Hospital visit: declines to depose; the shoplifted Get Well card

pivotal · post-shooting, ~mid-Nov YDAU, ~1100h

• When: some days after the shooting — Gately post-surgery in St. Elizabeth's Trauma Wing (his own estimate puts the surgery "between let's say four and eight days" back), around 1100h.
• What: McDade and Gavin Diehl come in around 1100h from visiting Doony Glynn in Gastroenterology, goofing archaic high fives onto Gately's good hand, reporting Glynn blissful on a Levsin-codeine diverticulitis drip. Then, interrupting each other, they apologize that it's looking like they can't stand up and legally depose for Gately — they'd do it "in a fucking hatbeat" but their P.D. and P.O. respectively say walking into Norfolk District Court would be "tittymount to like judicio-penal suicide." Diehl adds that the .44 Item has vanished — likely "promoted... up off the lawn" by Lenz — and McDade relays that Lenz has been possibly spotted, officially relapsed, "back Out There." McDade then volunteers, in "what's either an intimate aside or a knife-twist at a Staffer who's in no position to enforce anything," that he and Emil Minty are arranging engraved-looking formal invitations to lure the incoming Unit-#3 agoraphobics to a crowded outdoor Welcome-to-the-E.M.P.H.H.-Neighborhood bash — and with that, Gately knows for sure it was McDade and Minty who put the HELP WANTED sign under the window of the Unit-#4 lady who shouts for Help. McDade produces an unsigned Get Well card and puts it carefully through the railing's bars; it is clearly shoplifted. The pathetic hot card plus the refusal to depose tip the mute, intubated Gately into "a sudden total bitter impotent Job-type rage"; Diehl and McDade back away and melt out the door "with the vague alacrity of seasoned drug-addicts" as a nurse arrives. Per 161, the non-deposers are a recognized class: all the fracas residents "except Lenz and Thrale and the ones that aren't in a legal position to step forward" have filed depositions supporting Gately.