Rough Trade

delivered.
    “Our hospital policy is to give the same level of high quality care to every single patient without regard to their circumstance or ability to pay,” she replied promptly, spouting the corporate line. “I guarantee you that the man who shot Mr. Rendell is getting the very same level of care that he is.”
    “The man who shot him is here?” I demanded incredulously. “He’s here? In this hospital?”
    “We’re the only level-three trauma center between Madison and Chicago. I understand he was very seriously injured. There’s no place else they could have taken him.”
    “And he was shot?”
    “Yes. Three times. I believe once in the head. As far as I know he’s still in surgery.”
    “What’s his name? Who is he?”
    “Oh, I don’t know if I can give out that information—” she sputtered.
    “It’s a matter of public record,” I declared, taking a step toward her. “I bet you’ve already told the media.”
    “His name is Darius Fredericks,” she said quickly.
    “The wide receiver?”
    She nodded while I grappled with my disbelief.
    Until the day he’d nearly killed a call girl in a hotel room after a game, Darius Fredericks had played football for the Milwaukee Monarchs.
     

CHAPTER 21
     
     
    Football is a game of violence; a sport where the players hit hard and they hit first, where knocking an opponent unconscious is a badge of honor and breaking bones a treat. Violence isn’t just part of the game. It is the game. I once read an interview with an offensive lineman with the Chicago Bears who calmly explained that he liked to play mad. “Not mad at anyone in particular,” he was quoted as saying, “but mad at the world.”
    But there are some players who can’t distinguish the violence of the game from real life, players who are mad at the world, not just for the three hours they are on the field, but all day long. Couple that kind of rage with the sense of entitlement that comes from being a twenty-three-year-old millionaire sports celebrity and you get Darius Fredericks.
    By the time Darius Fredericks reached the NFL, he was already no stranger to the law, and Amber Cunningham was by no means the first young woman the 220-pound professional athlete had used as a punching bag. However, she was the first one that I ever saw, and let’s just say it left an impression.
    I couldn’t get to the hospital until the early hours of the morning. I’d had to first arrange for representation for Fredericks and then issue a statement to the press. All I really wanted to do was go home. But Jeffrey Rendell had begged me to go and see her. To his credit he was not just terrified of the publicity, but genuinely concerned that whatever could be done for Amber Cunningham and her family be done.
    When I got upstairs to her room the nurse spoke softly, as if the girl already lay dead. She explained that Cunningham was nineteen and, according to her driver’s license photo, very pretty. But there was no way to tell any of that from the mangled lump of flesh in the hospital bed. There were dozens of tubes and lines running in and out of her body, and her face was the color and consistency of raw hamburger.
    Her mother was at her bedside, furious and weeping. When I told her who I was and why I’d come, she’d vented her anger—a cold and hissing stream of hate. I stayed until she was done, asked her if there was anything that she needed, and got out of there as fast as I could, feeling sick at heart and thoroughly ashamed of myself. When I got home I took a shower, but I knew that no amount of water would wash off what it was that clung to me.
    In the weeks that followed, Amber Cunningham did not die. Indeed, according to the truncated metric of the medical world, she got better. Eventually the bruises faded and the fractures healed. The lines were removed and she was sent home. However, she would never again be pretty. Or walk. Or have children.
    For his punishment a jury of twelve sentenced Darius Fredericks to two years in prison. In a separate civil suit Cunningham was also awarded $9 million. From that day on the Monarchs started sending Fredericks’s paychecks to his victim. Amber’s parents would never be able to heal their daughter or erase the reality of what had happened to her, but they were at least able to return Darius Fredericks to the poverty from which he’d started. I never had a chance to ask them whether they considered this enough.
    I remembered seeing that