Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

  I asked, “You’re reachable on your cell if I need you in the next couple of hours?”

  “At your service,” Jankle replied.

  With that, I got up and walked along the aisle and down the ramp of the darkened park. It was the bottom of the ninth, tie game, my turn at bat. Sorry about the cliché, but hey, how often am I the star performer at Fenway Park?

  Chapter Thirty-six

  I always know I’m hyped on a story when I’m constantly writing and rewriting the lede on the keyboard of my brain, and that’s exactly what I was doing as I pushed through the steel door and out onto Yawkey Way on my way to take down the sitting mayor of one of America’s great cities.

  Yes, he had denied any involvement in Hilary Kane’s death and his son’s illegal flight, and yes, he was convincing in that denial. I would include that prominently in my story, and allow the readers—smart people, mostly—to make up their own minds. Daniel Harkins’s version would be set against a veritable treasure chest of information—that he had a sexual tryst with a murder victim three nights before she died, that the victim had seen potentially criminal material on his personal computer, that he had an irrefutable tie to his fugitive son, and that he had been the target of a federal investigation for at least the past six months.

  As I played this out, I became a little bit embarrassed and aggravated that I had taken so long to jump into print with the story, but those feelings were overcome by the kind of intense emotional drive that takes over amid all such blockbuster stories. I was, to say the least, jazzed.

  On Yawkey Way, I saw the navy blue van still idling at the curb. The breeze still blew in from the east. Traffic was light. People were nowhere to be seen.

  I headed toward Kenmore Square, to flag a cab that would take me to the Record. On the way, I belted out the number to my voicemail, and there was Vinny Mongillo, still on the ground at Logan, telling me that the number I had given him was to the Boston office of the FBI. Ding ding ding. Hilary Kane had talked to Tom Jankle before she died. Why is it that every step forward in this damned story is followed by a step back, and that every revelation only prompts more questions.

  Then I called Peter Martin’s office, and despite the fact it was ten o’clock on a Sunday night, he, of course, picked up the phone on the first ring.

  I said, “We’ve got the FBI saying they’ve had the mayor under investigation for six months for ties to his son, and they’ve allowed me to hear a recording of an incriminating telephone conversation between the two. We can’t afford to hold back anymore.”

  He asked a few of his typically pointed, always-on-the-mark questions. He was a true newsman, even if he looked more like an actuary. At the end of the brief conversation, he said, “All right. I’m going to go tear up the front page. I’ll let Justine know. You have about ninety minutes to make this work.”

  And that was that.

  Though not quite. The week before, my story got in the way of a good life, specifically Hilary Kane’s, which came to a fast and ferocious end in the parking garage beneath the Boston Common. Out on Brookline Avenue, on my way to type up one of the most explosive tales of my career, life got in the way of a good story. Here’s how:

  I walked past the Cask ’n’ Flagon, a bucket of blood overlooking the backside of the famed left-field wall, also known as the Green Monster. I walked up and over the Massachusetts Turnpike bridge. I was heading down toward the square, to something resembling civilization, when a man, a veritable animal, a mananimal, stepped out of a barren side street directly in my path.

  I mean, this guy was big, and ugly. Think Joey Buttafucco, then imagine his bulkier, less sophisticated older brother. The guy looked like he drank water out of a trough and ate food from a metal bucket.

  “We meet again,” he said in a guttural voice, almost as if it were a great effort for him to form words in that tiny power plant of a brain. He said this as his face was about two feet from mine—so close that I could smell the garlic and onions that weren’t just on his breath, but probably still caught in his crooked teeth.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever met before now,” I said to him, slightly startled, literally stopped in my tracks.

  Then, without announcement or ceremony, he pulled his right arm back, and the whole image instantaneously, though belatedly, became strikingly familiar—and I do mean strikingly. He was the man who I had met in the street outside the Gardner Museum the prior Wednesday, the one whose sucker punch left me napping in the gutter.

