Angie said, “How’s Roland ever hope to beat Socia?”

    Devin shrugged. “You got me. I got a hundred bucks on Socia in the pool, myself.”

    “The pool?” I said.

    He nodded. “Of course. The departmental pool, see who wins the gang war. They don’t pay me enough to do this job, so I got to take my perks where I find them. Odds on Roland are about sixty to one.”

    Angie said, “They looked pretty even at the funeral.”

    “Looks can be deceiving. Roland’s tough, he’s smart, and he’s got a pretty good posse working for him up on Angel Avenue. But he’s not his father, not yet. Marion is ruthless and he’s got nine lives. There ain’t a member of the Saints who isn’t convinced he’s Satan. You fuck up even slightly in Socia’s organization and you die. No outs. No compromises. The Saints think they’re in a holy war.”

    “And the Avengers?”

    “Oh, they’re dedicated. Don’t doubt that. But, push come to shove, enough of them die, they’ll back down. Roland’s going to lose. Bank on it. Couple years from now, it might be a different story, but he’s too green right now.” He looked down at his cold coffee and grimaced. “What time is it?”

    Angie looked at her watch. “Eleven.”

    “Hell, it’s noon somewhere,” he said. “I need alcohol.” He stood up, dropped some coins on the table. “Come on, kids.”

    I stood. “Where?”

    “There’s a bar around the corner. Lemme buy you a drink before the war.”

    

***

    

    The bar was small, cramped, and the black rubber tile on the floor smelled of stale beer and wet soot and sweat. It was one of those paradoxes that are common in this city  a white Irish bar in a black neighborhood. The men who drank here had been drinking here for decades. They walled themselves up inside with their dollar drafts and their pickled eggs and their frozen attitudes and pretended the world outside hadn’t changed. They were construction workers who’d been working within the same five-mile radius since they got their union cards because something’s always being built in Boston; they were foremen from the docks, from the General Electric plant, from Sears and Roebuck. They chased cut-rate whiskey with impossibly cold beer at eleven o’clock in the morning and watched a videotape of the Notre Dame Colorado Orange Bowl from last New Year’s.

    When we entered, they glanced at us long enough to assess our color, then resumed their argument. One of them was up on his knees atop the bar, pointing at the screen, counting some of the players. He said, “There, they got eight on the defense alone. Fucking eight. You tell me again about Notre Dame.”

    The bartender was an old-timer with slightly fewer scars on his face than Devin. He had the bored, opaque face of someone who’s definitely heard it all and made up his mind about most of it years ago. He raised a tired eyebrow at Devin. “Hey, Sarge, what can I get you?”

    “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” someone by the TV said. “Count ‘em again.”

    “Fuck you count ‘em again. You count ‘em.”

    Devin said, “What’s the thrust of the intellectual discourse at the other end of the bar?”

    The bartender wiped the bar in front of us as we sat down. “Roy the guy on the bar he claims Notre Dame’s the better team because they got less niggers. They’re counting to decide.”

    “Hey, Roy,” someone yelled, “the fucking quarterback’s a nigger. How white can the Fighting Irish be?”

    Angie said, “If I wasn’t used to this, I’d be embarrassed.”

    Devin said, “We could shoot ‘em all, maybe get a medal for it.”

    I said, “Why waste the bullets?”

    The bartender was waiting. Devin said, “Oh, sorry, Tommy. Three drafts and a shot.”

    Someone less familiar with him might have assumed he’d ordered for the three of us. I wasn’t fooled. “A draft,” I said.

    Angie said, “Me too.”

    Devin hammered a box of unopened cigarettes against his wrist, then removed the wrapping. He took one, offered the pack. Angie took another. I resisted. With pain, as always.

    At the other end of the bar, Roy his pale, hairy belly spilling out of a sweaty blue softball shirt was banging his finger off the TV faster than tapped Morse code on a sinking ship. “One nigger, two, three, four, five... six, another makes seven, eight, nine. Nine and that’s just the offense. Buffaloes my ass. Colorado Spearchuckers.”

    Someone laughed. Someone always does.

    I said, “How do these fucks stay alive in this neighborhood?”

    Devin considered the jar of pickled eggs. “I have a theory about that.” Tommy set the three beers in front of him, placed the shot beside them, went back for ours. The shot disappeared down Devin’s throat before I saw him pick it up. He wrapped a hand around one of the frosted mugs, downed half a pint before he spoke again. “Cold,” he said. “My theory is this people like that, you got two choices: you either kill ‘em or you let ‘em be, because you’ll never change their minds. I figure the folks in this neighborhood are just too tired to kill ‘em.” He polished off the rest of his first beer. He still had half a cigarette and two of his drinks were gone.

