chapter 26
JOHN
THE day after Christmas, I checked into Mass General to have my second major surgery. This time they wanted to remove the pellet from the sinus cavity under my eye—something that had been lodged there since I was shot but was too difficult to remove earlier. They would also insert a thin steel rod to replace my jawbone and transplant bone cells from my hip—called osteoblasts—into the space where the bone was missing.
The surgeons basically drilled a hole into the area of my pelvis called the iliac crest, removed a section of marrow, and transferred it up into my face, where it would hopefully grow and replace the missing pieces of bone. I was prepared for the surgery to be extremely painful, but the marrow extraction from my pelvis hurt almost more than being shot did.
When I woke up after the surgery, my right hip hurt like hell and an area on my right thigh—over a foot long and at least half a foot wide—had gone numb. I called it the Dead Zone. Collateral damage of the surgery and couldn’t be helped, I guess. My head also started hurting—not just my jaw where they had gone in with the steel bars and the marrow, but my whole skull. All in all, I was in for a good three days of unreal pain. The medication they were giving me usually wore off about an hour before I was due for more, making for miserable in-between time.
I ended up on a different floor of the hospital this visit, and for some reason—maybe because of the holidays—the place was overbooked and understaffed. Overnight, there was just one RN and two LPNs for fourteen patients. I was in a four-bed ward with my guards standing outside the door—Jack Coughlin, Charlie Day, Mitch Morgan, Paul Stone, and Jim Fagan; one guard at a time around the clock from December 26 to January 4.
Mitch Morgan was on guard duty on New Year’s Eve, and we watched the Boston fireworks go off from the roof of the hospital. Ironically, it was the best seat I’d ever had for those fireworks, and I saw the city of Boston in a whole new light. That night, I got some pain meds around 1:00 a.m. and went to sleep. I was awake when the meds wore off around 4:00 a.m., waiting for that long hour to pass until I’d get my next dose of happy juice and go back to la-la land. During that hour, I got to thinking about Job in the Bible and all the things that God put him through. Job went through a living hell, but no one ever shot him, so by my reasoning he got off pretty easy.
Right around the time I woke up, the nurses brought in an old man. He was a dermatology patient, but the hospital didn’t have any rooms left on that floor, so we got blessed with him. He had a skin rash, and no matter what the nurses tried he was uncomfortable. He was moaning and groaning that everything hurt. “No, no, I can’t lie on my side. No, not on my back. Oh no, my stomach hurts too much. I can’t sit in the chair, my ass is killing me. Oh, now my elbows hurt, the bottoms of my feet, my legs, my legs.” After about forty-five minutes of hearing this guy complain, I waved over one of the LPNs and wrote her a note: “Please bring a sleeping pill.” When she got back with the pill, I wrote: “Please shove it down his throat—NOW” and pointed at the rash man. Around 5:00 a.m. they took him off somewhere, right around the time I got my next dose of painkillers. I was in la-la land already and couldn’t care less. Good-bye rash man, good-bye pain . . . for now.
Before the surgery, I had graduated to blender living and feeding myself with my syringe and a big bowl full of whatever. It wasn’t a pretty sight and one I didn’t particularly want to do in front of the kids or company. It was Polly who convinced me that since this was the way I’d be eating for the next few years, I should treat it as my normal life and get on with it. So I started sitting at the kitchen table at mealtimes with my blender full of whatever the others were having and tried to get over the awkwardness. My favorite meal was lunch, when everyone was out. I’d whip up a milkshake with lots of ice cream, eggs, and fruit. I’d consume the forty or so ounces and feel quite satiated. I wasn’t gaining anything, but at least I wasn’t losing—I was still about twenty-five pounds underweight. In the hospital, I wanted to stay on a blended diet to avoid having the feeding tube reinserted, but they kept bringing me soft foods that they thought I could eat with the syringe. I kept trying to tell them that I just wanted them to take a meal, throw it into the blender, and bring me what was left—that’s what I ate at home. But the nurses didn’t have a blender, and they didn’t seem to think it was a good idea to grind up the Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes that everyone else was eating and bring it to me in liquid form. Instead, I got by on Cream of Wheat and vanilla ice cream dissolved in milk for the week, but I lost about ten pounds that I really couldn’t afford to lose.
During this hospital stay I met a young man from Dennis, on the Cape, seventeen years old. He had a severe case of Crohn’s disease. He had a TNA (total nutrient admixture) given through a central line into his superior vena cava to keep him fed. He’d heard about what happened to me and had a case of hero worship. Wanted to spend all his time with me and the guys guarding me. A nice youngster. We were both quietly starving—me because they wouldn’t give me the right type of foods and him because they couldn’t give him enough. I was able to leave Mass General a day early to avoid a predicted snowstorm, and I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to him. I’ve no idea how he made out. On the way home, thinking about him and hoping that he’d have some kind of a life, it hit me that he was the same age as Jeff Flanagan—the kid whose body was found in the bogs across from Meyer’s house. The one who had been shot execution style with a shotgun. This kid in the hospital seemed so young and naive, not quite a man yet. Christ, seventeen years old—both of them had their whole lives ahead of them. It bothered me to make the connection.
