Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Dead M.I.T. Policeman, and the Sounds of a Shootout: The New Yorker Last night, I was watching CNN's report about the dead M.I.T. policeman and the carjacking in Cambridge, where I live, when my wife came downstairs and said, "There's something really strange going on. I just heard lots of gunfire. Together we listened at the open window, waiting for that eerie sound we had heard a few times before, when we lived in Washington, D.C. It was about 12:50 A.M. Then, very clear in the still night air, uncannily near, came the most extraordinary storm of noise. Shot after shot after shot, followed by two heavy explosions. Forty or fifty shots, I guess. So that, I thought - with the banality that maybe always attends the spectator's virginity - is what a shootout sounds like. And that is also what something more than a shootout sounds like: grenades, some kind of small bomb or improvised explosive. We knew this had to be related to the carjacking, to the dead policeman, to the two men on the run, and the only question was whether this was also connected to Monday's marathon bombing.... For the next couple of hours, the frantic wail of police sirens was all you could hear. And it is the same today in Cambridge. Watertown, where the manhunt apparently continues, is about a mile from our house. There is no one on the streets, all is still and silent. The only sounds are wailing police cars, which scream up Fresh Pond Parkway toward Watertown, and the ceaseless orbiting of helicopters. It's very close, and close in another way, too: the suspect still at large is a graduate of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the city's public high school, a place well-known to us. And the suspect's elder brother, now dead, trained at the Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center on Brighton Avenue, where a very good friend of mine also goes. I phoned him this morning, around 9 A.M., and gave him the information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He went online and saw the photograph. Jesus, that's Tamerlan! Jesus fuck!" he shouted. I only knew him to say hi to, but sure, yeah, he used to train very seriously, kept to himself. As we talked, I was scrolling through the images, too, and there was the latest and last one of what appeared to be Tamerlan Tsarnaev, spread-eagled on a Watertown street, as good as dead. Photograph, of a police officer during the manhunt in Watertown, Massachusetts, by Mario Tama/Getty.