Part 6 (2/2)

The first blow to the back of his head had rocked his brain, causing it to collide with the inside of his skull. The trauma triggered an inflammatory response of infection-fighting cells. Mike's head began swelling immediately, a b.u.mp the size of an egg.

The second blow then ripped open the right side of Mike's forehead. Blood began pouring from a laceration along his hairline that was nearly three inches long. Next Mike was pulled off the fence, and he fell toward the front of the marked police cruiser that was to the right of the Lexus. More blows followed, ferocious blows. Mike's radio fell to the ground by the front of Dave Williams's cruiser.

He was down on all fours, wobbly like a dog on its last legs. He lifted his head and saw a puzzling image. ”It looked like an officer,” he thought. But that was crazy, a hallucination. Mike looked again, but the initial impression would not vanish: It was a cop, a white cop. ”He was standing in front of me.” Mike tried to raise his head up higher to get a better look. But the only thing he saw was a boot coming flush into his face.

Now Mike felt the pain-pain in his face, his head, his shoulders, his back. The kick was followed by more blows. He curled his arms over his head for protection against the blows to ”all sides of my body, from different directions.”

He fought to stay conscious; he wanted to see who was doing this to him-and why? Blood ran from his nose and mouth. He was alternately conscious and semiconscious, and he'd lost any sense of time. The blows to the head happened so fast, but now everything seemed to be happening in a clouded slow motion.

”I don't know how long it took in actual time,” he said.

Then, suddenly, it stopped. There was quiet, too. ”I saw that there's no one, there's no one there.” Mike was alone. He struggled to get back up on all fours. He crawled to the rear of the nearby cruiser. ”I used it to lift myself,” he said. ”I was having trouble breathing and standing.”

He tried to balance himself. His hands swished in the blood on the car's trunk-his blood. He was facing the end of Woodruff Way with the hole in the fence. Then he detected that someone was standing a few feet away. He heard the man saying something. But in the thick fog that had overtaken him, he could not make out the words right away.

Mike then realized the man was ordering him to submit to an arrest. Mike couldn't believe this. He looked and saw a black officer. It was Ian Daley, but Mike didn't know that; all he saw was the uniform. Mike began trying to explain who he was, but blood, not words, spit from his mouth. The officer seemed disgusted and jumped back a step. Mike heard the man yelling at him to put his hands behind his back.

Mike couldn't believe this. He felt sore and dizzy and like he might fall down. The officer was looking to cuff him! Then Mike had an idea: He flailed at his black parka, trying to open the jacket enough so the officer would see ”something on my waist, my badge or something. I was just trying to identify myself.”

The arm movements only alarmed Ian Daley, who, seeing Mike's handgun holstered on Mike's belt, drew his own weapon. Daley held the gun in his right hand, supported at the wrist by his left hand. His index finger rested on the trigger.

Mike pulled at the parka's zipper; he couldn't believe this. Then something was different. The officer must have seen Mike's badge and realized finally he was not one of the suspects. Mike heard the officer's voice: ”Oh s.h.i.+t. Oh my G.o.d.”

Mike took a step forward. But the officer just stood there. ”He did nothing,” Mike said later. Mike took another step, but walking was too much. Everything around him was spinning. ”I don't remember falling but I remember being on the ground again.” His head hurt, and he held the spot on his forehead that was bleeding the most.

He knew he was losing consciousness. ”I just wanted to like sleep.” He was alone again, struggling as he blacked out to fathom the unfathomable: How could this be?

While Kenny Conley was handcuffing s.m.u.t Brown, other officers arrived, including a patrol supervisor and a black officer who returned Kenny's flashlight, which had fallen during the foot chase. Kenny didn't know any of the officers-they were all from the immediate police districts while Kenny was far from his in the South End. He handed off the suspect to two officers who arrived in a police wagon.

Then he retraced his steps through the woods. He was checking for anything s.m.u.t might have discarded during the run, but he didn't find anything. He made his way back across the street and up the short hill to the fence surrounding the dead end. The scene surprised him. The area was all lit up. ”The whole street was just lined up with cars.”

He stood there and took it all in. Officers were all over the circle, including a bunch he knew: Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio in uniform, and Gary Ryan and Joe Teahan, dressed in street clothes, from the gang unit. But what caught his attention was an ambulance, where paramedics were loading a black man strapped to a gurney into the back. The injured man was dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweats.h.i.+rt.

”What happened?” Kenny asked.

”It's a cop,” replied a security guard standing at the fence. The guard then recited the story already circulating around the dead end: ”Hit his head on the ice.”

PART II.

True Blue.

CHAPTER 9.

”8-Boy”

When Kimberly c.o.x approached her husband in the acute care unit of the Boston City Hospital, her first words to Mike had a clinical purpose: to determine his level of responsiveness. She found Mike able to talk, but he was groggy and only ”semi with it.” Mike would try to speak, but he was unable to summon the words to complete a sentence. He complained about his head, with its swollen black ma.s.s, about feeling dizzy, about pain in his flank and in his abdomen. ”He just looked very much out of it.”

Mike also complained about his right hand, and Kimberly noticed his right thumb had ballooned. It was determined Mike had torn a ligament and hyperextended the thumb and finger-injuries that most likely occurred as he tried to break his fall.