When I got home, it was a brand-new year. Nearly four months had passed since I’d been shot. There was an eight-foot-tall, stockade-style fence up around the house that would be wired with an alarm system. This was for our protection, but it was also to save the town money. Falmouth was going into debt trying to keep me safe; it couldn’t afford to have two cops on duty guarding our house around the clock. A fund had been started in my name, and local businesses and residents alike had been sending in money and their well wishes. This money was collected under the guise of “helping” the Busby family, but it would eventually be pooled and used to relocate us from Falmouth to an undisclosed location—a cheaper alternative to the constant protective services.
As soon as I was well enough, Polly and I were taken to a kennel where specialty dogs were trained—police dogs, seeing-eye, search hounds, etc. The first one they showed us was a Rottweiler. As we walked by the cage, the dog charged at us in his pen, and I saw the bar that held his door shut actually start to bend. He was like a bad nightmare. “There is no way that dog is coming anywhere near my children,” Polly said.
Then they took us to meet a large-chested German shepherd named Max, who weighed in at about a hundred and twenty pounds. The woman who had trained him put him through his paces to show us what he could do. He could climb a ladder just as nimbly as a cat, walk a beam like a gymnast, then turn and attack a guy in a padded suit like he was going to eat him for lunch. This dog could go from sweet and eager to please to vicious attack dog in about two seconds flat. I liked him right away, and he seemed to like me. Best of all, he had been trained to follow hand signals, not just verbal commands, an important factor since I couldn’t talk.
I went to the training center every day for about a week to work with the dog trainer and Max. He would become my dog and listen only to me. The trainer reminded me constantly that he was not a pet; he could not come into my house or play with my children. During one training session, they put a steak down in front of Max, and he never took his eyes off of me. He wouldn’t so much as look at it until I signaled him that he could.
After a week of training, we brought Max home to live with us. A couple of fellow officers had built him a big doghouse outside, which Cylin had outfitted with some old blankets and pillows to keep him warm at night.
I continued to work with Max every day. He was an amazing dog—a true friend, smart as hell, and he never once faltered. But as soon as we got him home, it became clear that our family dog, a little old beagle named Tigger, didn’t really feel the same love for Max. She was terrified of him and didn’t even want to go outside anymore. She started peeing in the house, especially whenever she heard Max barking outside. One day Tig was looking out the back door when Max jumped up on the stairs, startling her. Tig turned to run in the other direction so fast she pulled something in her hip and could barely walk for days, dragging her hind legs. After about a week with both Max and Tigger, it became clear that we were giving our family pet a nervous breakdown. But getting rid of Max just wasn’t an option, so I called up my sister, Bernadette, in Maine to see if she could take Tig. Bee and her husband, Dale, were Kelly’s parents, and lived up in Belgrade, a beautiful town situated on a series of lakes—our favorite summer vacation spot. Bee was more than happy to take Tigger for us. This was also about the time that Polly and I decided that Kelly should leave us too. She had been a huge help, and it was nice to have her around, but it felt wrong to have my nineteen-year-old niece subjected to the prison we were now living in. An eight-foot fence, a vicious dog, no visitors besides cops, the constant threat that someone might want to do harm to us. Why would anyone want to live like that? We sat her down one night and explained that she needed to get on with her life. Her brother Lucky came to get her and also took Tigger with him. To say the kids were devastated by this double loss would be a great understatement.
While I was in the hospital right after Christmas, Polly had taken our friend Winny’s advice and brought the kids in to see the psychiatrist whom I had visited. They went in as a group, and Polly sat outside. After about an hour, he called Polly in and sent the kids out. What he told her was pretty disturbing. Their answer to every question was that things were “fine” and that everything was “okay.” They were not scared; they were not getting into trouble at school. They were not bothered by the police protection, the fence, the dog, the guns. “They’ve become very adept at deception,” the doctor pointed out. “I don’t know if they are just trying to deceive me, or if they have actually convinced themselves of this, but the picture they paint of your home life is not accurate; it just can’t be. As a rule, we don’t like to see children, especially this young, suppressing such strong emotions. Or becoming this good at deception. Either way, it’s not good for their mental health.”
Polly told him that we were thinking about moving to a safer place, to an undisclosed location where we could all live normally again. We were just waiting to see if there would be a break in the case, give it a few more months. “I would encourage you to relocate sooner rather than later,” the doctor said. “I don’t know how much more your family can take under these conditions.”
Polly was horrified. “Maybe we should just pack up and go, disappear,” she told me one night. But she was in the middle of her final year of nursing school, the kids were halfway through with school. Maybe we hadn’t given the investigation enough time. I didn’t have very high hopes, but it had been just four months. Maybe they would get some sort of lead and be able to arrest someone, make our lives safe again.
“If nothing happens by the time I graduate in May,” Polly said, “then we are gone.”
I agreed. I was still angry, especially hearing about how my shooting was now affecting the kids. But the urgency of my revenge was fading. There was no rush. If the detectives couldn’t do their job, then I would. It was as simple as that. I had no job to go back to, no life waiting for me. I had nothing but years and years of surgery stretching out in front of me. The way I was looking at it, I had nothing but time.