Walked away. Switched off his radio and come to the hospital to see if he could talk to any of the injured men.
And while the staff had been kind and helpful, they had also been….
Well, vague.
“Look,” he said after a moment, “I have to go back to my station house and fill out paperwork. Can I at least get everybody’s name?”
“Sure,” said Nurse Dara. He handed Brady a clipboard with four driver’s licenses on it and tapped his finger against the one on top. “This one? Bobby Persons? He’s the one with the hand wound, which should be stitched up about now. He’s also got a concussion, but he’s been conscious for about two hours. He’s noncritical, and they gave him some pain meds, so you can go talk to him now.”
Oh. Okay. “That would begreat,” Brady said. “Thankyou.”
Nurse Carmichael escorted him—not to a bed in a room, or even a cubicle, but to a hospital bed parked on an out-of-the-way corridor, where a scruffy white man in his early forties was zip-tied to a gurney, squinting against the fluorescent light.
“Fuck,” the nurse muttered. Then, to Brady, “I’m going to try to dim the switch for him—he’s got to have a hell of a headache in spite of the painkillers.”
A quarter of the man’s face was a massive bruise, Brady assumed from being kicked in the head.
A part of him was sympathetic, but a part of him was thinkingPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes.
He tried to quash that part down. Criminals were human beings too.
Brady pulled up a nurse’s stool and waited until the lights were dimmed before trying to get the man’s attention.
“Mr. Persons?” he queried gently.
“Who wants to know?” The voice was groggy but also sort of… naturally defensive. Brady recalled that the witnesses he’d interviewed had told him that the leader had been the one who’d ended up with a knife through his hand. He hadn’t been able to get a description of the knifethrowerout of anybody—average white guy, built, wearing an OD green T-shirt and jeans, both of which had seen better days.
“Didn’t even see the first throw,” said one of the cashiers. “Knife sailed out of nowhere, pinned the two guys together, and all hell broke loose.”
“I’m Officer Brady Carnegie of the Southern California Police Department—”
To his surprise, the man broke into a sort of cackle. “And you’re here to arrest me? Fuckin’ figures.”
“You were, in fact, read your Miranda rights when you were handcuffed to the stretcher in the ambulance,” Brady told him, because he’d done that for all four of the men in the redzip-up hoodies piled near the front door in puddles of blood. He Mirandized Persons again and continued, “I’m just here to clarify some things.”
“Should I ask for my lawyer?”
Brady grunted. “If this were an official interrogation as to your doings, yes. But since we can’t do that until you’re no longer concussed, this isn’t about you, but rather about the person or persons who wounded you and your… associates as you stood at the entrance of the bank.”
Persons moaned a little. “We were waiting,” he mumbled. “Brady, the faggot cop, was supposed to show up. We’d blow out of there, kill him in the crossfire, walk away with the take.”
Brady wondered if his lungs still worked. It was like somebody had dropped an ice-water porcupine from the sky, and still he sat there, every inch of his skin both skewered and frozen in shock.
From behind him, he heard a little gasp, but that was in a whole other world.
“So the whole robbery?” he asked and then had to ask again because his voice wasn’t working. “The whole robbery was to kill a cop that had been set up?”
The bank robber made a disgusted sound. “Robbery was the robbery,” he said. “We was planning it one minute, and the next some fucker’s telling us he’ll double our money if we do the other thing too.”
“Where were you planning it?” Brady asked, fighting the urge to grab Bobby Persons by his bloody shirt and shake him until his head popped off.
“Collard’s Bar.”
“I know the place,” Brady said. It was a tiny dive bar in Baker. Whole town had probably been there at one time or another. He imagined that throwing up in one of their tinybathrooms was a rite of passage. “Who promised to double your money?”
Bobby moaned. “Cop. Fuckin’ cop. Promised. Promised all the other fuckin’ cops wouldn’t be there. We just had to come roaring out of the bank… one dead cop, all the fuckin’ money.”
Brady thought coldly of all of that backup that didn’t show up. Had it all been waiting somewhere? Oh yeah, poor Brady, got killed in the line of duty, but we killed the cop killers as they got away.
