—
IHAVE ONEsuit. Actually, Francis and I have one suit that we share. There’s just not much of a need for fancy clothing when you work drywall during the day and run a White Power website at night. But the next afternoon, I put on the suit—black, pinstripes, the kind of thing I imagine Al Capone would have looked really sharp in—and a white shirt and a tie, and Brit and I drive back to the hospital to meet with Carla Luongo, the lawyer in Risk Management who has agreed to see us.
But when I come out of the bathroom freshly shaved, the tattoo on the back of my head stark and unmistakable, I am surprised to find Brit curled on the bed in my flannel shirt and sweatpants. “Baby,” I say. “We have a meeting with the lawyer, remember?” I’ve told her this a half hour ago. There’s no way she forgot.
Her eyes roll toward me like they are ball bearings, loose in her head. Her tongue pushes words around her mouth like they’re food. “Don’t…wanna…go…back.”
She turns away from me, pulling up the covers, and that’s when I see the bottle on the nightstand: the sleeping pills that the doctor gave her to help her transition. I take a deep breath and then haul my wife upright. She feels like a sandbag, heavy and immobile.Shower,I think, but that would require me to get in with her, and we don’t have time. Instead, I take the glass of water on the bedside table and throw it in her face. She sputters, but it gets her to sit up on her own. I pull off her pajamas and grab the first things I can find in her drawer that look decent—a pair of black pants and a sweater that buttons up the front. As I am dressing her, I have a sudden flash of myself doing this same thing to my baby, and I wind up yanking so hard on Brit’s arm that she yelps and I kiss her on the wrist. “Sorry, baby,” I murmur, and more gently, I pull a comb through her hair and do my best to bunch it together into a ponytail. I stuff her feet into a pair of little black shoes that might actually be bedroom slippers and then haul her into my arms, and out to the car.
By the time we reach the hospital, she is near catatonic. “Just stay awake,” I beg her, anchoring her to my side as we walk in. “For Davis.”
Maybe that gets through to her, because as we are ushered into the lawyer’s office, her eyes open a fraction wider.
Carla Luongo is a spic, just like I guessed from her name. She sits down on a chair and offers us a couch. I watch her nearly swallow her tongue when I take off my wool hat. Good. Let her know who she’s dealing with, right up front.
Brit leans against me. “My wife,” I explain, “is still not feeling well.”
The lawyer nods sympathetically. “Mr. and Mrs. Bauer, let me first just say how sorry I am for your loss.”
I don’t respond.
“I’m sure you have questions,” she says.
I lean forward. “I don’t have questions. I know what happened. That black nurse killed my son. I saw her with my own eyes, beating at his chest. I told her supervisor I didn’t want her touching my baby, and what happened? My worst fear came true.”
“I’m sure you realize that Ms. Jefferson was only doing her job…”
“Oh, yeah? Was it also her job to go against what her boss ordered? It was all in Davis’s file.”
The lawyer stands so that she can grab a file on her desk. It’s got the little colored confetti of stickers on the side that is some secret code, I imagine. She opens it, and even from here I can see the Post-it note. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn’t comment.
“That nurse wasn’t supposed to be taking care of my son,” I say, “and she was left alone with him.”
Carla Luongo looks at me. “How do you know that, Mr. Bauer?”
“Because your staff can’t keep their voices down. I heard her say she was covering for the other nurse. The day before, she was screaming her head off, just because I made a request to take her off my son’s case. And what happened? She was pounding on my baby. Iwatchedher,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. I wipe them away, feeling foolish, feeling weak. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to take this hospital to the bank. You killed my son; you’re going to pay for it.”
Honestly, I have no idea how the legal system works; I’ve done my best to stay away from getting caught by the cops. But I’ve watched enough TV infomercials to believe that if you can get cash in a class-action lawsuit for having some lung disease brought about by asbestos, you most certainly have a bone to pick if your baby dies when he’s supposed to be receiving choice medical care.
I grab my suit jacket in one fist and half-drag Brit to the office door. I’ve just managed to open it when I hear the lawyer’s voice behind me. “Mr. Bauer,” she asks. “Why would you sue the hospital?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
She takes a step forward, gently but firmly closing the door of her office again. “Why would you sue thehospital,” she repeats, “when everything suggests that Ruth Jefferson was the individual who killed your baby?”
—
ABOUT A YEARinto my running the Hartford NADS crew, we had a steady income. I was able to lift guns from Colt’s by forging inventory, and then sell them on the street. Mostly, we sold to blacks, because they were just going to kill each other with them anyway, and also because they paid three times more for a weapon than the Italians would. Yorkey and I ran the operation, and one night we were on our way home from a deal when a cop car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing.
Yorkey nearly shit a brick. “Fuck, man. What do we do?”
“We pull over,” I told him. It wasn’t like we had the stolen gun in the car anymore. As far as the police were concerned, Yorkey and I were headed back from a party at a buddy’s apartment. But when the cops asked us to step out of the car, Yorkey was sweating like a coal miner. He looked like he was guilty as sin, which is probably why the police searched the car. I waited, because I knew I had nothing to hide.
Apparently, Yorkey couldn’t say the same thing. That gun hadn’t been the only deal going down that night. While I was negotiating, Yorkey had bought himself an eight ball of meth.
But because it was inmyglove compartment, I went down for it.
The thing about doing time is that it was a world I understood, where everyone was separated by race. My sentence for possession was six months, and I planned to spend every minute planning my revenge. Yorkey had used before he became part of NADS; it was part of the skater culture. But my squad, they didn’t touch drugs. And they sure as hell didn’t squirrel them away in my glove compartment.
