by Chuck Hogan
Dez was closer to the Suburban, wavering, torn between staying behind or taking off with Gloansy. “Fuck!” he said, watching Gloansy slam the trunk door shut. Then Dez hustled back to Doug.
With a rebel yell, Jem curled out into the mouth of the tunnel and filled the passageway with fire and noise.
CLOSER, OVER THE RAIN and the sound of his own slapping footsteps, Frawley heard gunfire. He saw flashes inside Gate D and heard echoed yelling.
Then someone out on the street near him cried, “Here they come!”
He ran with Dino and the others to the corner of Van Ness. A silver armored truck came scraping out of the block-long brick wall, yellow beacon twirling, surging down the street toward them through the rain. Two sergeants who should have known better rushed to the sidewalk and wasted bullets against the can’s grille and windshield.
Frawley worried about the gun ports. He tried to make out the driver but the wipers weren’t going, and all he could see through the rain was a blur of frizzy hair—maybe a bad disguise. Whoever it was, the driver was running scared.
Dino yelled at the rest of them to get away as the truck wheeled past doing thirty. It turned hard right and went into a heavy skid on the wet road, the driver righting the wheels and briefly regaining control, then overcorrecting, the truck veering toward the sidewalk across from the ballpark, ramming the parked police camper head-on.
The blow was tremendous, the loudest, ugliest thing Frawley had ever heard, the camper buckling and grinding on its rims, all four tires exploding, tearing up the asphalt and taking out a hydrant before stopping some forty feet away. Cops tumbled out of the open end of the wrecked camper, falling hurt to the wet pavement and trying to crawl away from the fountain the hydrant made in the rain.
Dino and the rest of the lawmen ran to the truck, the crash bringing two tac cops charging back out of Gate D to investigate. The silver truck was unhurt, the driver grinding gears, still trying to flee. Dino warned the men back from the gun ports.
Approaching sirens drew Frawley the other way, back out onto Van Ness—just as a second vehicle, a big black Suburban, jumped from the park.
It started away in the opposite direction, but the screaming patrol cars forced it to reconsider, cutting its wheels into a controlled skid that ended with the truck facing Frawley’s end of the street, then starting toward him.
Frawley couldn’t see the driver at that distance. All he knew was that he had someone fleeing a shooting. He stepped left onto the curb, working the pump action and aiming low for the tires—Blam!—missing the first shot, kicking sparks off the asphalt, pumping again and leading the truck this time—Blam!—striking the right front tire, pumping again—Blam!—bursting the rear. The tires shredded and peeled back off the rims, and there was a spray of wet sparks in the road as the driver fought the steering wheel, losing control on the turn going the other way, jumping the curb and plowing into a Thunderbird parked at the corner.
Frawley ran wide around the rear of the Suburban, assuming all four of them were inside the tinted windows. A two-man tac team advanced with MP5 submachine guns off their shoulders, and Frawley backed away, letting them do their work.
THEY HEARD THE CRUISERS wheel past after Gloansy in the Suburban. Shotgun blasts in the rain. The sickening glass punch of the crash.
“They got him,” said Dez, hands on top of his head. “Oh, fucking shit, they got Gloansy.”
Jem wheeled and screamed, sending more angry spray down the tunnel. “Who the fuck dimed us?” he bellowed. “I’ll fucking kill them!”
Doug swallowed hard, going after the two uniformed guards and pulling them to their feet, powering them back near the tunnel.
Jem was reloading again, gripping his weapon in anguish. “Gloansy, you fucking shithead…”
Dez’s bandanna eyes showed dull shock, his gun hanging in his hand. Doug woke him up by thrusting the guards at him and making him hold them at gunpoint.
Doug ran down the length of the cave, hitting plungers and opening the other four doors, then running back.
One empty duffel bag remained on the floor by the pushcart, and Jem was kneeling over it, stuffing it with cash, the Tec dangling from his shoulder rig.
“What are you doing?” said Doug. Jem kept on loading. “The fuck are you doing? Leave it! Come on!”
When Doug went to grab him, Jem raised up the Tec.
It was the guilty way in which Doug backed off. Jem sensed it, standing, tasting it the way a shark tastes blood, realizing, bright-eyed.
