Compromised (2 page)

Dr. Efram must have sensed that I was emotional. “It’s all right,” he said. “Cry if you feel you need to. It’s not uncommon to feel sad or disoriented after awakening from a coma.”

“What? Did you say that I was in a coma?”

Gus sniffled. “You were out for five days, Stephanie. We were worried that—” He stopped midsentence and turned away. I saw his chest rise steeply and then fall before he turned back to me, fighting tears. “I’m just so happy you’re all right.”

“But why can’t I remember anything, and why won’t you tell me what’s happened?”

It looked as if Dr. Efram was about to speak, but he stopped when he saw me reach for the back of my head. I could tell that my head was heavily bandaged, and I felt a sharp twinge where I touched it. I held out my hands imploringly.
“Gus?”
I could see that he was unable to speak, and in the next instant he covered his eyes and bawled like a child.

Gus was chased out of the room, then doctors and nurses paraded in one after another, all eager to have a crack at me, pinching, poking, prodding, squeezing, testing, and annoying me to death.

Five days?
Gus’s words ran through my mind over and over again. Dr. Efram had subsequently explained that I’d been brought in by ambulance on Monday evening, and it was now late Saturday afternoon.
Five days. Dear God. No wonder Gus is such a basket case. I can’t imagine what he must be going through. I can’t believe I haven’t seen my little baby boy, Max, in five days. Jesus.
A tear popped out of my eye. I shook my head while the medical staff tested me like a lab rat. I had been unconscious five full days. Still, the question remained: What happened?

More than an hour passed before the hospital staff finished their initial examination and Gus was allowed back into the room. He looked better when I saw him again—or maybe
relieved
was the word. Folded blankets and a pillow rested on the recliner near the window. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that Gus had slept by my side all week long.

“How’s your back?” I asked him.

He seemed surprised by my question. “My back? You’ve been unconscious for days and you’re worried about
my
back?”

“Well, I mean, sure. You slept in a chair all week, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“That spine of yours is probably twisted up like a pretzel.”

Gus shrugged, but his expression was buoyant. He didn’t answer my question but instead sat down alongside me on the bed, leaned over, and hugged me with his cheek pressed firmly against mine. “Thank God,” he whispered.

“You’re smothering me, you big lug.” I pushed him away good-humoredly. “Enough with the melodrama already. What does a girl have to do to get a straight answer?” I winked a sultry wink. “And by the way, sailor, I’ll do just about anything to get what I want.”

“We don’t have any answers.” He looked into my eyes lovingly. “
I
don’t have any.”

“Well, what do you have for me? Tell me something, will you? Tell me something before I go completely insane.”

“You don’t remember
anything
?”

“I already went through this with the doctors. My mind is blank. They think it’s probably confusion as a result of the weeklong snooze.”

“Maybe.”

“What does
that
mean?” I asked unhappily.

Gus wore a rare awkward expression on his face. “You may have amnesia, babe. Dr. Efram said it’s not uncommon in cases of severe head trauma.”

I touched the thick bandage on the back of my head. “This, huh?”

“It appears that you were slugged with a blunt object and that you have a severe concussion. Your brain really swelled up, and we were afraid . . .” His hand went to his mouth, but he removed it after a moment. “The point is that you’re all right. I called Ma to let her know you’re awake. She’ll come down to the hospital as soon as I get back to watch Max.”

“But what about Yana? He doesn’t know what happened?”

Gus cringed. I could see by his expression that something was terribly wrong. As mentioned, Tadashi Yanagisawa had been my partner for about a year, ever since Gus and I had gotten married. It was a violation of department policy for husband and wife to work together as a team.

“Gus, what happened?”

He shook his head with despair. “I’m sorry, Steph. Yana . . .” He looked away and drew a deep breath. “Yana didn’t make it.”

“Oh my God.” I strained to remember what had happened, but there was a wide and jagged rift in my memory.
Yana didn’t make it?
I gasped, filling my lungs with air, and tears began to run down my cheeks. “Gus, what are you talking about? Is Yana dead?”

