they were replacing the plate, which they said will help my recovery time.”

“I see,” he said, sounding almost disappointed. “Henry, do you like being a cop?”

“What?” I asked, the non-sequitur taking me by surprise.

“You’ve been here for about a year, and while I don’t have any complaints about how you handle yourself, you have the general air of someone who doesn’t like it here. It seems like the only reason you do the work is because it’s your job, and you have to. Not because you have a passion for public service.”

“I’m … not sure what to say about that. I mean, I didn’t like getting shot yesterday, but overall, I’m happy.”

“I guess the reason is your old shift commander from your last precinct called, and we got to talking, and he had some of the same thoughts.”

“I feel like you’re trying to say something, but you don’t want to hurt my feelings. Do us both a favor and don’t tie yourself in knots trying to go easy. Just say what you have to say.”

“Some of the mayors’ new initiatives to move services from us to social services will start going into effect in June. I know they’re saying they aren’t looking to ‘defund the police,’ but that is, in fact, what they’re doing, since they are taking some of our budget and giving it over to social services so they can hire new counselors and the like. They’ll be handling some of the non-criminal or low-level stuff like mental wellness and vagrancy checks, which would be fine, since those calls are mostly bullshit anyway, except that it’s going to cost us some officers. The mayor had to make some promises to the PBA that we wouldn’t be forcing out any existing officers and instead the only cuts would come from early retirements and the like. The problem is, even with that, we’re still low on our numbers, and we need to find some places to trim down.”

“Don’t think of this as a punishment,” the PBA rep said. “You’re not the only guy we’ve talked to, and we’re making sure you’re taken care of. Because the doctors are saying there’s a chance you might not heal fully, they’re offering to let you out on full disability retirement. You’d have to work another ten years for your pension to equal that. It’s a really good deal.”

“So, you want to kick me off the force to make room in the budget, and you don’t expect me to take this personally.”

“I want to be clear, we aren’t doing that. We’re just discussing your options. You are, of course, welcome to stay, but since you’re not going to be in the field, we’re going to have to move you to the property room. Our concern is, there might not be enough spots in rotation for you when you’re ready to come back, and you might get stuck there.”

The property room is where they put old-timers who wanted to wait out for their full pension but didn’t have the heart or weren’t physically able to stay in the field. It was essentially where police officers went to die. Without any more street time, without putting up arrest numbers or finding moments to shine, it was next to impossible to get a promotion. You essentially became an armed piece of furniture.

They weren’t telling me I had to take the disability, but they were making sure that it was my only option. If I stayed in the property room, I’d never make enough money to afford anything but my one shitty apartment, and even that would be scraping by now that it would be only my paycheck now that Terri had left. I was screwed either way.

On the other hand, they could be right. I didn’t love being a cop. Or rather, I didn’t love being a cop in New York City. The criminals hated us, the citizens mostly hated us, and we generally got a raw deal all around. I’d been coping with it, or at least I thought I had, right up until that kid pointed a gun at me. Sitting in the hospital bed afterward, I’d had some time to think, and I realized I was almost kind of glad he shot me, since the alternative would have been shooting and probably killing a nine-year-old. I couldn’t imagine what that would have done to me, but I’m pretty sure it would have screwed me up.

I’d never grown up wanting to be a cop, and I’d never really wanted to live in the city, let alone the largest city in the country. I’d wanted to play football, get famous and rich, and eventually buy a farm somewhere. I hated my apartment. I hated the smell. And he was right; I also hated being a cop.

“Fine, I’ll take the severance,” I said.

Of course, now I was going to have to figure out how to live in this place I hated on half the salary I’d had yesterday, which didn’t even consider it was just that half, with no money from my future ex-wife.

It seemed a fitting end to what had to be the worst three days I could imagine.