chapter 32

JOHN

SHAWN picked the state of Tennessee out of the hat. We knew where we were going now, a small town called Cookeville. Didn’t know the population, but it was small, about halfway between Nashville and Knoxville. The town’s claim to fame was that it was basically the perfect stopping point off the highway for a break if you were driving between those two cities. The money from the Busby fund would help us to relocate—it was enough for a down payment on a farm with some left over to rent a moving van.

The town of Falmouth offered to sell our house after we were gone—a hard sell; it was the infamous Busby house now and had an enormous fence around it. Not the most attractive piece of property on the Cape. Our phone number would be transferred over to Rick Smith’s house, and he would keep the recorder on it, on a separate line, to screen any unusual activity.Our identities would not be changed, but we would have to cover our tracks pretty thoroughly. Polly had to tell the personnel department at the hospital in Cookeville that if they wanted to hire her, they could not reveal that she worked there unless they ran the inquiry by her first. She told them the whole story of what had happened to us in the past year, and they were most understanding.

Our mail would be forwarded first to the police department, then, in large bundles, to Polly’s sister in North Carolina, who would in turn send it to us. I wished we could have told a few guys on the force where we were going, but for everyone’s safety it was best to keep it a secret, even from our closest friends. I knew there were a handful of fellow cops that I could trust with my life, but even they had to be kept in the dark. No slipups, no turncoats. Once the information was out, you couldn’t know where it was going to end up.

Polly graduated at the top of her nursing class, with honors. How she did it, I’ll never understand. She had only been halfway through the two-year program when I was shot. She missed a lot of school and study time, but she still managed to ace her tests and outsmart everyone else in the program. She graduated summa cum laude and was awarded a scholarship that she could use toward tuition at Northeastern University for two more years of nursing school and a BSN, but she had to turn it down because we were leaving for God knows where. Her instructors told her to stay in touch, and that if she ever wanted to continue medical school, they would all write references for her. That’s probably why, when Eric and Shawn brought home their not-so-stellar report cards at the end of the year, Polly wasn’t having it.

“Don’t try to use what happened to your dad as an excuse,” she said to Shawn, shaking the report card in his face. “If I managed to get all A’s on my tests, you guys should be able to do just as well. You have to apply yourself, no matter what else is going on in our lives. School comes first.”

Cylin was too young to have a real report card yet, but from what we were hearing, she also wasn’t doing that well in school. She loved to read but was way behind in math—the second and third graders in her open classroom were doing better than her. The teacher told us it was something to keep an eye on.

The day of Polly’s graduation, we packed the whole family into the van. It was probably the second time we’d been out of the house together as a family in almost a year. I went armed with my shoulder holster, and so did my friend and fellow officer, Dave Cusolito. His wife, Ethel, was a graduate in the same class. Fortunately, the ceremony went off without any problems.

By now, I had a pretty good beard growth over most of my lower face and no bandages. To the unknowing eye, I looked almost normal, but inside I was still tightly wired shut and had steel rods in my face. I had been back in to Mass General in March for another round of the osteoblast transplants, this time to the other side of my face, but they went into the same site on my pelvis to harvest them, which was extremely painful. For the hospital stay and recovery time, I bought an electronic chess game, ordered from the back of a chess magazine. It had the dubious name of “the Chess Challenger,” but it sometimes took eight minutes to make a move—not too challenging. I could beat it even during my worst pain days. A newspaper reporter who came to see me in the hospital after this round of surgery had an unusual question for me.

“I see that your constant companion is this chess computer,” he pointed out. “You don’t have to talk to it, is that why?” He looked at me very sympathetically. I could tell he wanted to pull some heartstrings with his story in the paper, make it a little melodramatic. Readers loved a sob story.

“What did you name it?” he asked me, looking at the computer.

I’d never thought to give it any special name other than what it was called by the game makers. But I understood what the reporter was getting at: I was unfit for company, unable to talk and constantly under protection, I had become so isolated that this machine was my only friend. The only one I could really trust. Maybe that’s how he saw it, but I didn’t. I still had a life; a different life, but I still had friends, my family. The chess computer was just something to take my mind off of everything else: the pain, the present, and the future. And that’s all it was.

