by Mike Lawson
“Look!” Roy said. “His car broke down!”
“We got the fucker,” Ray said. “There’s no one within miles of this place.”
Ray stepped on the gas.
Both McNultys were grinning, looking like feral dogs when they did.
DeMarco saw the car coming toward him accelerate, and when it was about a hundred yards away, he ran. It would take him only seconds to reach the back of the fruit stand. And in the dark, with the black clothes he was wearing, he’d barely be visible; he’d be like a moving shadow.
“Son of a bitch! He saw us,” Roy said.
“We’ll get him,” Ray said, and slammed on the brakes. The Corolla skidded to a stop, almost hitting the rear bumper of DeMarco’s rental car. They grabbed the fish bats and took off in the direction DeMarco had taken. Running with the small clubs in their hands, wearing shorts and high-top tennis shoes without socks, the McNultys looked like a couple of cavemen chasing down a meal.
When they reached the back of the fruit stand, they stopped. “Shit, where’d he go?” Ray said. “He couldn’t have gone far, not unless he’s some kind of goddamn Olympic sprinter. He’s hiding close by.”
“Yeah, but it’s so fuckin’ dark out here,” Roy said, “he’s going to be hard to spot. I wonder if Doreen has a flashlight in her car.”
“We don’t have time to get a flashlight. If he’s got a cell phone, he’s probably calling the cops. We need to find him fast.”
Ray pointed to his left. “See that little shed up there?”
“Yeah,” Roy said. He could just make out the shape of the shed in the darkness.
“He either went that way,” Ray said, then pointed to his right. “Or he went that way, into those trees. I’ll look in the shed. That’s most likely where he is, either in it or hiding behind it. You go see if you can spot him in the trees.”
“I don’t think we should split up,” Roy said.
“If we don’t split up, and if I’m wrong about him being behind the shed, he’s going to go through those trees and circle back to the road, and then he’ll start running down the road, hoping a car will spot him. And like I told you, if he’s got a phone, he’ll call the cops. The good news is way the fuck out here in the middle of nowhere it’ll take the cops a while to get here. But we gotta move.
“If you spot him, yell, then start beating on him, and I’ll be there in two minutes to help. If I spot him, I’ll do the same thing. But if you find him, don’t go killing him all by yourself. I want some of him, too.”
“Okay,” Roy said. With the fish bat held in his big right hand, he started jogging toward the orchard. He was really worried about the darkness, thinking he could run right past the guy and not see him. They really should have looked for a flashlight in Doreen’s car, but knowing Doreen, if she had one, the batteries would be dead.
DeMarco watched the brothers as they stood behind the fruit stand, and saw one of them raise a hand and point at the toolshed, then point in the other direction, toward the orchard. He couldn’t see their features in the darkness; all he could see were the shapes of their short, muscular bodies. What were they going to do? Both go the same way or split up? He smiled when he saw one man run toward the toolshed and the other start jogging toward the orchard—the direction DeMarco had taken.
DeMarco was standing behind the pile of apple crates he’d constructed near the edge of the trail leading into the orchard. He figured the man coming toward him would either walk past the crates, in which case he’d step out and hit him from behind with his potato-filled sock, or he’d look to see if DeMarco was hiding behind the stack of crates. And if he did that, as soon as his head appeared, DeMarco would swing his homemade sap.
He could hear the man approach the apple crates, and then heard him stop. The guy was trying to decide if he should keep going or see if DeMarco was hiding behind the crates. The sock was ready in DeMarco’s hand—and when Roy McNulty took a peek to see if DeMarco was there, DeMarco swung the sock as hard as he could. He put every ounce of strength he had into that swing; he hit Roy McNulty hard enough that he turned his baking potato into a mashed potato. The reason he’d filled the sock with a potato as opposed to pennies or a rock was that he didn’t want to kill the McNultys; he just wanted to hurt them badly.
