What Doesn't Kill Us--A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright (most read books txt) 📗

switched channels. He found a male anchor who seemed put out by the story he was reporting.

“The shooting remains under investigation,” he said. “It should be noted that this is not the first time that police have been called to the RT’s Basement, located on Rice Street in St. Paul, because of a violent act. Over to you…”

Herzog knew what Chopper was thinking.

“Ain’t none of our business,” he said.

“Shooting remains under investigation means they don’t know who did it.”

“So?”

“We could find out.”

“How we gonna find out?”

“RT’s Basement—who we know down there?”

“C’mon, Chop. We don’t owe McKenzie nothin’.”

“Don’t we?”

“It’s St. Paul, man. That means fucking Bobby Dunston. He’d like t’ put us inside just for the fun of it.”

“He’s McKenzie’s friend.”

“He ain’t ours, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Cops always whining about not gettin’ no cooperation from the African-American community. We just cooperating is all.”

Herzog shook his head and muttered a few obscenities before turning off the flat-screen and climbing out of the chair. He was the largest, hardest man I had ever met in person; you could roller-skate on him. He was also the most dangerous. He had done time for multiple counts of manslaughter, assault, aggravated robbery, and weapons charges, but was working hard to clean up his act. He’d been out on parole for the past four years with one more to go and had been Chopper’s right-hand man ever since they released him from the halfway house. He tolerated me—but just barely—because we both liked baseball and jazz and Chopper, and because I had arranged through Nina to get him and his date the table closest to the stage when Cécile McLorin Salvant sang at Rickie’s.

“Jus’ so you know, I think this is a really bad idea,” he said.

TWO

The Surgical Intensive Care Unit was damn near impossible to reach by a visitor using Regions Hospital’s overly complicated elevator and corridor system. Except Bobby knew a shortcut. He walked into the ground floor emergency entrance, flashed his badge, and announced that he was a commander in the St. Paul Police Department’s Major Crimes Division. Shelby stood by his side as if she had always been there and always would be. They whisked them both up to the third floor in no time.

That’s as far as they were allowed to go, however. A woman, who wore a white linen coat but no scrubs, said I was in surgery. Bobby had questions. Instead of answering them, the woman asked how they were related to me. Bobby showed her his badge. That bought him and Shelby visiting privileges but no answers; they were both escorted to a waiting area. Bobby said he wanted to see someone in authority. The woman said she would contact the surgeon in charge when circumstances permitted, turned, and walked away.

“You should have seen his face,” Shelby told me later. “Most people are afraid of Bobby, but this woman, she was an admin or something—I don’t think she was afraid of God.”

Bobby and Shelby settled in a couple of uncomfortable chairs and stared more or less straight ahead. They didn’t speak.

“What was there to say?” Bobby told me. “Same story, different room.”

I asked them later what they were thinking. Shelby said she was repeating a mantra in her head that she had learned in yoga class in an attempt to remain calm and composed. Bobby said, “I was thinking that you were always doing shit like this, getting in trouble, getting hurt, and I was goddamned tired of it.”

While they waited, Officer Jeremiah Healy appeared.

“Where the hell have you been?” Bobby asked him.

Healy raised a paper cup filled with black coffee and gestured toward the door.

“There’s a machine down the hall,” he said.

“What do you have for me?”

Healy set the coffee down and pulled out a small notebook. Good for you, Bobby thought as Healy started reciting facts—the time he received the call, the time he arrived at the scene, who was present at the scene upon his arrival, how long it took for other officers to arrive, the name of the supervisor who took charge of the scene, and that he had identified the vic by the driver’s license in his wallet, which he surrendered to the supervisor who immediately relayed the information to Major Crimes.

“We thought you’d want to know right away,” Healy said.

“Yes,” Bobby said.

Healy said a plainclothes from the Homicide Unit arrived just as they were loading me into the ambulance, even though the incident was still rated as an aggravated assault, but that he didn’t know who it was.

“I accompanied the vic to the hospital in case he woke up and said something, only he didn’t,” Healy said.

“Okay,” Bobby said.

“That’s him, isn’t it? McKenzie.”

“What do you mean, him?’”

“Everyone in the SPPD knows about McKenzie; I heard about him my first week on the job. How he won the lottery, what is it now? Ten years ago?”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Some say that he sold his badge when he quit the cops to collect the reward on an embezzler he collared off the books. Got fifty cents for every dollar he recovered from the insurance company they say, made millions.”

“He didn’t sell his badge.”

“What do you call it?”

“He took an early retirement to help his father out. Unfortunately, his father passed six months later.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You can leave now. I want to see an incident report first thing in the morning.”

Healy glanced at his watch to see how much time he had before his ten-hour shift ended.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Detective Jeannie Shipman hated my guts; she especially hated it when I called her Jeannie which I did because she hated my guts. She was “young, beautiful; smart as hell”—at least that’s how Bobby once described her to me, although I could never see it. She had been Bobby’s partner before they made him a lieutenant (all lieutenants were later named commanders, I have no idea what the SPPD was thinking), and remained his cohort of choice on those occasions when he