When I woke up at Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson Hospital, I started grinding. I knew they must have had me loaded up with a morphine drip and all the other procedural narcotics, but I didn't come out groggy, I came out analyzing.

My first thought was paralysis and I was afraid to move because I wasn't sure I wanted to know. I stared up at the ceiling and then started working my eyes to the white corners and down to a light fixture and then to a television screen mounted high on the opposite wall and then to my left on the curtain rod and to the right a mirror that I couldn't look into.

I concentrated on what I could feel and picked up the cool stiffness of the sheet against my legs and chest and was encouraged enough to move my right hand. "Thank Him for small miracles." I could hear my mother's old mantra and my hand went across to the left side of my neck and felt the bandage, thick and gauzy and wrapped all the way around. When I tried to move my head, pain shot straight into my temples and I knew from the tingle that my vertebra were probably intact.

I was taking an accounting of fingers and toes when District Chief Osborne walked into my room, followed by my father's brother-in-law, Sergeant Keith O'Brien, and someone in a dark suit that should have had "Beancounter" written up and down one of the legs like they do on sweatsuits from the universities that say "Hurricanes" or "Quakers."

"Freeman. Good to see you awake, man."

I'd never met the district chief in the dozen years I'd been on the force and was sure he'd never known my name until early this morning when a dispatcher woke him out of a warm sleep in his home in comfortable East Falls. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders and the belly, and was wearing some kind of paisley button-down shirt and had tossed on a navy sport coat to look both official and hurried. He had gray-flecked hair and a bulbous nose that was starting to show the spider web of reddish veins from too much whiskey for too many years.