The Fence - Dick Lehr [55]
Mike Cox was standing outside Walaikum’s when a black man dressed in a dark uniform approached him. He was a security guard named Charles Bullard. Bullard excitedly began telling Mike that two guards from his company were following the car—the gold Lexus. Mike asked what he meant. “They’re chasing the car?”
Bullard held up his radio and Mike listened to the voices talking about the Lexus. None of the police channels had yet broadcast information on the Lexus’s whereabouts. Mike summoned Craig. They told Bullard to get into the backseat of their cruiser. Craig jumped in behind the wheel and Mike was on his radio.
“TK,” he said.
“Okay, come in,” the dispatcher said.
“One of those security officers is in the car with us,” Mike said. “They seem to be chasing the car that did this shooting. He’s got the radio with him and we’re listening to this chase, trying to catch up to it.”
Mike and Craig were at Walaikum’s for all of two minutes. They headed down Warren Avenue hoping to get a bead on the Lexus.
The first Boston police officer to see the Lexus was an officer from the Roxbury station named Dave McBride. McBride was driving down Martin Luther King Boulevard when he heard Jimmy Rattigan putting out a description of the “suspect vehicle,” and there it was—the gold Lexus. The Lexus wasn’t speeding, just motoring down the street. Behind the Lexus, McBride saw another car, the one with the two security guards in it. McBride did not activate his lights or siren, but he called in his location.
The first sighting by the Boston police brought a sudden focus to the manhunt. For some officers, it meant realizing they were nearby. For others, it meant they were way off track, like Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan. They’d raced into Dudley Square but then got all mixed up. Confused, they made turns that took them farther away from the action. It didn’t help when they heard Dave McBride start “calling off” the Lexus’s whereabouts. “We didn’t know the streets,” Kenny said. They couldn’t make any sense of the information and took turns yelling out in frustration: “Where the fuck are they!”
Mike and Craig were not lost, but the moment they heard McBride reporting the Lexus’s location, they knew they were off the mark. They’d gone up Warren Avenue toward the gang unit and Dudley Square, but the Lexus had now reversed direction and was working its way back south toward Franklin Park. With McBride reporting the Lexus’s movement, Mike turned to Bullard and told him to turn off his radio. “His radio was still blaring and our radio has two different signals, and it was too confusing.” Craig turned around so they could work their way toward Franklin Park.
It wasn’t until Tiny approached a traffic light that he discovered the Boston police cruiser in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t noticed the cruiser fall in behind him; it seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Tiny turned off his headlights, and he didn’t stop at the light.
McBride watched the Lexus go dark and accelerate. It was time: He turned on his siren and blue lights. What had been a watch-and-wait shifted abruptly into an actual police pursuit. McBride was on his radio shouting out his location.
“We got a Lexus going down—uh—Crawford!”
Jimmy Rattigan and Mark Freire, listening to the frantic tone in McBride’s voice, realized the Lexus was heading their way. They were on Humboldt Avenue. Crawford Street intersected Humboldt. The two were thinking they could cut off the Lexus. “We still thought a police officer was shot,” Rattigan said.
Rattigan turned onto Crawford. He ignored the fact Crawford was a one-way street lined with parked cars. But he was forced to pay his full attention to what he saw coming his way, “This car just flying, I mean, it was moving.” They had not expected to see the Lexus so quickly. “I’m like, holy shit!” Rattigan had a split second to make up his mind. “I’m either gonna let this guy