chapter 18

JOHN

DON Price, two guards, and Polly and I made the trip back to the Cape with all my new equipment. I was due for checkups every three days in Boston, so although it would be a lot of traveling, it would be worth it just to get home.

Don was cheerful on the trip, talking about how my security detail was the best job going, and everyone in the department wanted to sign up for it. “No traffic or pissed-off tourists to deal with. Time-and-a-half payscale.” I had a small pad with me and wrote, “Sounds like my shooting will fatten the wallets of a lot of cops/friends.” Polly read it off to him and they both laughed.

I looked out the window, watching the tranquil cranberry bogs pass by. As happy as I was to be going home, I could feel anger welling up inside me as we crossed the Bourne Bridge. I was returning a different man. I couldn’t escape it; there were too many reminders. The fact that I couldn’t talk. The tube sticking out of my stomach, the hole in my throat. I didn’t want to see my face. Look what they did to me—that was all I could think when I saw my reflection. I can’t wait to get those bastards.

The kids were thrilled that I was home, though it meant tighter security for them. A sniper was added to the security detail, and he took up position on top of the house, right over the boys’ room. “No way,” Polly said. “Tell that guy to get down. If his gun goes off by mistake or something . . . “

I wanted to point out that the chances of him misfiring, of a shot going through the roof and somehow finding one of our sons was pretty slim, but she had been through a lot and it was the least I could do. We asked him to move to the other side of the roof.

Don was right about the guard detail—most of the guys watching the house were friends of mine, and those first few days it probably felt more like a party than a job. Everybody came by to visit and pay respects. One guy, I think it was Paul Carreiro, pointed out that while some cops on the force had been retired early due to physical ailments and injuries—bad backs and the like—no one had ever been shot like I was. “You’ll be the first Falmouth cop to retire with a gunshot wound,” he told me. The comment hit me hard. I hadn’t really thought too much about the future, but now it had become obvious that I couldn’t be a cop anymore. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have assumed that I would work again. Thirty-six seemed young to retire, for that part of my life to be over, but it was.

Friends kept things light; no one mentioned the investigation when I first got home. I didn’t realize how careful everyone was being around me until somebody slipped up and mentioned that Chief Ferreira had filed for early retirement due to some heart condition (news to me). He’d put in his paperwork the week after my shooting and would be gone by the end of the year. Clearly he wanted out, and pronto.

“Polly sure ripped him a new one when he came by here,” Rick Smith said, and several fellow officers clinked beer cans in agreement. “Good riddance,” someone said.

I wrote Rick a note: “He was here?”

“Polly didn’t tell you?” he asked. “He was here all right, and he probably won’t ever be back. I don’t know what she said to him, but we could hear her yelling all the way out the driveway.”

“John, he came out of your house so red, he didn’t say another word. Just got in his cruiser and took off,” Paul Carreiro added.

I would excuse myself every couple of hours to go into our back bedroom and use the suction machine, with Polly’s help. The machine was a little loud, but so far the kids hadn’t really noticed it. We kept it covered with a towel on the floor on the other side of the bed, out of sight. That afternoon, when Polly was helping me use the suction, I wrote her a note, asking her about the chief’s visit. “Chief F. came by? When? What happened?”

“I didn’t want to tell you when you were in the hospital,” Polly started, “but yeah, he came by one afternoon, after I brought the kids home. Came in here telling me that he knew just how I felt, because he’d had a car go up in flames in his driveway years ago, and he knew it was Meyer who did it.” Polly stopped for a second and focused on the gauze and tape she was putting back over my trachea hole. “I told him that if he had the balls to suggest that having a car burn in your driveway is anything like having your husband get his face shot off, that he better goddamn rethink things,” she said.

I could tell she was getting mad. “And I told him what I thought of how he’s running that police department, and your investigation. I don’t remember what else I said.” She looked like she was going to cry. “I’m sorry, but that man just made me so mad! How dare he come by here with that sob story, with you still in the hospital. I mean, who does he think he is? What a bastard.”

