The Fence - Dick Lehr [1]
Kimberly listened as the voice told her Mike had been in an “accident.”
What kind of accident?
He’s alive but hurt. He’s on his way to Boston City Hospital.
Kimberly was up and standing by the bed. She was nervous all over. She dressed quickly. Teahan said they would send a car to get her. But it wasn’t that simple. Fast asleep in their bedrooms were her boys, six-year-old Mike Jr. and Nick, whose fifth birthday was still fresh on everyone’s mind. She told Teahan she’d call him back after figuring out the logistics. She hung up and hurriedly dialed her mother-in-law. Kimberly was thinking Bertha Cox could stay with her sons. But when Bertha arrived a few minutes later, she insisted on going along with Kimberly to the hospital. This led to more telephone calls to other family members to ask them to hurry to 52 Supple Road, where Michael and Kimberly and their boys lived in the second-floor apartment of the two-family home owned by one of Michael’s sisters.
It took nearly an hour for Kimberly to sort it all out. That’s when Joe Teahan and his partner, Gary Ryan, pulled up in front of the red-brick house. The two officers had first met as classmates in the police academy and had worked side-by-side for most of their four years on the force. They could see that fellow officer Mike Cox was living in the middle of it all. Walking a block in any direction landed you on a street where guns and drugs were the name of the game. In fact, for Mike and the dozen or so gang unit officers on a special operation that night, the trouble had begun only three blocks away.
Kimberly and Bertha Cox came down the brick front steps, hurried across the cement walkway of the tiny front yard, and climbed into the backseat of the cruiser. The two officers stuck to the script. They told Kimberly that Mike had head injuries. They said he likely slipped on a patch of ice, hit his head, and “split it open pretty good.” Gary Ryan did not share what he’d thought when he first saw Mike on the ground, his head so bloodied and swollen, “it looked like a gunshot wound.” The sergeant had said not to alarm her. Little else was said during the short drive to the hospital about a mile away.
The two women were taken to the emergency room entrance. They rushed through a double set of automatic doors. The entry-way’s linoleum floor was covered with a carpet rolled out in winter-time to absorb wet snow and slush. Nurses steered them through the trauma unit’s two heavy wooden doors that swung outward.
For a weeknight in the winter, the emergency room at Boston City Hospital was a busy place. Surgeons and nurses in the operating room were working furiously on a man named Lyle Jackson. Jackson, twenty-two years old, had been shot three times in the chest by two gunmen at a small take-out restaurant on Blue Hill Avenue, where he’d gone to munch on chicken wings and a hamburger. The young Roxbury man had been in the ER less than an hour. Meanwhile in the acute care unit, two other Boston police officers were receiving treatment. Jimmy Rattigan occupied one of the thirteen bays, and his partner, Mark Freire, was in another. Both had been injured while chasing Lyle Jackson’s shooters. Their cruiser was demolished when it hit a parked van on a narrow Roxbury street.
Kimberly and her mother-in-law found Mike in one of the other bays that circled the unit, each enclosed by a cloth curtain hanging from the low ceiling. When she first saw her husband, Kimberly said nothing. She walked up to where he lay on a gurney and studied him. It was as if in these surroundings, Kimberly, anxious up to this point, switched gears and assumed the detachment of the budding physician that she was. Observations she made were clinical: hematoma, the size of an egg, on the patient’s head; a swollen face; swollen nose; one laceration on his scalp that would require sutures,