'Coat.'
In the background, the siren kept getting closer, weaving through Georgetown. In the foreground, people weren't so much staring at us as gawking, as if they never had a car bomb explode on their block before in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I reached into the inside pocket of his navy blazer and found a sheet of white paper. I put it in my pocket without looking at it. He seemed content, and closed his eyes.
'Don't go anywhere, Steve,' I said. 'Hang tough for me. Just hang tough, and you're going to be fine.'
I didn't even realize that my hand was on his and that he had been gripping one of my fingers. I didn't realize it until I felt his grip loosen, his hand become completely slack. He gave one hard exhale, and his facial expression changed completely. When I put a finger under his nose, his breathing seemed to have stopped.
I said, louder, 'No, Steve. No. You're staying with me here. I need you on this. Your wife, she needs you. Don't go anywhere.' The sirens seemed to multiply and got increasingly louder. It sounded like they were only a block or so away. I had my other hand cupped on the back of his head, and despite myself, shook him a bit.
'Come on, Steve. We've come too far. We don't have that much further to go. Stay with me.'
With that, I started to breathe into his mouth, to push air into his system. But the sad fact of the situation was that I didn't have a clue what I was doing. It all seemed so futile. When the ambulance pulled up and the EMT'S leaped out, I told them I thought he had just stopped breathing a few minutes ago. One of the men put an oxygen cup over his mouth. Another thumped at his chest. Two more raced over with a stretcher. I backed away, fading into the background, almost tripping over what must have been the passenger-side door to my car.
A woman in an official-looking jumpsuit approached me and asked if I was all right. I replied that I was fine, and she said, 'You know you have a cut on your head?' She wiped a cloth over it and told me to come with her. I shook my head, never really diverting my eyes from Havlicek and all the men around him. She disappeared and came back in a moment, told me to stay still, and carefully placed a bandage on my temple. 'You'll be all right for now,' she said. Physically, yeah.
The rest, I wasn't so sure.
At that precise point, it hit me-the dog. I turned back and raced toward the house and into the front door, which was open. The inside looked, well, like a bomb had hit it. On the floor in the middle of the living room, Baker was sprawled out on the rug, the shattered chandelier pinning him to the floor. When I knelt down in the broken shards of glass, he didn't so much cry as whimper, his eyes looking at me in a pleading pursuit of relief.
They say you never approach a wounded dog, that it might even attack its master to protect itself. Screw that. I kissed his muzzle and rubbed his ear and told him he was going to be fine. I very gently pulled part of the chandelier off his back end. I gingerly pulled some shards of glass off his fur. He seemed unable to move, stuck on his side. Whenever my hand or leg went near his mouth, he licked me furiously, almost apologetically. A wounded wolf in the wild he was not.
I made a move to run outside and get help, but when I did, Baker tried to get up, found himself overcome by pain and started to give a plaintive wail. Rather than leave, I covered him with a throw from my couch, scooped him up in my arms, and took him outside into the street.
I hoped against hope that the first cop I saw would be a dog lover. A nondog person, they'd just as soon let Baker die in a pool of his own blood. A dog person would carry him on their back to the vet if they had to.
'This dog,' I said to a policewoman who seemed to be working some form of crowd control, though the Georgetown crowd would prove more than tame. 'He's mine, and he's injured, and he desperately needs some veterinary help. Do you have someone who could rush him to the Friendship Animal Hospital?'
She said, 'Well, I'm supposed to call animal control to transport a dog. Technically, we're not allowed to.'
She looked concerned, and by her words and tone, I knew I had her.
Baker licked my face. I said, 'Look, ma'am, this dog desperately needs help. I'd drive him myself, but the insides of my car are scattered all over the street. Please. I'm begging. Please take him.'
'Follow me,' she said. She led me to a station wagon, opened the back, and I gently slid Baker inside. He kept looking at me, frightened and in pain. I borrowed the woman's cellular telephone, punched out the number for Kristen's house, and told her, in about twenty seconds, of my situation. About two minutes later, she was standing in front of me, out of breath. She slid into the back of the car beside Baker and, lights blazing, they were off.
As I turned back toward Havlicek, a pair of EMT'S were pushing his stretcher into the back of an ambulance, about to close the doors. I raced over and said, 'I'm with him,' and began climbing into the back cabin. One of them gave me a look like he was about to stop me, then didn't bother, which I didn't take as a particularly hopeful sign. The doors shut behind me. Inside, two EMT'S worked furiously on Havlicek's head and occasionally pounded his chest.
Within about four minutes, the ambulance slowed to a halt, the doors flung open, and I leaped out of the way. Havlicek was transferred onto a new stretcher and wheeled into the emergency room of Georgetown Hospital. As I tried to follow, a nurse blocked my path and said,
'You'll wait out here.' By now, I was too dazed to argue. I slumped down in a chair in a hallway, in a situation that was too hauntingly familiar, and tried to piece together the violent puzzle that had been the last hour, and probably Havlicek's final hour.
Before I could put a single fragment of the day in its place, a doctor appeared in front of me. This time it was a man, not a woman. This time he stayed in the hallway, rather than lead me into a conference room. This time, I knew the message before the words came out.
'Your friend, Mr. Havlicek,' the doctor said in a tone that seemed aloof, even clinical. 'I'm afraid I must inform you that he's dead.'
I'd like to report back that I was handling this spate of violence with Bond-like cool, that Havlicek's death only made me angry, and when I get angry, I get even. But save that for the movies. Sitting on that lime-green chair in the hallway of the Georgetown Hospital emergency room, it felt like my entire world had just packed up and abandoned me.
I was, admittedly, frightened. Someone had just tried to blow me up along with Havlicek, or more likely it was just me they were after, and Havlicek was the unwitting victim. Let's put aside questions over who and why for a moment to look at the results.
Havlicek's death had left me without my crucial partner on the biggest story of my life. His death would also mean that I was about to become part of the story yet again, rather than a reporter covering it, just like the week before when I was hit in the assassination attempt.
More importantly, it also left Margaret Havlicek without the husband she adored, something I can relate to. And it left their two children without a father to see them through college. This was a sadness that transcended every other, which is why I finally lifted myself up off that chair, walked slowly, heavily, to a pay telephone around the corner, and dialed the Havlicek household in Braintree, Massachusetts.
It should probably be up to some Record official to inform the widow of her husband's death. Problem was, this being two on a Sunday morning, even a newspaper can take a while to mobilize. That very moment, I strongly suspected that a CNN camera crew was standing in front of my house, some blow-dried reporter telling an anchor in Atlanta named Ashley, 'All around me are the glass remnants that just a few hours ago were Boston Record reporter Jack Flynn's automobile.'
Fuck the reporter, and fuck CNN. Now I know how it feels.
'Hello.'
It was the unfailingly pleasant, though sleepy, voice of a middle-aged woman, namely Margaret Havlicek, picking up the telephone. She sounded calm, not panicked, meaning she didn't know yet.
'Margaret,' I said. 'Jack Flynn here.' I spoke in the calmest, most soothing tone I could muster. 'Margaret, I have some bad news. It hurts me terribly to have to tell you this. Your husband died about twenty minutes ago. We were about to drive to an interview tonight in my car, and he was alone in the front seat while I ran back into the house to get a tape recorder I had forgotten, and it exploded. It appears that someone planted a bomb.'
There was silence on the other end as she processed what I had just told her. Then I heard her soft voice say to no one in particular,
'No, I just talked to him a couple of hours ago. I just heard his voice. This can't be right. He just told me he loved me.' She had become almost too choked up to talk. 'Oh, my God,' she said, then came the sounds of