If I could have smiled, I would have. I was so proud of her for standing up to him. We’d all been cowards for so long, doing what we were told, not writing tickets to certain connected people, backing down to Meyer and his city contracts, his connections, his threats. I was glad to see my wife fight back. Maybe I wasn’t so alone in this after all.

The local papers and even the Boston papers had been having a heyday with my story; a week didn’t go by without an update. An article had run in the local paper when Polly and the kids got home, announcing a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for any information about my shooting. So far a sixteen-man investigation unit made up of state and local cops hadn’t turned up any leads—no one wanted to talk, and without any ballistic evidence, they had nothing legal to go on except for my word that Meyer wanted me dead.

The two detectives assigned to my case stopped by the house shortly after I got back from the hospital. Detective Sergeant Curt Reaves and Detective Charles Dimatto. I knew both of these guys, though not that well. They had no luck tracking down Meyer’s missing wife, Brenda. Also didn’t have a lot of luck finding the guy who shot Jeff Flanagan with a shotgun then dumped his body in the bogs across from the Meyer compound. So I wasn’t expecting too much.

“We’ve been questioning owners of registered white VWs; so far nothing,” Reaves told me. The night I was shot, I’d seen a white VW turning into Pinecrest Beach Drive. The white VW must have been a little bit ahead of me on the road that night, and my theory is that the shooters thought that VW Bug was mine. They had probably planned to pull out into the road in front of me, block my car, and then shoot me good while my car was blocked and I couldn’t get away. So when this car comes down the road at just about the right time, looking like mine, they almost pull out in front of that one. But the guy in the white VW goes to turn on Pinecrest Beach instead—they realize it’s the wrong car, so they back down. Then here I come down the street, but my car is now green, thanks to Polly’s and the kids’ paint job that afternoon. They let me drive by—mistaken identity number two—then realize it’s me and follow. They have to pull up alongside me to shoot, and their aim isn’t as good. By this time, the guy in the white VW is probably long gone, down Pinecrest and on his way to wherever.

The detectives want to talk to this guy in the white VW and see if he remembers anything about the blue car, the people in it. I want to talk to this guy because I want to shake his hand. If they did mistake his car for mine and it bought me some time, then I owed him my life.

The detectives keep asking me over and over again what I remember about the blue car, but my memory of the night is full of holes. “How would you feel about undergoing hypnosis?” Dimatto asks me. “Might help you to remember something—a plate number or something distinctive about the car.” I’m a cop, so I’m pretty good at eyeing someone’s plates and remembering the numbers. If they get the plate numbers out of me under hypnosis, then we’ve got a lead. I’m game, though I figure the whole hypnosis thing is just treading water—to help them look like they’re doing something on my case when really they’re just wasting time. I’m pretty sure I know who wanted me dead, but these two guys aren’t about to go there.

From what I’m told, Meyer’s lawyered up and won’t talk to anybody, and without a motive, the detectives feel like they can’t question him. I was about to go to court to testify against his brother, James Meyer, on a pretty serious charge. Guess that’s not a direct enough motive for them. “But we’re interviewing everyone you’ve arrested in the past few months,” Reaves tells me.

“There are a lot,” Dimatto adds with a grin. “You were a pretty busy guy, Busby.”

I think, Just doing my job. But these guys wouldn’t get that. They’re too busy covering their own asses to actually get shit done in this town. When they leave, I’m so angry I start pacing the house. It’s time for the kids to come home from school, and I should be thrilled to see them, but these bastards have got me so worked up I can’t see straight.

Polly tried to calm me down. “Just sit for a minute. It’s time to do a feeding, so let’s get that done before the kids get off the bus.” She knew me and knew just what I was thinking. I knew I was going to have to take care of this myself, but seeing the sorry state of this noninvestigation just pissed me off. While she helped me draw the fluid out through my GI tube, she tried to talk some sense into me. “You just got home, you’re with your family now, please, please, please don’t do anything stupid. Let’s just get you better; that’s your focus right now.”

But watching her mix the formula for my next meal made me seethe. Look what they’ve done to me. Just look at what they’ve done to me.