Matt put his hand to it.
Two more cops appeared, carrying a stretcher.
“Get me to my feet,” Matt said. “I don’t need that.”
They ignored him. He felt himself being unceremoniously picked up and then dumped onto the stretcher. Then he was lifted up and carried to the van. The feet of the stretcher screeched as it was pushed inside.
“Where do you think you’re going, Mickey?” someone asked.
“Where does it look like?” O’Hara replied, and then he was sitting on the floor of the van beside Matt.
And then something else was thrown in the van. Matt looked and saw that it was the man he had shot. He was unconscious.
Two uniformed cops, neither of whom Matt recognized, scrambled inside. The van’s rear doors slammed closed, and then a moment later, there was the sound of the front doors slamming. The engine raced and the siren began to wail again.
“Is he dead?” Matt asked.
“I don’t know,” Mickey replied, and then matter-of-factly turned and put his fingers to the unconscious man’s jugular. “Not yet, anyway,” he added.
“Look at my leg,” Matt said.
“What’s wrong with your leg?”
“You tell me.”
He propped himself up, awkwardly, and watched as Mickey pulled his trouser leg up.
“Looks like you got it there too,” Mickey said. “Not much blood. It hurt?”
“No, not much,” Matt said. “It feels like I got hit with a rock or something.”
“There’s only one hole,” Mickey said. “The bullet’s probably still in there. I don’t think anything is broken.”
When Matt let himself fall back on the stretcher, he saw that the man he had shot was bleeding from the nose and mouth. There was a froth of bloody bubbles on his lips. Matt looked away, wondering if he was going to be sick to his stomach.
Matt suddenly started to shiver. Mickey looked around the interior of the van.
“Hand me one of those blankets,” he ordered.
A gray, dirt-spotted blanket appeared, and O’Hara draped it over him.
“Throw one on him too,” Matt Payne ordered.
Two minutes or so later the van leaned on its springs as it made a turn, then bounced over a curb. It stopped and the doors were jerked open.
Three men in hospital whites and a nurse with a purple, sequin-decorated sweater thrown over the shoulders of her whites peered into the van. One of the men grabbed the handles of the stretcher and Matt felt himself sliding down the van’s floor.
Once the stretcher was out of the van, he felt himself being moved, and then he realized he had been transferred to a gurney; he could feel the cold plastic beneath the thin sheet on his stomach.
“Get the handcuffs off him!” he heard his nurse order angrily. “He’s unconscious, for Christ’s sake!”
Matt’s gurney began to move into the hospital. There were two sets of doors. The gurney slammed into the outer set, and then the inner set.
“Out of the way!” the nurse’s voice called, and Matt’s gurney was moved to the wall, where it stopped. He saw a second gurney being pushed, at a trot, by two of the attendants, down the corridor.
And then Staff Inspector Peter Wohl’s face appeared next to his.
“How are you doing?”