Dead Line

by Brian McGrory

  My escort was waiting at the door. He led me across a hard floor, straight, then left, then right. He sat me down on a coarse cloth chair and said, “You’re being watched. If you try to leave, you’ll be immediately killed, so my advice to you is not to do anything stupid. As soon as you hear the door shut, pull off your hood if you like. We’ll take care of you shortly.”

  Take care of you shortly.

  I wasn’t 100 percent sure I liked the sound of that. I wasn’t even 25 percent sure. Regardless, the door shut, I yanked off my hood, and drank in my environs.

  I was in a small, windowless room in some sort of bunker, with cement floors, walls and ceilings. It looked like it was decorated by the same people who designed Alcatraz. There were just three chairs in the room, all of which looked like they were purchased at a yard sale, facing each other, beneath an overhead light. The walls were unadorned. There was no rug. Rustic would be a compliment. Minimalist describes a style; this was just plain old and bare.

  I sat and I sat and I sat. I had no watch. My cell phone was someplace other than with me. I could picture poor Peter Martin calling it every two minutes and screaming at some confused thug, “What do you mean, he’s a hostage. We’re on deadline. Let him fricking go!”

  Finally, the door opened, and standing before me was the elusive, reclusive Toby Harkin, America’s most wanted, right there, right then, in the flesh.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  M y friends at the Traveler had dubbed him the Casanova Convict. They’d written that he could either charm or harm, depending on his mood, and I could sense that, actually see that, from the exact moment when Toby Harkins walked into the room.

  He was something of a pretty man, with refined features on an unblemished face. His thick black hair was slicked back, Wall Street style. His eyes were a blaze of blue, which some might say weren’t unlike mine. His hand, when he offered it to shake, was surprisingly soft, especially considering where it had been and what it had done. Not to worry, I’m still every inch a heterosexual, but I couldn’t help but be momentarily taken when a man whom I had only known in pictures had suddenly, in the flesh, entered my life.

  “You look like you’ve fallen,” he said, seeming sincerely concerned as his eyes drifted from my face to my soiled clothes. He added, “I hope my guys were professional with you.”

  Yeah, professional killers. Professional assholes. “They got me here alive,” I replied, and he didn’t press me for more details.

  Regarding Toby Harkins again, he was slighter than I might have expected, thin, wiry. He wore a pair of olive-colored cargo pants and a tight blue-striped polo shirt that was stretched across his shoulders and arms. He looked like he could have been heading out for a weekend on Cape Cod, which made me wonder if that’s in fact where we were.

  “Thanks for coming, Jack,” he said.

  There’s that Jack thing again, just like on the phone. I replied, “You’re welcome, Toby. Of course, I wasn’t offered a whole lot of choice.” The exchange was a bit of déjà vu, taking me back to the first conversation I had ever had with Jankle six nights before, after his own lackeys had escorted me to his downtown office.

  Harkins smiled. I didn’t. It was important for me to keep in mind that I wasn’t sitting here with any ordinary source, but a ruthless killer who had embarked on a reign of terror in the Boston underworld unlike anything that the city had ever known. Legend has it that he always shot his victims in the forehead so that he could see the look in their eyes the moment they realized they were about to die. I wondered if he’d want to see that look from me before this night was out, but if he did, he wouldn’t get the story that he seemed to want even more.

  I said, “So there’s a point to all this, I assume.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, caught slightly off guard by the idea that someone was questioning him, rushing him along, an anomaly in a world in which he always retained complete control—his flight from justice aside.

  “There is,” he said, leaning back. “But slow down. First off, thanks for holding off on printing that story about my old man. You did the right thing, and I’ll explain why in a moment. But know that I appreciate it.”

  “I held back,” I interjected, “because we didn’t have all our facts lined up, not because of any request from you.”

  He seemed not to care about that, and said only, “Regardless, the right thing got done, which is too rarely the case, Jack.” And he smiled again, though at what, I wasn’t sure.

