Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

  “You’re the best boy in the world,” I whispered into Baker’s ear. “The very best boy.” His tail thumped against the hard surface several times. He had a look on his face like he had done something wrong, so I caressed his forehead and his muzzle and repeatedly said, “You’re going to be fine, pal. You’re going to be just fine.”

  A few minutes later, the door opened and Lisa Stoles came in with a concerned look on her well-preserved face. She was a woman of about sixty, with an unkempt mane of grayish black hair that flowed down beyond her shoulders, a true Cantabrigian who I suspect lolled away endless hours in Harvard Square coffee bars reading a much dog-eared copy of Moby Dick or War and Peace. Of this I had little doubt: She loved animals, Baker particularly, and she was every inch as smart as she looked.

  “Jesus, I’m glad you’re on tonight,” I said as she made her way into the room.

  “So am I,” she said, her tone concerned. She kept walking right toward Baker. The dog whacked his tail a few more times for good measure when he heard her voice. His eyes opened wider. He liked Lisa, despite himself, though he knew that the things she represented—needles and pulling and prodding—he could live without. Or not.

  “What is wrong with my Baker?” she asked in her dog voice.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  I showed her the bulge. I explained the symptoms. She felt around, put her stethoscope up to his heart, looked at his gums, probed inside his mouth, peered into his big brown eyes one at a time. All along, he kept his head down on the cold metal and his gaze focused on mine.

  “I’m going to need X-rays, immediately,” she said, and I lifted him from the examination table onto the cart and she began rolling him out. I followed her until she said, “You stay here, Jack. I don’t want him distracted by you. We’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  As she pulled him out the door, he lifted his head up with a monumental struggle, his eyes focused like lasers on mine, and let out a long, soft, moan. “Good boy,” I said, but the words didn’t really get out, and by the time I cleared my throat enough to speak, the wood door had clicked shut and I was standing in the spare room all alone.

  Standing there with nothing more than my fears, awful memories rushed into my addled mind, first and foremost, the vision of Katherine staring panicked at me on her delivery room bed as her doctor ordered me in no uncertain terms to get out of the room. It is a look that will haunt me the rest of my life.

  Then better ones, of Baker, the way he’d sit obediently in front of me to take his arthritis medicine, how he’d paw at tennis balls that rolled under the couch, chewing on sticks in the park while I shot baskets, proudly stalking squirrels in the Public Garden that he never actually caught. “That’s 0 for 7,943,” I used to tell him, and he’d give me a sidelong glance that said, “Whatever.”

  He was my last link to a way of life that was never supposed to end—a gift from my late wife, a puffy little ball of blonde fur presented in a hatbox a few days before Christmas as we sipped red wine on the couch and looked at a newly purchased tree that wouldn’t stand straight in its stand. To lose him now was to lose a little bit more of Katherine. No, make that a lot of Katherine, because Baker, physically speaking, was the last remaining tie that binds, and I often pictured that wonderful woman somewhere in the Great Wherever looking at us with a smile on her face as we walked through the park or wrestled on the living-room floor, and saying to herself, “My two boys.” What would happen if I were to lose that?

  Not to be overly dramatic, but put it this way: My life is his life. He is there every morning when I wake up; sometimes, he’s the one who wakes me by licking my hand or my chin as a gentle reminder that I’m cutting into his daily routine. If I rose too early, he would fake being asleep, not quite ready to rouse before his desired time. I would hear him have little dreams in the still dark of the night on my bedroom floor, small yelps as he shuffled his paws as if he were in hot pursuit of a neighborhood cat. If I read too late on the couch or got caught up in a show on television, he would stand up with a long, dramatic sigh, pad back to the bedroom, and flop down on the L. L. Bean bed that Katherine had gotten him years before.

  We had walked thousands of miles together, had made tens of thousands of throws of the dirty tennis balls that he constantly carried around in his mouth, maintained a running seven-year conversation. If he could actually speak, he’d probably be constantly telling me to shut the hell up. Most important, to borrow that line from the great political novel The Last Hurrah: How do you thank someone for a million laughs?

