by Cylin Busby
But most of all, I’m happy to have the picture of Dad’s car. Because the next time I saw that car, it was in a black-and-white photo on the front page of the Cape Cod Times, shot full of holes. The front window was shattered, the driver-side window completely knocked out. And the driver-side door, freshly painted green, was riddled with shotgun pellets.
chapter 2
JOHN
AUGUST 31, 1979, was a Friday, the start of Labor Day weekend on the Cape. I’d worked the previous 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. shift, and then spent until late afternoon in court. After sitting around all day I didn’t even get to testify, having only a minor backup role in the case. It was a major waste of time. I got home around five in the afternoon with no sleep, exhausted, and was supposed to take the kids to the movie theater.
I thought about calling in sick, spending some time with the kids before school started back up in a few days. But this was Labor Day weekend, and on the Cape that meant parties, drunk drivers, tourists having their last hurrah before heading back to New York and Boston and wherever else they came from. We needed extra cops on duty to handle this weekend—more of the real guys on the force, not just the “rent-a-cops” as we year-rounders called the summer guys. It would be an asshole move not to show up for my shift. So I told Polly I had to hit the sack and to wake me at 9:45 for work.
The kids were disappointed about the movie, but I told them we’d go tomorrow night instead. Polly got me up; I showered and trimmed my beard and had some coffee. I’d been wearing a beard for several years at this point. Came about as a result of a week-long vacation and fast-growing whiskers. We were working five days on and three days off, so right before my vacation, I skipped the shave for my last shift. That gave me twelve days to grow a beard, and it looked pretty good. So I went to work with it, and since there wasn’t any official policy about facial hair, my sergeant said he’d talk with the chief. Next morning, Sergeant and I met with the “Grand Fubar”—our private name for the chief, “Fubar” meaning “fucked up beyond all reality.” The chief approved beards as long as they were neat and trim. Within a month, a dozen bearded cops were saving copious bucks on razor blades.
Polly told me shortly after she woke me up that—surprise!—she’d painted half the car green. I took a look. She’d used a four-inch paintbrush and, under the circumstances, had done a credible job. But I was grumpy, still tired from getting only three hours of sleep, so I didn’t give her any compliments. Instead, I pointed out that now I’d have to get a new registration due to the color change, just nit-picking. It was looking like it was going to be a tough night on the public indeed.
At about twenty of eleven, I fired up the newly painted Bug and headed in to work. As I drove down Sandwich Road, I noticed another Bug, a white VW, facing into Pinecrest Beach Drive and a full-sized light blue sedan facing out. The people seemed to be talking to each other. About half a mile south, a vehicle closed on me rapidly from the rear, hit high beams, and pulled out to pass. The speed limit on this stretch of road was thirty-five, and we were already doing a bit more than that.
But the car didn’t pass. Instead, I heard this incredible roar and felt this tremendous punch in my nose. My head and upper body were thrown down, across the passenger seat. There was a second booming roar, and I started to sit back up. I noticed in the light from the radio that there was a pool of blood, bone, teeth, and hair lying in the passenger seat. Somehow I knew it was parts of me lying there, and I thought quite calmly, Shit, now I’m going to have to go to the dentist. I knew I’d been shot, that’s what the booming sounds were. I’d probably been hit in the nose and mouth.
I sat up and stomped on the brakes, bringing the car to a screeching halt. A third boom went off and the passenger side of the front windshield filled with half-inch round holes. I could see the light blue sedan now, stopped about fifty feet in front of me, and I was thinking how easy it would be to shoot back through the windshield at it—the thing was already full of holes; it wouldn’t do any more damage. But since I had kids at home, my stainless steel (to resist rusting in the salty Cape air) .357 revolver with its six-inch barrel was hanging in my locker and not in the shoulder harness that fellow officer Pauly Gonsalves had advised me to start wearing years earlier.
