Mission Flats (2 page)

Consider this, too. As the officer idles outside the Kilmarnock Pub – fidgeting with his radio, deciding what to do, deciding whether to bother – I am five years old, asleep in bed in western Maine, some three hundred miles away.

Back to our policeman. He decides he’ll go in, tell the bartender to close up, maybe even make some noise about writing him up to the ABC, the Alcoholic Beverages Commission. No big deal. He calls in his position to the turret: ‘Bravo-four-seven-three, take me off at the Kilmarnock on Mission Ave. Bravo-four-seven-three, charlie-robert.’ No concern in his voice. Routine.

Then the policeman walks into an armed robbery.

Inside the Kilmarnock, a wiry man, an addict named Darryl Sikes, puts a nine-millimeter Beretta to the policeman’s head. Sikes is coked up, and he has stoked the high with amphetamines, mellowed it with Jack Daniel’s.

The policeman raises his hands in submission.

The gesture sends Sikes reeling with laughter.
Hahahahahahahaha.
His mind is literally buzzing; there is a purr in his ears that, to Sikes, sounds like the electric hum of a guitar amplifier.
Turn it up! Turn that motherfucker up! Hahahahaha!

Sikes’s partner is a man named Frank Fasulo. Fasulo is not as high as Sikes. Not nearly. Frank Fasulo is in control. He carries a sawed-off pump-action shotgun. He points the shotgun at the cop and orders him to strip. Fasulo cuffs the officer’s hands behind his back and orders him to his knees.

Naked, the cop shivers.

The two celebrate, Frank Fasulo and Darryl Sikes. Sikes plucks the police uniform shirt from the floor and puts it on over his sweatshirt.
Hahahahaha!
They do a little victory dance around the bar. They kick at the policeman’s clothes, sending them flying – tube socks, urine-dappled briefs, black shoes. Fasulo fires the shotgun into the ceiling, racks and fires, racks and fires.

The policeman is forced to perform fellatio on Fasulo. At the moment of orgasm, Fasulo fires the gun into the policeman’s head.

Now it is nine days after the Kilmarnock murder, four
A.M.
, a bitterly cold winter night. The wind is whipping across the lower deck of the Tobin Bridge, where the temperature is five degrees with the windchill.

Frank Fasulo steps off the side of the bridge and turns slow cartwheels in the air, arms and legs extended. It will take three long seconds before he reaches the surface of the Mystic River about one hundred fifty feet below. He will hit the water at around seventy miles an hour. At that speed, there isn’t much difference between hitting water and hitting concrete.

What passes through Fasulo’s mind as he tumbles through the air? Does he glimpse the black wall of water rushing up at him? Does he think about his partner, Darryl Sikes, or the murdered cop? Does he think his suicide will end the story of the Kilmarnock case?

Frank Fasulo doesn’t know it, but in the last nine days he has learned the original meaning of the word outlaw. Today the word has come to refer to any criminal. In the ancient English law, it had a more specific definition. If a court declared you an
outlaw,
you were literally outside the law – that is, the law no longer protected you. An outlaw could be robbed or even killed without penalty. There was no sanctuary for him in all England. So it is for Frank Fasulo. The Boston Police Department has no interest in arresting and trying him. They want him dead. No sanctuary.

They caught up to Darryl Sikes just two days after the murder. Found him holed up in the old Madison Hotel, near the Boston Garden. Four BPD cops burst into the room and fired forty-one rounds into his body. To a man, the entire entry team swore Sikes was reaching for a gun; none was ever found.

Now it’s Fasulo’s turn. The police want him even worse than Sikes. It was Fasulo who had . . . well, most of them can’t even say it.

And where can Fasulo run? Every law-enforcement agency in the world will return him to the Boston police on a murder warrant.

So it has to end this way. That is all Frank Fasulo knows for sure. As he plummets, in those three seconds as he feels his body accelerate and the wind tugs his jacket off his shoulders like a helpful host, it is his only thought: There was no other ending – some cop was going to find him sooner or later.

Ten years later. August 17, 1987, 2:25
A.M
.

Again we are in Mission Flats, in the sort of three-family wood-frame structure Bostonians call a triple decker. On the third-floor landing, eight policemen crouch. They stare at a door, listening intently as if the door might speak.

