by Cylin Busby
“What’s happening?” I jumped up and screamed. Was someone in the kitchen hurting my mom?
I heard chairs being pushed back from the table and everyone scrambling around and talking at once. “Kids, kids, get in here now,” Mom called to us. As we moved through the dark into the kitchen, the control panel for the alarm system starting flashing and letting out a high-pitched warning sound. “That’s okay, just means that the system isn’t working,” Craig said.
Someone grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the attic doorway and shoved me up the stairs. I didn’t want to be first to go up into the dark, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I climbed the steep ladder without complaint, Eric and Shawn behind me, then Mom. I could hear Dad and the guys talking quietly downstairs. “They’re going to get Dad’s rifle, don’t worry,” Mom whispered to us as we sat on the carpet in Eric and Shawn’s room. “Each one of these guys has at least one gun on him, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Mom, do you have your gun?” Shawn asked her.
“Oh damn it, I don’t,” Mom said. “I took it off.” In the dim light I could just see her as she felt along her side where she usually carried her gun. “Wouldn’t you just know it?” She sounded like she was trying to make a joke.
I couldn’t hear anyone downstairs anymore. Eric moved over to the window. “I see someone,” he whispered. I looked out the window too and saw a figure moving along the fence. It was a man holding a long gun that looked like it had a flashlight on top of it. “Who do you think that is?” Eric whispered.
“That’s your dad, that’s his gun,” Mom said. She sounded pretty confident, but what if she was wrong? What if that was someone else?
We watched the person with the gun walk the perimeter of the fence until he rounded the corner and we couldn’t see him anymore. I was waiting, tensed up. Somehow, I just knew I was about to hear that gun go off. I was ready for the sound of it, just like when we went shooting. I tried to remember the advice that Rick and Don gave my brothers that day, how to hold the gun, how to shoot it. If I had to get Mom’s gun from downstairs, I was pretty sure I could use it. Turn off the safety, I remembered. Aim for the body, not the head. I was nervous that the trigger would be too hard to pull, but maybe Mom’s gun was easier than the one I had used that day and I could do it. I just had to pull harder—
We heard a door open, then footsteps downstairs, and we all held our breath. Then John Ayoub called up to us, “It’s okay, power’s out all over the street.”
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” Mom said as she hurried down the stairs. When we got to the kitchen, Mom started lighting some candles. I watched Dad slide the small black flashlight off the top of his rifle and put the gun back into a big black suitcase that was open on the kitchen table. The inside of the case was made of black foam that had an imprint of the gun, so it fit perfectly inside. The flashlight had its own little spot too, right above the rifle. As Mom lit more candles, Dad snapped the case shut and took it out of the kitchen. “Bedtime,” Mom said to us.
Even though it was still early, my brothers and I went to our rooms without a word. When I lay down to go to sleep, I started thinking about what had happened. I realized that if someone had come for us tonight, I didn’t have a weapon anywhere that I could use. I didn’t have a gun, and I hardly knew how to use my mom’s. My dad’s rifle was too big, and his revolver was almost too hard for my brothers. What could I use?
I waited in the dark until I heard the other cops leave, until Mom and Dad went into their room for the night, then I waited until the house was quiet. I crept into the kitchen and opened the silverware drawer. I knew exactly what I wanted: one of Mom’s good steak knives, with a wooden handle and serrated edge. Perfect. Back in my room, I hid the knife underneath my mattress, where I could reach it easily but no one else could see it.
The next morning on the bus, Amelia asked me if our power had gone out the night before. “It was so funny, my mom was right in the middle of making us a milkshake and the blender just died,” she told me. “She tried to mash it up with a fork, but it didn’t work. The bananas weren’t even cut up; there were big chunks of ice in it. It was so gross we just had to throw it out!”
I smiled at her story, and opened my mouth to say something. For some reason, Dad’s rifle with the mini flashlight came into my mind and I almost told Amelia about it. But then I caught myself.
