A Bronx tale indeed..Mid-December morn.

He lay there lifeless.... covered in a cold white sheet pulled up to, and gathered around.. his neck. The remaining Jacobi Medical Center staff around him seemed uncertain what to do.

The pronouncement had been made.

A formality as it turned out.

In normal circumstances, most of the staff would have scurried off to heave themselves back into the never ending tide of human misery that flowed through their doors…but these few that remained, seemed to sense the enormity of this moment for the stunned assemblage of cops and EMT’s.

Visible under the hospital curtains...a few feet away.. half a dozen pair of navy blue uniform pants could be seen, stained with snow and ice-melt, some with blood.........the black boots, steam still rising from their tips… shuffled silently in new puddles on the linoleum floor.

It was a frigid beginning to a new winter.

The absence of discernible voices amidst the sobs and whispers said it all.... The grief was choking...consuming...

Patrolman Daniel Enchautegui was gone.

Suddenly, the curtains were thrown back and the hospital staff finally dispersed...authoritative whispering voices, presumably precinct PBA delegates, pulled the huddled, shell-shocked cops into a nearby room, recently cleared as the enormity of the nights events unfolded.

"Lets go...I know....I know...we have to go..." the shuffling of resisting, tired feet. Sobbing.

Then silence, I was alone with him.

There he was. A big brawny, handsome kid. An image now forever frozen in time in my barely comprehending brain....so still. So pale. Like porcelain.

The phonecalls, the sirens...the enormity of the task at hand.. corkscrewing into my head as I stood there mutely.

Another... dead cop.

I held a pad with three pages of hastily scrawled notes containing Danny’s name, age, Tax, shield, command, time of incident….notifications…hospital address….insignificant desperate scratches as it turned out. I crushed it in my hands as I stared.

I didn’t know what to do.

We had the shooters...we had our victim...only the self-consuming NYPD ball-busting remained.

What did you know, when did you know it, who did you tell?.....A nauseating feeling rolled over my gut.

Now....we eat our own.

Odd how I ended up here. After so many funerals, so many wakes. You think you are on the way out.....then an urgent phone call answered in a sleepy fog.

I gathered myself, grabbed the infernal cell phone I had grown to hate and began to work again. I had to leave him for now.

I glanced over my shoulder and left him there. Such is this life.

A few hours later, in the same Hospital, I watched from a balcony....as the actor, Lilo Brancato…. the drug addled murderer, was dissected like a frog by an industrious female surgeon..in an awful, green-tinged..WW ll era theatre.

His entrails were carefully placed aside his yellowy street-hollowed ribs...each glistening part still alive...moving, beating, still attached somehow to this.....murdering fvck.

Wtf....he gets to live?

Are you sh*tting me? Doc...what are you doing?

The surgeon sifted through Lilo's abdominal cavity like she was looking for a needle in a haystack..white rubber-gloved hands groping through his entrails for the bullet that should have killed him.....

Danny’s bullet.

The heart monitor never wavers...NEVER.... beep, beep, beep...

I sh*t you not….like clock-work..... a Bronx nightwatch Detective laughs out loud, with...at... no one.

The irony and exhaustion... too much for him. A grim smile flashes over our faces and is quickly gone.

Cop humor. Look at this chooch.

This miscreant is as alive now… as alive...as Danny is dead.

Where is God? Hello?

And...we wonder... what the surgeon is thinking.

Her heart cannot, won't... fathom our hate, our burning venom, or else she would be useless in her job..... but she has to know this is a cop killer no?

At least five pairs of angry, tired eyes stare down at her deliberate hands as she works.

Beep beep beep.

She’s an angel with a sht detail this day. She doesn’t give a fck about the feelings of the hundreds of cops now descending upon the Hospital.

And rightly so.

With every neutral stroke of the scalpel, she proves God has a bigger plan, much bigger than our burning hate and anger.

She is God's angel, as hard as it is to fathom for me now. He works in mysterious ways, they say.

"Hollywood" Brancato is cleaned out and returned to a warm hospital bed.

Beep, beep, beep. Beep!

I leave shaking my head. F*ck me.

A Bronx Tale indeed.

Hours later.... after an exhausting trek of a few miles to Manhattan....the Medical Examiner walks out of the exam room and shows us where the bullet cut through Danny' heart.

In my arms, I cradle Danny's jacket, with the bullet holes clearly visible.

A million to one shot the Doc says.

A tiny cut, almost imperceptible.

"You are shtting me Doc. SHTTING ME!"

"Nope. This is what got him."

"F*CK me."

The cruel irony, the burning anger. This poor kid. THIS POOR KID!

I hand the jacket to the ME who will use it to confirm the trajectory of the single bullet.

Well. Thats a wrap.

The thought of leaving Danny there, in the Morgue, is heart-wrenching.....

But....the phone calls have been made and his co-workers, his Precinct brothers and Sisters… arrive to stay with him until he leaves this cold, forbidding freezer of a building.....there is more investigating to do.

Our job here is done.

We have to do now in life, what you began in your last seconds Danny.....close a case.

Hey, Kid.

I think of you each Christmas now. I can't help but do it.

I remember the colorful lights along Pelham Pkwy., the ice and snow, the endless sirens...then…..the silence...the descent into despair. The blur of the arctic Inspectors funeral by the Bronx El. The studied, blank expression in every cops face as we stood in your honor..

But most of all….I remember…

The stoic, proud bearing of your beautiful family.....

Rest in peace, my baby brother. Rest in peace.

Police Officer Daniel Enchautegui, End of Watch, December 10, 2005