  In fact, “gutter” was the exact word I was thinking when his fist again connected with my stomach and I crumpled into a heap of unbridled—though not unexpected—pain. I fell to my knees on the cool sidewalk and dry-heaved in the general direction of the pavement, all while the mananimal stood over me asking in his garbled syntax, “You remember me now?” And of course, as if following a script, he laughed.

  His problem, and arguably mine too, was that I was still filled with the adrenaline that accompanies any major story. The pain quickly melted into my reservoir of determination, and as he leaned toward me about to deliver another adolescent taunt, I climbed to my feet, looked him in the eye and delivered a thunderous blow to the bridge of his nose.

  He gave a surprisingly shallow little yelp for a man whose voicebox was probably the size of a carton of Marlboros. He staggered back, fighting to retain his balance, blood spurting from his nostrils. At the precise moment he turned backward to break his fall, he came in direct contact with a brick wall. Next thing you know, he was sprawled out on the ground.

  I checked my pockets to make sure I still had my notes. Then I set out down the street. Problem was, I didn’t get more than two steps before an octopus like arm reached around my neck and tightened over my Adam’s apple.

  Immediately, I squirmed around and shot elbows into what felt like canvas bags filled with sand, which I think was my assailant’s chest. I kicked backward with my legs but failed to connect.

  A voice, clean and firm, said to me, “Make one more move and I’ll blow your brains all over my new shirt. And then I’ll get really angry.”

  As he spoke, I felt a cold metal object press against my right temple, a very strong signal that it was time to give in. A split second later, a sport utility vehicle glided to the curb. The rear door was thrust open from within. I was thrust inside from without. The man who had me by the neck yelled over to the mananimal, “Get the fuck in the front seat, and don’t bleed on the leather.”

  With everybody settled inside, we immediately pulled out. The guy to my right, the gunman, seemed to be the ringleader. I sensed this because when I said, “Listen, guys, this is very kind of you, but you can just drop me off at a cabstand,” he grabbed my face, pulled it toward his, and hissed, “If you say one more word, I’ll blow your fucking pea brain right out the back of your stupid fucking head.”

  For a guy who makes his living with words, meaning me, this didn’t create an easy situation.

  A moment later, the ringleader reached into a small shoulder bag on the floor and pulled out what looked like a wool hat. I looked out the window as the SUV glided through Kenmore Square. The ape in the front seat had a cloth of some sort shoved up into both his nostrils. The driver wore a baseball cap and glasses and never turned around. The guy to my left didn’t utter a word.

  “Put this on your head,” the ringleader said. He handed me the black thing and I put it on. He then violently reached up and pulled the edges down well below my eyes, all the way to my chin.

  “I can’t breathe,” I said. And as the last word came out, I felt a fist connect reasonably hard with my right cheek. My first impulse was to punch back. My second impulse, my survivor’s instinct, was to sit still and not do or say anything else.

  Everyone around me sat in stone silence. The radio was off. The heavily tinted windows were tight as a drum. The vehicle stopped at a light or two, then sped off. I felt us go left, then straight, then veer slowly to the right as we accelerated, and sensed th
at we were on Storrow Drive, heading toward downtown Boston.

  Funny thing is, my stomach hurt, my cheek was swelling, my brain ached, but I still couldn’t stop writing the story of the mayor over and over again in my head, refining the lede, elaborating on it, restructuring the next few paragraphs and the order of the critical information involved. Question was, would I get to write it?

  Sitting there, other questions came to mind, first and foremost: Who were they? Where were they taking me? And of course, that simplest and most important question: Why?

  I hoped that they were the henchmen who would lead me to Toby Harkins, though at this point in the game, anything goes. The thought crossed my wool-covered mind that they could work for Mayor Harkins. They might have seen me meeting with Jankle. They might have been planning to kill me before I had the chance to write my devastating story.

  The car kept speeding along without stopping, meaning we were, in fact, on a highway, not on city streets. My escorts rode in absolute and utter silence, professionals all. I wanted to ask if anyone would mind listening to NPR, but felt it best to continue to keep my big mouth firmly shut.

