Edsel by Loren D. Estleman

what.” I was hoarse as a dust devil. If I could have tumbled off the gurney I’d have crawled over to the cinderblock wall and licked the condensed moisture from the mortar between the blocks.
    “The store turned the puke and his little whore over to the precinct. You going to press charges?”
    “I used to know a Kozlowski in the detective bureau. Any relation?”
    “Probably. Everybody in the family’s been some kind of cop. My mother’s still working Dispatch in Royal Oak. We’re holding them two for A-and-B. You want to forgive and understand them and set them on the right path, or would you rather we stick their butts in juvie? Personally I don’t give a shit. Either way we get to deal with ’em all over again.”
    “Could you get me a drink of water?”
    “We’re not supposed to give you nothing. Croakers get awful sore. So how about it, you pressing the rap? ’Cause chances are their parents live in Grosse Pointe and when we pull them out of whatever party they’re at to take the pukes home they’ll slap a suit on you for cutting little Buster’s toes with the busted ends of your ribs. This way you get something back.”
    “How’s Agnes?” I was ashamed of not having asked first thing. My face was throbbing and every time I inhaled someone sank a hat pin in my side up to the head.
    “She’s okay. I think she broke a nail.” He flipped shut his pad, a dime-store notebook with a cardboard cover hanging by two loops. “Tell you what, I’ll talk to you later. Right now I’m answering all the questions. You got a strange way of being in shock.”
    “I used to be a reporter.”
    “Yeah? Well, you must’ve stunk at it, You ain’t reported a thing since I been here.”
    He left me to stare at the tube lights in a trough on the ceiling. After a long time the dark oval of an orderly’s face blocked it out and the gurney started moving. In X ray a young nurse whose skin was as pale as her cap helped me off with my shirt and pants and rolled me around on a cold steel table like an egg noodle, putting torque I didn’t need to my cracked ribs and then doing it all over again half an hour later when the pictures didn’t turn out. When a doctor finally made his appearance, he was half my age and his face wore an expression of even less concern than Officer Kozlowski. He poked at my abdomen and rib cage, twisted my head right and left, examined my pulse, and took six stitches in my lower lip, which was as big as a couch. While a nurse who may or may not have been the Florence Nightingale who had manhandled me in X ray sponged the blood off my face, Young Dr. Kildare scowled at my vital statistics on a clipboard in his hands.
    “You have three cracked ribs, Mr. Minor,” he said. “We’ll tape them up before you leave, but you’ll have to leave the bending over and climbing stairs to someone else for a while. I’d like to hang on to you overnight for observation; however, we have no beds available. We had a little roadshow performance of The Wild One on Hastings earlier tonight and some of the actors have decided to honor us with their presence.”
    I grunted, grateful for the reprieve. A steady stream of youths swathed in bloody gauze had delayed my treatment for almost two hours. The battle seemed to have been drawn along racial lines, reminding me uncomfortably of the ’46 riots. “What about Agnes?”
    “The woman who came in with you? She’s in the waiting room. She has a facial contusion she refused treatment for. Otherwise she seems all right.” He skinned back a page. “There’s one laceration I can’t account for. Did the boy who attacked you have a knife?”
    “Not unless you count his boots.”
    “It’s a four-inch gash on your upper right thigh. It seems to have had an adhesive bandage on it until quite recently.”
    “Oh, that. I did that to myself when I dropped my portable typewriter. I shouldn’t have tried to catch it.”
    “That would be sometime last