Free Brutal by Kevin Weeks Page A

jumped down behind a car. I pulled him up, went to his car, pushed him in, and got into the driver’s seat as Larry headed into the back. With the lights off so no one could get the plate number, I backed the car up and took off. We drove along Carson Beach to L Street onto First Street and headed to Triple O’s. When we got there, I parked the car and we went inside. As it turned out, Franny had gotten slashed with a straight razor, not with a knife, and had gone over to the hospital to get stitches. A week later, the kid I’d shot got out of the hospital and went down to the Devins family’s house and apologized. He said he and his friends didn’t want any more trouble. The next night, I saw Chucka down the bar, and he was telling me how no one wanted any more trouble with the Devins brothers. The kid must have thought I was one of Franny’s brothers.
    That wasn’t my first time shooting a gun. I’d had guns since I was eighteen. My license to carry a weapon for protection of life and property was issued from Boston police headquarters in 1978. I lost it nine years later, in 1987. It wasn’t hard to get the permit itself. I went down to the range to qualify and ended up getting a 298 out of 300. I had great eyesight, 20/10 vision, and was a good shot. I got it because at the time I was carrying receipts and money when I closed up Triple O’s. Also, I was around Jimmy, so it was advantageous for me and for him that I had a permit to carry a firearm. Since he was a convicted felon, he couldn’t legally carry a gun.
    Most of the time I’d carry two .45s or two .38s, in shoulder holsters underneath my jacket or on my waist. It was never difficult to buy guns. I’d get them from gun stores or private people. I didn’t like being aroundpeople, so I didn’t shoot at ranges. Instead, once or twice a month, I would go down to Carver, where a lady I knew owned a cranberry bog, and shoot on her property. There were sand pits there and we would put down cantaloupes and targets and shoot at them. Jimmy went down to the bogs a few times with me and we shot a variety of weapons, from assault weapons all the way down to pistols.
    When I shot that kid, I didn’t feel anything. It just happened. He was trying to stab me, so I shot him. It was simple.
    But there was rarely a night at Triple O’s when I wouldn’t break up a fight or two at the bar. One fight turned out to be particularly important. And it wasn’t even one I fought. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1976, during a big fight outside, someone stabbed a biker and handed me the knife. When I walked into the bar to get rid of the knife, Kevin O’Neil logically assumed I was the one who had just stabbed the biker. Afraid he would lose his license, he came down on me, riding me for hurting the bar with that kind of violence. Not that there wasn’t plenty of violence every night in that bar, but stabbings didn’t usually happen more than twice a year and were worse than the usual stuff.
    For weeks afterward, Kevin would ride me about the incident, still angry about my jeopardizing the bar with the stabbing. “That’s my license you were fooling around with,” he kept telling me. “You should have thought about losing my license for that stabbing.” I never responded much, just shrugged and went about my business.
    One night when Jimmy was there and Kevin was going at me yet again about the fight, Billy O’Neil went up to his brother and said, “Hey, he didn’t do it. I did it. So lay off him.”
    Jimmy turned to Kevin and said, “He kept his mouth shut and didn’t tell on your brother. What do you think of that?”
    Kevin looked confused. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he finally asked me.
    â€œI wasn’t going to tell you your brother did it,” I told him. Kevin just walked away, shaking his head. From then on, however, I could see