Authors: Dale Brown
“But forget about me, you guys, what about you?
When I got the message this morning that you guys, were headed to Mercy, I thought the baby was going to be born in the back of the car. Sheesh, Patrick, maybe you’d better wait outside—he’s obviously afraid to come out and face you.” His smile dimmed as he noticed that his brother and sister-in-law weren’t sharing his joke. “Any complications?”
“Wendy’s in labor and she’s one hundred percent effaced, but not dilated over three centimeters,” Patrick said, reciting the obstetrical lingo he had been hearing for hours now. “She’s been in labor since three
A.M.
and her water broke at five, but it had blood in it so we came right in. The doc found blood and meconium—baby shit—in the amniotic fluid, so he was worried about infection. They hooked the baby up to a monitor with a probe attached to his scalp, and of course they got Wendy wired for sound and put an IV in at the same time. So no walking around, no relaxing showers—our delivery plan pretty much went out the window fifteen minutes after we arrived here.”
Patrick offered Wendy some crushed ice to keep her hydrated—she initially refused, but relented after a mock stern demand from her husband. He pointed to one of the monitors. “Here’s the baby’s vitals, and here’s Wendy’s uterine monitor …”—he watched as the graphing needle started a rapid climb—“… and here’s another contraction. Deep cleansing breath, sweetie.” Wendy took a deep breath and expelled it all the way out, her eyebrows knotting in concentration as she tried to separate her mind from her pain, as they had taught in Lamaze class. “Good. About thirty seconds to the peak. Don’t hold your breath, hon. Let it out through your teeth if you need to, but don’t hold it … good. Five seconds … that’s the peak, hon, you’re doing, good … on the way
down, about thirty seconds and it’ll be over … real good, babe, you did good. Give me another deep cleansing breath. Relax your hands, sweetie, and relax those toes too, you’re staying tense when you should be relaxing. You need another calf massage?” He reached over to knead her left calf.
Paul looked at the strip of paper unreeling beneath the monitor—Wendy had obviously been undergoing this same ordeal for a real long time now. His sister-in-law looked as if she had been beaten up and left in a sauna. The sheets were wet with sweat, and her face was ashen from the exertion. “How much longer, Patrick?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I hope things start happening soon. It’s kicking Wendy’s butt pretty good. They don’t want to give her any pain stuff until she’s dilated to five centimeters.”
“I’m sure that will be a big relief—I know it will be for
me”
Paul said, wondering if he could ever be as strong and as together as they were. “I think I’m having sympathetic abdominal pains.” He hesitated, then asked, “Do you think they’ll do a cesarean if she doesn’t dilate any more?”
“We can’t do a C-section,” Patrick said. “Wendy has … er … has some abdominal injuries. A C-section would be risky. It’ll be a normal vaginal delivery. We’ll give her something to speed up labor if we need to.”
“Injuries? How did she get injured? What happened?” Then he saw Patrick hesitate, and he held up a hand to stop him. “I got it, I got it—you can’t talk about it. God, I hope everything turns out okay.” He wrote a number down on a slip of paper. “Here’s my pager number. Call when the big event happens and they’ll page me.” He kissed Wendy on the forehead, just as another contraction began. “Deep cleansing breath, sweetheart,” Paul said with
a reassuring smile. “I’ll see you soon.” Wendy’s smile was contorted by a grimace, but she squeezed his hand in thanks.
P
aul met up with LaFortier in the roll call room of the South Sector Substation a few minutes before eight. “Hold it right there, rook,” the big police corporal said. Paul stopped. “Stand ready. Let’s take a look.” Paul stood at parade rest while LaFortier scanned the uniform. “Where’s your damned badge, rook?”
“On my raingear, sir.” Badges were always worn on the outside of outer garments such as jackets or raincoats.
“Let’s see it.” McLanahan handed over his raingear and hat. He was wearing it properly, all right—and he was wearing
the
badge, the old silver badge. Almost seventy-five years old, it belonged in a museum. Instead, a new cop would be wearing it on the streets of Sacramento, which was as it should be. LaFortier reverently ran his fingers over the heavy silver star for a moment, careful not to get fingerprints on it, then handed the raingear back. “Lots of history behind that star, rook. You better be up for it.”
“I’m ready, sir.”