As soon as the kids were out of school, we put Max into a kennel for a month and headed up to Maine and my sister Bee’s cabin on the Belgrade lakes. Polly still had to pass her national nursing boards, so we weren’t going anywhere until that was done—then she would officially be a nurse and could take the new job in Cookeville. But we didn’t want to sit in our fortress on the Cape for a month, unable to go to the beach—or anywhere for that matter. Better to spend the time in a cabin in the woods where no one knew us, and no one in Falmouth knew where we were. I told the detectives and my friends on the force that if they needed to reach us, they could contact my sister and she’d get the message to me. The cabin had no TV and no contact with the outside world. It was a wonderful escape.

Polly was able to study in peace, I played a lot of chess and swam in the lake when the temperature got over seventy (which wasn’t that often this early in the summer), and the kids got tan and bug-bitten. It was great to see them outdoors and playing with other kids—kids who didn’t know anything about us, or have a reason to be scared of us. Polly had warned the kids on the ride up not to say anything to anyone about us, and I could tell by the way they were making fast friends that they had taken her advice.

In the evenings we’d all make dinner together, then wash up and tackle a giant puzzle on the big kitchen table, or play cards—long games of Bastard Bridge and “thirty-one” with my sister Bee and her husband, Dale, on nights when they joined us. Their house was only about a twenty-minute drive away, so they spent a lot of time with us. I could tell by the way I sometimes caught Bee staring at me that she could hardly believe what had happened to my face, but she never said anything about how I looked, and I was happy to avoid it. I didn’t need comments from someone I had grown up with about how different my appearance was, or how handsome I used to be. This was how I looked now, and everyone just needed to get used to it.

At night, after the kids had gone to bed, I usually sat out on the screened-in porch and listened to the loons on the lake, their sad, haunting calls ringing out over the water. It should have been a serene way to pass the evening, but not for me. I’d sit with my pistol in my hand, just waiting for someone to approach. All those years of working the midnight shift, all I wanted to do was sleep. Instead I sat up every night with a paranoid insomnia I couldn’t shake. If a drunk had stumbled by, walking on the shore path, lost his way, I would probably have shot him first and asked questions later.

Polly came out late one night to see why I was still awake. I heard the screen door open behind me but didn’t have time to put the gun away, so she saw it on my lap. “No one even knows we’re here,” she whispered to me, leaning over to give me a hug. “You have to stop now, okay? Please come to bed.”

She went back in the cabin and left me out on the porch with my demons. I knew she was right, but for some reason I just couldn’t turn off that part of my brain. No matter where we were,I wasn’t able to feel safe. And I was beginning to wonder if blowing Meyer away was really the answer. Even if I did manage to kill him—and I knew that I could—there was still his brother, his sons, his other “partners.” Who knows how far his reach extended. I had heard rumors that he was connected to a big crime family in Boston. I didn’t know if any of that was true, but Meyer certainly hadn’t done anything to dispel the rumors. True or not, that was a whole different can of worms, and one I didn’t especially want to open.

I had been so angry about what had happened to me for so long, I hadn’t thought about my exit strategy. I wanted to kill Meyer, but then what? I would go to jail, my family would be left God knows where without me to protect them. That wouldn’t work. So I told myself I wouldn’t get caught. Even then, we would have to live in hiding for the rest of our lives, all of us. It would start a revenge game, tit for tat. Did I really want to play that game? The only other option was to scuttle away, hide out somewhere, and keep quiet forever. Leave our old life behind. Stop fighting and give up. That would mean that Meyer had won. Or would it?

I went into the cabin and checked on Polly. She was sound asleep in the queen-sized bed downstairs, still a young woman—just thirty-six years old, the fate of our family’s financial future on her shoulders. I crept up the spiral staircase to the loft and looked at the kids in their beds. All asleep, tired from the day of swimming and playing with their new friends. I watched them for a few minutes, listened to their quiet breathing, then went back to my watch on the porch. I would do whatever I needed to do to keep them safe. That had to be my priority now—not revenge, not my personal anger, no matter how much it would kill me every day to let Meyer live.