The Fence - Dick Lehr [54]
Mike Cox and Craig Jones had just pulled up to Walaikum’s, no more than a minute or so after they’d left the gang unit, when they heard the update about the victim. “So we knew right away there wasn’t a policeman shot,” Mike said. But they hadn’t yet heard about the gold Lexus. They spotted other police cruisers and an ambulance. Craig headed toward the restaurant’s entrance. Mike stayed outside. “We were trying to find out what kind of car the shooters were in.”
Paramedics worked on Lyle Jackson, noting, in a report prepared later, Lyle was suffering from “multiple gunshot wounds,” “a very serious loss of blood,” and was “in a great deal of pain.” They immobilized his neck and back, gave him oxygen, propped up his legs to get blood to his brain. The diagnosis was “acute, major trauma.”
Lyle’s mother, Mama Janet, arrived as they were putting Lyle into the ambulance. She’d run from her house with another son. She saw Lyle and called out his name. “He kind of looked at me,” she said. “His eyes were closing. He looked at me and the tears started rolling down his cheeks.” Lyle Jackson lasted six days before dying on January 31 at Boston City Hospital.
When he’d heard gunfire, Smut bolted to attention—suddenly feeling cold sober. He watched as people began screaming and running from Walaikum’s. The other three were back, “huffing and puffing.” He yelled at Tiny to get going. “Pull off, pull off,” he ordered. Marquis was in the front seat, and Boogie-Down was next to Smut in back. They drove a block down Blue Hill Avenue and turned right onto Warren Avenue. Within a few blocks they turned left onto a side street, avoiding any oncoming police cars.
Smut and the others yelled and swore at one another for taking the Little Greg dispute too far and shooting up Walaikum’s. They also quickly decided it would be best to split up, and the first idea was to get Marquis home because he lived close by. Tiny began winding away from Grove Hall toward Dudley Square on what Smut considered “back roads.” They worked their way through a thicket of streets either intersecting or near Humboldt Avenue, the Roxbury boulevard known as the location of one of the city’s most notorious murders, the 1988 shooting death of a twelve-year-old girl named Tiffany Moore. Humboldt and its side streets were on the north side of Franklin Park, originally the “crown jewel” of Frederick Law Olmsted’s network of parks created throughout the city a century before. The 527 acres were now in the middle of the city’s poorest section and, while featuring a golf course and a zoo, always seemed in need of an overhaul.
Being inside the Lexus was like being inside a bubble. Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down had no idea of the size and scope of the police response to the initial report that an off-duty cop had been shot at Walaikum’s. They had no idea that throughout the city nearly every officer on duty was listening closely to the radio while those in the immediate area were either racing to Walaikum’s or looking for them. Ian Daley was among the latter. He’d left his paperwork behind at the station and, instead of racing to Walaikum’s, began cruising the outskirts trying to think where the shooters would go. He wasn’t alone—Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio, Gary Ryan and Joe Teahan, and Jimmy Rattigan and Mark Freire were all driving around Roxbury looking for the Lexus.
Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down did not know about any of this. Nor did they realize that when they made a turn onto Martin Luther King Boulevard they were spotted—almost simultaneously—by two security guards riding in their company