“Good. And let’s stop with the ‘sir’ stuff unless the LT’s around. I’m Craig or Cargo or partner to you. You ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ every other superior officer
you see, which will be everyone, until he or she tells you not to or buys you a meal, which will never happen, so keep on doing it.” McLanahan nodded. “Weapon.”
McLanahan unholstered his SIG Sauer P226 semiautomatic service pistol, careful to keep it pointed at the floor with his finger outside the trigger guard. He walked over to a clearing barrel in a corner of the roll call room—a steel fifty-five-gallon drum half-filled with sand and canted at an angle that provided a safe place to load and unload a weapon. Aiming the gun at the sand inside the barrel, he ejected the magazine, opened and locked the slide, retrieved the bullet ejected from the chamber, checked the chamber, and handed the unloaded weapon over to LaFortier. As expected, LaFortier found it spotless—they hammered weapon-care lessons hard at the academy. He checked all of McLanahan’s magazines to make sure each had the maximum fifteen rounds of 9-millimeter subsonic hollow-point parabellum police-load ammo in them. “Lock and load,” he told his new rookie partner as he handed the weapon back. McLanahan reloaded his weapon in the barrel, chambered a round, decocked the action, ejected the magazine, put the sixteenth round back in the magazine to fill it completely again, then holstered and secured the weapon.
Jesus, LaFortier thought, it’s going to be tough to nail this guy on anything. McLanahan didn’t seem to be cocky, but it was always best to nail the rookies on one or two uniform items just to keep them from thinking that their shit didn’t stink. “Handcuffs.”
McLanahan handed over his handcuffs. “One pair? You only expect to arrest one guy at a time?”
“We’re only issued one pair at a time.”
“I know, but I don’t care. Get yourself a double carrier and carry two from now on. Go to Property tomorrow and tell them I told you to get a second one.” He touched the inner claw of each side of the cuffs and spun them; they spun easily. They’d obviously been recently graphited. LaFortier handed them back. “Got a spare handcuff key?” McLanahan reached around behind his back and retrieved a tiny key—in case he was ever handcuffed with his own handcuffs, a hidden spare key could get him out. The Sarge obviously taught his son well, LaFortier thought. “Good. When you get a few paychecks in the bank, invest in a good Streamlight. The city’s flashlights aren’t worth shit. Keys?”
McLanahan undid his Velcro key holder and retrieved his set of keys—cops were issued a whole wad of them for various rooms, lockers, call boxes, and dozens of other things. He had secured his keys with a thick rubber band to keep them, from rattling, leaving only the squad-car key outside the band so it could be retrieved easily. Yep, this kid knew his shit and kept his eyes and ears open. The Sarge had probably rubber-banded his toy keys when he was a youngster, LaFortier thought.
“Very good. Now all you have to do is do the same for the next twenty or thirty years, and you’ll be in good shape.” He turned serious for a moment. “Now, what’s this I hear about you sitting in on an MDT class this afternoon?”
“Yes, sir, I did,” McLanahan said. “They didn’t give us much MDT training in the academy—”
“I know that,” LaFortier interrupted. “You’ll be scheduled for it soon enough. But you need permission from your sergeant before you can request overtime.”
“I didn’t want any overtime—I did it on my own time.”
“For you, there is no ‘own time,’ rook,” LaFortier said. “You work for eight hours and eight hours only, from nine
P.M.
to five
A.M.
I had to get permission just to get you in here
one
hour early. Neither the city nor I want dead-tired rookies on the street. Graveyard is tough, McLanahan. You need every hour of sleep you can get. But more importantly, you did something that I didn’t know about, something I had to hear about from
my
boss.”
LaFortier leaned forward, getting right in McLanahan’s face so his new partner could look nowhere but in his eyes. “If I don’t teach you anything else in the next six months, rook, you will learn this: We must, we
will
communicate with each other. We need to act like
one
out there. I’m not one of those FTO’s who’ll tell you to just shut up and listen and stay out of the way. We need to be each other’s eyes and ears. When one of us is occupied, the other is watching, listening, always on guard. We never work alone. You want something, even if it’s trivial or personal or anything, you tell me. You talk, you tell me what’s on your mind, and you verbalize. You don’t think of yourself, you think of
us.
Understand?”