“Yeah, our power went out too,” I told her, and left it at that.
chapter 28
JOHN
WE were living in a fortress, hiding in plain sight. With the eight-foot fence around the house, the guard dog, and the alarm system, it felt more and more like prison every day. I was nearing the end of my rope and wanted this all just to go away.
Some days, the anger overwhelmed me. Why should my family have to live like this when they had done nothing wrong? The police department needed to move their asses and get something done. After the shooting, the focus of my hatred had been Meyer, but now that was morphing into something larger—I was mad at the cops who weren’t doing their jobs, the selectmen in town, the detectives, the principal at the boys’ school. The list was getting long. It was enough that Meyer had wanted me dead, that was personal. But I worked for these guys, for the town of Falmouth, for ten years, protecting residents and keeping the general population law abiding. And now that I was in need,where were they? Who was protecting me and my family? The investigation into my shooting had gone from a good-natured bumbling attempt to pushing it away like it was something that smelled bad to a flat-out fiasco.
There was one aspect of my shooting that continued to haunt me that I just couldn’t shake: the fact that someone on the force—a fellow officer—must have given Meyer my work schedule. There’s no other way he could have set up the ambush the way he did—knowing right where to wait for me and at what time. So when I wasn’t thinking about ways I was going to off Meyer, I spent my time thinking about which one of my brothers-in-arms had turned rat. There was only one guy who kept coming to mind, and that was Larry Mitchell. He seemed like a pretty decent officer, but I’d heard he was friends with Meyer—though I didn’t know how close. That didn’t bother me as much as a couple of stories I’d heard about him from other cops, guys I trusted. First, Mitchell was the guy Rick and some other officers had seen the morning after my shooting talking to Meyer in the parking lot of the police station. According to the reports I heard, they were laughing and having a nice little chat, while inside the station everyone else was busy looking into what had happened to me the night before.
On the night I was shot, Mitchell had been assigned to ride in the “party car” with a friend of mine, Rufino “Chuck” Gonsalves. Chuck was a small-built Portuguese guy, with a full black mustache and a great smile with a little space between his front teeth. If things were slow during his shift, Chuck had a habit of swinging by his home, about two miles down from our house on Sandwich Road, to see his wife and take a short coffee break. Whoever was riding with him would usually come along for some fresh coffee and pie. Then they’d go back to work.
About a week before my shooting, Mitchell told Chuck that he knew a guy who had some information for him; it was something important. Mitchell set up a meeting between Chuck and this “informant” at the Dunkin Donuts on Main Street. When Chuck arrived at the appointed time, it was Mitchell’s buddy, Raymond Meyer, who was there to meet him. Raymond, playing the good guy, told Chuck that he’d heard something through the grapevine. “The town selectmen are watching your house,” Meyer said. “They know that you go home during your shift and spend time with your wife. They’re planning to take pictures of your cruiser in the driveway and get you fired.” Chuck could hardly believe this. Why would the town selectmen care where he took his break—why would they focus so much energy on him?
“If I were you, I’d stop going home for your coffee break,” Mitchell warned his partner.
On the night I was shot, Mitchell called in sick, so Ch
uck was riding with a temporary partner. He had been thinking about what Meyer said, and it just didn’t add up. He chose to ignore the warning—let the town selectmen come after him for drinking coffee at home for fifteen minutes if they wanted to. Good luck.
He went by his house about ten o’clock that night and brought his partner with him. They had coffee and apple pie and hit the road around 10:20, back to the Heights to break up any parties that were getting too loud. But before they had gotten very far, they heard the radio call that an officer had been shot—back on Sandwich Road. The site of my shooting was less than a quarter of a mile from Chuck’s house.
The next morning, Chuck started piecing things together: clearly the “warning” from Meyer had been a ruse—he just wanted to make sure that no other cops were in the area that night. But there was only one logical way Meyer could have known that Chuck’s routine was to go home in the evenings around that time—and that was through his partner, Mitchell. So Chuck went in and told the investigators what he knew. They questioned Mitchell, and he claimed to be an innocent lamb. Sure he knew Meyer, but he didn’t know anything about my shooting, wasn’t there, wasn’t even working that night. They asked him to take a lie detector test, and he refused. Most unusual.