    I always feel like a Chevette with a bad tire chasing a Porsche when I try to keep up with Devin at a bar.

    Tommy placed two beers in front of Angie and me, poured another shot into Devin’s shot glass.

    Angie said, “My father used to come to this bar.”

    Devin inhaled the second shot sometime while I blinked. “Why’d he stop?”

    “He died.”

    Devin nodded. “That’d do it, sure.” He started on his second pint. “Your old man, Kenzie, the hero fireman, he come to places like this?”

    I shook my head. “He drank at Vaughn’s on Dot Avenue. Only place he went. Used to say, A man who ain’t faithful to his bar ain’t much better than a woman.’“

    “A real prince, his father,” Angie said.

    “Never met the man,” Devin said. “Saw that picture though. Two kids from a burning tenth floor.” He whistled and drank the rest of his second pint. “Tell you what, Kenzie you got half the balls your old man had, you might live through this.”

    A burst of laughter blew across from the other side of the bar. Roy was pointing at the screen, saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger” doing a little drunken dance on his knees. Soon, they’d start telling AIDS jokes, really bust a gut.

    I thought about what Devin said. “Your concern is touching,” I told him.

    He grimaced, his eyebrows furrowed, the third pint washing down his throat. He put it down, wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin. He said, “Tommy,” and waved his arm like a third-base coach sending the runner home. Tommy came down with two more pints and poured him another shot. Devin held up his hand, downed the shot, and Tommy poured another one. Devin nodded, and he left.

    Devin turned on the stool, looked at me. “Concern?” he said. He chuckled, a graveyard chuckle. “Tell you what concern changes nothing. I’m concerned that this city’s going to rip itself apart this summer. Won’t stop it from happening. I’m concerned too many kids are dying too young over sneakers and hats and five bucks worth of Grade Z cocaine. Guess what though? They’re still dying. I’m concerned that shitheads like that” he jerked a thumb down the bar ”are actually allowed to reproduce and raise new shitheads just as stupid as they are, but it doesn’t stop them from mating like rabbits.” He threw back the shot, and I had the feeling I’d be driving him home. He was favoring the right elbow on the bar over the left, taking deeper drags on his cigarette. “I’m forty-three years old,” he said and Angie sighed quietly. “I’m forty-three,” he repeated, “and I got a gun and a badge and I go into gang zones every night and pretend I’m actually doing something, and my concern doesn’t change the fact that I’m not. I slam sledgehammers into doors in projects that smell of things you couldn’t even begin to identify. I go through doors and people shoot at me and children cry and mothers scream and someone gets busted or someone gets killed. And then, then I go home to my shitty little apartment and eat microwave food and sleep until I have to get up and do it again. This,” he said, “is my life.”

    I raised my eyebrows at Angie and she smiled softly, both of us remembering her voice in the chapel the night before. “This is my life?” Lot of people taking stock of their lives these days. Judging by Devin and Angie, I wasn’t sure how bright that was.

    Somebody down the end of the bar said, “Look at that fucking nigger run, though.”

    Roy said, “Of course he can run, moron. Been hightailing it from the po-lice since he was two. Probably thinks that’s a stolen radio under his arm, ‘stead of a football.”

    Lots of laughter from the group. Wits, one and all.

    Devin was watching them now, hollow eyes staring from behind the stream of smoke that flowed from his cigarette. He took a drag from it, the fat forgotten ash tipping forward and dropping to the bar. He didn’t seem to notice, even though half of it hit his arm. He downed the rest of his pint and stared at the group and I had the feeling there was going to be some property damage.

    He stubbed out his cigarette halfway and stood up. I reached out my hand, stopping three inches from his chest. “Devin.”

    He pushed it away like it was a subway turnstile and walked down the bar.

    Angie turned on her seat, followed him with her eyes. “Eventful morning.”

    Devin had reached the other end of the bar. One by one, the men sensed him and turned around. He stood with his legs spread slightly, planted on the rubber tile, his arms hanging loosely by his sides. His hands made small circular motions.

    Tommy said, “C’mon, Sarge. Not my place.”

    Devin said, “C’mere, Roy,” very quietly.

    Roy climbed off the bar. “Me?”

    Devin nodded.

    Roy stepped through his friends, pulling the shirt down over his belly. The second he let go of it, it rolled back up like a disobedient shade. Roy said, “Yeah?”

    Devin’s hand was back down by his side before most of us realized he’d used it. Roy’s head snapped back and his legs buckled and he was quite suddenly on the floor with a shattered nose and blood jetting above his face in a small fountain.

    Devin looked down at him, kicked his foot lightly. “Roy,” he said. He kicked the foot again, a little harder. “Roy, I’m talking to you.”

    Roy moaned something and tried to raise his head, his hands filling with blood.