“This is you,” he said. “You fucking did this. Did you fucking do this?”
Dez shouted from behind, “Fucking come on, assholes!”
Jem stared in white-eyed astonishment. He kept the gun on Doug as he knelt and zipped the bag shut, then pulled the bandanna down off his bewildered face. “Why, kid?”
Dez didn’t know where to point his gun, at the guards or at Jem. “Tell him you didn’t, Duggy!”
More sirens now, Jem’s face going grim. He hefted the bag at his side, eyes and gun never leaving Doug as he backed up the incline to the open bay door, pausing there before the rain.
Doug awaited Jem’s bullet.
The Tec came down and Jem tucked it into his raincoat, dead-faced, then ducked his head and started out with his black bag into the rain.
THE DRIVER OF THE Suburban, whoever he was, was at the very least unconscious. The spotter could see his shoulders rising and falling through the windshield, but his head remained down on the bloodied steering wheel. It was a potential medical emergency, but the spotter could not get a clear view of the backseat or of the cargo trunk. The status of the other three—their very presence—remained unknown.
A cordon of cops surrounded the crash site—the smaller of the two wrecks on Yawkey—one of them with a bullhorn, trying to coax out the occupants.
Frawley was down on his haunches behind a patrol car angled across the intersection, holding his shotgun across his knees. The boots next to him belonged to an ear-wired tac cop standing with his submachine gun braced atop the rain-popping roof of the car, trained on the Suburban. Frawley was coasting on adrenaline, not even feeling the rain. Fucking Special Agent Steve McQueen. I just shot out a car’s tires in the street. He looked around for Dino. He had to tell this to someone.
More sirens coming, flashing blues arriving from everywhere. Frawley liked the cavalry’s sound. But then he remembered the two cruisers that had scared off the Suburban. Those early patrol cars—who had called them?
There’ll be nothing on the radio, Dino had said. They’re on a scrambled freq.
Frawley got up and started looking for Dino for real, finding him under a borrowed umbrella at the corner fence, talking to a police captain. Frawley stepped in between them, interrupting, jacked up on hormones though barely aware of it. “Where’d the patrol cars come from?”
The captain looked at the letters FBI on Frawley’s chest. “Well,” he said under the umbrella patter, “when a daddy patrol car and a mommy patrol car love each other very, very much…”
Dino rested a stop hand against the captain’s chest. “This is my guy, Cap. Frawley, bank squad. Good cop.”
The captain looked back at Frawley, nodding a grudging apology. “We got a 911. Radio distress call from inside the armored.”
Frawley turned and looked at the silver Provident truck near the camper wreck, now empty—a distress call going out inside his mind.
“Dean,” he said, and Dino registered it, completed the thought.
This crew never left things like that to chance. They went around alarms.
“Trip it on purpose?” reasoned Dino. “But why?”
Frawley stepped back to take in the car wrecks on Yawkey, the multitude of cops in orange coats attending. He turned and looked up Van Ness, seeing more orange coats. “They wanted police here.”
He noticed one cop crossing the street carrying a loose black bag—walking away from the ballpark, moving too calmly.
DOUG STOOD WATCHING JEM go. Another arriving cruiser squealed past, and then Dez was yelling at him. Doug turned to find Dez still holding his gun on the guards. Flashlights and footsteps in the tunnel.
Doug pulled his Beretta and extracted the magazine. Only two rounds left. He pocketed that clip and pulled a full mag from his belt, reseating it, chambering a round. He took a guard from Dez and hustled them all down to the last door, the one farthest away from the tunnel, at the end of Van Ness.
Doug put his guard facedown onto the floor there, then holstered his gun and untied his bandanna from around his face. The guard was begging for his life, certain he was about to be executed, until Doug’s bandanna across his mouth gagged his pleas.
Dez did the same, then stood, still wiping at his eyes, trying to blink his contacts right. “Can we do this?” he said.
Doug looked out the door at the rain. “Fuck,” he hissed, considering their chances, then turned to Dez. “It’s life for me—I got no choice. For you it’s just a couple of years. Cut a plea, give them everything you can. If I make it out, I’m gone from here anyway.”
Dez stared, uncertain.
