Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

Jankle was incredulous. “Trying to kill you? Trying to fucking kill you? I tried protecting you. I leaked word that the fucking broad with the mayor stumbled across the files that said where you were. I did that so you’d know what to do with her before she started yammering to the wrong people.”

Harkins replied, “I didn’t kill her.”

“No shit. I decided you’d fuck it all up, that you were out of practice, that you’re getting fat and lazy on the run. So I decided to do it myself.”

I could sense Harkins’s arm nearly go limp as he processed that which he was just told. I, too, was floored. Tom Jankle, my source, was also Hilary’s killer, because he didn’t trust that the scenario that he had intricately mapped out would be properly carried out. I became so angry I wanted to grab Harkins’s gun and shoot Jankle dead right there amid the tall pines of an unknowing night.

“You’re saying my father didn’t kill her?”

“He doesn’t have the balls. I fucking did it — for you.”

“You did it for yourself,” Harkins said, softer now. “You should have told me. I unloaded those two paintings to throw this asshole off the trail.” He was, I believe, referring to me. Friends, allies, are tough to find these days.

These revelations were followed by a protracted silence, not broken until Harkins said, “And now you’re telling me that if I kill him”—he shook the gun against my skin as he said this—“you’ll let me walk away?”

“I will.”

I felt Harkins become so taut that the barrel of the gun was chattering against the side of my head, as if it were shivering. He was getting ready to kill me. In a world in which I knew too little else, this I understood as fact.

I didn’t think. I didn’t process. I didn’t foresee, calculate, devise, or anything else. What I did instead was slam my body directly into Toby Harkins, at once pushing him, then driving my shoulders hard into his ribs and stomach like a sophomore freak on the Oklahoma University offensive line. I felt a gush of breath rush out of him. I toppled over him as he fell. And then I heard the nearby sound of a gunshot — his, followed by another one a little farther away.

Lying on the cold ground, I immediately, frantically, felt my chest, my head, my limbs, for the sensation of warm blood. Nothing. I looked at Harkins, sprawled out beside me. He was dazed, but apparently uninjured. The gun was no longer in either of his hands, but I couldn’t see it on the dark ground. I slammed my fist into his nose, not out of vengeance, but to keep him on the ground.

I felt around for the gun, but still no sign, so I crawled slowly toward the base of a tree. The light that had been trained on us a moment ago was now lying on the ground, pointing arbitrarily toward an inconsequential patch of woods. I wondered if Jankle had dropped it and fled. I was wondering this, as a matter of fact, when I heard muffled voices followed by the sickening thud of bone hitting flesh.

I moved cautiously in the direction of the abandoned light. When I was but a few feet away, off to the side, I saw Jankle in silhouette on his knees, his hands wrapped around a wounded thigh. About three feet away was the massive form of Hank Sweeney, gripping a gun that was trained directly on Jankle.

I heard Jankle seethe, “I saved your fucking ass years ago, saved your fucking life, and this is what you do to pay me back.”

Sweeney said, “You gave me no damned choice.”

He paused and added, “And you give me no choice now.”

I heard a clicking sound, as if Sweeney was getting ready to fire again. I don’t think he or Jankle knew I was there within earshot and eyeshot, not to mention gunshot. So I called out, “Hank, he’s not worth it.”

Hank looked over at me, as if shaken from a reverie. “Jack,” he said, “you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Where’s Harkins?”

“Unconscious.”

“I shot Jankle in the leg. I thought he had killed you.”

“Put the gun down, Hank.”

Jankle said, “Shoot him, Sweeney. You can’t kill me, and I’m not going down without taking you with me.”

I saw Jankle’s weapon on the ground between us, out of his reach. I regarded Hank for a long moment. He spent a lifetime putting away the city’s most heinous criminals, always with what I believed to be an unwavering sense of wrong from right. But something, somewhere, had gone terribly awry, and the look on his face in the dark of this unfathomable night said he didn’t know how to get back on the right side of life.

I kept walking. Hank kept pointing. Jankle remained on the ground with a foul look on his face.

“Hank, hand me the gun,” I said.

Now it was his arm that was quivering. Sweat was rolling down his shiny face. The expression in his eyes told me he was about to shoot, and if he did, that would mean that he either had to kill me next, or know that he would be splashed across the front page of the next day’s Record as the retired Boston homicide detective who gunned down a once-respected federal agent. There’s more than bad publicity in that; there’s the death penalty.

“Hand me the damned gun, Hank. Do the right thing. He’s not worth it. You are.”

Finally, he looked at me, the gun still pointed at Jankle’s head. Then he dropped his arm in one gradual motion, took the gun in his other hand, and turned it over to me, handle first. As he did this, Jankle skidded along the ground toward his own firearm. Hank took two strides toward him and kicked him so hard in the face that his jaw would forever be coming out of the top of his head. Agent Tom Jankle, to say the least, was out cold.

Hank said to me softly, his voice raspy again, “I’m one of those cops that Jankle flipped. It’s a shame I’ve lived with ever since.”

Standing just a few feet from a man I would consider one of my closest friends, I said, “What did you mean, that he gave you no choice?”

“I thought I had Harkins cold in the Gardner theft. Jankle came to me and said if I pursued it, that I should be very worried about the health of my wife and my son.”

He paused here, looking down through the dark. “So I didn’t say anything. Next thing you know, I get a promotion. The whole thing kind of goes away. My wife and boy are fine. I put it in the back of my mind, but not really. You’re never entirely done with it. I’m supposed to enforce the law, not break it.”

And I’m supposed to write stories, not cause them, pursue the truth, not obscure it. But that’s what had happened on the complicated road to reason.

“You just saved my life. If you can forget about it, so can I,” I said.

He smiled and replied, “Let’s both give it a try.”

I nodded at Jankle’s form sprawled out across a collection of broken branches and puffy weeds. “He alive?” I asked.

Sweeney crouched down and put his finger under Jankle’s nose. “Yep.”

We walked across the clearing, into the shallow woods, to where Toby Harkins lay. But in what I thought was the space, there was only tamped down weeds. I ran and grabbed the lamp and flashed it around, but saw nothing.

“He’s gone,” Hank said.

“Brace yourself,” I said quietly. Then I hollered, “We need some help back here.”

Flashlights shone through the woods. Men yelled back. I called out, “Toby Harkins has escaped. Look for Harkins.”

I turned to Hank and asked, “Where are we, anyway?”

“At the truth,” he said, nodding knowingly, draping his arm over my shoulder.

Indeed, we were. It took a long time getting there, but it was a damned nice place to be.

Friday, October 3

It was one of those remarkable autumn days when summer takes a curtain call amid the brightly colored leaves and the chilly nights, as if the entire season has stepped back out of the dugout and waved to the crowd in the way that Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski never did or would.