    Devin said, “A nigger friend of mine asked me to give you that. He said you’d understand.”

    He walked back down the bar and took his seat again. He made another pint disappear and lit another cigarette. “So, whatta you think?” he said. “Is Roy concerned now?”

NINETEEN

    

    We left the bar about an hour later. Roy’s friends had already taken him out, presumably to the emergency room at City. They gave Angie and me their hard-guy stares as they dragged Roy past, but they avoided Devin’s flat gaze as if he were the Antichrist.

    Devin tossed an extra twenty on the bar for Tommy’s lost business. Tommy said, “You’re a real pisser, Sarge. You gonna come in, put money down for every other fucking day they don’t come back?”

    Devin grumbled, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and did a drunken shuffle toward the door.

    Angie and I caught up with him on the street. I said, “Let me give you a ride home, Dev.”

    Devin shuffled his way into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. He said, “Thanks anyway, Kenzie, but I got to stay in practice.”

    I said, “For what?”

    “Case I ever drink and drive again. I’ll want to remember how I managed this time.” He turned, walking backward, and I waited for him to tip.

    He reached his rusted Camaro, got his keys out of his pocket.    

    I said, “Devin,” and stepped toward him, reaching for the keys.

    His hand closed around my shirt, the knuckles pressing into my Adam’s apple, and he walked me back a few feet, his eyes swimming with ghosts. He said, “Kenzie, Kenzie,” and pushed me back against a car. He tapped my cheek lightly with his other hand. He’s got big hands, Devin. Like steaks with fingers. “Kenzie,” he said again and his eyes grew hard. He shook his head from side to side slowly. “I’ll drive. OK?” He let go of my collar and brushed at the wrinkles he’d left behind in my shirt. He gave me a smile that had no soul. “You’re all right,” he said. He turned back to his car and nodded at Angie. “Take care of yourself, Stone Fox.” He opened the door and climbed in the car. It took two turns of the ignition for the engine to turn over, then the exhaust pipe banged off the small exit ramp and the car dropped into the street. He weaved into traffic, cut off a Volvo, and turned a corner.

    I raised my eyebrows and whistled softly. Angie shrugged.

    We drove downtown and got the Vobeast out of the parking lot for a little less than it would have cost me to put a kid through med school. Angie drove it, following me to the garage where I returned the Porsche to its happy home and climbed in with her. She slid across the seat and I chugged the rolling scrap metal onto Cambridge.

    We drove through downtown, past where Cambridge becomes Tremont, past the place where Jenna went down like a rag doll in the morning sunlight, past the remains of the old Combat Zone, dying a slow but sure death at the hands of development and the X-rated video boom. Why jack off in a scuzzy movie theater when you can jack off in the comfort of your own scuzzy home?

    We drove through South Boston Southie to everyone who isn’t a tourist or a newscaster past strings of drab three-deckers, packed like a line of Port-o’-Potties at a rock concert. Southie amazes me. A good percentage of it is poor, overcrowded, relentlessly unkempt. The D Street housing projects are as bad as anything you’ll find in the Bronx  dirty, poorly lit, teeming with angry, crew-cut punks who roam its streets with bloodlust and baseball bats. During a St. Patrick’s Day parade a few years ago, a very Irish kid with a shamrock on his T-shirt wandered in there. He ran into a pack of other Irish kids who also had shamrocks on their T-shirts. Only difference between his T-shirt and theirs was that his said “Dorchester” in green over the shamrock and theirs said “Southie.” The D Street kids solved the difference by tossing the kid off a roof.

    We were driving up Broadway, past the babies in curlers pushing babies in carriages, past the double- and triple-parked cars and the “Niggers Stay Out” spray-painted on a store grate. Broken glass glittered from the darkness of filthy curbs and trash blew from under cars into the street. I thought of how I could step from this car and poll twenty people here, ask them why they hated “the niggers” so bad, and maybe half would probably tell me, “’Cause they got no fucking pride in their communities, man.” So what if Broadway in Southie was identical to Dudley in Roxbury, if slightly lighter?

    We crossed into Dorchester, rode up around Columbia Park and down into the neighborhood. I pulled in front of the church and we could hear the phone ringing as we climbed the stairs. Busy day. I caught it on the tenth ring. “Kenzie-Gennaro,” I said.

    Angie dropped into her seat as the voice on the other end said, “Hold on. Someone here want to talk with you.”

    I took the receiver with me as I went around the desk and sat down. Angie gave me a “Who is it?” look and I shrugged.

    A voice came on the line. “Mr. Kenzie?”

    “Last time I checked.”    

    “This Patrick Kenzie?” The voice had an edge to it, someone not used to dealing with smart-asses.

    “Depends,” I said. “Who’s this?”

    “You’re Kenzie,” the voice said. “How’s the breathing?”

