When he woke a few days later, he couldn’t speak properly and the whole left side of his body was numb.

“You’ve had a stroke,” the doctor said.

“I’m twenty-seven years old,” Danny said, though it came out, “I’b wenty-vesen airs awl.”

The doctor nodded, as if he’d spoken clearly. “Most twenty-seven-year-olds don’t get stabbed and then shot three times for good measure. If you were much older, I doubt you would have survived. In truth, I don’t know how you did.”

“Nora.”

“She’s outside. Do you really want her to see you in your current state?”

“She I mife.”

The doctor nodded.

When he left the room, Danny heard the words as they had left his mouth. He could form them in his head right now—she’s my wife—but what had come out—she I mife—was hideous, humiliating. Tears left his eyes, hot ones of fear and shame, and he wiped at them with his right hand, his good hand.

Nora entered the room. She looked so pale, so frightened. She sat in the chair by his bed and took his right hand in hers and lifted it to her face, pressed her cheek to his palm.

“I love you.”

Danny gritted his teeth, concentrated through a pounding headache, concentrated, willing the words to leave his tongue correctly. “Love you.”

Not bad. Love ooh, really. But close enough.

“The doctor said you’ll have trouble speaking for a while. You may have trouble walking, yeah? But you’re young and fierce-strong, and I’ll be with you. I’ll be with you. ’Twill all be fine, Danny.”

She’s trying so hard not to cry, he thought.

“Love ooh,” he said again.

She laughed. A wet laugh. She wiped her eyes. She lowered her head to his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her against his face.

If there was a positive outcome to Danny’s injuries, it was that he didn’t see a newspaper for three weeks. If he had, he would have learned that the day after the shoot-out in the alley, Commissioner Curtis proclaimed all positions of the striking police officers to be officially vacant. Governor Coolidge supported him. President Wilson weighed in to call the actions of the policemen who left their posts “a crime against civilization.”

Ads seeking the new police force contained within them new standards and rate of pay, all in keeping with the strikers’ original demands. Base salary would now start at fourteen hundred dollars a year. Uniforms, badges, and service revolvers would be provided free of charge. Within two weeks of the riots, city cleanup crews, licensed plumbers, electricians, and carpenters began arriving at each of the station houses to clean and remodel them until they met safety and sanitation codes at a state level.

Governor Coolidge composed a telegram to Samuel Gompers of the AFL. Before he sent the telegram to Gompers, he released it to the press where it was published on the front page of every daily the following morning. The telegram was also released to the wire services and would run in over seventy newspapers across the country in the following two days. Governor Coolidge proclaimed the following: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”