Dead Line

Chapter Nine

She answered the phone on the first ring with an abrupt, “Yeah,” though given the situation, the grieving, the fear, the unknown, I excused her obvious and understandable lack of etiquette.

“This is Jack Flynn,” I said, trying to sound calm, reassuring, more confident than I was in the bathroom when faced with the prospect of a Sunbeam iron across the upside of my handsome head.

“I know,” she replied. Her voice was taut. She wasn’t being rude, just concise, as if she didn’t have the emotional capacity just then to say much more.

I was standing on St. James Street, my cell phone planted against my left ear, pacing back and forth along the brick façade of the University Club. She was on a pay phone at an undisclosed location, though I immediately knew she was hard by a busy street because of the noise from the loud traffic that threatened to overwhelm her voice.

“Tell me your name, who you are, and what I can do for you,” I said, still trying to sound confident and competent, not always an easy trick to pull off, especially in my current state.

She hesitated on the other end of the phone. I heard the revving engine of a truck gaining speed as it passed her, telling me that she was at an intersection, probably with a traffic light. I heard the beep of a thin horn, like on one of those tinny Asian imports that come from countries like Korea that you associate more with madmen than cars. I heard muffled voices in the near background, perhaps people at the same bank of pay phones.

“I’m being followed,” she said, responding to precisely none of my questions. She threw that line out there as if it were a dart, simple, direct, and more than anything else, pointed.

“How do you know?”

“I was so shaken after I saw you in the apartment that I pulled over on Beacon Street because I thought I was having an anxiety attack. I could barely see. I was hyperventilating. And this car that was behind me pulled over a little ways in front of me. When I pulled out, the car pulled out. So I went around the block, like they do in the movies, just drove a nonsensical route, and he followed me all the way.”

“Where are you now, and is he still following you?”

“I don’t know. I’m at a pay phone, obviously. I double-parked in the street. I haven’t seen his car, but I assume he’s out here somewhere. I’m just trying to stay around other people so he can’t get to me.”

I tried asking the most important question again in the same exact way. No sense in playing tricks on her: “I need to know, where are you now?”

“I told you, at a pay phone, in Boston. I can’t tell you any more. I’m too afraid.”

And at that moment, she truly sounded it, her voice becoming even more strained with fear, that fear nearly spilling over into a fit of emotion.

I said, trying to sound less like the inquisitive, opportunistic reporter that I am and more like the stable presence that I can occasionally be, “I want to help you. You tell me who you are.”

Again, silence from the other end, but this time not the result of her putting herself back together, but rather gauging whether it would be wise to provide me, a newspaper reporter, with this kind of information. That silence rounded the corner toward an eternity before she said, “I’m Hilary’s sister, Maggie.” And she left it at that.

I said, “If you feel threatened, why don’t you go to the authorities — the police or the FBI or somebody?” Truth is, I’d rather have her come to me, because once she was in the hands of detectives, I’d probably lost any shot at getting any decent information out of her. Police disdain the same public realm that I thrive in, for a lot of logical reasons, and some rather illogical ones as well.

But the greater truth was, I felt like I’d already caused the death of her sister, and wasn’t exactly of the mood or mind to be cavalier with her life next. So I added, “They could protect you.”

She laughed a rueful laugh, her mouth pressed hard against the phone, and replied, “Yeah, just like they did with Hil.”

I calculated that last comment in a gathering silence. Then I heard bells go off, not around me, not on the phone, but in my own head, like the ceremonial opening ring of the New York Stock Exchange. Information was starting to come in.

“Tell me what you mean by that,” I said, trying to maintain the veneer of control.

As she began to reply, an ambulance hurtled toward me on Stuart Street, it’s blaring siren echoing off the ancient stone buildings and smacking against the sleek glass side of the John Hancock Tower. She was talking, but I couldn’t hear her, so I said, trying to control my frustration, “Hold on, I can’t get what you’re saying.” Then I added, “Is there any chance we can just get together?”

Again, I heard her voice in the phone, but not the words formed by it. At that moment, the Boston Emergency Medical Services ambulance streamed past me and took a right on Trinity Place, heading toward Copley Square. As the blare faded, I said to her, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear a word you were saying.”

And then I heard it again, the siren, and angrily looked down the street to see if another one was on the way, or perhaps a fire truck racing to the scene of a disastrous crash. But my street was barren now — no ambulance, no fire truck, not even any traffic, really.