But as hard as he swung, the thickheaded son of a bitch didn’t go down. He was clearly stunned, but still standing. So DeMarco dropped the sock and hit him with a right-hand uppercut—right on the point of his chin—and this time he went down. Roy McNulty was unconscious. DeMarco quickly flipped him over onto his stomach, then used a zip tie to bind his hands behind his back. He used a second zip tie to bind his feet. It had taken him less than a minute to deal with one McNulty—and now it was time to deal with the other one.
DeMarco started to pick up the rake handle he’d placed behind the crates earlier in the day to use for a weapon, then noticed the small club that Roy McNulty had been carrying in his hand: a little bat about twelve inches long, like a cop’s nightstick. He’d known the McNultys would be armed, and he bet that Ray McNulty had an identical bat. Unlike with DeMarco’s potato-filled sock, if the McNultys had started whaling on him with the little bats they would have killed him, which was most certainly their intention. DeMarco thought about it for a moment, then decided to use Roy’s bat instead of the rake handle. If he used a weapon belonging to one of his attackers, that would add to the impression that he hadn’t known in advance that he’d be attacked. He hoped.
He stepped out from behind the pile of apple crates. Due to the darkness, he couldn’t see Ray McNulty, but suspected he was near the toolshed. But DeMarco didn’t have any intention of sneaking around and hunting for Ray. Instead he yelled, “McNulty! McNulty! I just killed your brother.” He paused, then said, “I slit his fuckin’ throat.”
Sound carried well out there in the country with no cars passing by or any other urban noises. DeMarco heard Ray yell, “You motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you.” Unlike DeMarco, who was dressed in black, Ray McNulty was wearing a white T-shirt, and although DeMarco couldn’t see his features clearly, he could see his blocky form running rapidly toward him—and that’s what he wanted: Ray’s head filled with rage and the desire for revenge and not thinking about anything else.
DeMarco didn’t run toward Ray. He just waited where he was, holding the fish bat in his right hand. He didn’t realize it, but he was smiling.
DeMarco had thought that Ray would stop a few feet away—but he didn’t. Ray believed that DeMarco had killed his brother, and the only thing he was thinking about was killing DeMarco. He ran toward DeMarco at full speed, no hesitation at all, the fish bat in his right hand, raised in the air, ready to bring it down on DeMarco’s skull. Ray didn’t notice that DeMarco was armed with the same weapon.
DeMarco waited until Ray was about ten yards from him and unable to stop his forward motion—and he threw the fish bat directly at Ray’s head. And just like when he’d brought the potato sap down on Roy’s head, he threw the bat as hard as he could—and he didn’t miss. The short club pinwheeled in the air and the blunt end of the bat hit Ray right between his eyes.
Ray staggered backward from the blow and before he could react, DeMarco was on him. His first punch broke Ray’s nose—and then DeMarco just kept throwing punches. Right, left, right, left—until he beat Ray to the ground, where he continued to hit him until he wasn’t moving.
It took all his willpower to stop hitting Ray. He didn’t want to kill the man, or more to the point, he didn’t want to face the legal consequences of killing him. He got up off Ray, his chest heaving from the exertion of pounding on him.
Now what DeMarco needed to do was stage the scene to match the story he planned to tell the cops. The first thing he did was take the shoestrings out of Ray’s tennis shoes and use them—instead of his handy-dandy zip ties—to bind Ray’s hands behind his back. Then he walked back to Roy
McNulty, who was still unconscious; this was beginning to worry DeMarco. He used his newly acquired pocketknife to cut the zip ties binding Roy’s hands and feet, then used Roy’s shoestrings to bind his hands because he couldn’t leave the zip ties in place. He threw the remnants of the zip ties into the stack of apple crates, then took the sock containing the potato and flung it far into the apple orchard. He didn’t want there to be any evidence lying around that his encounter with the McNultys had been premeditated.
He returned to his car and called 911. He told the dispatcher that his car broke down and he’d been attacked by two men with clubs. He said he barely managed to fight them off, and that both men were injured and needed medical attention. When she asked for his location, DeMarco said he didn’t know where he was exactly, just that he was on Pine Orchard Road, near the town of Chepachet. He added that he was parked by an abandoned fruit stand and his hood was up.
