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order. Next date, everybody shows up in their Sunday Mass duds and the tragic facts are presented by their side. Mike and his guys hire an attorney who will later become the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. I hire a guy who’s done some real estate law for my parents. Cost fifty dollars—my life savings at the time. He puts me on the stand to defend myself. I’m sweating bullets but somehow get through it. Swear the knife isn’t mine, and I mean it.
    The judge finds Mike and his friends guilty, me and my crew not guilty. But the judge has seen me in here twice before and has something to say to me personally before we’re led out of the courtroom. “Join the service, boy,” he says. “Your next appearance before me, you’re headed to Village Avenue”—the address of the local jail. I go home that night and think about what he said. It wasn’t really a choice. I went down to enlist in the Air Force the next day.

     
    When I woke up, I didn’t know what day it was. I knew I was in a hospital. Polly was there. Then I remembered being shot. I looked at all the tubes, IVs, hoses, and machines attached to me. There were tubes going in and out of my stomach and chest for some reason too. Was I shot there? I couldn’t remember, couldn’t figure it out. Polly started talking to me.
    “You’re okay. You were in surgery for twelve hours, now you’re in the ICU.” I remembered seeing parts of my face and my teeth in the passenger seat of the car. I remembered the doctors talking about me at Falmouth. I motioned for paper and wrote Polly a note: “Don’t let me live like this.”
    Polly just gave me this look and didn’t say a word. I knew she couldn’t pull the plug. Later I learned that when Rick Smith got to the house the previous evening to bring her to the Falmouth ER, he’d told her I’d been shot but not badly. He was trying to ease her into it. When she arrived at the hospital, she thought I would be wearing an eye patch or something. She couldn’t believe that my chin was hanging down onto my chest. The bones on both sides of the lower jaw had been discontinued—not broken or fractured; they were gone. Most of my teeth were gone, or broken off at the root. My tongue was nearly severed. I had metal fragments from the lead and from the car and glass fragments from the side and front windows in my face and eyes.
    I’d been lucky to be hit where I was. Had the bullets passed an inch higher or an inch farther back, I would have bled to death or died from brain damage. It seemed the idiots who tried to kill me were pretty amateurish. First of all, it’s almost impossible to aim accurately from a moving vehicle, and this becomes a lot harder when you’re shooting at another moving vehicle. Second, they got too close. They used a shotgun loaded with double-O buckshot. Inside the casing for each shot are nine 32-caliber copper-plated lead pellets. The object of double-O buckshot is that, once fired,the nine pellets will spread out into an ever-widening pattern. If they’d been six feet away, the bullets would have spread sufficiently enough to literally blow my head apart. Instead, they pushed the gun almost to the window of my car and the nine bullets followed a two-inch-wide path through my face.
    Had those rounds been an inch lower, I would have suffered from little more than a singed beard and a busted-up car. But then I guess the second blast that came through the top of the door and the roof might have hit me since I wouldn’t have been knocked over into the passenger seat. I could have gone around and around with these kinds of thoughts, but it wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere. I was still faced with the simple facts: Someone shot me. They wanted to kill me. And here I was, still alive.

CYLIN
     
    FROM our hiding spot in the attic, we couldn’t hear anything going on downstairs, but we waited like Kelly had told us to do. The insulation pricked my skin, and I was careful to balance my bare