The Fence - Dick Lehr [21]
The night before, Kenny and McDonald had driven slowly down one of the narrow alleys running behind the townhouses and red-brick buildings that made up the Back Bay, the historic neighborhood that was home to a mix of students, young professionals, and the well-heeled. Kenny was driving when they noticed a car ahead of them, occupied and idling. They watched as two men approached the car, textbook “suspicious activity” for that hour of the night. The officers ran the car’s plate. When it came back as a stolen vehicle, McDonald opened the cruiser’s door, climbed out, and began walking to the car. That’s when the car lurched forward. Instantly, Kenny hit the gas pedal and looped around to cut the car off. Other police units responded in time to catch the two men who fled on foot. The suspects were taken into custody, while McDonald was taken for treatment. He’d been hit in the knee by the lurching car and would eventually undergo surgery to repair the ligament damage.
Kenny learned during roll call that McDonald would be out. His supervisor asked whom he’d like to work with that night in the Delta K–1 car. Kenny looked around the guardroom full of officers ready to go on duty. He spotted Bobby Dwan. He’d never worked with Dwan before, but they were friendly. Bobby had come onto the force in 1990, a year before Kenny did. He was a second lieutenant in the National Guard who had served for six months in the Gulf War in 1991 as a platoon leader in the military police. Like Kenny, Bobby was from Boston, although Bobby grew up in Mattapan on the opposite side of the city from Kenny’s South Boston. Bobby was a jock; he was a three-sport varsity athlete in high school—football, hockey, and baseball—and played center for the first line on the police department’s hockey team. He was married, with a baby girl and another due any day now, and he lived just outside the city. There was no pretense about Bobby—nothing fancy and no bull—and Kenny liked that.
How about Bobby Dwan? Kenny told the supervisor.
It was done.
Bobby had been scheduled to work a one-person service unit, so he had to run to his locker and change back into the clothes he’d worn to work—blue jeans, sneakers, and the L. L. Bean barn jacket with the green corduroy collar his wife had bought as a gift. He joined Kenny, who already was set to go—dressed in jeans, sneakers, a black turtleneck, an off-white Carhartt jacket, and a corduroy baseball hat with a shamrock on it.
They headed out to the Delta K–1 anti-crime car. Side by side, they were an odd couple: Kenny towered at six-four and weighed 215 pounds, while Bobby was five-three and barely topped 150 pounds. In the city, the big news at the time was the nationwide manhunt for Boston’s most famous gangster, James J. “Whitey” Bulger. Under investigation for years, the aging crime boss from Southie had hit the road at the beginning of the month after a corrupt FBI agent tipped him off to a pending federal indictment. Whitey disappeared with a girlfriend, and soon enough the sixty-six-year-old killer made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List alongside Osama bin Laden.
Whitey was the talk of the town, especially in Southie. But for twenty-six-year-old Kenny Conley, another son of Southie, all the Whitey talk was background noise to personal anguish. His mother had died—on Thanksgiving Day. She’d fallen ill suddenly in October, was hospitalized, and fell into a coma. She never recovered. She was fifty-two.
“I took that hard,” Kenny said. He and his mother had been very close. “It was the toughest thing I ever went through.” He thought about his mother every day. But he was not about to talk to Bobby Dwan about her. “When I’m on the job, I focus on the job.”
The first-time partners left the D–4 station after midnight. Within minutes, the Delta K–1 unit was heading to East Newton Street in the South End