Gus nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

I grabbed a tissue as the horror of my partner’s death washed over me. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force my memory to return, but it just wasn’t there. The damn thing just wasn’t there. “What the hell happened? The last thing I remember is . . .”

I had a vague recollection of that Monday, the day that I was admitted into the hospital. I remembered rushing around the apartment that morning, getting Max ready for the day, and Ma hitting me with one of her requisite zingers as soon as she walked through the door to babysit. It was something about me never having Max ready for her on time. I remember that she had laid into me pretty good, going on and on about how I never went to bed at a reasonable hour and how I was going to run myself into the ground. She was always full of motherly advice and complaints about me not listening to any of her sage wisdom.

“What do you and Gus do all night?” she’d asked.

“Duh!”

“All night? Is he Superman or something? My God, the two of you must be insatiable.”

“Well, not
all
night, but we can hardly play hide the salami before the little one goes lights out for the night, now can we?”

“
Hide the salami?
That’s disgusting. I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap. I’m still your mother.”

I snickered. “I’m well aware,” I’d said and gave her a peck on the cheek.

I recalled feeling that familiar pang I always got when I kissed Max good-bye before leaving for work.

Fast-forward a bit and I vaguely remembered that Yana and I had spent the day questioning relevant parties on the Serafina Ramirez homicide case, but when it came to the specific interviews, and the sequence of the day’s events . . . I looked out the window and could sense that I wore a vacant expression on my face. “Christ,” I barked. “What’s wrong with me? I can’t remember anything.”

“You will,” Gus assured me. “You’ve been in a coma all week. Give it a little time to let the cobwebs clear.”

“I know, but . . . shit.” I felt a frown pulling at the muscles in my face. “Jesus. I can’t believe that Yana’s dead.”

Gus leaned forward and put his arms around me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you so soon, but I knew you’d ask.”

“I want to remember so badly, but it’s just not there. It’s as if my head is empty.”

“Far from it. It’s just short-term memory loss. It’s like getting a cold—you just have to let it run its course.”

“Short term? How long is short term?”

“The doctors can’t be sure—a few days or weeks.” He shrugged. “It’s the brain, Stephanie. You know how complicated the mind is. There just aren’t any absolute answers.”

“I need something to jog my memory. I need . . .” My eyes flashed with revelation. “My notebook. You know how I . . .”

“I know, you’re a meticulous note taker. It’s with the rest of your stuff in the evidence room.”

“Why there?”

“Shearson’s orders. She said that your notebook would help to establish a timeline leading up to the altercation. I couldn’t argue. Not that she would’ve listened to me anyway.”

Pamela Shearson was one of several NYPD deputy commissioners. I wasn’t a fan of her overly ambitious agenda, but she had good instincts and was rarely wrong. “I need it.”

“I’ll request it and see if I can get my hands on it before the next time I come to visit. Yana’s too.”

“How?”

‘“How?’ What do you mean?”

“How, Gus? How was Yana murdered?”

“He was shot in the chest. No witnesses to the actual shooting, no video, and you . . . well, I’m sure your head will be clearer tomorrow.”

I couldn’t remember what had happened, but my skill set was still intact and I began calling on it immediately. “But we have forensics, don’t we? There’s a bullet slug with markings we can run down, and possible DNA, and—”

Gus held up his hand, cutting me off before I could finish my rant. “Easy now. It’s a cop killing. A dedicated task force has been established, rewards offered . . . No one is taking this lightly, and five days is a long time. The slug has been analyzed. It came from a thirty-caliber rifle.”

“Who manufactured the weapon?”

“We’re not sure yet. Ballistics is still trying to match the rifling marks on the slug to a specific weapon.”

“From what distance?”

“A nearby rooftop.”

“But then how . . .” I felt my facial muscles tightening and my head throb painfully, so painfully that I had to squeeze my eyes shut to deal with it.

“You all right?” Gus asked with urgency. He waited a moment and then pushed the call button.

