Strangled - Brian McGrory [103]
I looked over at Edgar, who was lying on his side, bleeding from his face, his stomach, and his leg, and raced toward him. As I did, the shooter bolted for the door, screaming all the way out onto the street, his gun still on the floor inside.
“Edgar, we’re getting help,” I cried out. “Help is on the way.”
His eyes were glazed over, fading from life to death. I turned toward the clerk and yelled, louder than I intended, “Did you get hold of the cops?”
He looked at me, panicked, but said nothing.
“Call them again and tell them a man’s been shot!”
He picked up the receiver again and dialed 911.
I got on the floor and cradled Edgar’s bloody head in my lap. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it against the wound near his temple, hoping to stem the flow of blood.
“Help is on the way, pal. Just stay with us, okay? Edgar, just stay with us.”
I tried to sound reassuring, but I probably sounded anything but. My thoughts drifted back to the time Record colleague Steve Havlicek was wounded in a bomb attack on my car, and I sat with him on a Georgetown street waiting too long for an ambulance to arrive. He died a few hours later.
In the distance, I could hear the faint sound of a siren, and announced to Edgar, “Here they are, pal. They’re on the way. They’ll be here in a second.”
No response.
The siren got louder, closer, too slowly.
“Just stay awake for me, Edgar. Don’t go anywhere on me. I want to be toasting you at your next wedding.”
Still no response. His eyes were closed now. I placed a finger under his nostrils and barely felt a breath.
His head was heavy to the point of being — and I don’t like using the expression here — dead weight, his neck slack. His blood was flowing right through my shirt and spilling down my legs.
“Edgar, we’ve got way too much left to do on this story for you to go anywhere, so don’t even think about it.”
The siren was now blaring outside. I could see the flash of blue lights reflected in the front window — a police car, not an ambulance. The doors to the store jolted open as I screamed at the clerk, “Call a fucking ambulance — now!”
In a second, there were two cops flanking me, both of them down on their knees. One of them asked what had happened.
I said, “He was shot three times by a guy who fled out the door about three minutes ago. Bullet wounds in the head, the stomach, and his leg. He’s losing blood. He’s unconscious. He’s barely hanging on.”
Another siren outside, and then another one after that, and still more in the distance. I could see blue lights reflecting in the window, and then red ones, meaning an ambulance was pulling up, thank God.
One of the cops stood up and barked into his radio, “APB for a suspected gunman who fled from the CVS on Charles and Cambridge Streets within the past five minutes.”
He looked down at me and asked, “What’d he look like?”
I still held Edgar’s head in my arms. His face had gone from pained to peaceful, which should have been nice, but instead scared the hell out of me.
“White guy, forties, black trench coat, bloody nose. That’s all I know.”
The cop repeated that into his radio. A whole cadre of police and EMTs burst through the front door. I heard someone drop a stretcher beside me. A guy in a brown uniform knelt down next to me and edged me slowly away from Edgar, saying, “Let me take over from here.” I stood up, and Edgar was surrounded by rescue workers.
The cop who was the first on the scene put his hand on my elbow and asked, “Can I get a word with you?”
We walked a few feet down an aisle that held deodorants and razors on the well-stocked shelves. Don’t ask me why I noticed this; I just did.
“Can you give me a brief account of what just happened?”
That was the cop, doing his job, though at the wrong time. My eyes and my thoughts remained on Edgar. The EMTs had spread him flat on the floor, on his back. One was ripping off his clothing and