    I inhaled audibly, sucking it way back and expelling it in a long rush. I said, “Much better since I quit smoking, thanks.”

    “Uh-huh,” the voice said, slow like freshly sapped maple. “Well, don’t get too used to it. Might be all that more depressing when you can’t do it no more.” The maple voice was thick but light, a hint of lazy Southern afternoons hidden behind years of Northern living.

    I said, “You always talk this way, Socia, or you just in a particularly elliptical mood today?”

    Angie sat up and leaned forward.

    Socia said, “Only reason you’re still walking, Kenzie, is because we got things to talk about. Hell, I might just send someone over anyway, have them take a hammer to your spine. All I need’s your mouth as it is.”

    I sat up and scratched an itch near the small of my back. I said, “Send them by, Socia. I’ll do some more amputations. Pretty soon you’ll have an army of cripples. The Raven Gimps.”

    “Easy to talk that way, sitting nice and safe in your office.”

    “Yeah, well look, Marion, I got a business to run.”

    “You sitting down?” he said.

    “Sure am.”

    “In that chair by the boom box?”

    Everything went cold inside of me, a flush of chipped ice spilling through my arteries.

    Socia said, “You sitting in that chair, I wouldn’t get up anytime soon, less you want to see your ass blow past your head on its way out the window.” He chuckled. “Was nice knowing you, Kenzie.”

    He hung up and I looked at Angie and said, “Don’t move,” even though her moving wasn’t the problem.

    “What?” She stood up.

    The room didn’t explode, but I damn near fainted. At least we knew he didn’t put a bomb under her chair too, just for fun. I said, “Socia said there’s a bomb under my chair.”

    She froze, a wax statue in mid-stride. The word “bomb” will do that to people. She took a deep breath. “Call the bomb squad?”

    I tried not to breathe. The possibility existed, I told myself, that the weight of the oxygen going into my lungs could put pressure on my lower extremities and detonate the bomb. It also occurred to me how ludicrous that was since the bomb was obviously triggered by a release of pressure, not a gain. So now, I couldn’t exhale. Either way I wasn’t breathing.

    I said, “Yeah, call the bomb squad.” It sounded funny, talking while I held my breath, like Donald Duck with a cold. Then I closed my eyes and said, “Wait. Look under the chair first.”

    It was an old wooden chair, a teacher’s chair.

    Angie put the phone down. She knelt by the chair. It took a few moments for her to do that. No one wants their eyes an inch from an explosive. She bent her head under the chair and I heard her exhale loudly. She said, “I don’t see anything.”

    I started to breathe again, then stopped. Possibly it was in the wood itself. I said, “Look like someone might have tampered with the wood?”

    She said, “What? I can’t understand you.”

    I took a chance and let out my breath and repeated the question.

    She was down there for six or seven hours, or so it seemed, before she said, “No.” She slid back out from under the chair and sat back on the floor. “There’s no bomb under the chair, Patrick.”

    “Great.” I smiled.

    “So?”

    “So, what?”

    “Are you going to stand up?”

    I thought of my ass flying over my head. “There’s a rush?”

    “No rush,” she said. “Why don’t you stand up?”

    “Maybe I like it here.”

    “Stand up,” she said and stood herself. She held her arms out to me.

    “I’m working up to it.”

    “Stand,” she said. “Come to me, baby.”

    I did. I put my arms on the chair and did it. Except, somehow, I was still sitting. My brain had moved, but my body was of another opinion. How professional were Socia’s people? Could they fit a bomb seamlessly into a wooden chair? Of course not. I’ve heard of people dying in a lot of ways, but getting blown up by a completely undetectable bomb in a thin wooden chair isn’t one of them. Course, maybe I was being honored by being the first.

    “Skid?”

    “Yeah?”

    “Anytime you’re ready.”

    “OK. Well, see I ”

    Her hands grabbed mine and she yanked me up out of the chair. I fell against her and we banged into the desk and didn’t blow up. She laughed, an explosion in itself, and I realized she hadn’t been entirely sure herself. But she’d pulled me out anyway. She said, “Oh, Jesus!”

    I started to laugh too, the laugh of someone who hasn’t slept in a week, a laugh along a razor blade. I held on to her, my hands tight around her waist, her breasts rising and falling against my chest. We were both drenched in sweat, but her eyes were pulsing, the dark pupils large and drunk with the taste of a moment that wasn’t our last on earth.

    I kissed her then and she returned it. For a moment, everything was heightened the sound of a car horn four stories below, the smell of fresh summer air mingling with spring’s dust in the window screen, the salty whiff of fresh perspiration at our hairlines, the slight pain from my still swollen lips, the taste of her lips and tongue still slightly cool from the pale ale we’d drunk an hour before.

