Brutal_ The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob - Kevin Weeks [71]
Around eleven, when I was through with my part of the maneuver, I said good night to Stevie and headed home. The whole deal had taken me maybe two hours from start to finish, and no one had noticed a thing.
Stevie and I also worked well together when one of us was involved in any sort of fight. For instance, one afternoon the two of us were down at the variety store when I got a call from the Fitzie—Steven Fitzpatrick, the bartender at Triple O’s. Fitzie wanted to tell me that some guy named Tommy McClure was demanding I come to the bar so he could show everyone I wasn’t as tough as I thought I was. He was giving the bartender a hard time, pulling money off the bar and being a complete asshole. Stevie was even more excited than I was when I told him what Fitzie had said, and he was in his car heading to Triple O’s before I could get into mine. When we got to the bar, Stevie headed for the back door and I walked in the front door and stood where I usually did.
Tommy was standing in the middle of the bar, shouting to Fitzie, “I told you to get him down here.” As Fitzie glanced at me, Tommy saw me. Tommy McClure was a redhead, five-eleven, maybe 190, with a medium build. I had my hands on the bar and was looking nonchalantly around the room. As Tommy turned the corner and started to approach me to say something, I lifted my hands and hit him. Tommy fell hard against the windows, where I proceeded to beat on him. In less than a minute, I had split him open and broken his ribs. This time he had showed how tough he was by hitting the floor and pissing and shitting himself as he went down.
I was still going at him when Stevie grabbed me off him. “You’re going to kill him,” he told me, pulling me away from the guy. That was pretty strange coming from Stevie, who would most likely have shot him in the head the minute he walked into the bar. But when Stevie let go of me, I saw the kid’s face was soaked with blood, while his pants were sopping with shit and urine. Not a pretty sight any way you looked at him. But I was through with him. I saw no reason to kill him. I’d just wanted to give him a beating. And I had.
Outside the bar, a cable crew was digging up the road to lay new cable and a cop was standing near the crew. The real tough guy who had wanted so badly to fight me staggered over to the cop and tried to tell him what had happened. The cop took one look at Tommy, saw the piss and shit, figured he was drunk and, disgusted, told him to get away from him. Somehow, Tommy pulled his stinking, bloodied body away from the street.
About six hours later, I noticed that my left hand had blown up, and two red lines were moving up my left arm. I drove over to the New England Medical Center, where an emergency room doctor examined me. It only took him a few minutes to see that when I hit the tough guy a left hook, I had knocked out one of his teeth, which then pierced my finger. The doctor didn’t hesitate. Explaining that I had blood poisoning from where Tommy’s tooth had entered my finger, he wrapped a rubber tourniquet around my arm and rushed me into an operating room to excise and drain an abscess where the tooth had gone into the knuckle of my ring finger and infected my entire arm. I ended up staying in the hospital for three days on intravenous antibiotics. After that, I was confined to my house for another seven days with a heparin lock inserted into my hand to administer IV antibiotics three times a day. Pam took one look at me when I got home from the hospital