  After about ten minutes, I felt us turn and descend a little. They say that when one of your senses is blocked, your others come alive in ways you could never possibly imagine. That, I was learning, was an old wives’ tale at best, bullshit at worst, because sitting in the back of this SUV between two guys whose high school nicknames could both have been Himalaya, I didn’t have the hint of a clue.

  And then, after a turn right followed by a quick turn left, the car stopped. The doors were flung open. The ringleader grabbed my arm and yanked me outside. He held me in front of him with both his hands on each of my shoulders and pushed me along.

  “Make one wrong move, and I’d love the chance to break your skinny fucking spine,” he said. As I digested that thought, he added, “You’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of your stupid life communicating by blinking your fucking eyes.”

  “Step up,” he said sharply. I felt around with my foot and found a stair. I hesitantly climbed it, then another, and another. When I got about four steps up, someone on the front end pulled hard at my wrist and the guy behind me pushed on my back. I stumbled through some sort of opening and as I was off balance, the person in front pushed me down hard into a chair. Nobody said a word.

  A moment later, I heard the voice of the ringleader say, “Let’s go.”

  I felt him lean into me as he said, “Same rules. You say a word, I’ll punch your face. You say a sentence, I’ll break your neck.”

  At that rate, I assumed a paragraph would get me killed, so I stayed church quiet.

  I heard a door shut hard somewhere to my right and in front. I heard an engine start. I assumed we were on some sort of small airplane, flying off to destinations unknown, though I could be fairly certain it wasn’t going to be anyplace I’d particularly want to be. I wanted to tell them that I didn’t bring a change of underwear, but again, wisdom and its accompanying silence prevailed.

  A new voice called out from the front of the plane, “We’re set for departure.”

  I heard the sounds of buckling around me, though no one bothered with mine. What the hell. I didn’t know how many of the morons from the car were actually on the plane with us, but I suspected I’d find out.

  As I readied myself for the plane to begin rolling, the oddest sensation occurred instead. Rather than taxi, we lifted straight up in the air. We weren’t on an airplane at all, but a helicopter.

  I’ve always wanted to take one of those chopper tours of Boston, seeing my hometown in all its grandeur from high above—the nooks, the crannies, the parks and the treetops, the relationships between streets and neighborhoods and rivers and harbors that you can never possibly appreciate when you’re literally in the thick of things. But I suppressed my desire to pull off my woolen mask, lest I encourage an immediate physical relationship with the ringleader’s fist or the pavement below.

  We kept rising and rising, the whirl of the propeller overhead overriding what would have been a stifling silence. We leveled off at God-knows-what altitude, and then thrust forward for a place that I didn’t yet know.

  It was like that for nearly twenty minutes, the helicopter swiping through the night air, occasionally bumping and grinding, dipping and rising and turning. Normally I might find myself getting airsick in these situations, but my body was on such high alert that I don’t think it had the capacity to feel much of anything at all.

  Without fanfare, the copter finally slowed and hovered for a long moment, then began to descend, not straight down, but at a forward angle, gradually slipping toward the ground, lower and lower and lower. And then came a significant jolt, rocking the helicopter from one side to the other. Seconds later, the door flew open. I immediately smelled salt air, even through the hood. I heard what I suspect were the stairs thrust into place. Someone grabbed my arm. Evidently, the shared experience of the chopper ride didn’t lend itself to any sort of fraternity, because whoever it was threw me forward like a rag doll. I braced my arms out in front of me to try to cushion my fall. As I did, someone else grabbed me, squeezed my arms painfully hard and said, “Walk down the stairs. Now. Step. Step. Step.” I did what I was told until I found myself on the soft, cool ground. And I mean, on the ground.

  When I got to the bottom, I heard the familiar voice of the ringleader say, “I’ve got ’em.” At the same time, I felt an arm come hard underneath mine and swing me violently around. I staggered and kept falling until I was rolling on the damp, muddy earth. I heard laughter, then I felt a shoe connect hard with my chin, and for the briefest of moments, aside from a ringing in my head, I felt nothing at all.