    Then the phone rang.

    She pulled back, her hands on my chest, and slid away from me along the desk. She was smiling, but it was one of disbelief and her eyes were already taking on a spectre of regret and fear. God only knows what mine looked like.

    I answered the phone with a hoarse, “Hello.”

    “You still sitting down?”

    “No,” I said. “I’m looking out the window for my ass.” “Uh-huh. Well, just remember, Kenzie anyone can get to anyone, and anyone can get to you.”

    “What can I do for you, Marion?”

    “You gone come see me, have a chat with me.”

    “I am, am I?”

    “Bet your ass.” He chuckled softly.

    “Well, Marion, I’ll tell you, I’m booked solid till October. Why don’t you try back around Halloween?”

    All he said was, “Two-oh-five Howe Street.” It was all he had to say. It was Angie’s address.

    I said, “Where and when?”

    He gave it another soft chuckle. He’d read me perfectly and he knew it and knew I knew it too. “We’ll meet someplace crowded so you have the illusion of safety.”

    “Damn white of you.”

    “Downtown Crossing,” he said. “Two hours. In front of Barnes and Noble. And you come alone, or I might just have to pay a visit to that address I mentioned.”

    “Downtown Crossing,” I repeated.

    “In two hours.”

    “So I’ll feel safe.”

    He chuckled again. I figured it was a habit of his. “Yeah,” he said, “so you’ll feel safe.” He hung up.

    I did the same and looked at Angie. The room was still overcrowded with the memory of our lips touching, of my hand in her hair and her breasts swelling against my chest.

    She was in her seat, looking out the window. She didn’t turn her head. She said, “I won’t say it wasn’t nice, because it was. And I won’t try and blame it on you, because I was just as guilty. But I will say, it won’t happen again.”

    Hard to find a loophole in that.

TWENTY

    

    I took the subway to downtown crossing, climbed up some steps that hadn’t been hosed down since the Nixon years, and stepped onto Washington Street. Downtown Crossing is the old shopping district, before there were malls and shopping plazas, back when stores were stores and not boutiques. It was refurbished in the late seventies and early eighties like most of the city, and after they opened a few boutiques, business came back. Mostly younger business  kids who were bored with the malls, or too cool or too urban to be caught dead in the suburbs.

    Washington Street is blocked off to auto traffic for three blocks where most of the shops are, so the sidewalks and streets teem with people people going to shop, people returning from shopping, and most of all, people hanging out. The sidewalk in front of Filene’s was lined with merchant carts and packed with teenage girls and boys, black and white, leaning against display windows, goofing on adult passersby; a few couples French-kissed with the desperation of those who don’t share a bed yet. Across the street, in front of The Corner a minimall with shops like The Limited and Urban Outfitters, plus a large food court where three or four brawls break out a day a pack of black kids manned a radio. Chuck D and Public Enemy pounded “Fear of a Black Planet” from speakers the size of car tires, and the kids settled back and watched people walk around them. I looked at all the black faces in the massive crowd and tried to guess which ones were Socia’s crew, but I couldn’t tell. A lot of the black kids were part of the coming-from-shopping or going-to-shop crowd, but just as many were packed together in gangs, and some had that lazy, lethal look of street predators. There were plenty of white kids strewn throughout the crowd who looked similar, but worrying about them wasn’t a concern now. I didn’t know much about Socia, but I doubted he was an equal opportunity employer.

    I saw immediately why Socia had picked this location. A person could be dead ten minutes, lying facedown on the street, before someone paused to wonder what he was stepping on. Crowds are only slightly safer meeting places than abandoned warehouses, and in abandoned warehouses, you sometimes have room to move.

    I looked across the street, past The Corner, my eyes bouncing along the heads in the crowd like sheet music, slowing as they reached Barnes and Noble. The crowd thinned somewhat here, a few less teenagers. Guess bookstores aren’t ideal places to pick up babes. I was ten minutes early and I figured Socia and his crew had gotten here twenty minutes before me. I didn’t see him, but then I didn’t expect to. I had the feeling he would suddenly appear an inch away from me, a gun between my shoulder blades.

    It didn’t come between my shoulder blades. It came between my left hip and the bottom of my rib cage. It was a big .45 and seemed even bigger because of the nasty-looking silencer on the end. Socia wasn’t the one holding it either. It was a kid, sixteen or seventeen, but hard to tell with the black leather watch cap pulled down low over a pair of red Vuarnets. He had a lollipop in his mouth that he shifted from one side of his tongue to the other. He was smiling around it, like he’d just lost his virginity, and he said, “Bet you feel seriously fucking retarded about now, don’t you?”

    I said, “Compared to what?”