Kimberly watched as the more than three-inch laceration on his forehead, still bleeding when she arrived, was treated and st.i.tched. Nurses wiped off the blood caked around his swollen nose and mouth. More sutures were used to close the deep cut inside his upper lip, while the many smaller cuts and scratches were cleaned and bandaged.

Mike kept clutching his midsection, saying he felt as if he needed constantly to pee. Kimberly found a portable urinal and supported him. ”I noticed that the urine was really dark.” She sought out one of the attending physicians, showed him the urine, and asked that the doctor ”dipstick it.” The test showed traces of blood, hematuria. The doctors ordered further testing to explore the possibility of kidney damage and internal bleeding.

By 4 A.M., Mike was wheeled down the hall into the radiology unit for a series of examinations of his liver, spine, facial bones, and brain. The X-rays showed ”no evidence of fracture” on his facial bones and nose, while the CAT scan showed that ”the surfaces of the brain are clear.” The results were favorable regarding Mike's neurological condition, although in the weeks and months to come, that would change.

In another bay, nurses were getting Jimmy Rattigan ready to be released. Rattigan had come into the hospital strapped to a backboard, wearing a neck collar; fortunately, neither he nor his partner was injured seriously in the crash with the gold Lexus. They were treated for b.u.mps, bruises, and strained back and neck muscles.

Rattigan watched doctors and nurses attend to Mike; he saw Kimberly and Mike's mother arrive, and he saw other officers come and go. He could tell everyone was worried. ”Michael c.o.x is one of the nicest guys I've ever met in my life, and one of the nicest guys I've ever worked with-always a gentleman, always says h.e.l.lo, never in a bad mood when you saw him. I was kinda worried for him, too.”

Rattigan did pick up one tidbit about Mike's condition. ”I heard before I was leaving that he might have been urinating blood-now that's definitely not a good sign.”

Rattigan was right-blood in the urine was not a good thing. But unknown to Rattigan, Mike was going to have a lot more to worry about than traces of blood in his urine. Mike's concerns would soon enough extend beyond the physical to the metaphysical-a Boston police officer's expectation for justice was about to collide with the police culture of silence.

Having blacked out, Mike had missed the chaos that continued swirling in the compact cul-de-sac at the end of Woodruff Way. By some estimates, more than twenty police cruisers from various departments, several ambulances, and dozens of officers ended up crowded into the dead end. The cruisers' lights sliced up the sky. ”It looked like Christmas,” one of the officers said later.

Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan were among the first to attend to him. Teahan discovered Mike alone on the ground behind Williams's cruiser, writhing in pain. ”He was lying on a good-sized patch of ice,” Teahan said. ”He was hurt; he was bleeding.” Teahan also saw the blood, with handprints, spread across the car's trunk. Kneeling down, he heard Mike moan, ”I can't believe this s.h.i.+t. I don't need this f.u.c.king stuff.”

Despite the cold, Teahan stripped off his sweats.h.i.+rt and folded up his T-s.h.i.+rt. Gary Ryan used the unders.h.i.+rt like a bandage and tucked it under Mike's head. Teahan noticed that Mike had begun to shake. ”He looked like he was getting cold.”

Other officers, including a couple of munies, gathered around. They began calling for an ambulance. The requests broke an eerie stretch of silence on the police channel 3 after Mike's final scratchy transmission that the suspects were getting ready to bail. It was a vacuum that left the police dispatcher grasping for straws. ”Where are we now?” he'd yelled. ”Are we on foot? Could someone tell me? Are we on foot?”

The silence had finally ended with the calls for an ambulance. Even then, the requests lacked the necessary particulars-nothing about for whom, for what, or even where. ”I need your location,” the dispatcher said, stating the obvious.

The Woodruff Way cul-de-sac was described.

”What kind of injuries do we have?” the dispatcher asked.

The question hung in the air.

Gary Ryan then ended the suspense: ”Officer with a head wound.”

Many of the responding officers did not drive into the cul-desac itself. Two other members of Mike's gang unit, black officers Donald Caisey and Sergeant Ike Thomas, had circled in and had driven down Mary Moore Beatty Way, the street below the dead end and down a short hill from the fence. Mary Moore Beatty Way was the street s.m.u.t Brown had run down after scaling the fence. While they parked, they heard the radio call about an injured officer, but didn't know what to make of it. Caisey climbed the hill ahead of Thomas and saw Teahan and Ryan huddled over Mike. Hurrying over, he was shocked. ”His injuries were very similar if not exactly like injuries obtained when someone is shot in the head. Clumps of blood coming out of his nose, out of his mouth, blood everywhere. Real thick blood.”

Caisey leaned down. ”Have you been shot?”

Mike heard the question, but no longer knew up from down. ”I don't know.”

Thomas, meanwhile, was making his way through the hole in the fence to gain access to the dead end. The s.h.i.+ning cruiser lights made it hard to see. But once he adjusted his eyes he noticed the empty Lexus and three black men in handcuffs on the ground by the curb. Then he recognized Ian Daley walking quickly in his direction. Thomas and Daley knew each other pretty well; earlier in their careers they'd worked together in Dorchester at the Ca11 station. They'd socialized on occasion and played basketball. But it had been a few years since they'd hung out.

Daley motioned at Thomas. ”Ike, Ike,” he said.

”What's up, Ian?”

<script>