The siren, I realized, was coming through the other end of the phone. Unless my ears and all that empty space between them were playing tricks on me, Maggie Kane was standing somewhere in Copley Square, less than a few hundred yards from where I was then.

So with the phone up to my ear, I began walking, first tentatively, then quickly. I moved fast around the corner, down Trinity Place toward the square, somewhere between a stride and a jog. Still, I heard the ambulance in the phone, and as I got closer to Trinity Church, the live blare filled my other ear as well. Any reporter worth the ink in their Bic Click has been accused of being an ambulance chaser at some point in their illustrious career; I will say, though, I don’t think even the best of them has taken the concept quite this literally.

But Maggie Kane was around here. She was near me, and I needed to find her.

I arrived on the grassy stretch of the Copley Square park, panting slightly like Baker might and scanning intently around in search of any public phones. Because of the sirens, Maggie couldn’t speak, or if she did, I couldn’t hear her. The sounds of the ambulance faded, both in the phone and in my open ear, and I looked across the park, onto Boylston Street, and saw the tail end of the actual vehicle vanish down the block. I wonder if she heard what I heard in the phone, if she put sound and sound together and came up with the possibility of discovery.

I said to her, trying to catch my breath, “Look, Maggie, I really want to help you, but I can’t if you insist on hiding from me.”

She replied, in a voice even more shell-shocked than before, “Jack, I don’t know what to do.” And then there was silence — actual silence, without so much as the siren, which was fine, because it provided the opportunity for exploration. I set off across the park in search of a pay phone and the woman on it.

“She’s dead,” she said, her words now dissolving into tears. “Hil’s dead. Someone killed her. Now they might kill me.”

“I can help you,” I said. The problem with pay phones is they tend to fade into the cityscape. We tend to just assimilate them, overlook them, see right through them.

I crossed Boylston Street and jogged east along the wide sidewalk, past the Copy Cop, the CVS, the various financial institutions with nonsensically spelled and descriptively meaningless names like BancNorth. I kept my mouth shut tight and breathed only through my nose so she wouldn’t hear me straining. And I searched, as hard as my eyes would allow me, boring into the buildings and the crystal clear autumn air that marked another September afternoon.

I saw a homeless man, gray-haired and bearded, pushing a grocery cart filled with plastic bags of beer cans. I saw men by the dozens in business suits returning from another expense account lunch. I saw women young and old darting about during a lunch hour filled with the routine administration of their busy and sometimes difficult lives. But no Maggie Kane.

“How am I supposed to trust anyone?” she asked. She asked this sincerely, like she wanted an answer, needed an answer, before we could consummate any relationship or deal.

I said, “You need to tell me who your sister trusted. That will help us find out who killed her.”

My eyes raced around the sidewalk, even as I stood frozen in silent agony. More men and women in suits. More kids in loose jeans. Another homeless guy, this one lugging a torn trash bag over his right shoulder.

And then I saw it. No, not Maggie Kane. That would be too easy, too ordinary. I could have just walked up to her and said, “Maggie, hi, it’s Jack. We met at your sister’s place. Yeah, that’s right, in the bathroom. I’d really like to help you.” We could have walked up the street to the Starbucks, had ourselves a nice cup of coffee, maybe some biscotti, and she could have explained to me in minute detail all that she knew about her sister’s life and what she suspected was the cause of her death, and I could then have taken that information and put it on the front page of the next day’s Record and brought an end to the tragedy that was overwhelming my otherwise perfectly pleasant career.

But no, it wasn’t her that I saw, not at first, anyway. What I saw was a dark green sedan double-parked on the north side of Boylston Street. I saw it because the rear driver’s-side window was rolled down, and a metal object barely protruding from it caught the afternoon sun in such a way that the gleam seemed to poke me in the eye. I realized it was some sort of scope, and below the scope I saw the long, black barrel of a rifle, and I followed in the direction of the rifle, across the sidewalk, and saw nothing but passersby making their merry way to places unknown.

But beyond the sidewalk, I saw the shiny glass front of a store, a bagel store called Finagle-a-Bagel, to be more specific, and through the reflecting glass, I noticed the hazy outlines of a female form leaning on a wall with a telephone up to her ear. And thus I found Maggie Kane.

“I think I’m just going to run, to get the hell out of Boston for a while. Maybe I’ll call you from wherever I go.” That was her, still talking into the phone, having no idea of what was unfolding outside. The door to the store was propped open, which explained the street noise and the ambulance silence. There were a few customers flitting in and out. The situation, the scenario, the utter unlikelihood of a rifle here in Copley Square, of a woman talking to me on the verge of death, took a moment to register, and once it did, the next few seconds seemed to unfold in that proverbial slow motion, though rapidly so.