    Angie stepped out of the crowd with her gun against Lollipop’s crotch. She was wearing a cream-colored fedora on her head, and her long black hair was tied in a bun under it. She wore sunglasses that were bigger than Lollipop’s and ran the gun muzzle over Lollipop’s balls. She said, “Hi.”

    Lollipop’s smile faded, so I replaced it with my own. “Having fun yet?”

    The crowd all around us kept moving at their escalator pace, oblivious. Urban myopia. Angie said, “So what’s our next move?”

    Socia said, “That depends.”

    He was standing behind Angie and by the way her body tensed, I knew there was another gun back there with him too. I said, “This is getting ridiculous.”

    Four of us stood in a crowd of thousands, all interconnected like blood cells by fat squat pieces of metal. Someone in the crowd jostled my shoulder, and I hoped like hell no one had a hair trigger.

    Socia was watching me, a benign expression on his worn face. He said, “Somebody start shooting, I’ll be the one walks away. How ‘bout that?”

    He almost had a point he’d shoot Angie, Angie would shoot Lollipop, and Lollipop would definitely shoot me. Almost.

    I said, “Well, Marion, seeing how this is already about as crowded as a Japanese camera convention, I don’t figure one more body’ll hurt. Look at Barnes and Noble.”

    He turned his head slowly, looked across the street, didn’t see anything that alarmed him. “So?”

    “The roof, Marion. Look at the roof.”

    All he could see was a target scope and the muzzle of Bubba’s rifle. Big target scope, though. The only way to miss with a scope that big would be in the event of an instant solar eclipse. Even then, you’d have to be lucky.

    I said, “We’re all in this together, Marion. If I nod, you go first.”

    Socia said, “I’ll take your girlfriend with me. Believe it.”

    I shrugged. “She ain’t my girlfriend.”

    Socia said, “Like you don’t care, Kenzie. Try that shit on someone who ”

    I said, “Look, Marion, you’re probably not used to this, but what you got here is a no-win situation and not much time to think about it.” I looked at Lollipop. I couldn’t see his eyes, but drops of sweat were doing relay races down his forehead. Not easy holding a gun steady all this time. I looked back at Socia. “The guy on the roof, he might just get ideas of his own real soon. Figure he can pull the trigger fast, twice” I glanced at Lollipop ”and take the two of you out before you get a shot off. He might decide to do that on his own, before I nod. Before I do anything. He’s been known to... act on his own inner voice before. He’s not real stable. You listening, Marion?”

    Socia was in his Place wherever it is people like him go to hide their fear and emotion. He looked around slowly, up and down Washington Street, but never once at the roof. He took his time about it, then looked back at me. “What’s my guarantee I put my gun back in my pocket?”

    “Nothing,” I said. “You want guarantees, go to Sears. I can guarantee you’ll be dead if you don’t.” I looked at Lollipop. “Hell, I’m fixing to use this kid’s gun on him as it is.”

    Lollipop said, “Sure you are, man,” but his voice sounded hoarse, an untaken breath sitting atop his esophagus.

    Socia looked up and down the street again, then shrugged. His hand came out from behind Angie’s back. He held the gun where I could see it a Bren nine millimeter  then stepped from behind Angie and put it inside his jacket. He said, “Lollipop, put it away.”

    The kid’s name was actually “Lollipop.” Patrick Kenzie, Psychic Detective. Lollipop’s lip was curled upward toward his nose and his breathing was hard, showing me how tough he was, the gun still in my side, but the hammer down. Stupid. He looked ready to prove his manhood, not because he wasn’t terrified, but because he was. Usually the way it works. But he was too busy watching my face, proving how much of a man he was. I pivoted slightly with my hip, no big movement, and the gun was suddenly pointed at air. I took the gun hand in mine, snapped my forehead off the bridge of his nose, cracking the Vuarnets in half, and shoved the gun into his stomach with his own hand. I pulled back the hammer. “You want to die?”

    Socia said, “Kenzie, let the boy go.”

    Lollipop said, “I die if I have to,” and bucked against my hand, a line of blood running thickly down his nose. He didn’t look pleased at the prospect, but he didn’t look unwilling.

    I said, “Good. Because next time you pull a gun on me, Lollipop, that’s exactly what’ll happen.” I eased the hammer back down and flicked the safety forward, then ripped the gun from his sweaty hand and put it in my pocket. I raised my hand and Bubba’s rifle disappeared.

    Lollipop was breathing hard and his eyes never left mine. I’d taken a lot more than his gun. I’d taken his pride, the only commodity worth a damn in his world, and he’d definitely kill me if there was a next time. I was getting real popular these days.

    Socia said, “Lollipop, disappear. Tell everyone else to pull back too. I catch up with you later.”