I decided there was only one way to get out of this alive, and that was to run for help. Whoever was in that other car wanted me dead, and they had come armed with a very effective weapon. I couldn’t fight back, and suddenly I knew how it felt to be the other guy, like guys I’d arrested or pointed a gun at. I got an image in my head of the night Jack Coughlin and I pulled over a suspected drunk we’d gotten a call about from another cop. The perp was supposed to be carrying weapons in his car and on his person, so we weren’t taking any chances. We had him put his hands out the window first, so we could see them, then when he was out of the car, hands up and on the roof.
“Spread your legs and step back to where your weight is on your hands,” I told the guy—this so he couldn’t pull anything out of a pocket. “Now listen carefully,” I told him, and then I pumped a round into the shotgun and let him feel it on his back. “You move, I blow you away. Understood?” He was all, “Yes, yes, yes,” so we asked him where his weapons were. He said, “I don’t have any weapons.” So Jack searched him while I held the shotgun on his spine. Nothing on him. We put him in the back of the cruiser and tossed his truck, meaning that we searched everywhere—seat cushions out, glove box emptied onto the street, even in the engine cavity—everywhere. Found nothing. We were red-faced, put this guy through hell for nothing, on a call from another cop.
We explained to the guy why we’d stopped him. His voice quivered as he repeated that he didn’t have any weapons and also wasn’t drunk. He said that when I had him against the car, he felt his arms weakening and shaking, and he was afraid that if he started to really shake, or if he passed out, I would shoot him. I felt like shit hearing that. Told him if he wanted to take any recourse, we would supply his lawyers with information about the search and why it happened. I was almost hoping he would sue, so the cop who had called this in—a real asshole—would have to answer in court. And so a lot of cops on the force who weren’t doing their jobs right would have to answer too. But the guy just thanked us and drove off, like that.
Now I was the one in a gunfight, and what that guy told me, about being scared and feeling like he was a dead man, was suddenly coming back to me clearly. I’m a big fan of horror movies and Stephen King books, but this kind of scared didn’t feel like that. “Scared” isn’t the right word for it. There is no word for it. It’s a gut feeling when you know you’re about to die, and it’s horrible. I put the car into reverse and backed into the oncoming lane, then put it into gear and just drove straight, at an angle, bouncing off the pavement and shooting across a lawn. I felt the car bump into, then drive over, a fence that I didn’t realize was there, and almost crash into the front door of a house. As the car came to a halt, I tumbled out and ran to the door, fully expecting to hear a fourth boom and feel the bullets tear through the back of my head.
I reached the doorstep, and stopped. A large puddle of blood was pooling at my feet. It was a cool night so I’d worn the zip-in vest lining from my police jacket over my uniform shirt. I quickly took this puffy vest off and held it to where my lower jaw used to be, which was just now starting to hurt. I was doing two things—trying to control the bleeding and making my uniform visible so they would know I was a cop.
A young girl opened the door immediately—obviously they’d heard the gunshots and me driving up on their lawn. She took one look at me and ran screaming into the house. An older woman appeared—her mom, I guessed—and I somehow managed to indicate that I was police and I’d been injured. She led me into their kitchen and, in shock herself, started yelling for wet towels. I knew from my EMT training that I had to maintain my airway even though I might bleed to death anyhow, and this was a major fear as I watched the pool of blood spread slowly around my feet into a
circle, and then across the entire kitchen floor. I had no way to tell her that dry towels would really be a lot better, so I just took what she gave me.
I had to lean over and let the blood flow out of my face, onto the floor, because to lean back or try to stop it in any way sent it down my throat, and I was literally drowning in it. Time slowed down, the wet towels being handed to me, the pool of blood on the floor creeping wider. I knew they had called to report a police officer shot; I heard them on the phone. Then, far away but growing louder, I heard the sirens coming. But it wasn’t an ambulance; Tony Mello, a fairly new cop, was in the neighborhood and heard it over the radio. Once he saw me, the situation, he radioed in immediately, confirming that a cop had been shot and an ambulance was needed. Tony didn’t know who shot me, what had happened, where the shooter or shooters were. He did know that EMTs won’t enter until the scene is secure, so that’s what he did, making the family sit together on the couch in the living room, away from me. Then he started pacing between the kitchen and front door with his gun out, keeping guard.