Word of this got around the department, and the guys who were my friends or were straight cops quickly labeled Mitchell a rat. No one knew, fully, what his involvement was in my shooting, but there was something connecting him with Meyer and the night I was shot—and it smelled bad. Refusing to take the lie detector test didn’t add to his credibility either—that could be grounds for dismissal for an officer, so it made me think he must have had good reason to avoid it. So there was one lead that the detectives were letting get cold. When I asked them about it, they told me that they were “working on it,” and to let them do their jobs.
I was wondering, too, when they were going to get around to interviewing me about the recent arrests I had made involving members of Meyer’s family. But I wasn’t holding my breath. During one arrest—the night I brought in his son, Paul Cena—Meyer was there and actually told me he was going to kill me, in front of witnesses, other cops. It should have been of interest to the detectives, but it didn’t seem to send up any red flags when I mentioned it.
Paul Cena’s arrest had occurred the previous spring, about six months before my shooting. The Bruins were playing their archrivals, the Montréal Canadiens in the playoffs for the Stanley Cup. It was in overtime of Game 7, sudden death, and I had to go to work. I got to the station and found out that Tom DeCosta and I were going to ride overlap.
They had the game on the radio at the department, and right after I arrived for my shift it went into a second overtime. We were standing around listening to the game when the car patrolling the Far East section of Falmouth radioed in, saying they were in pursuit of a vehicle that wouldn’t pull over. Not high speed, just wouldn’t pull over. The Main Street car joined in, and they both started slowly winding their way around town behind this guy. Then Jean Beliveau scored for Les Habitants and ruined the Bruins’ season. It still wasn’t quite time for us to go on duty, but there wasn’t any point in standing around either—the game was over. I turned to Tom and said, “Let’s go catch this bastard,” meaning the low-speed perp.
We headed out to Teaticket, on reports that the vehicle had pulled into a yard and stopped. Upon arrival, the three pursuit vehicles and the chase car were parked in a long dirt driveway off Brick Kiln Road. Six cops were milling around with their thumbs up their asses. Turns out the driver had gone to his own house, parked in his own driveway, locked the doors and windows, and wouldn’t come out of the car. “He won’t cooperate. What should we do?” DeCosta said to me.
The driver had been initially observed speeding but then slowed down and wouldn’t stop. Failure to stop for an emergency vehicle or police car is an arrestable offence, so I figured this guy needed to be brought in by the Far East cruiser that originally gave chase. But if he won’t come out, how do you arrest him? “I think I can fix this dilemma.” I turned to DeCosta and said, “Those windows are glass, aren’t they?”
DeCosta caught my drift. “That’s Ray Meyer’s son in there; I’m not breaking any glass,” he told me.
I grabbed my “prosecutor”—a type of nightstick, about twenty inches long, with a six-inch handle at the side—and approached the car. The engine wasn’t on, so I knew he could hear me. I yelled, “Open up,” to the guy inside. One last warning. He was a mousy dude—small and thin. He wouldn’t even look up at me, so I made a quick jab at the glass with the stick, and the driver’s-side window shattered. As I reached for the lock button inside, the driver reached forward and started the car, quickly putting it into gear. I wrapped my arm around him, trying to reach over to pull the key out of the ignition, but I couldn’t get it. The guy started to accelerate forward in a semicircle, dragging me with him as he swung the car around to exit the driveway. I was holding on and running as fast as I could, but he started doing twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. I couldn’t keep up at those speeds and decided to let go—better to drop at this speed than later, on the pavement, if he decided to go any faster. I rolled down the driveway, shaken, bumped, bruised, covered with dirt but not seriously injured. The other cruisers all turned around and commenced the pursuit. By this time, a state trooper, Ted Tessasini, had heard the call on his way home and joined in too.