“I understand, Craig,” Paul responded. “I was just trying to get pumped up, sir, you know, get a little ahead …”
“I know you’re gung ho, McLanahan,” LaFortier said. “All you McLanahans have a reputation of being bulldogs. But reputations don’t count for shit until you earn yours. Don’t go off freelancing. You got an idea you want to do something, talk to me about it first. I’m your FTO, but I’m also your partner. We work as a unit. Remember that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Clipboard,” LaFortier said, holding out his hand and taking McLanahan’s metal clipboard.
Good job, LaFortier thought as he studied its contents. McLanahan had indeed put himself ahead of his peers by sneaking into that Mobile Data Terminal class. The department usually took weeks to schedule that class, so the rookies had to absorb as much as they could about the complicated system as they went along. It felt good to be riding along with a rookie who wasn’t afraid to take some initiative, who knew what he didn’t know and went out and got it on his own.
Even the clipboard was put together pretty well. But he could never let McLanahan slide that much, not on the first day. “You’re missing several forms in here, rook,” he said. “I’ll show you what you need to bring. Forms are written in point-five millimeter B lead pencil, not in pen, not in HB lead. And you better have more than one pencil—you’ll probably lose at least three a night. Follow me.”
T
he obstetrician completed his examination. “Still only three centimeters—maybe four,” he said. Wendy McLanahan was too exhausted to register any reaction except to close her eyes as another contraction began. Patrick’s jaw dropped open. “Doc, you said she was, three centimeters
eight hours ago.
Wendy has had a contraction every three or four minutes since three
P.M.
! What’s going on?”
“It’s a difficult delivery, that’s all, Mr. McLanahan,” the doctor said. “We’ll go ahead and give her
some oxytocin to speed things up. That might help.”
“I’m not oil a timetable here, Doc, but she’s already exhausted—she’s shaking, she’s sweating like crazy but she’s shaking and white as a ghost and complains of being cold. It looks like she’s going into shock. What are we going to do?”
The obstetrician studied the monitor readouts. “I wouldn’t worry too much, Mr. McLanahan,” the doctor said. “Wendy seems strong, and so does the baby. It’s important that she not push …”
“She’s too
exhausted
to push, Doc,” Patrick protested. “What about an epidural? Something to reduce the pain? …”
“Normally we don’t do an epidural until she’s dilated at least five centimeters,” the doctor said. “We can give her something to take the edge off, but an epidural at this stage would be asking for trouble. She may not be able to push when the time comes. We’ll start the oxytocin—that’ll get things moving a little more quickly—and I’ll give her a mild painkiller in her IV. As soon as she’s at five centimeters, in one or two hours at most, we’ll …”
“One or two
hours?”
Patrick exclaimed. “It’s almost twenty hours now!”
“I don’t think she was in active labor when you brought her in, Mr. McLanahan,” the obstetrician said. “In any case, we have to let things take their course. We want to avoid too much intervention. Accelerating labor is a big enough step. We want to avoid having to do’ a cesarean if at all possible.”
“We can’t do a cesarean at all, Doc,” Patrick said. “Wendy had wanted this to be as natural a childbirth as possible, with minimum drugs and maximum mobility …”
“I know that, Mr. McLanahan,” the doctor said,
“but things are obviously not going as planned. We may have no choice …”
“Read the records, Doc,” Patrick said. “She
can’t
have a cesarean.”
“I read the records Dr. Linus faxed to me, Mr. McLanahan, and I read his annotation about abdominal injuries and damage to hercirculatory system. I also read that Dr. Linus recommended terminating the pregnancy because of the severe risks to Wendy’s health if there were complications during delivery.” The doctor saw the guilt that spread across Patrick’s face and felt sorry for him. They obviously wanted a child badly enough to risk the life of the mother. He looked at the chart and frowned, then studied Patrick warily. “I’m a little confused about a few things, Mr. McLanahan,” he said. “I see evidence of scarring, perhaps burns, and damage to her lungs, abdomen, and heart, but no cause listed. How did your wife get injured? A car accident?”
Patrick swallowed hard, obviously conflicted and apprehensive. “I … I can’t tell you,” he responded.
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t give you any details, Doc,” Patrick said. “I thought Dr. Linus was going to include a note with the medical records explaining …”