I was losing so much blood I could see it everywhere. No matter what, I just wanted to live long enough to describe the vehicle. Tony was walking a bloody trail into the carpet between the door and the kitchen, looking for that ambulance and telling me, “They’re on their way, on their way.” But I knew I was safe now from being shot again—they were going to have to go through Tony to get to me, and he had his weapon, so that was one worry off my mind. They can’t shoot me any more tonight, I told myself, and just as I did, the pain caught up with me. Suddenly, I was hurting bad, with electric shooting pains radiating from my jaw and through my head, right into my brain, like I was being shocked, electrocuted. It’s the feeling of touching a live wire, but in my face, my skull, and it wouldn’t stop. I started shaking hard, going into shock.
Looking at the blood, the amount of it, I could tell I was going to either pass out or bleed to death before the EMTs arrived. I wanted them to know that I needed a transfusion of O positive blood. I wanted to let them know about the car, in case there wasn’t time. This was all I could think about, that I had to write this down somehow. I always carried a small notebook and a pen in my shirt pocket when I was on the job, for anything I might need to write down to make a report on later—plate numbers on cars I wanted to run, you name it. I managed to hold the wet towel to my face with my left hand and to pull out my notebook and pen with my right. If I couldn’t keep pressure on my face, I was definitely going to bleed out. But this was more important. Somehow, I scrawled the words “not an accident” on the paper, smearing blood on it as I wrote.
I heard more sirens, and Craig Clarkson—a fellow cop, good buddy, and also an EMT—ran into the house. I was so relieved to see he had the emergency kit from his cruiser; I was beyond happy to see this guy. Now Tony had the door covered and Craig was the best medical coverage I could have asked for. I shoved the notebook at him so he could read what I’d written, then I tried to write more while Craig was checking me out. I wrote the name “Ray Meyer.” This is the only person I could think of who would want me dead, and I knew why. I also knew what this guy was capable of and how much he hated me. He was a convicted arsonist and a suspect in several murders and “disappearances,” too. And if I was right, he was going to try to burn down my house and kill my family tonight, while the police department was distracted taking care of me. Last I wrote, “Polly and the kids—not safe.”
Craig was looking in my eyes, and I noticed his pupils were huge. He was doing his best with what he had. He looked at the wound, then just put the towels back up to my face without saying anything. He didn’t bother to even open the kit, there was nothing in there that could help me. Now he was the one applying the pressure, so I could write down more, about the car description; about the boom, boom, delay, third boom; about the light blue sedan with four headlights horizontal, not vertical. He kept telling me that I was going to be okay, but I knew I was dying, and I wanted him to have all the facts. I had to get this information to somebody. “You’re gonna be okay,” he kept saying, but I could always tell when Craig wasn’t being straight. I knew the guy.
He was worried. So was I.
Everything slowed down more. It was quiet; everyone kept doing the same thing over and over. Craig checked my stats; Tony walked his bloody trail in the carpet, his police-issue black shoes making a swishing sound when he came near the kitchen. I wrote a note to Craig saying, “Where are the kids?” He said he was going to take care of that. “Don’t worry about it now.” I wrote more: “bone pain.” My face was hurting in a deep, horrible way, but that’s all I felt, besides the sensation of blood surging down my throat with every heartbeat, and even that was starting to slow way down. I could feel what was left of my face keeping time with the beats. Pump, pause, pump, pause, pump. Then I heard more sirens, but these ones were different, they sounded so far away, like they were coming from underwater. I kept hearing them, but they didn’t seem to get any closer. I kept hearing them, and hearing them, and hearing them. “They’re coming,” Craig said. “Hold on, Buzz. Hold on.”
chapter 3
CYLIN
WE lived on a cul-de-sac called Decosta Circle, which was just off of Sandwich Road, on the border of Falmouth and a town called Hatchville. On our left were the Sullivans. They had only one kid, a daughter named Erin, who was in my grade at school. Erin was okay to play with when I was at home, but at school I thought hanging out with my neighbor just wasn’t cool. I had other friends at school and I ignored Erin from the moment we got on the bus.