“Are you hurt?” the dispatcher asked him.
“No. Fortunately. But I was lucky they didn’t kill me.” He wanted that statement on tape.
His next call was to Detective Fitzgerald, BPD. “I’m going to need some help. I was just attacked by Roy and Ray McNulty. They followed me out to a place in Rhode Island—”
“Rhode Island?”
“Yeah. Anyway, my rental car broke down—the engine stopped running—and they attacked me. With clubs. I was able to, ah, overpower them, and now they’re both tied up.”
“Both of them?”
“Yeah. I already called nine-one-one to report the attack and the cops are on their way. But I don’t know who has jurisdiction. I’m near a town called Chepachet. Anyway, I need you to talk to the right cop here in Rhode Island to back up my story that the McNultys were following me in Boston and about their history with Elinore Dobbs and the weapons charge against them.”
“How were you able to beat both of them if they had clubs? Are you some kind of karate guy?”
“I just got lucky. And what difference does it make? I’m the victim here.”
It turned out that the cops in Glocester, Rhode Island, had jurisdiction for Pine Orchard Road. A Glocester patrol car showed up about fifteen minutes after DeMarco called 911, its light bar flashing blue and red. Five minutes later an ambulance belonging to the Glocester fire department arrived at the scene.
The Glocester cop, a young guy no more than twenty-five, took DeMarco’s statement as the medics attended to the McNultys.
“I was just driving along and my car died and—”
“What’s wrong with it,” the cop asked.
“I don’t know. It just died on me. What difference does it make? Anyway, I’d just raised the hood to take a look when the McNultys pulled up behind me, so I took off running.”
“You knew your attackers?”
“Yeah. They’re bad guys from Boston.”
DeMarco gave the cop the backstory on the McNultys: how they had been hired to harass Elinore Dobbs, how they rigged a wire to cause her to fall down a flight of stairs, then how they were later arrested by the ATF for transporting machine guns with the intention of selling them.
“For some reason,” DeMarco said, “these guys, who by the way are connected to the Providence mob, got it into their heads that I was responsible for their arrest. After they got out on bail, they started following me around Boston. You can verify that with Detective Fitzgerald of the BPD. So tonight, when I drove out here to see a guy—”
“Who did you drive out here to see?” the cop asked.
“You don’t need to know his name,” DeMarco said. DeMarco had anticipated this question. Why was he driving around in the sticks of Rhode Island late at night? But he couldn’t give the cop the name of a man who didn’t exist, a man the cop might want to call to verify DeMarco’s story.
“Look,” DeMarco said. “My boss is Congressman John Mahoney.” He figured that tossing out Mahoney’s name couldn’t hurt. “And he just wanted me to talk to a guy who lives out here. It has to do with a congressional hearing that’s coming up. But I can’t tell you his name. It’s confidential, at least until after the hearing. And what difference does his name make anyway? I was just going to see this guy and my car broke down, and the McNultys attacked me with those clubs you saw.”
The cop looked skeptical. But then skeptical was the way cops usually looked.
“How were you able to beat them both?” the cop asked.
“Well, you see, when I first ran, I hid behind the fruit stand, then I saw that pile of crates, so I ran up and hid behind them. When the McNultys got to the fruit stand, they didn’t know which way I’d gone, so one of them went that way, to see if I was hiding by that little shed up there, and the other one ran toward those trees to see if I’d gone that way. Anyway, when the one guy got to the pile of crates, he looked to see if that’s where I was hiding, and when he stuck his head around the corner, I hit him.”
“Hit him with what?”
“My fist. What else? I hit him a good one, stunned him, then I hit him again and knocked him out.”
“Huh,” the cop said. Like: Huh, I’m impressed. Or maybe it was: Huh, sounds like bullshit to me.
“Then I started to run back to my car—”
“But you said your car wasn’t working.”
