Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

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 be 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.”