Some seconds later, Hammer was returning to the waiting area with water and a soft folded blanket. She sat next to the young man and wrapped him up. He opened his eyes as she held something to his lips. It was icy cold and wet and felt wonderful. Warmth began to spread over him, and his shivering calmed as his feverish eyes focused on an angel. Harrel Woods had died, and he was relieved as he drank the water of life.

“What’s your name?” the angel’s voice sounded from far away.

Woods wanted to smile, but his lips bled when he tried.

“Do you have a driver’s license with you?” the angel wanted to know.

It blearily occurred to him that even Heaven required a picture I.D. these days. He weakly zipped open his black leather butt pack and handed the license to the angel. Hammer wrote down the information, in the event he might need a shelter somewhere if he ever got out of here, which wasn’t likely. Two nurses were making their way to him with purpose, and Harrel Woods was admitted to the ward for AIDS patients. Hammer returned to her chair, wondering if she might find coffee somewhere. She digressed more about helping people. She told Brazil that when she was growing up, it was all she had wanted to do in life.

“Unfortunately, policing seems to be part of the problem these days,” she said. “How often do we really help?”

“You just did,” Brazil said.

She nodded. “And that’s not policing, Andy. That’s humanity. And we’ve got to bring humanity back into what we do or there’s no hope. This is not about politics or power or merely rounding up offenders. Policing always has been and always must be about all of us getting along and helping each other. We’re one body.”

Seth’s body was in dire straits in the O.R. His arteriogram was fine and he hadn’t leaked any barium from his bowels, but because he was a V.I.P., no chance would be taken. They had draped and prepped him, and he was facedown again, and nurses had pierced his tender flesh repeatedly with excruciatingly painful injections and a Foley catheter. They had rolled in a tank of nitrogen and connected it to a tube. They began subjecting him to what they called a Simpulse irrigation, which was nothing more than a power wash with saline and antibiotics. They were blasting him with three thousand cc’s, suctioning, debriding, as he complained.

“Put me under!” he begged.

There was too much risk.

“Anything!” he whined.

They compromised and gave him an amnesiac they called Midazolam, which did not relieve pain but caused it to be forgotten, it seemed. Although the bullet was located on the X ray, they would never locate it in so much fat, not without dicing Seth as if he were destined for a chef salad, the surgeon knew. Her name was Dr. White. She was a thirty-year-old graduate of Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and had done her residency at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. White would not have been as concerned about leaving the bullet were it the typical semi-jacketed, round-nosed variety.