The door is lacquered in China red. There are two small holes in the door frame, just above eye level, where a mezuzah was once attached with little gold brads. Fifty years ago, this neighborhood was predominantly Jewish. The mezuzah is long gone now. Today the apartment is a stashpad for a crew called the Mission Posse.

No doubt the door has been reinforced somehow. Most likely, it is wedged shut with a makeshift police lock, a board jammed at a forty-five-degree angle between the door and the floor, anchored in place by wood blocks bolted to the floorboards. To get into the apartment, the police will have to reduce the door to splinters. That could take fifteen seconds or it could take several minutes – an eternity, long enough to flush cocaine, burn cuff lists, toss scales and baggies through holes in the walls. Too long. Now, a sheet-metal door you could judge, you could predict how it would hold up. The thin ones bend, become distorted, and quickly twist out of their frames. The thick ones just dent, and your only choice is to try to rupture the hinges, the lock, or the entire door frame. But these old wood doors? Hard to say. This one looks solid.

Julio Vega certainly doesn’t like the look of it. Vega glances at his partner, an Area A-3 Narcotics detective named Artie Trudell, and shakes his head. Vega’s message:
They don’t make doors like this anymore.

Trudell, an enormous man with an orange-red beard, smiles back at Vega and flexes his biceps.

Vega and Trudell are excited, nervous. This is a first, a raid that is all theirs. The target is a major player: The Mission Posse moves more rock in this neighborhood than anyone else by far. The no-knock warrant is all theirs too, based on their own investigation – two weeks of surveillance, and a stream of information from a CI endorsed by Martin Gittens himself. The warrant is bulletproof.

Detective Julio Vega could be bulletproof, too, with a few more scores like this one. Vega has a plan. He’ll take the sergeant’s exam in the fall, work drug cases a couple more years, then try for an assignment in Special Investigations or even Homicide. Of course, Vega keeps his careerism to himself because his partner, the big redhead Artie Trudell, doesn’t get it.

Trudell does not dream of going to Homicide or anyplace else. He is happy just to work narcotics cases. Some guys are like that. They prefer cases that are victimless, with suspects as professional as their police adversaries. It’s neater that way. Vega has tried to instill a little ambition in Trudell. Told him he won’t climb the ladder without working victim crimes. He even hinted once that Trudell should take the sergeant’s exam, but Artie just laughed it off. ‘What?’ Artie said. ‘And give up all this?’ At the time, they were sitting in a battered Crown Vic looking at the moonscape of Mission Avenue in the Flats – block after block of ashy, broken tenements. How do you deal with a guy like that?

The hell with him, Vega figures. Let Artie chase crackheads around the Flats forever. Let him rot here. But not Julio Vega. Vega is a player. He’s moving up. Up and out. If, if . . . See, Detective Vega can dream about Homicide or SIU all day, but first he needs to make a little noise. He needs a few skins to show the Commissioner’s office. He needs this score.

Vega and Trudell stand beside the apartment door like sentinels.

The other men avoid the area directly in front of the door as best they can, but the landing is small, and they wind up arrayed along the stairs leading up to the next floor. There are four uniforms among them. The rest – the Narcotics guys – wear jeans, sneakers, and Kevlar vests. Casual. None of the commando-style gear other units use. This is the Flats; these guys have gone through doors before.

For several seconds the men listen for noise in the apartment and, hearing none, they turn to Vega for the signal.

Vega kneels against the wall, then nods toward Trudell.

The burly detective steps in front of the door. The temperature in the hallway is pushing ninety degrees. Trudell is sweating in his vest. His T-shirt is stained. His beard is damp; curly orange tendrils glisten under his chin. The big policeman smiles, maybe out of nervousness. He hoists a five-foot steel pipe into the crook of his right elbow. Later, the newspapers will describe the pipe as a
battering ram,
but in truth it is just a segment of water pipe filled with concrete and fitted with two L-shaped handles.

Vega holds up five fingers, then four, three, two – on one he points at Trudell.

Trudell smashes the door with the pipe. The stairwell echoes with a sound like a bass drum.

The door does not budge.

Trudell steps back, drives the pipe into the door again.

The door shakes but it holds.

The other cops watch, increasingly uneasy. ‘Come on, big man,’ Vega encourages.

A third strike. The bass-drum sound.