“Gloansy’s already hurt,” said Doug. “Give yourself up. It’s what I would do.”
Dez blinked, sore-eyed. “No, it’s not.”
Doug leaned out of the bay and saw cops coming up from both sides, almost upon them. He stepped right out into the rain and quickly waved over the nearest pair.
In orange coats they came running up the sidewalk, guns at their sides. Doug made sure they saw his empty hands, then pointed them around the corner to where Dez was standing over the bound and gagged guards.
The cops got busy immediately, one officer dropping his knee down hard on a guard’s back, the other calling in their position. “Nice catch,” said the kneeling cop.
The guards started to wriggle, grunting in protest, trying to talk with their eyes.
“Transport these two,” said Doug. “We’re going after the third.”
Doug and Dez started across the street, briskly but not running. Doug glanced down the length of Yawkey to where the Suburban was bunched up at the corner, having smacked into their stolen T-bird, cops in orange all over it. A paramedic was at the driver’s-side door, working on Gloansy, and a chill rippled through Doug.
To their left lay Landsdowne Street, beyond a pair of empty cruisers. Ahead was Ipswich Street, full of orange cops, the direction in which Jem had gone.
“Come on,” hissed Dez, starting left, looking to slip the police perimeter.
Gunshots sounded on Ipswich up ahead. Doug felt the reports in his chest, the way you feel thunder or a woman’s scream.
“Holy fucking hell,” said Dez.
“Take off,” Doug told him, then started alone after Jem.
THE COP HAD REACHED the end of Ipswich where it met Boylston, walking in the street along the left-hand row of parked cars. “Excuse me!” said Frawley, coming up behind him. “Officer! Hold up a minute there, please.”
The cop stopped, the bag hanging heavy and low in his hand. A gas station was to his left, another one across Boylston, a Staples office supply store to his right. Traffic continued on four-lane Boylston as usual.
The cop did not turn at first, his slick orange back wrinkling as his free hand went into it. When he did turn, it was with a sweeping arm motion such that the rounds rattling out of his gun would have zippered Frawley up from feet through groin to head, dropping him dead in the street. But Frawley had spun away behind a small gold Civic hatchback, which the cop now fired into.
Two other cops nearby came under fire, dropping the blue Boston Police sawhorses they were carrying, and Frawley hazarded a look through the cracked auto glass at his assailant.
Frawley only caught a distorted flash, the wild face with its white-out eyes and upper lip ridge looking profane in cop blues, like a cannibal wearing a chef ’s apron. James Coughlin. He was backing away behind cover fire with the engaged smile of a teenager seeing his violent daydreams come true.
Frawley tried to get his shotgun over the roof of the car, but pedestrians scattered behind Coughlin, cars waiting for a green light. Then Coughlin swung back, turning with the shoulder-harnessed semiauto—an illegal Intratec-9—popping window glass out of the car.
It sunk in then that Frawley was actually being shot at, and he went into a tight fetal crouch, putting his shoulder into the hindquarters of the car. Many of the rounds went through-and-through, puncturing the roof and thumping into the wooden fence behind him.
Then the firing stopped. Frawley gripped his shotgun wildly, expecting an ambush.
What he got instead was a sound like a stone skittering across the road. The thing rapped against the curb and Frawley peered down under the car, watching it spin and settle.
It looked like an old hand grenade. Frawley couldn’t believe it. And then of course, he did believe it—and jumped up, racing away, yelling to the responding cops to get back—
The grenade blew, and the Civic’s gas tank blew, and Frawley and his shotgun went sprawling. He turned from the wet asphalt and saw the little import on its side, undercarriage aflame. The windows of the storefront Staples were blown in, and everywhere on Boylston Street people were leaping out of their cars and running. Coughlin was gone.
Frawley got to his feet, pissed. That mangy fucker had tried to kill him. And a guy who’d open up on a federal agent would open up on anybody.
Frawley regripped his Remington and took off after him.
DOUG CAME UP ON the burning car, its stinking black smoke rising into the rain.
The grenades. Doug couldn’t believe it.
“Fucking crazy,” said a voice behind him.
Doug turned, found Dez still there. “Get out of here—”
“You two!” barked a voice from the side.
