He turned back to enter the porch when he caught a flash of lights through the woods between his backyard and the main drive into Hidden Refuge. He heard several vehicles moving along the road. What now? Whatever it was, he knew one thing—it wasn’t good.

Chapter Six

Chapter
SIX

2:40 a.m.

Barrett Connolly led the procession of Falling Rock police SUVs down Hidden Refuge Drive, stopped at the gate, entered the code, and proceeded into suburban Indian Country. As a boy, he’d enjoyed old westerns more than cartoons, the prospect of a different time and an adventurous place more alluring than the streets of the Mary Ellen McCormack public housing project in South Boston. Since his mother had died when he was six and his father, broken after her loss, didn’t care what Barrett did, one saving grace was that he was allowed to watch pretty much whatever he wanted. And westerns were what he wanted—and needed—to escape his dreary existence in Southie.

The years between his mother’s death and his teenage years were a blur of dark memories, ones he knew were there, just under the surface, waiting to pull him down if he dwelled on them. But it was when he turned thirteen that the Irish gangs of his housing project claimed him as one of their own.

His father was a semi-employed mechanic who bounced around from one run-down garage to another. While the elder Shawn Connolly drowned his sorrows in cheap beer and Irish whiskey, the younger Barrett allowed street violence and petty crime to soothe his raging soul—at least until three days before he turned eighteen.

While the McCormack had been built for the poor predominantly Irish Catholic working class in 1938, decades of disrepair, the civil rights movement, and the Housing Act of 1949 had transformed the waiting list from white to poor Black families. With a slow integration came racism and conflict to the point that by the 1990s, 20 percent of the population was African American.

Barrett never blamed the Blacks for organizing into gangs, just the fact that a group of five Black teenagers had taken to calling themselves the “MC Hammers” because they lived in the Mary Ellen McCormack and used ball-peen hammers on their victims. Their gang’s name would’ve brought derision on them had they not been violent to the extreme—just shy of murder.

Coming home from one of the local bars—South Boston didn’t enforce the legal age of consumption—at a little past 1:00 a.m., Barrett and his best friend James Shaughnessy were ambushed by three of the MC Hammers.

While their willingness to use blunt instruments had instilled fear in their previous victims, in the case of Barrett and James, it only angered them. The bigger problem for the Hammers was that they didn’t know how to use the flat-end weapons, at least not as well as Barrett and James.