  He asked, “You got both paintings?”

  “Received the second one, the Rembrandt, on Saturday night. We’ll be reporting its authenticity in tomorrow morning’s paper.”

  I hesitated, then asked, “Have you been following our coverage every day?”

  Truth is, I didn’t give a rat’s furry ass whether he read my paper every day. The question was merely an unsubtle attempt to find out if he had been in hiding in the Boston area, and thus able to acquire the paper. He responded, smiling again, “I do, Jack. I do. Online.”

  Ah, another online reader, taking for free what others paid for. The Internet was going to be the death of newspapers, I tell you, but that’s not really the point here.

  “And if you hold up your end of the agreement, you’ll get all the others back as soon as the article appears in print,” he said.

  It’s probably worth noting here that we had no agreement, Toby and I. What we had was a single phone call that preceded this face-to-face meeting in which no ground rules, no accommodations, no deals had been set or met. I saw no need to raise the point, and instead said dismissively, “Let’s see where this takes us.”

  He sighed deeply, his thin chest rising and falling as he exhaled.

  “Jack,” he said, and believe me, this Jack thing was getting old. “Jack, this is big. My story is important. I don’t think I’m going to survive much longer, but you might be my only hope.”

  In many ways, politicians and high-level crooks—who are, as I’ve said, often one and the same—share a lot in common, and one of the most prominent traits is this: They think that the entire world revolves around them, that people care, that everyone wants to help. I guess it comes from having fearful underlings catering to your every whim every hour of the day.

  I wanted to explain to him in elaborate detail just how little I cared, but at the same time, I wanted to hear what it was that he had to say. So I nodded and said, “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  He seemed satisfied with that response. He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, and said, “The FBI wants me dead.”

  Stop the presses. I mean, whoo-fucking-eee. That’s what he grabbed me off the streets of Boston and flew me on board a helicopter to the middle of nowhere in the dark of an angst-ridden night to tell me, that the FBI, the investigators who’ve been trying to track him down for years now, want him dead?

  “And your point is?”

  He furrowed his otherwise smooth brow and bit his bottom lip in thought as he looked sternly across at me.

  “I mean, they really want me dead. If they find me, they’re going to kill me.”

  I considered this for a long moment as I studied the fear in his eyes and the anxiety that flashed across his face. It sounded like the typical lament of a criminal who had spent a career confounding some of the best-trained law enforcement officers in these United States, and now was living to regret it. His head was filled with grandiose conspiracy theories. The rustle of trees in the autumn breeze was, in his mind, the movement of government snipers in the nearby brush. The passing plane overhead was a spy drone capturing his every move.

  When I was about to respond, I heard a distant shout coming from outside the slightly opened door, a faraway voice that in any other place, in any other setting, would have been caught in the filter of the mind, but there and then, proceeded through to the realm of greater meaning. There was no good reason to hear shouting in these faraway woods. I knew that, and I didn’t have to b
e a psychology major at Harvard to know that Toby Harkins knew it as well. If the look on his face didn’t tell me, then it was the revolver that he pulled out of the back of his pants.

  He eyed me suspiciously and asked, “Were you followed?”

  “Followed?” I asked, incredulously. “Your guys beat the shit out of me and put me on a helicopter. You think I have spy satellites tracking me?”

  “Take off your shirt,” he said. He was serious. The last time another human being asked me to remove my shirt this seriously, it was Elizabeth. We were drunk out of our gourds after a dinner party with some friends. We had just walked into the foyer of our apartment, but now is probably not the time to explain where it all went from there.

  I peeled my shirt off—both for Elizabeth back then and Toby now. He walked around me, though not to admire my lats and pecs. He was checking for wires.

  “All right,” he said, businesslike now. No more of that “Jack” stuff, at least for the time being. I put my shirt back on, and outside, there was another shout. Then there was a knock on the door to our room. It opened, and a young man, twenty-five-ish or so, with close-cropped hair, walked in and said to Harkins, “Hank Sweeney’s outside. Says he wants to see you.”