  “Get the fuck up,” the ringleader said. I assumed he was talking to me. He repeated himself, less pleasantly the second time than the first, even if that didn’t seem possible. “Get the fuck up.”

  I pawed at the dark expanse with my hands, reaching, groping, for anything that would help me in my struggle to stand. But there was nothing there, so when I got on my two feet, I staggered again, and one more time felt an arm swing under mine and fling me, and this time I went crashing into a hard, round surface, which I could only surmise was the solid trunk of an old tree.

  While I was lying on the ground in a light fog, I heard another voice, strong but distant, yell, “Hey, cut the shit.” And I thought to myself, here we go again.

  Then I heard the ringleader, my tormentor, say, “I’m just showing him who’s in control.”

  The first voice, closer now, replied, “Keep your fucking hands off him.”

  “Fuck off. He broke TJ’s nose.”

  And then came the sound of fist into flesh. I grimaced, assuming it must be mine—the flesh, not the fist—but felt nothing other than relief. I heard it again, and again, along with a string of profanity, and a couple of other voices yelling out “Hey.” One guy said, “Let them go.”

  I lifted the wool up over my eyes for the briefest of moments and saw two seriously enormous men rolling on the ground about ten yards away beating the living bejesus out of each other, punching and clawing and flailing and kicking. Two other men stood near them, unsure what to do.

  I gazed around. I felt salty wind on my face, as if we were next to the ocean. We appeared to be on the edge of a thick grove of towering pine trees. It was dark, moonless, and right there and then, I knew if I slipped into the trees I could have easily escaped my captors, possibly made it to a main road, and flagged down a car to take me to safety. It was, by every measure, the instinctual thing to do. Probably the wise thing as well.

  I lay on the ground, my mind running faster than my legs ever could, figuring, processing, playing the angles and the ramifications and the scenarios that would make up a very important future. One of the men in the fistfight screamed. The two onlookers jumped into the fray, and I was even freer than before to bolt into the night.

  But something stopped me, and that something was news. Ye
s, if I ran, I might still make it to a phone to call in the Dan Harkins story, but there was too good a chance that these guys who had ferried me to this distant point had done so in the name of Toby Harkins, and despite the physical abuse, I wasn’t willing to walk away from the distinct chance that I was about to come face-to-face with America’s most wanted fugitive.

  So I stood up. I pulled the wool back over my eyes, so to speak. And I waited. Maybe I’m an assholic moron. Maybe I was about to be killed. But I couldn’t bring myself to run from even the slightest potential of information this good.

  Five minutes later, the fight receded into a kind of “Fuck you,” “No, fuck you,” volley. I eventually felt a hand grab my elbow, and heard the voice of the new man say, “Come with me. Don’t try anything funny.”

  We walked for about three minutes, across what felt like a grass and dirt path covered with leaves and twigs that crunched underfoot. The crickets continued to chirp. The air was filled with the scent of fresh pine. I was filled more with curiosity at that point than fear.

  He tugged at my arm to stop. He said, “So far, so good, so don’t do anything stupid now. I just need to pat you down.” And he did, pulling the cell phone out of my pocket and not returning it. “You’re clear,” he said, as I heard him push open a door. “Step down.” I felt around with my foot and descended one stair. A door shut behind me.

  “Do you have to use the head?” he asked me.

  God, yes. I nodded, still unsure if I was allowed to speak. He led me by the arm, shoved me gently through a doorway, told me, “You can take your cover off in the bathroom. Put it back on when you come out.” And he shut the door behind me.

  I pulled off the cover to see that I was in a tiny, spartan, windowless bathroom, with just a toilet and an old sink, the kind where the drain plug dangles on a chain from a dank faucet. The walls were cinder block. There was no mirror, no towels, no soap, nothing that I could fashion in any way into a weapon, not that I’d have even the slightest idea how, or, for that matter, the desire to do it. I felt around my face for blood, and saw none on my hands. I did my thing, I put my hat back on, and I walked out.