Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

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 that 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.