    Lollipop gave me one last look and entered the stream of people heading down the street toward Jordan Marsh. He wasn’t going anywhere. I knew that much. He and the rest of them, whoever and wherever they were, would stay in the crowd, keeping watch on their king. Socia was way too smart to leave himself unprotected. He said, “Come on, let’s go sit ”

    I said, “Let’s sit down right over there.”

    He said, “I got a better place in mind.”

    Angie tilted her head in the direction of Barnes and Noble. “You don’t have any choice, Socia.”

    We walked past Filene’s and sat on a stone bench in the small cement plaza next door. The scope appeared on the roof again, tilted in our direction. Socia saw it too.

    I said, “So, Marion, tell me why I shouldn’t do you right here, right now.”

    He smiled. “Shit. You already in enough trouble with my people as it is. I’m like a god to these boys. You want to fuck with that, be the target of a holy war, go on ahead.”

    I hate when people are right.

    I said, “OK. Why don’t you tell me why you’re allowing me to live?”

    “I’m swell that way sometimes.”

    “Marion.”

    “No matter what, though,” he said, “I might just kill you for calling me ‘Marion’ all the time.” He sat back on the bench, one leg up there with him, his hands clasped around the knee. A man out for some fresh air.

    Angie said, “Well, what do you want from us, Socia?”

    “Hell, little girl, you ain’t even a part of this. We might let you go on about your life after this is done.” He pointed a finger at me. “Him, though, he stick his nose in where it don’t belong, shoot one of my best men, fuck with all this shit that ain’t his to fuck with.”

    Angie said, “A common complaint among the married men in our neighborhood.” That Angie, what a hoot.

    Socia said, “Joke all you want.” He looked at me. “But you know this ain’t a joke, don’t you? This is the end of your life, Kenzie, and it’s happening.”

    I wanted to say something funny, but nothing came to mind. Nothing came even close. It was definitely happening.

    Socia smiled. “Uh-huh. You know it. Only reason you’re alive right now is because Jenna gave you something, and she told you something else. Now, where’s it at?”

    I said, “In a safe place.”

    “In a safe place,” he repeated, rolling it off his tongue, slightly nasal inflection. His imitation of Whitespeak. “Yeah, well, whyn’t you tell me where this safe place is,” he said.

    “Don’t know it,” I said. “Jenna never told me.”

    “Bullshit,” he said and leaned toward me.

    “I’m not busting my ass to convince you here, Marion. I’m just telling you so that when you toss my office and apartment and don’t find anything, you won’t be too surprised.”

    “Maybe I get some friends, we toss you.”

    “Your prerogative,” I said. “But you and your friends better be real good.”

    “Why? You think you’re real good, Kenzie?”

    I nodded. “At this, yeah, I’m real good. And so’s Angie, maybe better. And that guy on the roof, he’s better than both of us.”

    “And he’s not too fond of black people,” Angie said.

    “So, you two real proud of yourselves? Got yourselves a three-man KKK to keep the black man from your door?”

    I said, “Oh, please, Socia, this ain’t color. You’re a fucking criminal. You’re a douche bag who uses kids to do his dirty work. Black or white, that wouldn’t change. And if you try and stop me on this, chances are you’ll succeed and I’ll die. But you won’t stop him.” Socia looked up at the roof. “He’ll come at you and your whole gang and take you all out and probably half the ‘Bury with you. He has about as much conscience as you and even less of a sense of public relations.”

    Socia laughed. “You trying to scare me?”

    I shook my head. “You don’t scare, Marion. People like you never do. But you do die. And if I die, so do you. Simple fact.”

    He sat back on the bench again. Crowds passed us in a steady stream and Bubba’s target scope never moved. Socia tilted his head forward again. “All right, Kenzie. We’ll give you this round. But, either way, don’t matter what, you’ll pay up for Curtis.”

    I shrugged, a heavy weight behind my eyes.

    “You got twenty-four hours to find what we’re both looking for. If I find it before you, or you find it and don’t get it right over to me, your life won’t be worth piss.”

    “Neither will yours.”

    He stood up. “Lotta people tried to kill me over the years, white boy. No one figured a way to do it right yet. Either way, that’s the workings of the world.”

    He walked off into the crowd, the big scope on the roof following him every inch of the way.

TWENTY-ONE

    

    Bubba met us at the parking garage on Bromfield Street where Angie had parked the Vobeast. He was standing out front as we came up the street, chewing a wad of gum the size of a chicken, blowing bubbles big enough to drive passersby to the curb. He said, “Hey,” as we approached, then started on a fresh bubble. A verbal treasure trove, our Bubba.

    “Hey,” Angie said in a deep baritone that matched his own. She slid her arm around his waist and squeezed. “My God, Bubba, is that a Russian assault rifle under your coat or are you just happy to see me?”

