Hank Sweeney, it’s important to note, had virtually disappeared. Last I saw of his light was a full minute earlier, before the shot was fired, when he was futilely searching the last envelopes in the postmarked bin. As I crawled along the gritty floor, my heart was heavy with failure. All my soaring optimism coming in was seeping out. I was pretty resigned that my new goal wasn’t finding the letter, which would have been the proof I needed for a story I hadn’t written. Rather, it was simply the three of us getting out of there alive.
And then came the crash. It was surprisingly close to me, a few yards ahead, a fierce, sharp collision, as if something had just been flung across the room. Immediately afterward, a gun discharged. It was so close that I could see the flash of light from the muzzle. I could smell the explosion. Then silence. I was flat on the floor, holding my breath to mute any sounds.
About twenty seconds later, I heard commotion about ten yards away, a strange voice yelling some indecipherable words, and then another gunshot, followed by a scream of agony. Out of the mayhem, Hank’s voice cut through the darkness. “Hit the lights,” he yelled.
I bolted for the door, the narrow band of my flashlight illuminating the way. I stumbled across one cluster of boxes, and then another. When I got to the wall, I felt frantically around for a switch, found several, and flicked them all upward. Immediately, the room was bathed in harsh light, revealing Hank Sweeney kneeling atop a middle-aged man sprawled haphazardly on the ground, his head pushed against some empty boxes, his left thigh oozing blood.
Hank looked hard at the guy and said, “Wait a minute, I know you.” He still had that smooth voice, though his next motion didn’t seem quite so calm. He raised his fist and cracked it down on the guy’s nose, causing a veritable explosion of blood. The man was actually reduced to tears as Hank called out, “Let’s go.”
Vinny Mongillo was already up and about, seemingly recovered from his close call. The three of us got to the back door in unison. Hank flicked the lights back off and we all filed outside. My cell phone said 11:27.
On the loading dock, I asked, “Who was that?”
Hank replied, “Goddamned police captain, one of the commissioner’s top yes-men. Maybe I should say henchmen. Seems like the commish has been going to extremes to block your story.”
As I let that little shard of information sink in, Mongillo asked, “No luck with the letter?”
I shook my head. Hank said, “We’ve got to give it up.” He pointed to a car turning from Clarendon Street into the alley and added, “The writing’s on the wall. We’ve got to get out of here.”
The writing’s on the wall.
This jarred something deep inside my head, or maybe it wasn’t that deep. Maybe it was something that had been precariously floating along the surface of my mind, something I couldn’t quite piece together.
All truths are easier to understand once they are discovered.
That was Paul Vasco, in his miserable little room on that miserable Friday that Edgar Sullivan died at the hands of a gunman in the Beacon Hill CVS, and I was just now starting to sense what Vasco meant.
You want to get it in writing, young man. That’s the best advice I can give you.
That gem, courtesy of the famous H. Gordon Thomas, pretty much summarized what I had been trying to do right here. But it occurred to me that I had the wrong execution of the right idea. It was as if I had just heard a clap of thunder in my brain.
I turned to Hank and all but yelled, “What’s the zip code of police headquarters?”
The car was pulling down the alley now, into a space in front of the bay.
Hank told me.
“Hold this person off,” I called out as I slipped back under the garage door.
I could hear Hank hissing, “Wait,” as I groped my way farther inside.
Once in, I flicked on my penlight, got myself to the row of canvas baskets, and found the one marked with the zip code at police headquarters. There were about a hundred envelopes inside, and I furiously picked up a stack and sorted through them, throwing the ones that I didn’t need onto the floor. No luck.
So I scooped out another stack. I couldn’t hear anyone at the door. I couldn’t hear anything at all but my own heavy breathing. And that breathing got a whole lot heavier when I came upon a plain white envelope with “Detective Mac Foley” typed in a familiar font. I tossed the rest of the mail back in the carrier and set out for the door.
I slammed into a desk, stopped for a moment to get my bearings, and shone my light across the room to determine an easy flow to the door.
Click.
That sound, though, stopped me cold. It occurred right in front of me, in an open area of the room unencumbered by furniture or tall baskets. I shone my light onto the floor, and about ten feet away, in my path toward freedom and what I strongly suspected was a magnificent story that no one else would ever have, that middle-aged man with the bloody thigh was aiming a handgun directly at the bridge of my handsome nose.
“Drop it,” I said. I had no authority to command this. Well, maybe moral authority, but not a whole lot else. I had no weapon. I had no easy hiding place. I didn’t even have the power of persuasion, because by the time I’d use it, I think I’d already be dead.
The man, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, was trembling as he held the trigger up around his eyes and took aim at my face. I had watched Hank Sweeney grab the guy’s gun, but apparently, like the perpetrator in the CVS, he was hiding another. Actually, I shone my light on his face and realized he was the same attacker as in CVS, a thought that didn’t exactly thrill me because it meant he had no compunction about killing.
“You don’t want to do that,” I said.
I said this mostly to buy time, to play out my options, to give Hank or Mongillo or the postal inspector or the Easter Bunny time to walk inside this goddamned dank post office and shoot this nutcase in the back of the head. Problem was, I didn’t see any of the above — and didn’t hear them, either.
The gunman, by the way, didn’t reply to my assertion. He just kept pointing, trying to get his bearings, shaking all the while.
I said, “I can help you with that wound. I can drive you to the hospital, drop you off at the emergency room, get you taken care of, and no one will ever know why you or I were here.”
Again, nothing.
I shone my light more directly on him, and noticed what his hesitance was in shooting me. He was slowly gathering his body, arduously lifting it upward against the pain of his own wound. He was obviously trying to position himself to be able to flee once the gunshot rocketed through the room and I lay dead on the floor. Sweat was pouring down his face as he tried to move, hampering his vision.
“Get that fucking light down,” he said, his Boston accent thick, his voice craggy and tough.
I pushed the light off to the side, and in the process saw the glint of a metal object on the desk that I had just slammed into. It was a letter opener, long and sharp, just sitting there for the taking.
So here’s what happened next. I sized up the gunman’s position, and then mine. I flicked my flashlight off, leapt over the desk, grabbed the handle of the letter opener, and flung it directly into his temple, kung-fu style, killing him instantly.
Well, all right, that’s what I was trying to do, anyway. Would have been good, even if I wasn’t.
Here’s what actually happened. I flicked off my flashlight. The split second I did that, he began firing, the bullets passing so close to my face and shoulders that I could hear them scream past in the air.
I dove for cover, paused for about ten seconds, picked a basket filled with mail up off the floor, and heaved it in his direction — one, then another after that, and still another. After the third one, the gunman groaned in agony. Suddenly the lights sprung to life in the room. Sweeney raced toward us with his weapon drawn. The perpetrator lay on the ground, still as a statue, his gun just out of reach of his hand. Sweeney approached frantically, kicked the gun farther away, lifted the guy’s head off the concrete, and announced, “He’s out cold. You must have hit him in the head with this basket.”