Two other cops ran past them. The one yelling to them had rank.
“Pick up that left flank! We’re gonna sweep up Boylston and shut this end down!”
Doug nodded and did as he was told—pulling his Beretta and moving past the abandoned cars to the far sidewalk, past panicked citizens crawling away in the rain.
“What are you doing?” said Dez, coming up at his side. “What do you think you can do for him?”
“Desmond,” said Doug, furious. “Get out. Leave me.”
Then Doug saw Jem break from the Howard Johnson’s parking lot half a block up, orange coat flapping, the bag in one hand, the Tec out in the other. Four, maybe five car lengths behind him, a plainclothes guy with a shotgun cut across after him, wearing a nylon vest reading FBI.
COUGHLIN WANTED THE MCDONALD’S, running toward it, probably for hostages.
Frawley could not allow that to happen. He ranged left, and as Coughlin reached the curb up the street, Frawley pulled the shotgun to his shoulder and fired wide, between Coughlin and the restaurant—Blam!—shredding a Free Apartment Guide stand on the sidewalk. He pumped, fired again—Blam!—this time killing a Boston Herald machine.
Coughlin jerked back from the exploding stands. He spun and fired into the street, finding Frawley, but not quickly enough. Frawley dived between parked cars, scraping up the skin on his elbows and his knees, hearing rounds pick through the side of the truck, rap-rap-rap, thinking, I’m in a fucking gunfight. He got up off the road, worried about ricochets, sitting on the front bumper of the truck with his feet on the tail of the next car. He went into his jacket pockets and reloaded the shotgun, spilling some shells.
Smatterings of small-arms fire behind him, a burst here, a burst there. Then only the rain. Frawley leaned out one way, looking up the sidewalk toward McDonald’s, people streaming out of the back entrance with kids in their arms. The front of the restaurant was glass, and he could see in between the painted Mayor McCheese and the Hamburgler, Coughlin was not inside.
Frawley leaned out the other way, looking up the rain-swept street cluttered with abandoned cars, their wipers still going. Not there either.
> Frawley pulled back patiently, thinking Coughlin was waiting to pick him off if he moved. Somebody was going to get hurt in the cross fire. Coming up toward him were two cops on his side of the street, still half a block away. They were orange just like Coughlin, and he checked them for a split second, remembering that MacRay was likely still at large.
Shots again, rap-rap-rap off the side of his truck, and Frawley ducked out the other way, charging up the sidewalk, determined to keep Coughlin in the middle of Boylston and moving west.
DOUG MADE THE FBI shotgun as Frawley—the sleuth propped up on the front bumper of a UPS van, stopping to reload.
Dez was rubbing his eyes, trying to see clear. “You gonna shoot at cops?”
“Fuck away from me, Dez.”
“How you gonna save him? How?”
Doug could take out Frawley. If he wanted Frawley to be dead, he could do it right now.
“You don’t owe him anything, Doug. You can’t do anything for him except die with him.”
Then rounds cracked and pinged off the parked car next to them, popping glass, kicking rain off the street.
Jem was spraying rounds at them—at cops—from half a block away. Dez stooped low, swearing. “Duggy. We’ll be pinned down here. We gotta bail now.”
Doug watched Frawley curl out from behind the truck. Sometimes just knowing you can pull off a thing is enough. He let Dez tug on him, and together they started back down Boylston toward the black smoke of the bombed-out car.
WHETHER OUT OF PANIC or confusion or just softheadedness, Coughlin started across the intersection where Boylston met the end of Yawkey. Cops lay in wait there, the rounds pecking at Coughlin’s vest, dancing him, picking at his leg and his shooting arm. Still he turned and spit rounds back, silencing the service pieces but not the submachine gunfire. Controlled double-taps staggered Coughlin, who held the money bag in front of him now as a shield, retreating back to the corner in front of Osco Drug.
Bloodied and sniggering, he hobbled up the wheelchair ramp to the drugstore, where someone inside had had the foresight to lock the doors. A wasted stutter of gunfire broke some of the glass until his Intratec clicked dry. Frawley heard it clatter to the pavement from his position in the drugstore parking lot, flat against the wall, listening to Coughlin’s half-laughed cursing and the drag of his wounded foot.
