church.
The next morning when we got up, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table and she looked fine. She had taken a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans that she borrowed from Aunt Kate. She hadn’t had a nervous breakdown! I couldn’t wait for the chance to tell Lauren that she had been wrong.
I went into the den while everyone else was still eating breakfast and got out some art supplies to make another card for Dad. I pictured the man lying in the hospital bed and how he had written “I love you.” I drew a big red heart, then put a happy face on it and arms and legs. Then I added some running shoes and some flowing hair. It was a jogging heart. I thought it was pretty creative, especially since Dad liked to go jogging. “I love you, too,” I wrote over the heart. “Get well soon,” I wrote under it.
JOHN
THE kids came for a visit and were terrified of me. Eric was stone-faced the whole ten minutes, Cee cried, Shawn couldn’t even stay in the room and instead ran up and down the hallway until Joe grabbed him. I could tell from the look on Joe’s face that there was no way he would bring his daughters here to see me; he seemed to think the whole thing was a huge mistake. But Polly had been saying that the kids thought I was dead, or about to die, and she wanted them to see that wasn’t the case. I don’t know if her plan worked exactly; now the three of them were in shock after seeing their dear old dad hooked up like Frankenstein. I didn’t expect they’d be back anytime soon.
About five days after the shooting, the pain level dropped markedly. I was suddenly more aware, could stay awake for longer periods, understand what people were saying, and actually remember conversations. My blood oxygen level was returningto normal after all the blood I’d lost, and that was helping me to get my bearings and feel more like myself.
Around this time I had a visit from Joe Urcini, a guy I went to high school with, who was working in the ballistics lab of the Mass State Police. He came in one afternoon and held up a small plastic bag that contained a shotgun round. “Dug this out of the house across the street from where you were shot,” Joe explained. The slugs went through me, out the passenger side of the car, and straight into the side of a house across the street.
“It’s double-O,” Joe went on. “Impossible to trace. I’m sorry, John.” He looked pretty glum, but I didn’t need ballistic evidence to know whose weapon of choice that was.
A few years back, I’d heard a story from a fellow officer—a good buddy of mine, someone I trusted. He was in the east on the four to one shift one night and had picked up a kid—around sixteen or seventeen years old—for loitering. He was talking to the kid in the cruiser when a truck from Ray’s garbage company rolled by. Suddenly, the kid hit the floor, hiding under the dash, scared shitless. My buddy wanted to know what was up. The kid told him that he was afraid of Ray and said that if Ray got his hands on him, he would be dead. “Did he threaten you?” my friend asked. The kid said yes, then said no, and generally looked terrified. He probably knew that Meyer had some guys on the police force under his sway, and wondered if this cop could even be trusted. Finally the kid admitted that he had just heard some stuff through the grapevine, innuendo, that Meyer didn’t likehim. My friend told the kid to either get things straightened out with Ray or split to somewhere else, somewhere he’d be safe. But the kid did neither and was found floating facedown in the cranberry bogs across the street from Meyer’s house not long after.
The kid’s name was Jeff Flanagan, and when his body was pulled out of the bogs, it appeared that he had been shot at point-blank range, execution-style. From the autopsy, it was clear that the bullets had entered his head at the right cheek and exited from his upper back, severing his spinal cord and killing him
The next morning when we got up, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table and she looked fine. She had taken a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans that she borrowed from Aunt Kate. She hadn’t had a nervous breakdown! I couldn’t wait for the chance to tell Lauren that she had been wrong.
I went into the den while everyone else was still eating breakfast and got out some art supplies to make another card for Dad. I pictured the man lying in the hospital bed and how he had written “I love you.” I drew a big red heart, then put a happy face on it and arms and legs. Then I added some running shoes and some flowing hair. It was a jogging heart. I thought it was pretty creative, especially since Dad liked to go jogging. “I love you, too,” I wrote over the heart. “Get well soon,” I wrote under it.
JOHN
THE kids came for a visit and were terrified of me. Eric was stone-faced the whole ten minutes, Cee cried, Shawn couldn’t even stay in the room and instead ran up and down the hallway until Joe grabbed him. I could tell from the look on Joe’s face that there was no way he would bring his daughters here to see me; he seemed to think the whole thing was a huge mistake. But Polly had been saying that the kids thought I was dead, or about to die, and she wanted them to see that wasn’t the case. I don’t know if her plan worked exactly; now the three of them were in shock after seeing their dear old dad hooked up like Frankenstein. I didn’t expect they’d be back anytime soon.
About five days after the shooting, the pain level dropped markedly. I was suddenly more aware, could stay awake for longer periods, understand what people were saying, and actually remember conversations. My blood oxygen level was returningto normal after all the blood I’d lost, and that was helping me to get my bearings and feel more like myself.
Around this time I had a visit from Joe Urcini, a guy I went to high school with, who was working in the ballistics lab of the Mass State Police. He came in one afternoon and held up a small plastic bag that contained a shotgun round. “Dug this out of the house across the street from where you were shot,” Joe explained. The slugs went through me, out the passenger side of the car, and straight into the side of a house across the street.
“It’s double-O,” Joe went on. “Impossible to trace. I’m sorry, John.” He looked pretty glum, but I didn’t need ballistic evidence to know whose weapon of choice that was.
A few years back, I’d heard a story from a fellow officer—a good buddy of mine, someone I trusted. He was in the east on the four to one shift one night and had picked up a kid—around sixteen or seventeen years old—for loitering. He was talking to the kid in the cruiser when a truck from Ray’s garbage company rolled by. Suddenly, the kid hit the floor, hiding under the dash, scared shitless. My buddy wanted to know what was up. The kid told him that he was afraid of Ray and said that if Ray got his hands on him, he would be dead. “Did he threaten you?” my friend asked. The kid said yes, then said no, and generally looked terrified. He probably knew that Meyer had some guys on the police force under his sway, and wondered if this cop could even be trusted. Finally the kid admitted that he had just heard some stuff through the grapevine, innuendo, that Meyer didn’t likehim. My friend told the kid to either get things straightened out with Ray or split to somewhere else, somewhere he’d be safe. But the kid did neither and was found floating facedown in the cranberry bogs across the street from Meyer’s house not long after.
The kid’s name was Jeff Flanagan, and when his body was pulled out of the bogs, it appeared that he had been shot at point-blank range, execution-style. From the autopsy, it was clear that the bullets had entered his head at the right cheek and exited from his upper back, severing his spinal cord and killing him
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