  I was so lost in thought that I jumped when my cell phone rang. I was still standing, leaning with my back flush against the cinder-block wall, and I peered at the incoming number long enough to realize that I didn’t recognize it. At that moment, as the phone continued to ring, the door opened up and the male orderly backed in with Baker following on the cart. The ringing stopped and the kid pushed him toward me and said, “The doctor said she’ll be back in a few minutes.” He quickly got out of the room.

  Baker was still moaning, but he thumped his tail again when he saw me, and I buried my face into the soft fur on the side of his neck and told him that nothing would ever go wrong as long as I had any say in it. The question is, did I?

  A few minutes later the door opened again, and Lisa Stoles walked in. She wore a flowing peasant skirt beneath a bright white laboratory coat, and her unruly hair was now pulled into a loose bun on the back of her neck. She carried an oversize manila folder. She leaned back on the examination table facing Baker and me and said in a no-nonsense voice that will be forever lodged in that worst part of my mind, “Jack, things don’t look very good.”

  Those words hit me like an uppercut. Emotion began to wash from my chest up into my head, as I told myself to stay clear and remain calm.

  “Tell me,” I said, swallowing hard. My hand was absently caressing Baker’s ear. His head was still flush on the metal.

  She pulled the X-rays out of the folder, walked around to the lamp and flicked on the light. “Push him over here,” she said. I did, and she turned the overhead lights off in the room. She placed a print up against the light-board and pointed at it with a retracted pen.

  “I’ve already gone over this with the head of oncology at the hospital, who happens to be on tonight, and she is in complete agreement over what we see. This is a side view of Baker’s stomach. You can see this unusual mass down here, very large. It’s a tumor, a very rapidly growing one, hemangiosarcoma, and it’s opened up and bleeding into his stomach. It could fully burst at any moment now, and if and when that happens, he will die of shock or loss of blood.”

  My head went light. I lost all feeling in my body—my hands and my feet and everything else. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see anything, until I turned my face and looked down at the fabulous animal stretched across the gurney beside me, still moaning, still scared, still in deep pain. Now I knew why.

  “We could operate,” she said, and I quickly cut her off, saying, “Then do it.”

  She didn’t respond. Instead, she pulled the print off the light-board, placed it on the table, and picked another X-ray from the folder. She adhered that up against the pale glow.

  “Except for this, Jack. Except for this. Here’s a view, straight-on, of Baker’s chest. Take a look at all these little masses. They’re called metastases, and they’re lodged into his bones, his lungs, and I’m sure in his other vital organs as well. This was a brutally fast-moving tumor, and it’s spread throughout his entire body before you or I or probably even Baker realized it was there.”

  I shook my head. I was trying to focus on the X-ray, but couldn’t make out what she was telling me that I needed to see. I blinked hard, stared harder, all as my hand kept rubbing the side of my dog’s face. “What are you saying?” I finally asked.

  She folded her arms across her white coat and replied, “I’m saying that, yes, I could do the surgery. We could do it right now. We’d try to pull the tumor from hi
s stomach, and sometimes we get it and it works, and sometimes it doesn’t and the patient dies during the procedure. But even if it was a success, he’s still riddled with tumors everywhere else. He’s never going to fully recover. He’s never going to be healthy again, to run or even walk, or eat, or play. Jack, I hate to tell you this, but I have to. Even if we do the surgery, Baker’s probably going to be dead within a few weeks, best case, and those aren’t going to be comfortable weeks for him. He’s going to be in real pain.”

  She paused. I sucked in the stale air in that tiny room, trying to maintain composure, keep my balance, hold on to some vestige of clear thought.

  “If you decide on the surgery,” she said, her gaze tight on mine, “it’s for you, not for him. I know how much you love that dog, Jack, and I think I know why, and I love him too. He’s a wonderful animal, my favorite patient. But I have to say, the most humane thing you can do right now is to put him out of his misery and have him pass gently.”