It took me a minute to get back to my cruiser, and when I got there the dispatcher was reporting that the perp had pulled into another driveway, down the road a bit. I knew that address. It was Raymond Meyer’s house. When I arrived, another standoff was in progress, this time with Ray standing out in his yard yelling at the cops. I grabbed my nightstick, got out of my cruiser, and headed straight over to the perp’s car. I wasn’t giving him any more warnings. A quick, sharp tap took out the passenger-side window. I didn’t bother to brush the glass away, just opened the door, climbed in, and grabbed the keys from the ignition. Then I realized that the perp had tied the belt from his pants around the gearshift. It was the first time I’d ever seen somebody do that, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. I yanked the belt loose, grabbed him, lifted him up, and threw him out the driver’s-side window. He didn’t resist, and there was nothing said. I cuffed the perp vigorously, my knee in his back while he was facedown on the ground. “He’d better not be hurt! If there’s one mark on him... ,”Ray started yelling at me, still standing in the yard. I ignored him until he shouted, “I’m gonna get my shotgun!”
I looked over at Meyer and yelled, “Hey, Ray, are you interfering with an arrest? ‘Cause if you are, you can come down to the station with us.”
Meyer glared at me, turned, and went into his house. Dave Cusolito took out his nightstick and slid over to the door of the house, waiting for Meyer to come back out. The other cops on the scene got into position behind their cruisers, guns out.
Meyer came back out, holding up something. I was relieved to see that it was a baseball bat, not a shotgun. “Your head is gonna be in your lap, Busby!” he hollered at me, waving the bat.
“Drop it, right now!” Ayoub had his gun pointed right at Meyer. “Put that bat down.”
Meyer looked over at the guns pointed at him, dropped the bat, and put up his hands. “That’s my boy,” he said, waving a finger at me. “You better not hurt him.”
I lifted the perp off the ground to shove him into the back of the cruiser. “Ray, you’re more than welcome to come down to the station and see justice being administered,” I yelled over to him. Meyer didn’t do anything else, just continued shouting about how I’d better not hurt his boy. “All I have to do is drop a dime, Busby!” he threatened me. “Your head will be in your lap!”
When we got down to the station, I learned that the perp in custody really was Ray’s boy: his illegitimate son, Paul Cena. The Far East cops issued a citation for speeding and failure to stop, and then I charged him with assault and battery on a police offi
cer with a deadly weapon (the car). Sonny boy sat there like a wilted flower during the entire process. Before we’d even been at the station a half hour, a lawyer, hired by Meyer, of course, showed up to bail him out. We hadn’t even fully booked him, leaving me with hours of paperwork to do on the arrest.
So now I’d bothered one of Ray’s nephews in public and arrested his bastard son—on his property, no less. This was on top of issuing citations to other members of his family and friends, instead of looking the other way like I was supposed to. And I was tight with the other guys on the force who couldn’t stand him, like Mickey Mangum. I’d not only shown Meyer that I wouldn’t back down to his intimidation, but I’d become public enemy number one, a real thorn in his side. I wouldn’t say that I went looking for trouble with him, but by nature of doing my job, I’d found trouble with him. And it only got worse from there.
chapter 29
CYLIN
ONE cold, clear Saturday that winter, Mom decided that we should go and do something as a family—with no guards for once. Instead, she and Dad would wear their guns and we would bring Max for protection. “It’s time we started acting like a family again,” she said.
By this point, my brothers and I had overheard enough conversations to know what was going on. Mom was tired of the constant fear and anger, living in seclusion and under protection. She wanted to move away if there wasn’t a break in Dad’s case soon. “This is no way to live,” she had told Dad. “It’s not fair to any of us.” The town of Falmouth also wanted us to move; the selectmen had offered to pay to help us relocate, which really got Dad steaming mad. “They’ll spend money to send us somewhere else but they won’t spend money on the case,” he wrote in his notebook. “They want to make us disappear.” If we did want to move, the town had collected over fifteen thousand dollars—most of it donations from the townspeople—that would be ours for a down payment on a new house. The police department would sell our house for us after we left, and all tracks would be covered. No one would know where we had gone.
