Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [62]
“Who’s the girl in your wallet?” Myers asked when he returned to the interrogation room.
“She’s a friend of mine,” Hinckley said.
“Why did you do this?”
“When you find my room, you’ll know why.”
Hinckley seemed to have no interest in saying more. Myers continued filling out the arrest report, noting that Hinckley was being charged with assault with intent to kill a police officer. The detective was about to add the charge of attempting to kill the president when he paused and turned to McCarthy.
“How do you spell ‘assassinate’?” Myers asked.
“I’ll spell it for you,” Hinckley interjected. “A-S-S-A-S-S-I-N-A-T-E.”
Myers was floored. The detective thought he had seen it all: drug deals gone wrong, violent domestic disputes, gambling-fueled rages, abductions, rapes, murders. A few years earlier, he had questioned a cop killer; in the end, the man coldly admitted, “Yeah, I killed that motherfucker. He was trying to be a hero.” Myers had studied the eyes of sobbing husbands who had killed their wives, of mothers who had identified the bodies of their own children, of thugs who had committed terrible crimes without apology or remorse. But nothing had prepared him for John Hinckley, an emotionless enigma, a man who was both worried about his safety and eerily calm. At first, Hinckley had seemed to want to talk, to tell the story that would apparently be instantly obvious to anyone who “found his room.” But then he went no further. He simply wouldn’t open up—except to spell a word, and correctly at that.
CHAPTER 10
“MY GOD. THE PRESIDENT WAS HIT?”
Hospital personnel continued to pour into GW’s emergency room; doctors and nurses now stood guard with Secret Service agents at the entrances to keep the area from becoming even more crowded with people who didn’t belong there. The noise level was higher than ever; at times, agents and nurses and doctors had to shout to be heard. Even so, the necessary work of trauma care was getting done.
The president seemed to be doing better. He was receiving universal donor blood, and doctors were speeding it into his system by kneading the blood bags dangling from hooks above his gurney. His blood pressure had risen to about 160, high enough that doctors decided to reduce his fluids. But blood kept flowing from his chest. Within a few minutes, the Pleur-evac had collected more than half a liter, then nearly a liter. The crimson stream was steady, and it was not slowing down.
Joe Giordano and David Gens watched it with concern; perhaps the president had suffered a second injury. They rolled him over to inspect his body for more wounds, but found none. Gens “milked” the chest tube to get a sense of the blood’s temperature. The stream was warm, meaning that it came from deep inside the president’s body, another bad sign.
Because the blood was flowing so fast, Giordano suspected that the bullet had ruptured an organ or an artery. Short of surgery, there was only one way to spot such damage. “We better get a chest X-ray,” Giordano said.
A technician wheeled over an X-ray machine and positioned its camera above the president’s chest. The platoon of doctors and nurses around the gurney stepped back six feet as the technician pressed the trigger on a small cord. Then the technician collected the X-ray cartridge and rushed off to radiology.
As the minutes ticked by, the president’s blood kept flowing. The Pleur-evac was now filled with over a liter of blood, more than 15 percent of Reagan’s total volume. Whatever the problem was, the chest tube wasn’t solving it. Giordano was running out of options—it was time to call a chest surgeon and get him to take a look.
Speaking as much to himself as to the others in the trauma bay, Giordano said, “We need Ben Aaron.”
* * *
NOT WANTING TO stoke panic, Secretary of State Alexander Haig ordered his driver not to use his official car’s lights