The Blue Edge of Midnight Read Free

was starting to show the spider web of reddish veins from too much whiskey for too many years.
    “Surgeons tell us you’re one lucky officer, Freeman,” he said. “They say a couple inches the other way could have been fatal.”
    Of course a few inches the other way and I wouldn’t have been hit at all, but being such a lucky officer, I decided to hold on to that charm and not respond, even if I could. I hadn’t yet attempted to speak. My throat felt thick and swollen as if I’d been to the dentist and the guy had pumped me full of novocaine all the way down to my collarbone.
    I swung my eyes over to my uncle, who’d taken a deferential step back from the chief. Since he was studying either the end of the bed or the top of his shoes, I took a clue.
    “They say you’re out of the woods now. So don’t you worry. But as soon as you’re ready, we’ll need a statement,” said Osborne, tipping his head to the beancounter as part of the “we” but not introducing him.
    There was an awkward silence. You can’t have an interview with a mute man. You can’t say congratulations to a shot cop. You can’t say “good job” to an officer who just killed a child.
    “We’ll check back, Freeman,” Osborne finally said, reaching out until he realized my hand wasn’t going to move, and then issuing what seemed to be a consolation pat on the side of the bed instead. The chief and the guy I would later dance with in his role as human resource director walked to the door, had a few short sentences with Sergeant O’Brien and left.
    My uncle Keith came to the bedside, making eye contact for the first time. Giving me the Irish twinkle and waiting a good safe period before flashing his more consistent fire.
    “Assholes,” he said, not elaborating on who he was giving the title to and letting it sit wide ranging. “How’re ya, boy?” he finally said.
    When I tried to answer, I couldn’t get even a croak through the novocaine-like block. My right hand went again to the left side of my neck, a movement that was already imprinted in my postsurgical psyche.
    “A through and through,” he said, nodding his head to the right.
    “Punk kid threw a .22 at you before you got off the knockdown. The EMS guys said the slug went straight through muscle, missed the windpipe and the carotid artery.”
    He told me how the slug had passed through my neck leaving an entrance wound as clean as a paper punch. The exit wound was twice as large and raggedy. The lead had then pucked into the brick façade of the Thirteenth Street Cleaners, chunking out a thimble-sized hole with spatters of Max Freeman’s blood around it.
    “Fuckin’ kid was a real sharpshooter,” he said before catching the look in my eye. Keith was like the majority of cops in Philadelphia and on every department in the country. In twenty-five years he had never pulled his gun in the line of duty. If the department hadn’t instituted a mandatory range qualification a few years back, the rounds in his old-style revolver would still be rusted in the chamber. But he had seen the results of shootings. He’d known officers who had killed and seen them change. Nobody took it without changing.
    “Both of ’em DOS,” he said. “Crime scene guys bagged them right on the sidewalk.”
    He hesitated, looking away.
    “Twelve and sixteen years old. Both from North Philly. Down doing Center City for the night.”
    He went on how the newspapers and radio talk shows were already howling about their new discovery this month that kids were carrying guns. He said a witness across the street on Chestnut was screaming that I took the first shot, cut the kid down without a warning. He said Internal Affairs had my gun and would be all over the shooting investigation, but being wounded and all, I didn’t have to worry.
    He was talking, but I had only been hearing, not listening. My eyes had gone to the ceiling again, my right hand to the bandage on my neck.
    I must have been forty strokes