He was ignored.
He felt a blood pressure apparatus being strapped around his left arm, and then his right arm was held firmly immobile as a nurse searched for and found a vein.
“Nothing broken. There’s no exit wound. There’s a bullet in there somewhere. Prep him and send him up to Sixteen.”
“Yes, Doctor,” the nurse said.
Peter Wohl watched as the gurney with Matt on it was wheeled out of the Emergency treatment cubicle, and then ran after the doctor he had seen go into the cubicle.
“Tell me about the man you just had in there,” he said.
“Who are you?” Dr. Hampton asked.
“I’m Inspector Wohl.”
“You don’t look much like a cop, Inspector.”
“What do you want to do, see my badge?”
“No. Take it easy. I suppose I said that because I was just thinking he doesn’t either. Look like a cop, I mean.”
“Actually,” Wohl said. “He’s a pretty good cop. How badly is he injured?”
“A good deal less seriously than most people I see who have been shot with a large caliber weapon,” Dr. Hampton sa
id, and then went on to explain his diagnosis and prognosis.
Wohl thanked him, and then went to one of the pay phones mounted on the wall between the outer and inner doors of the Emergency entrance and took first a dime from his pocket and then his wallet. Inside the wallet was a typewritten list of telephone numbers, on both sides of a sheet of paper cut to the size of a credit card, and then coated with Scotch tape to preserve it.
He dropped a dime in the slot and then dialed one of the numbers. There was an answer, surprisingly wide awake, on the third ring: “Coughlin.”
“Chief, this is Peter Wohl.”
“What’s up, Peter?”
“Matt Payne has been shot.”
There was a just perceptible pause.
“Bad?”
“He’s got a .45 bullet in his calf. It apparently was a ricochet off a brick wall. And his face was hit, the forehead, probably by a piece of bullet jacket. It slit the skin. Not serious, take a couple of stitches.”
“But the bullet in the leg is serious?”
“There’s not much damage. I don’t know for sure what I’m talking about, but what I think happened was that the bullet hit the wall, a brick wall, and lost most of its momentum, and then hit him. It’s still in him. They just took him into the operating room.”
“Where is he?”
“Frankford Hospital.”
“What the hell happened, Peter?”
I have just become the guy who is responsible for getting Denny Coughlin’s godson, the son he never had, shot.
“At five o’clock this morning, we picked up the doers of the Goldblatt job.”
“‘We’ presumably meaning Highway,” Coughlin said coldly. “I didn’t know that Matt was in Highway. When did that happen?”