I yelled into the phone, “Duck, Maggie. Duck!” To emphasize that I wasn’t just some proselytizing member of the Audubon Society seeking to fill our ranks, I hollered, “Hit the floor!”

I don’t know if she followed orders or not, because the next thing I did was pull the phone away from my ear and fire it in the direction of the car. Now’s as good a time as any to relive the past, so I want to remind anyone and everyone that it was a scant few decades before that I pitched a no-hitter in Little League, and a talent that immense doesn’t fade all that fast. I’d also like to note that this wasn’t the first time I threw a telephone in what seemed to be a life or death situation. A few years before, in the Washington bureau of The Boston Record, I struck a derelict FBI agent named Kent Drinker in the wrist with a desk phone that had never before made such an important connection, but more on that topic some other time.

I watched the mobile phone scream through the twenty feet of afternoon air between me and that green car. I think I was still on the line with Maggie Kane when I made the throw, and the thought briefly occurred to me that the phone might end up inside the car, Maggie might fall to the ground in escape, the car might drive off, and I might get a cell phone bill for about five thousand Benjamins because no one on either end ever bothered to hang up. I’d like to see Peter Martin’s reaction to that.

Instead, the phone struck the scope dead-on, not to use that word too loosely here. I saw the gun twitch to the right. I heard it fire, the report thundering off the walls of the nearby buildings and echoing back onto the street. People screamed. Some ran; others dropped to the ground, everyone no doubt believing they were amid one of the biggest nightmares of modern America: the mass murder. Six dead, two injured, gunman commits suicide. Film at 11.

I glanced over at the store and saw that the bullet had taken out a plate glass window many feet to the right of where Maggie Kane had stood. I tore after the car, which was in the process of pulling back into traffic. I was running off the curb and into the street when the driver leaned on his horn and accelerated through the intersection. The image of me as roadkill flickered into my mind, and then out. I grabbed the last three figures off the license plate — JF1, as in Jack Flynn has the number one arm — and ran another thirty or so yards down Boylston Street until I couldn’t see the car anymore.

I jogged back to the bagel shop, sweating like a hog in heat by now. All the customers, all the staff, were gathered on the sidewalk, some in tears, others in small groups talking among themselves while they waited for the television cameras to arrive and make them famous, if only for the night. I walked through and among the groups, looking for Maggie, then around them, and then I scanned the sidewalk and park on the other side of the street, but saw nothing of consequence. I asked a few people if they saw a pretty woman with short blonde hair leave the scene, but no one had. When they realized I had no microphone or klieg lights, their interest seemed to wane significantly.

It was then that I heard the familiar ring of my cell phone and reflexively reached into my back pocket to answer it. But the ring came not from immediately behind me, but from a short distance in front. My phone, sitting in the gutter, was chiming, and I immediately thought of Maggie Kane, standing at a nearby pay phone, urgently trying to reach me.

I bolted toward the sound, saw my severely dented phone resting atop an empty, bleached-out Doritos bag, and answered it. I mean, I was on what Verizon calls the “Do Anything plan,” but I had no idea it allowed me to literally throw my phone around. God bless Japanese engineering.

“Finally, you pick the frick up.” It was the annoyed and annoying voice of Peter Martin. Let’s quickly review: I think I’m responsible for a woman’s death. I just saved another woman’s life. I chased a murderer down one of the main avenues of downtown Boston. And Peter Martin, sitting in his comfortable office over at the Record, is severely put out because I haven’t answered the phone every six minutes when he’s been on the other line.

I bit my tongue, and my lip, and the inside of my cheeks. Finally, I said, “I’ve had a few things going on.”

Martin replied, his tone now one of complete sincerity, “You’re going to want to get over here, and fast. There’s a hand-delivered package sitting at your desk, and if it’s what I think it is, all hell is about to break loose.”

“What? What is it?”

With that, the phone made some funny squawking sound, like two horses mating on a Wyoming ranch, and went completely dead. When I pressed the On button again, the battery fell loose in my hand. Goddamn Japanese engineering.

As the sound of sirens filled the air all over Copley Square, I stepped off the curb, flagged a cab, and headed for the newsroom.

I was alone, and so was Maggie Kane, and somewhere in the city, a killer was on the loose with a motive that I didn’t yet know.