“It isn’t, but I’d left my cell phone in the cup holder. I was going to grab it and call nine-one-one and then start running down the road to get away, but that’s when the other one saw me. He came charging at me with that club he was holding, and we sort of crashed into each other, and when he took a swing at me and missed, I hit him. Hard. Then, well, I guess I just kind of went crazy and started throwing punches and knocked him out. I tied their hands so they couldn’t attack me again, and called you guys. I was lucky they didn’t kill me.”
“Yeah, I guess,” the cop said. “You’re going to have to come back to the station with me.”
“What?” DeMarco said. Like: How could you possibly doubt my story?
An hour later, DeMarco was still at the Glocester police department.
He was placed in an interrogation room and an older cop, one with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeves, came in and asked him to repeat the story of how he’d been attacked. When the cop asked him if he wanted a lawyer, DeMarco said, “A lawyer? First of all, I am a lawyer, but second, why would I need one? Those assholes attacked me and I just defended myself.”
“It’s kind of amazing how your car happened to break down where it did,” the cop said. “I mean, in a spot where you could find a place to hide. The other thing that’s kind of amazing is we sent a guy to tow your car back here, and when he tried to start it, it started right up.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you about that,” DeMarco said. “I was just driving along and it died, like it had run out of gas, but there was plenty of gas in the tank. Maybe the fuel line got plugged up or something. How the hell would I know? I’m not a mechanic. All I know is the car died, and I was just lucky I was able to hide behind those crates. I mean, how was I supposed to know there’d be a bunch of crates there?”
A female cop stuck her head inside the room and said to the sergeant, “Pat, there’s a detective from Boston here to see you.”
“Boston?” Pat said.
Twenty minutes later, Fitzgerald came into the interrogation room. He didn’t look particularly like a member of law enforcement wearing grape-colored Bermuda shorts and a lime-green polo shirt stretched over his considerable gut. Fitzgerald had been at home when DeMarco called him and he obviously hadn’t taken the time to change clothes before driving to Rhode Island.
Fitzgerald didn’t say anything for a moment as he stared at DeMarco, then he pointed at a camera mounted high on one wall. “I told them to shut that off.”
“Okay,” DeMarco said.
Fitzgerald paused again before saying, “The cops here know you�
�re not telling them the whole story, but I convinced them that the McNultys are bad guys so they’re going to arrest them for assaulting you.”
“Good,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, but I think you set them up, DeMarco. I think you . . . you lured them here. I also think you set them up so they’d get caught with those assault rifles in their van.”
For a moment DeMarco thought about going all Al Pacino on Fitzgerald—an Oscar-winning performance, his face first displaying bewilderment, followed by shock, and finally outrage at Fitzgerald’s ridiculous and offensive allegation. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he looked into Fitzgerald’s bloodshot eyes and said, “So what if I did?”
Fitzgerald started to snap something back, and then he, too, reconsidered his response. He just nodded and said, “Tomorrow I’ll call the federal prosecutor who handled their arraignment, tell her they were following you in Boston and then they followed you out of state and attacked you. She’ll go talk to the judge, he’ll revoke their bail, then a couple of federal marshals will escort them back to Boston.”
“Sounds good to me,” DeMarco said. “How are the McNultys doing, by the way?”
“I don’t know. I just know they’re not dead or this could be a whole lot worse for you.” Fitzgerald stood up. “You’re an operator, DeMarco, and I don’t like operators. I’m sorry about what happened to that old lady, but I’ll be glad when your ass is out of Boston.”
Roy and Ray McNulty were in the same room, lying in hospital beds with rails on the sides. Their left ankles were handcuffed to the rails. A cop was standing outside their door, flirting with one of the nurses.
They were both awake, and both had headaches. Roy had a concussion and Ray had a bandage across his broken nose and half a dozen stitches over his left eye. Both his eyes were black.
Roy McNulty couldn’t remember what had happened to him. His last clear memory was walking toward a stack of old wooden boxes looking for DeMarco, but after that nothing until he came to in the emergency room. For the third time—he apparently couldn’t remember the first two times—he said to his brother: “What the fuck happened, Ray?”
