45 Mischief by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Police Procedural, Police, Mystery & Detective, General, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780380713844
Publisher: Avon Books
Published: 1994-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

T/P/O meant Time and Place of Occurrence.

MOS meant Member of the Service.

GSW meant Gun Shot Wound.

VS meant Vital Signs.

By the time this report was filed, Georgia Mowbry had already been on the operating table for three hours.

THEY HAD REMOVEDa portion of her skull to allow for expansion of the brain. The pistol Jimmy had used first on his sister-in-law and next on Georgia was a .22 caliber Llama. It could have been worse; he could have used a .357 Magnum. But the trauma was severe nonetheless, and in all such cases blood rushes to the injured area, causing swelling that, if it is not decompressed, can result either in death or irreparable damage to the brain. This was one of the risks Adderley hadn’t been willing to discuss.

As Sharyn had told the gathered cops, the procedure was hazardous; but it was nonetheless commonplace: You went in, you stopped the bleeding, and you repaired the damage. But a big vein was open, and it took a long time to clip it, and tie it, and control the major bleeding, by which time Georgia’s pulse rate had dropped to forty, and then thirty, and her blood pressure had fallen alarmingly. When her vital signs were stable again, the surgeons were confronted with the choice of either digging for the bullet fragments in the brain or else leaving them in, and decided that probing for them presented the greater risk. They chose, however, to try getting the dead bone out rather than chancing possible later abscess and infection. They had lowered the temperature of the brain with a cold saline solution; the swelling seemed to be under control.

The eye presented problems of its own.

The bullet had punctured it and caused the gel to leak out, collapsing the eye like a deflated balloon. Blown back into the skull, it now hung precariously in the canal, waiting for the eye surgeon’s decision. He determined that the eye was completely destroyed and therefore unsalvageable; there was nothing to do but sever the connecting nerve and blood vessels and surgically remove it. The plastic surgeon was there to reinforce the back of the orbit and to patch the broken bones around the eye and the zygoma, the bone supporting the cheek.

All of this was painstaking, delicate, risky, and time-consuming work. At twenty minutes past midnight, some twelve hours after she’d been shot, Georgia, in a barbiturate-induced coma, was wheeled into the recovery room. She had been on the table for more than ten hours. Now there was an oxygen tube in her mouth to help her breathe, and a tube in her nose to draw out stomach contents, and a catheter going to her bladder, and tubes and lines feeding her intravenously and monitoring all her vital signs.

Early on the morning of March thirtieth, another note was added to the sick-desk report:

**0515 hours. Dep Ch Cooke advises MOS in recovery room listed as Critical/Stable. Prognosis guarded for recovery.

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