“I got me an uncle,” Cowling said, leaning against a wall and contemplating the steam rising from his cup of coffee. “Uncle Theo. Little spit of a niggah. Can’t be no more than five-six, five-seven. Funniest man you’d ever wanna meet. Have you fall out laughing in five seconds flat. Everybody in the family loves Uncle Theo. Bad thing is you never get a trigger warning with that crazy mothafucka. Spent eight months in Fulton County Jail in Atlanta on account he beat the living shit out of his runnin’ buddy, Tooty Howard, ’cause Tooty hadn’t paid him back the five bucks he lent him six months prior. See what I’m sayin’?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think I do. You’re saying you’re a useless loaf of dog shit with a badge pinned to it.”

I started back to Tomás’s room.

As I approached, Elena emerged looking pale, haggard and confused. She was accompanied by Tomás’s surgeon, a stocky Indian-American man with an Albert Einstein shock of salt-and-pepper hair.

“We’ll know more in the next sixteen to twenty-four hours, Mrs. Gutierrez,” Dr. Jack Gupta said. “Just trust he’ll get the best care possible in the meantime. And I so deeply apologize for the handcuffs”—he shot the DPD cop at the door a nasty look—“which are totally unnecessary given his current status.” Elena just stared vacantly at the doctor, nodding as he spoke. “You should try to get some rest, all right?” He took both of her hands in his. “Please. Do get some rest.”

As Gupta attempted to walk past me, I caught his arm. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Are you police or a relative?”

“I—He’s my godfather.”

He nodded toward Elena. “Then you’ll have to ask the lady, who is, I assume, your godmother. Confidentially, he’s critical. If I don’t see a considerable reduction in the swelling of his brain in sixteen hours, he risks permanent brain damage—or worse.”

“‘Worse’ meaning—”

“Yes,” he said, acknowledging the unspoken word. “That’s generally what ‘worse’ means in any hospital, sir.”

He continued on to the nurses’ station, where I heard him give Cowling a blistering earful about the handcuffs on his comatose patient.

“I am—” I began. “Jesus, Elena, I am so—”

Elena looked up at me with wet, swollen red eyes.

“Always with you two,” she said. “Playing cowboys.”

Then she slapped me.

Twice.

And walked away.

“Popular as ever,” Cowling said with a self-satisfied grin as he passed me.

I considered grabbing Cowling’s service Glock out of his hip holster and pistol-whipping him half to death with it. Unfortunately, we were in one of America’s premier hospitals, and they probably would have had him up and kicking his heels in no time.

Some people just deserve to suffer.