  Think about that for a minute. Hank Sweeney’s outside. My good friend, Hank Sweeney, in the flesh, proving Jankle correct in his assertion that there were Boston PD detectives who had gotten too close to Toby Harkins and his crime syndicate, and Hank Sweeney, my Hank Sweeney, was foremost among them.

  “Hank fucking Sweeney?” Harkins asked, with a cross of incredulity and anger. He looked down in thought, then said, “Send him the fuck in.”

  A moment later, Sweeney came walking through the door. Last I saw of him, he was walking through a door in the other direction, specifically heading down the jetway toward his flight for West Palm Beach and his ramshackle retirement home in Florida. I had assumed then that I’d never see him again, though I wasn’t quite sure why. Now I knew.

  He nodded at me, almost imperceptibly so. If he was embarrassed, he didn’t show it. Instead, he said to Harkins, “Time’s up, Toby. Honor the agreement with your father and turn yourself in, or we’re going to do it for you.”

  Toby stared at Hank. Hank stared at Toby. I regarded them both, completely unsure of what to make of this situation.

  After a long moment, Toby said, “Detective Sweeney, I would strongly urge you to shut the fuck up and get the hell out. You’re all bought and paid for. You’re no good to anyone anymore.”

  I saw Hank’s jaw tighten and his fists clench. He said in a voice that was marked by none of his typically easygoing raspiness, “You made a deal with your old man to surrender, Toby. And I’m here to enforce it.”

  Harkins let out a laugh, mocking in its tone. “You’re going to enforce it, detective? You’re really going to enforce it?”

  With that, Harkins pointed his gun at Hank and said, “If I give myself up, the FBI will kill me instantly, just like I’m going to kill you right now.”

  I stood up from my seat. Maybe Hank’s corrupt, but he wasn’t going to die on my watch. Harkins whirled toward me with the gun and said, “Down, Jack. This doesn’t involve you.”

  Before I could reply, Hank said, “Toby, if you shoot me dead, you’re dead too. Jankle knows that if he doesn’t hear from me in fifteen minutes, they’re coming here to get you. Either way, you’re done. It’s just a matter of how you want to do it.”

  Harkins looked momentarily confused, boxed in by circumstances that seemed increasingly beyond his control. In the silence, he turned to me and said, “So I hope this proves it to you. My old man was telling you the truth. He’s been trying to get me to surrender to authorities, to come back to Boston and face the charges. He says that’s a better way to live out my life than always looking over my shoulder, forever being on the run.”

  He smiled to himself, dimples forming on his unshorn cheeks. “I’m not so sure he’s right,” he added. “But I’ll give him credit. He’s a hell of a persuasive guy.”

  Harkins then turned to Hank and said, “You’re a piece of garbage, Hank. A corrupted piece of trash. Don’t you dare try to tell me the right thing to do.”

  He added, “But because you’re rotten to the core, I’ve got a million dollars for you if you get me out of here alive and free. No banks, no checks, just cash in a suitcase. Your kind of deal, Hank, and better than a life in prison after I rat you out.”

  He looked at Hank and so did I. Hank stood staring at him, his eyes as dark as his skin, his arms tense, his legs ramrod straight.

  Before he could answer, an answer I really would have liked to have heard, there were more shouts from outside, followed by the sound of gunfire—a report that began sharp and hard and then dissipated into the night air like a cloud of steam.

  Toby stared Hank down. Another shot rang out. “You fucking asshole, Hank. You’re going down with me.”

  Someone yelled in the distance, and inside the bunker, a man on the other side of the door screamed, “Feds on the island! Feds on the island!”

  That was followed by commotion—the hard sounds of footsteps, a door being flung open, a heavy object knocked to the ground. Outside, still far-off, I heard what sounded to be machine-gun fire, yells of warning, screams of agony, bedlam.

  In this one room, Toby bolted toward the wall nearest the entry door and flicked out the overhead light. I mean, Ray Charles didn’t spend as much time groping in the dark as I had over the last few hours.