A nurse rushed into the room and glanced at the heart monitor. “You have to calm down,” she said firmly. “Your blood pressure is way too high.” She called to a second nurse who had just entered the room. “Page Dr. Efram and bring me five milligrams of Valium.” I had an oxygen tube in my nose. She turned up the flow. “Deep breaths, honey. You have a head injury. The last thing you need is more bleeding in your brain. Come on, slowly in and out. Fill your lungs. Hold it . . . Let it out slowly. Again.” The second nurse returned and handed her a syringe. “I’m going to give you a small amount of sedative, just enough to calm you down.” She injected it into my IV line.

I felt the sedative take hold. My eyelids grew heavy, and I could sense my tension floating away.

“We have to clear the room,” the second nurse said to Gus.

He looked terrible as he backed toward the door. “You’ll be fine,” he offered in a soothing tone, but the worry I saw on his face made me think otherwise.
How could someone have shot Yana from a rooftop and knocked me unconscious too?
Something didn’t add up, but the medication was having its way with me, eradicating worry, removing doubt, and lulling me gently to sleep.

I saw Ma the very next morning.
She looked surprisingly good for a woman who had lost her NYPD husband and had now come uncomfortably close to losing her only daughter. She had taken Dad’s death really hard. She’d mourned deeply and had never truly felt alive again until . . . my marrying Gus had reignited her pilot light, but it wasn’t until Max’s birth that the flame truly breathed oxygen again and began to burn brightly—and thank God, because she was going down that road of those old Italian widows who dressed in nothing but black all of their remaining days. You know the ones I’m talking about, those women who looked like they were 112 when in fact they were only fifty.

One of her friends had recently become a widow and was on one of those antidepressants. It wasn’t Paxil or Lexapro. It was one of the newer miracle drugs. I think it was called Darnitol or Screwitol or Hellwithitol, or something equally hopeless sounding.

Ma scrutinized my face. “You look okay,” she said in a motherly, emotionally fortifying manner. “I knew that all you needed was a good night’s sleep. So, how do you feel?”

“Like I was hit by a semi that backed up and rolled over me again.”

“That sounds like an improvement,” she quipped.

I grinned awkwardly and opened my arms to pull her in. “Come here, you old pain in the butt.” I’m not sure which of us began to cry first, but I think I edged her out by a nose.

Ma gave us a moment to indulge in emotional catharsis before insisting, “That’s enough of that.” She wiped away her tears. “Are you a cop or a baby?”

“Right now?”

She smiled sympathetically and sat down on the bed next to me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You took one hell of a blow to the head. You scared the shit out of us.”

“I feel so hopeless. I can’t remember anything, not what happened to me or . . .”

“It’ll come back to you, sweetheart. The doctors said that it would take some time for your memory to return.”

“I don’t have time. Someone shot my partner. Do you understand how that feels?”

“Not entirely, but I have some idea. I know it must be eating at you, but at the moment . . . well, honey, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I’ve got to pull myself together and figure out what happened. Some cop killer is walking around free as a bird.”

“I don’t think you can force yourself to remember, Stephanie. You’ve got to try to relax and give yourself time to heal. You’re no good to yourself or Yana while you’re lying here, and the doctors said you’d be here at least another week. That’s my best advice,” she said with a weak smile. “Not that you listen to anything I say.”

My first thought was to check myself out of the hospital, but department protocol had to be followed and I knew that it would be quite some time before I got the okay to return to active duty. “This blows! It really does. Someone shot my partner and—”

“Yes, sweetheart, it blows, but you’re alive and well, with a handsome husband and an adorable little son. Things could be worse, a hell of a lot worse.” She patted me on the leg. “I made a delicious eggplant parmigiana. I’ll bring you some as soon as the doctor says that you can eat normally.”

“That sounds good. I hope you didn’t cheap out on the mozzarella.”

“Of course not. Why would you—”

“Did you use Polly-O?”

“Yes, Stephanie, I paid full price for Polly-O even though the store brand was on sale for half the price, just because I know you’re such a pain in the ass.”

“I’m not a pain in the ass. I have a discriminating palate.”

“Of course you do. Anything that makes you happy makes me happy.”

“Stop patronizing me.”

“I’m not.”

“The store brands aren’t as good as Polly-O.”