I looked over at Edgar, who was lying on his side, bleeding from his face, his stomach, and his leg, and raced toward him. As I did, the shooter bolted for the door, screaming all the way out onto the street, his gun still on the floor inside.
“Edgar, we’re getting help,” I cried out. “Help is on the way.”
His eyes were glazed over, fading from life to death. I turned toward the clerk and yelled, louder than I intended, “Did you get hold of the cops?”
He looked at me, panicked, but said nothing.
“Call them again and tell them a man’s been shot!”
He picked up the receiver again and dialed 911.
I got on the floor and cradled Edgar’s bloody head in my lap. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it against the wound near his temple, hoping to stem the flow of blood.
“Help is on the way, pal. Just stay with us, okay? Edgar, just stay with us.”
I tried to sound reassuring, but I probably sounded anything but. My thoughts drifted back to the time Record colleague Steve Havlicek was wounded in a bomb attack on my car, and I sat with him on a Georgetown street waiting too long for an ambulance to arrive. He died a few hours later.
In the distance, I could hear the faint sound of a siren, and announced to Edgar, “Here they are, pal. They’re on the way. They’ll be here in a second.”
No response.
The siren got louder, closer, too slowly.
“Just stay awake for me, Edgar. Don’t go anywhere on me. I want to be toasting you at your next wedding.”
Still no response. His eyes were closed now. I placed a finger under his nostrils and barely felt a breath.
His head was heavy to the point of being — and I don’t like using the expression here — dead weight, his neck slack. His blood was flowing right through my shirt and spilling down my legs.
“Edgar, we’ve got way too much left to do on this story for you to go anywhere, so don’t even think about it.”
The siren was now blaring outside. I could see the flash of blue lights reflected in the front window — a police car, not an ambulance. The doors to the store jolted open as I screamed at the clerk, “Call a fucking ambulance — now!”
In a second, there were two cops flanking me, both of them down on their knees. One of them asked what had happened.
I said, “He was shot three times by a guy who fled out the door about three minutes ago. Bullet wounds in the head, the stomach, and his leg. He’s losing blood. He’s unconscious. He’s barely hanging on.”
Another siren outside, and then another one after that, and still more in the distance. I could see blue lights reflecting in the window, and then red ones, meaning an ambulance was pulling up, thank God.
One of the cops stood up and barked into his radio, “APB for a suspected gunman who fled from the CVS on Charles and Cambridge Streets within the past five minutes.”
He looked down at me and asked, “What’d he look like?”
I still held Edgar’s head in my arms. His face had gone from pained to peaceful, which should have been nice, but instead scared the hell out of me.
“White guy, forties, black trench coat, bloody nose. That’s all I know.”
The cop repeated that into his radio. A whole cadre of police and EMTs burst through the front door. I heard someone drop a stretcher beside me. A guy in a brown uniform knelt down next to me and edged me slowly away from Edgar, saying, “Let me take over from here.” I stood up, and Edgar was surrounded by rescue workers.
The cop who was the first on the scene put his hand on my elbow and asked, “Can I get a word with you?”
We walked a few feet down an aisle that held deodorants and razors on the well-stocked shelves. Don’t ask me why I noticed this; I just did.
“Can you give me a brief account of what just happened?”
That was the cop, doing his job, though at the wrong time. My eyes and my thoughts remained on Edgar. The EMTs had spread him flat on the floor, on his back. One was ripping off his clothing and tending to his wounds. Another was pumping his heart, pushing his forearms down almost violently into Edgar’s chest. A third, a young woman, cupped her hands around Edgar’s mouth and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, that last word appearing to be a misnomer here. Edgar would like that part of the life-saving exercise very, very much. I hoped to hell he realized what was happening.
The EMTs were pumping and breathing feverishly, synchronizing their moves, talking to one another in increasingly loud voices. They did this until they didn’t, until the man pumping his chest placed his ear against Edgar’s heart, lifted his head, and announced to the others, “We’ve lost him. There’s nothing there.”
I pushed past the cop, plaintively yelling, “No! No! Keep trying!”
The three EMTs looked up at me simultaneously. The one on Edgar’s chest climbed off, stood up, and said to me, “I’m sorry. All his vitals have disappeared for too long. He’s gone. There’s nothing we can do.”
I looked down at Edgar Sullivan, sprawled on the floor of a Boston CVS, his clothing haphazardly torn away from his body, and tears immediately began flowing down my face. I thought of the help he had given me in a series of stories I wrote bringing down the mayor. I thought of his various ex-wives, his love of life, the extraordinary wisdom and wherewithal that he brought to his job. I knelt down and kissed his forehead, still warm, and whispered, “Thank you, Edgar. Thank you for everything you did.”
As I got up, the same uniformed officer who had tried questioning me shouted out, “This is a homicide scene. I need to ask everyone to step back and leave the body exactly as it is.”
I stepped away, toward the front counter. The cop walked over and asked the clerk, who had been standing there all this time, what had happened.
“It was a robbery,” the clerk said in a thick accent. “A man in a mask came in and tried robbing the store.”
The cop had a little notebook in his hand, jotting things down in a way not unlike I might have done if I was covering the story — which I wasn’t, but maybe I should have been. He looked at me and asked, “A robbery?”
I thought about that for a long moment. No, in fact, it wasn’t. A robbery would have involved the masked man trying to take money from the cash register. A robbery would have involved the gunman paying closer attention to the store clerk. That never happened. Instead, the assailant seemed hell-bent on executing me.
But was this the kind of information I wanted to share with the police? If I did, it would mean that I’d be thrust even further into the center of a story I was trying to unravel. It might also render me useless, because suddenly I’d be bogged down with detectives, answering questions rather than doing my job and asking them.
So I nodded my head. “Apparently,” I said.
Please note the Bill Clinton — esque answer. In a court of law, it would allow me to worm my way out, even if in the court of common sense, it would still be known as a lie.
Before he pinned me down any further, I changed the subject, saying, “The guy you’re looking for is going to have a gunshot wound to his wrist.” Then I added, “I need some air. I’m just going to step outside for a moment.”
I walked past Edgar Sullivan’s body, my eyes never for a moment leaving his. Another cop held the front door for me. The sidewalk around the store was cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape and protected by a phalanx of uniformed officers. Police lights still cut through the air, though the ambulance had already left. I leaned against the front of the building and sucked in the cool night air as hard and as fast as I could.
Edgar Sullivan was dead. He died protecting me. And someone was going to pay long and hard for what he had just done.