  Instinctively, I fell to the floor, on all fours, and crawled in the direction of the door, but about two-thirds of the way there, I ran smack into the form of Toby Harkins. I knew it was him because he whispered into my ear, “Come with me or I’ll fucking kill you.” As proof, he applied the barrel of his gun to the back of my neck. It’s lucky I don’t have a dermatological aversion to metal these days.

  So there we were, Toby and I, crawling across the grimy floor of an ancient bunker in God knows where while Hank Sweeney waged an internal battle between good and evil and federal agents and organized hoods engaged in a massive firefight on the edge of the property. If I stay in this ridiculous business of news and words, I think I’ll become the restaurant critic, though watch, I’ll take the job and die of food poisoning within two months.

  We crawled outside the room. We then crawled out the open front door, up the landing, and down one step to the ground. He stood up, hunched, and signaled for me to do the same. Then we bolted for a grove of soaring pines to the right side of the structure. Once there, he crouched onto the ground, and forced my shoulder down so I was doing the same. The barrel of his gun was never pointed anywhere but my face.

  And there we sat, behind a tree trunk, catching our breath. The air was cool, the ground moist, the night dark. I’m trying to think of some other clichés, but none come immediately to mind. Still, they’re all true.

  In the near distance, the sporadic blasts of machine-gun fire continued, and when I trained my eyes somewhere other than the gun that was aimed at me, I could see shards of red penetrate the black.

  Toby regained composure and whispered to me, “Jack, if you try anything stupid, you won’t be the first guy I’ve killed.”

  And probably not the last, either, the way this night was going. I replied, “Understood. Now tell me what you mean by the FBI is trying to kill you.”

  “They want me dead because of what I know,” he said, low and hoarse, nervous.

  I was about to ask the obvious follow-up question, when a voice magnified by a megahorn called out, “Federal agents with a warrant. Drop all your weapons, turn on all lights, and proceed into the clearing.”

  It was familiar, that voice, though maybe it’s because it sounded like every other magnified police voice I’ve ever heard on TV. Still, I believed it was Tom Jankle. I’ll admit with a slight amount of shame that I was feeling slightly torn. Yes, Jankle would make an arrest, and I’d still be at the forefront of a fantastic story, but t
hen I’d never properly hear what it was that Toby Harkins wanted to say.

  So I asked the question, in something just north of a whisper, “What do you know?”

  His eyes peered out across the expanse, looking, wondering, calculating. That’s when a spotlight that had been probing through the trees paused on us. Someone yelled something indecipherable, and gunfire tore through the air.

  Toby dove for the base of a nearby boulder, and so did I. We were shoulder to shoulder, pushing against each other for cover behind the rock, with the sound of bullets tearing at leaves, exploding against the wood of nearby trees, blazing past us through the night air.

  After a few seconds of gunfire, silence, followed by Jankle’s voice on the bullhorn again saying, “We have your location. We have you cornered. We’re coming in behind you. Come out, immediately, with your hands well over your head.”

  “I’m going,” I whispered to Toby.

  “One step and you’re dead,” he said. And he held his gun against my neck, pressing my face against the boulder. Forgive the obvious, but someday, somewhere, a kid is going to ask his father what the phrase “Between a rock and a hard place” means, and my name is going to come up.

  “Come out, immediately. We have thirty armed federal agents. We have killed or captured all of your accomplices. Surrender or face the consequences.”

  These are not the normal decisions of everyday newspaper reporters, this do-I-want-to-be-shot-in-the-head-while-I-hide-or-in-the-back-when-I-bolt thing.

  Do I get the soup or the pasta? Do I take the train to work or drive? Do I go to the gym or head straight home? What I wouldn’t give to be sitting in the University Club bar with Hank and Vinny at this very moment ordering hamburgers and swilling cold beer, and not giving half a damn that it’s all going on my tab. Lou, another round of drinks for all my friends, please.