  My left hand instinctively covered my eyes as my right hand stayed on Baker’s face. I fought back tears with every ounce of will that I had, and once I found the composure to speak, I said, “Can you give me some time with him in here?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  She flicked on the overhead lights, shut down the X-ray board, and walked over to the cupboard by the sink. She pulled out a blanket and spread it on the hard floor. She placed a medicine bottle on the counter next to a catheter and a syringe. Every move seemed to be in slow motion, every sound lumbered through my head.

  She said, “Just open this door up whenever you two are ready, and I’ll be right along.” And she walked out, clicking the door shut behind her.

  I picked Baker up, set him gently down on the blanket, and sat beside him on the floor. I tried to remember every one of those miles we walked on the coldest winter mornings and the softest summer nights. I tried to recall every one of those balls that he fetched, the cookies that he ate, the rawhides that he chewed, the countless times he’d whack me with his paw in an indication that he wanted to be rubbed.

  The crying started not in my eyes, but my chest, a quaking rumble that rolled up my throat and into my face until I began to shed a storm of tears—little droplets that rolled down my cheeks and onto his. He struggled again to lift his head and gave me a short lick, but he put his cheek back down on the wool blanket with a painful groan.

  How, I wondered to myself, could a grown man who had lost his wife and infant daughter be this upset over the death of his dog? Then I realized: It’s partly because I lost my wife and daughter that I was this upset. Baker was all I truly had.

  “Seven years, pal. Seven years of laughs. Seven years of fun. Seven years of stability, of responsibility, seven years of faith, seven years of the best friendship that I’ll ever have.” And I cried anew, kissing his ear, his muzzle, his cheek below his eye. He wagged his tail again, but I knew he wasn’t happy; he was scared, and so was I.

  I collected myself. I rubbed my palms along my face as I thought of a random morning seven years ago when I got up early to make waffles and Baker fell sound asleep in bed with Katherine, his paws draped over the back of her neck. When I came into the room to wake her, the two of them lifted their heads in unison.

  I thought of him earlier in the week, on Tuesday morning, when he pawed at the glass door to the balcony because he wanted to be outside in the sun with Elizabeth and me. He had the tumor then, and I had no idea.

  “You’re the best friend in the world, pal. My very best friend.” I rubbed my hands up and down his sides, trying to bring him some comfort in a time of tremendous pain. He moaned and thumped and kept looking at me, and the thought struck me like a bolt that maybe he knew what was happening, and maybe he had some innate understanding that it was his time to go.

  As I rubbed his head, I heard laughter coming from outside the door, two technicians cracking jokes. Someone else yelled something about going on break, their voices bouncing off the walls. I heard a squeaky cart being wheeled down the hall. Life went on, but for the two souls here in this room, everything had just changed.

  “I love you,” I said. “I have since the day Katherine brought you home, and I’ll love you until the day I join you wherever it is that we go. Hopefully they’ll have a crate of tennis balls there.” And I kissed him long and hard on the bridge of his nose. I stood up, steadied myself, and opened the door.

  A moment later, Lisa walked back in. “You’re ready?” she said in a low voice. I wondered how many times she had done this before, put dogs down, comforted emotional owners. Probably every day of her career.

  I nodded. I was back on the floor, sitting beside Baker, my hands caressing his head. She said, “I’m going to put a catheter in his front leg, then administer him a dose of barbiturates that will overwhelm his system. He’ll be very peaceful. There won’t be any pain. And in a moment, it will be done.”

  She looked at me with pursed lips and I nodded again. She knelt on the floor and put the catheter in his front leg. Baker and I stared at each other. I told him, repeatedly, “You’re the best boy in the world. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” I fought back tears with every ounce of energy that I had.

  She put a blue solution inside the catheter and I watched it out of the corner of my eye flow down the tube and into his leg.

  “You’re the very, very best boy,” I said, putting my face directly against his. “You’re my best boy.”

  He gave me a half lick. His eyes went from open to half-mast, and then they closed. I kept rubbing his ear, his forehead, his neck. Lisa pressed the stethoscope to his chest and pulled it away.