A fourth – this time with a different sound, a
boom-crack.

One of the upper door panels bursts out from the inside—

blasted out – a shot fired from inside the apartment—

a spray of blood sneezes out of Trudell’s forehead—

red mist—

a scrap of scalp—

and Trudell is on his back, the crown of his head butterflied open.

The pipe falls to the floor with a thump.

Cops jump back, throw themselves flat against the stairs, against one another. ‘Artie!’ one yells. Another: ‘GunGunGunGunGun!’

Vega stares at Trudell’s body. Blood is everywhere. Red droplets spattered on the wall, a pool of it spreading thick under Trudell’s head. The pipe lies right in front of the door. Vega wants to pick it up but his legs won’t move.

PART ONE

‘The quality of a nation’s civilization can be largely measured by the methods it uses in the enforcement of its criminal law.’

1

Maurice Oulette tried to kill himself once but succeeded only in blowing off the right side of his jawbone. A doctor down in Boston was able to construct a prosthetic jaw, with imperfect results. The surgery left Maurice’s face with a melted appearance, and he went to great lengths to hide it. When he was younger (the accident happened when Maurice was nineteen), he wore a bandanna around his face like a bank robber in an old western. This gave Maurice, who was otherwise a mousy and unromantic sort of guy, a dashing appearance he seemed to enjoy for a while. Eventually he got tired of the bank-robber mask, though. He was always lifting it up to catch a breath of fresh air or to take a drink. So he simply discarded the thing one day, and since then Maurice has been about as unself-conscious as a jawless man can be.

Most people in town accept Maurice’s deformity as if it were no more unusual to be jawless than to be nearsighted or left-handed. They are even a little protective of him, taking care to look him in the eye, call him by name. If the summer people stare, as even the adults invariably do, you can bet they’ll catch an icy stare right back, from Red Caffrey or Ginny Thurler or anyone else who happens to be around, a look that says,
Eyes front, mister.
Versailles is a nice town that way. I used to think of this place as an enormous Venus’s-flytrap with glue-sticky streets and snapping wings that snared young people like me and held us here until it was too late to ever live anywhere else. But these people have stuck by Maurice Oulette and they’ve stuck by me too.

They appointed me chief of police when I was twenty-four. For a few months I, Benjamin Wilmot Truman, was the youngest police chief in the United States, or so it was assumed around here. My reign was brief; later that same year, there was a story in
USA Today
about a twenty-two-year-old who was elected sheriff in Oregon somewhere. Not that I ever enjoyed the distinction anyway. Truth be told, I never wanted to be a cop at all, let alone police chief in Versailles.

In any event, Maurice lived in his late father’s white clapboard house, subsisting on SSI checks and occasional free meals from the town’s two competing diners. He’d won a settlement from the Maine Department of Social Services for negligent monitoring of his case while he shot the jawbone off his head, so he was comfortable enough. But, for reasons no one understood, the last few years Maurice had ventured out of the house less and less. The consensus in town was that he was becoming a little reclusive and maybe even a little crazy. But he had never hurt anyone (except himself), so the general view was that whatever Maurice Oulette did out here was nobody’s business but his own.

I tended to agree with that position too, though I drew one exception. Every few months, with no warning, Maurice decided to use the streetlights on Route 2 for target practice, to the great distress of motorists traveling between Millers Falls, Mattaquisett township, and Versailles. (The name is pronounced Ver-
sales,
not Ver-
sigh.)
Maurice was usually lit on Wild Turkey on these occasions, which may account for his poor decision-making and poorer aim. On this night – it was October 10, 1997 – the call came in around ten, Peggy Butler complaining that ‘Mr Oulette is shooting at cars again.’ I assured her Maurice wasn’t shooting at cars, he was shooting at streetlights, and the odds of him hitting a car were actually very slim. ‘Ha ha, Mr Comedian,’ Peggy said.

Off I went. I began to hear the shots when I got within a mile or two of the house. These were sharp rifle cracks at irregular intervals, once every fifteen seconds or so. Unfortunately it was necessary for me to go up Route 2 to reach the house, which meant passing through Maurice’s crosshairs. I lit up the wigwags, the light bar, the alley lights, every bulb that truck had – it must have looked like a Mardi Gras float – with the hope that Maurice would hold his fire a minute. I wanted him to know it was only the police.