The Record s were still in a stack near the door, bound by plastic wire. As I leaned down and pulled the plastic apart, Edgar said, “You know what I want? A Hershey’s bar with almonds.”
I replied, “You know what I want? I want to catch the Boston Strangler, I want to save any number of women from their miserable deaths, and then I want to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
Actually, that’s not what I said. What I said was, “Shit, you know what else I need? Some aspirin.”
A more inane conversation had never taken place among two people not married to each other.
Edgar lumbered up to the candy counter in search of his chosen bar. I grabbed a paper and scanned the front page on the very off chance that Justine Steele had changed her mind or that Peter Martin had grown a set of brass balls. Neither appeared to have happened. So I wandered the aisle where the sign said FIRST AID AND PAINKILLERS for something to quell the headache that their inaction, among other things, had caused.
That’s where I was when the killer came into the store, in Aisle 2b, looking for a goddamned bottle of extra-strength Excedrin.
I didn’t hear the door open. I didn’t see what the security camera would later show, which is that once inside the store, he pulled a ski mask over his head. I didn’t see him pull the gun out from the shin-length black trench coat he was wearing. I didn’t see it because I was shopping for a bottle of Excedrin. If so much of being a great reporter is just making sure you’re at the right place at the right time, then I failed miserably here. Or maybe I didn’t, because I’m at least alive to tell about it; it’s all a matter of perspective.
The first inkling of trouble I got was the loud voice calling out, “Don’t do nothin’ stupid.”
I looked up from the aforementioned Aisle 2b and saw the similarly aforementioned man in the black trench coat waving what looked like a semiautomatic pistol. He was talking to the counter clerk. Edgar was standing near a magazine rack off to the side, watching the situation unfold and remaining very calm.
If it was a robbery, I was perfectly willing to let it happen, and I suspect Edgar Sullivan was as well. Let the guy get his $280 or whatever from the till, make off into the night, and buy another week’s worth of heroin to make his miserable life remotely bearable.
But oddly enough, rather than tell the clerk to give him all his cash, he scanned the store, his gaze seeming to pass over Edgar and the older woman in the kerchief, and settling on me, still standing, appropriately enough, in the painkiller section.
“Everyone up here,” he barked. “I need people up here — now.”
His voice was shallower than a robber’s should probably be, and his build was slighter than he probably would have preferred — though his gun was undoubtedly every bit as powerful as the next one.
I didn’t move, or at least not quickly enough. He hollered, “Get up here, now.”
I began moving slowly up the aisle toward the front of the store, sans the Excedrin I came in for. I figured my headache was the least of my problems right now.
As I walked up, I noticed Edgar drifting farther off to the side, away from the cash registers. I saw out of the corner of my eyes the older woman slipping toward the door, and then out. The assailant heard the door open, whirled around, saw her leave, and did nothing but say “Shit” just barely loud enough for anyone to hear.
“Faster!”
I was staring into the distant barrel of the pistol. I don’t think the president of Smith & Wesson had seen as many guns as I had in the last few days. I picked up the pace a bit, but I wasn’t exactly setting a land-speed record. Time, I figured, bought opportunity. I just wasn’t clear what that opportunity was yet, though I had reasonable hopes that Edgar Sullivan might figure it out.
I’d be remiss in not noting that as I walked to the front, my mind flashed over the Starbucks massacre of 1997 in Washington, D.C. — three employees executed in an apparent robbery — and the Blackfriars Pub massacre of 1978 in Boston — five people executed for unknown reasons. Is this what we were destined for tonight?
I kept walking, Edgar kept drifting farther away, the clerk kept standing near the register, being no apparent help whatsoever. When I got to the front, maybe ten feet from the masked assailant, he said, “Get on the floor, facedown.”
This didn’t bode well. I thought about charging him, ramming his midsection, maybe giving him a kung-fu kick to the family jewels. I thought about grabbing one of the oversize bottles of Tide on a shelf within arm’s length and flinging it at his face. Instead, very slowly, still buying time, I descended to my knees, and even more slowly spread out on the grime of the cheap commercial carpet at the front of the Beacon Hill CVS.
I thought it extremely curious that of the four people in the store at the time of his arrival, I was the one to be singled out. But I didn’t think I was in much of a position — meaning facedown on the floor with a gun pointed at the back of my head by a masked assailant — to question why.
I saw him take a few steps toward me, saw his black trench coat swish against his jeans, until I could smell the leather of his dirty tennis sneakers. I heard his gun cock. And I heard a voice — Edgar Sullivan’s voice — shout out, “Drop it. Police officer. I’m armed and I’ll shoot.”
I don’t know if you can feel a gun’s aim leave you, but I’m pretty sure I did. I shifted my face to the other side and saw Edgar, pointing a pistol of his own at the guy who had been pointing a pistol at me.
Edgar repeated, “I said drop it. I’ll shoot you in the balls right now.”
There was a long moment of agonizing silence, during which I poised my body, and without warning shot upward, slamming the masked man in the bottom of the chin with the full force of both my forearms. It was probably stupid, but the alternative, which was nothing, seemed even more so.
He reeled back and toppled over from the shock and the force. The gun dropped aimlessly onto the carpet several feet from his grasp. Edgar pounced on it as if he was twenty-five years old, scooped it up, and put it into the outer pocket of his blue blazer. I jumped on top of our attacker and delivered one ferocious roundhouse punch to the vicinity of his nose, feeling flesh and bone crack on impact. I hoped it was his flesh and bone, not mine.
He groaned and I furiously yanked the mask from his head, revealing a panicked-looking fortysomething guy with a bad haircut and blood gushing from his oversize nose, across his upper lip, and down his chin.
Edgar yelled, “Step back, Jack.” So I did.
Edgar turned to the cashier and shouted, “Call the damned police.”
The clerk, who looked like he had gone into complete shock, turned around and began fumbling with a phone on the back wall.
And that’s when it happened. Edgar Sullivan’s arm was slack at his side, the gun in his hand pointing downward at the floor. The clerk was finally summoning the police. The assailant was still writhing in pain on the ground. I was collecting my breath and my wits. All of us just standing or lying there, playing our respective roles.
In a flash, the bloody intruder reached into his coat, yanked out a second pistol, and fired it. He fired it at Edgar Sullivan, once, twice, three times. The thing is, I remember hearing four shots, and quickly realized why: somewhere in the mix, Edgar returned fire.
His shot hit the perpetrator on the wrist of his shooting hand, causing him to drop the gun in screaming agony. The perp’s blood gushed out of him with such force that it splattered on my cheek.