Mom was aware of this silent rule I had made and tried to talk to me about it, but I had my mind made up. Erin’s parents were also aware of the way I treated their daughter, and they didn’t like me very much. In fact, with their perfectly kept yard and prim white house, I don’t think they were very fond of the big, loud Busby family next door, with all the cars rotting in the driveway, the unmowed lawn, and the barking beagle tied up outside. I saw the inside of their house twice, and it was perfect and clean, not anything like ours. Erin’s mom was a bit older than my mom, and she stayed home all day, making Erin tuna-fish sandwiches with the crust cut off. My mom was a teacher, and she was in nursing school at night, so we mostly made our own sandwiches.
When my brothers and I tried to cut through the Sullivan yard to get over to our other friends’ house, the Zylinskis, Mr. Sullivan would come out and yell at us. He was a big Irishman, with white hair and a high round belly that would have made him look like Santa Claus, except for the fact that he was always yelling. Mom told us that he had already had one heart attack and was “headed for another one,” the way he got so worked up. “You’re cutting a path through my grass! You’re killing my yard, you Busby kids. Get out of my yard!” Never mind the fact that we really weren’t cutting a path—we would walk along the fence at the edge of his property, where grass didn’t grow anyhow. What really bothered him was the fact that we were cutting over to see the Zylinskis and we didn’t invite Erin to come with us. But Mom would kill us if we walked down on Sandwich Road, so the only way to get there was by cutting through Mr. Sullivan’s yard.
To our right, we didn’t have neighbors, we had a church. It wasn’t the kind of church that people went to on Sundays; in fact, we saw it open only a handful of times in the ten years that we lived in Falmouth. This church was rumored to have been built by descendants of the Pilgrims in the mid- to late 1700s, and it was known as the East End Meeting House. A big, three-story boxy Cape Cod building, its shingles had weathered to a dark, dry gray, and the windows were trimmed in white paint. On top sat a huge steeple, with a weathervane that you could barely see from the ground. There had once been a bell in the steeple, but it had been removed a hundred years ago and hung from a wooden post near the front door. The front of the building was not ornate. It had a barn-style door, white and flat, and no steps, just a slim granite slab to step up on, worn down in the center from the footsteps of hundreds of Pilgrims,
or at least that’s what I liked to imagine. And in back of the church was one of the oldest graveyards in New England. The gravestones—at least, the ones you could still read—dated back to the 1700s. This graveyard spanned an acre or so in back of the church, so while the building was our “neighbor,” we really lived next door to a cemetery.
Our property was separated from the sloping green lawn of the church by a row of tall shrubs, intermixed with bamboo, about five feet wide. We called that area our “tree house” because of how dense the trees and bamboo had grown. It was dark and shady, a nice place to dig and build stuff on a hot summer day. When I was about six or seven, I was digging a hole in there and came across a long, flat stone. My brothers and I dug all around it, outlining the shape. It took us all afternoon.
When we showed it to Dad, he swore under his breath and got the shovel from the basement. He put the dirt we had dug up back over the stone and added some more for good measure, pounding it all down with the back of the shovel and pushing some fallen bamboo leaves over it. “Don’t dig over here anymore,” he told us. “Not ever.” Though the border of the graveyard was a few feet away from our yard, some old stones had been forgotten when they drew the property lines, or they had been lost over the years in the trees that bordered the graveyard. After that, whenever we felt like being bad, we would creep to the back of the tree house, at the very end corner of our property, and dig, looking for more stones, bones, and whatever else we might find.