Lieberman's Day Read Online Free PDF

head no and went through the door alone. There were starched-curtained cubicles on both sides of him, three cubicles on each side. The fluorescent lights hummed and beamed white and shadowless. He pushed back the curtain on his left and stepped in.
    His nephew David lay on a cart, eyes closed, wearing a suit and open tie. The blood had dried on his chest and drained from his face. He looked nothing like a Lieberman. He looked like his mother’s side of the family, which was fortunate.
    Lieberman stepped to the side of his dead nephew and looked at his face, at the wounds. He didn’t touch the flesh. He had touched dead flesh many times and he didn’t want to remember David this way.
    David looked troubled, puzzled, his full, dead-purple lips tight, as if someone had asked him one of those questions about trains traveling in different directions at different speeds.
    Lieberman muttered a few words of the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead in Hebrew, a language he did not understand. He did not know all of the prayer, knew very little, but he felt the need to try.
    Then he turned, went through the curtain and out the swing door to where Hanrahan stood.
    â€œYou all right, Rabbi?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œDon’t see how you could be. Nurse just came down. Doc says we can see Carol for a minute or two. Doesn’t look like Maish is here yet.”
    When they got back upstairs in front of the intensive-care unit, a young surgeon in a blue operating-room uniform was standing in front of the row of chairs where Hanrahan had spent more than an hour. The surgeon looked tired and ill and young and a little like Alan Alda. He was certainly no older than Lieberman’s dead nephew.
    â€œDetective Lieberman?” he asked, holding out his hand.
    The grip was firm, the look of sympathy sincere. Lieberman nodded.
    â€œI’m Jason Lorie. I’m sorry about your nephew.”
    Lieberman nodded and looked into the young doctor’s eyes and saw that he meant what he was saying.
    â€œCarol?” asked Lieberman.
    â€œI think she’ll be fine,” Lorie said, rubbing his eyes. “If there aren’t any complications, she should be fine. The bullet didn’t hit an organ. Broken rib and muscle damage.”
    â€œAnd …?” Lieberman said, leaving unfinished the question they both understood.
    â€œI don’t know about the baby,” said Lorie. “The bullet didn’t hit the fetus, but it did sever blood vessels and scraped part of the umbilical cord. Vital signs are very good. We keep the mother strong and the baby should be fine. We’re watching. I’m trying to track down her obstetrician. If we have to remove the baby, we will, but I doubt if that will be necessary. It looks like a seven, possibly eight-month fetus, so the chances are …”
    â€œCan we talk to her?”
    â€œI’m not sure she’ll make a lot of sense. She’s heavily sedated and just went through some rough surgery. If you can wait till morning …”
    â€œBy morning whoever did this could be halfway to California or Little Rock,” said Hanrahan.
    Doc Lorie held open his hands in resignation and led the two policemen to and through the doors of the ICU.
    The unit was dark with a round nurses’ station in the center. Facing the circle of the nursing station were glassed-in rooms with large windows. Green lights flickered beyond each window.
    A white-haired nurse with her glasses perched precariously on her nose looked up at them, saw the doctor, and returned to a chart before her.
    â€œThere,” said the doctor. “Room Three-sixteen. Two minutes. No more and possibly less. We’re monitoring vital signs out here.”
    â€œWe’ll be fast,” Hanrahan assured the doctor, softly, as Lieberman moved toward the door.
    They could see Carol through the window before they entered. She was turned toward the door, her eyes closed, her face bloodless