  “He’s gone, Jack.”

  I kissed him one final time, letting my face linger on the top of his head, feeling his warm fur tickle my eyes, my cheeks, the sides of my nose, as I had so many thousands of times before.

  And that was it. I got up and looked down at the most beautiful animal that I will ever know. And at that moment, I was in every way alone.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  S o now what? Now what happens when virtually anything of any emotional value in your life is stripped away, one thing, one person at a time, slowly, tragically, after a while, almost mockingly. My wife is long gone. Elizabeth is on the other coast and doesn’t bother to call. My career is in shambles. Mongillo is leaving the paper. My most trusted friend, my dog, is dead.

  Well, here’s what happens. You shift into automatic pilot. You dull your emotions, something I’ve had no choice but to practice over the years. You think practically, address the obstacles one at a time, and always strive toward a goal, which in this case was finding out who killed Hilary Kane, and why.

  With those answers, I might well save Maggie Kane and salvage what was left of my own damned reputation.

  First things first. I pulled my cellular phone out and listened to the message that was left for me as I comforted my dying dog. It was an unfamiliar voice, gruff and grainy, emerging amid a din of background noise that sounded like a restaurant or bar. “Jack Flynn,” the voice said. “Call this number—” and he gave it to me. “Your friend Hank needs your help, quickly.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. One death in one day was enough. So sitting in my parked car in the lot at the Angell Memorial Hospital, I punched out the number as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very quickly at all, given that my unsteady hands kept striking the wrong keys. When I finally got it right, a man picked up the phone on about the fifth ring with an abrupt, “Mulligan’s.”

  “This is Jack Flynn. Someone left me a message saying that Hank needs my help.” I said this in as firm a voice as I could muster.

  “Hold on,” he said, and the phone clanked on a hard surface. In the background, I heard the tinny sound of jukebox music, the loud laugh of a drunken woman, then a man’s voice, close by, asking for a pack of Winston’s. A moment later, that same man got back on the line and said, “Yeah, he’s still here, drunk as a skunk, sitting by his lone
some over in a corner booth. You better get him out of here before he says the wrong thing to the wrong person.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In Southie, 840 West Broadway, World-famous Mulligan’s Bar and Grill.” He was giving me a whiskeyed laugh as he slammed down the phone.

  Great. This is just what the doctor—or rather, veterinarian—ordered, a night of playing caretaker for a drunken friend just a few minutes after putting my dog down. I didn’t think I would ever again feel anything but sad, but an inner anger began to weave its way to the forefront of my thoughts.

  Regarding Hank, he had been a friend of mine for a couple of years now. I quite literally showed up on the doorstep of his Florida house one morning looking for help on a case that he had handled in homicide back before he retired. And did he ever help me. He flew to Boston. He guided me through a labyrinth of obstacles and deceptions toward an elusive truth. He risked arrest. He got shot. Once, he even plunged into the icy harbor in a needless bid to save my life. And I’ve got to say, I’ve loved the guy ever since.

  That said, a couple of things were noteworthy about that call from Mulligan’s. First off, in all the time I had known him, I had never witnessed Hank Sweeney drink anything more than a single beer or, if I bought it for him, a glass of red wine. He just plain wasn’t a drinker. A smoker? Yes. An occasional pain in the ass? Most definitely. One of the more lovable guys I’ve ever met? Absolutely. But a drunk? Never. Not unless there was something about him that I hadn’t seen in the last couple of years since we met.

  Second off, as I may have mentioned, Hank Sweeney is black, not that it matters. Except in South Boston it actually does, because the neighborhood was, is, and will probably always be lily-white. Yes, there are minorities in the Town, as the natives—myself included—tend to call it, but they’re mostly in the projects and certainly aren’t regular patrons of the slew of Broadway’s Irish bars. So when Prince Charming said on the phone that Sweeney might well say the wrong thing to the wrong person, he might just mean that Hank could tell someone, “Hello.”