    Bubba blushed and his chubby face bloomed for a moment like a cherubic schoolboy. A schoolboy who would put nitro in the toilets, but just the same. He said, “Get her off me, Kenzie.”

    Angie raised her head and chewed on his earlobe. “Bubba, you’re all the man I need.”

    He giggled. This psychopathic behemoth with a bad attitude and he giggled and pushed her away gently. He looked sort of like the Cowardly Lion when he did it, and I waited for him to say, “Aww g’won.” Instead he said, “Cut it out, you tramp,” and then checked to see if she was offended.

    She caught the look of mortification on his face and it was her turn to giggle, hand over her mouth.

    That Bubba. Such a lovable sociopath.

    We headed up the garage ramp and I said, “Bubba, you going to be able to stick around for a while, keep a watch on us mere mortals?”

    “Course I am, man. I’m there. The whole ride.” He reached out and punched my arm playfully. All the feeling drained out of it and it would be a good ten minutes, maybe more, before it came back. Still, it was better than an angry Bubba punch. I’d taken one of those a few years ago the only time I was ever stupid enough to argue with him and after I came to, it took a week for my head to stop echoing.

    We reached the car and climbed in. As we were leaving the garage, Bubba said, “So, we gonna blow these homeboys back to Africa or what?”

    Angie said, “Now, Bubba...”

    I knew better than to try and enlighten Bubba on racial matters. I said, “I don’t think it’ll be necessary.”

    He said, “Shit,” and sat back.

    Poor Bubba. All dressed up and no one to shoot.

    

***

    

    We dropped Bubba off at the playground near his home. He walked up the cement steps and trudged past the jungle gym, kicked a beer bottle out of his way, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. He kicked another bottle and it spun off a picnic table and shattered against the fence. Some of the punks hanging out by the picnic table looked away. No one wanted to catch his eye by mistake. He didn’t notice them though. He just kept walking to the fence at the back of the playground, found the jagged hole there and pushed through it. He walked through some weeds and disappeared around the corner of the abandoned factory where he lives.

    He has a bare mattress tossed down in the middle of the third floor, a couple of cartons of Jack Daniels, and a stereo that plays nothing but his collection of Aerosmith recordings. The second floor is where he keeps his arsenal and two pit bulls named Belker and Sergeant Esterhaus. A Rottweiler named Steve prowls the front yard. If all this and Bubba isn’t enough to deter trespassers or government officials, almost every other floorboard in the place is booby-trapped. Only Bubba knows the right ones to step on. Some walking suicide once tried to get to Bubba’s stash by forcing him to lead him there at gunpoint. Every other month or so, for about a year after that, pieces of the guy were popping up all over the city.

    Angie said, “If Bubba could have been born in another time, like say the Bronze Age, he would have been all set.”

    I looked at the lonely hole in the fence. “Least he would have had someone who shares his sensibilities.”

    We drove back to the office, and inside, began kicking around Jenna’s possible hiding places.

    “The room above the bar?”

    I shook my head. “If she had, she’d have never left them behind when we came and got her. Place didn’t look very burglar proof to me.”

    She nodded. “OK. Where else?”

    “Not the safety-deposit box. Devin wouldn’t He about that. Simone’s?”

    She shook her head. “You’re the first person she showed anything to, right?”

    “I think we’re working under that assumption, yeah.”

    “So, that means you’re the first person she trusted. She probably figured Simone’s view of Socia was too naive. And she was right, I’d say.”

    I said, “If they were in her apartment in Mattapan, someone would have them by now and there’d be no reason for any of this.”

    “So, what’s that leave?”

    We spent a good ten minutes not coming up with an answer to that one.

    “Shit!” Angie said at the end of those ten minutes.

    “Apt,” I said. “Not too helpful though.”

    She lit a cigarette, placed her feet up on the desk, and stared at the ceiling. More Sam Spade than I’d ever be. She said, “What do we know about Jenna?”

    “She’s dead.”

    She nodded. Softly she said, “Besides that.”

    “We know she was married to Socia. Common-law or legal, I don’t know, but married.”

    “And had his child. Roland.”

    “And has three sisters from Alabama.”

    She sat up in her chair, her feet banging off the floor. “Alabama,” she said. “She sent it down to Alabama.”

    I thought about it. How well did Jenna know these sisters anymore? How much could she trust them? Hell, how much could she trust the mail? This was her chance to be needed, to get a little “justice.” To do a little of what people had been doing to her all her life. Would she risk that by putting the major proponent of her vengeance in transit?

    “I don’t think so,” I said.

    Angie said, “Why not?” She said it sharply. Her idea  she wasn’t going to just let go of it.

    I explained my reasoning.

    “Maybe,” she said, her voice slightly deflated. “Let’s keep it on the burner though.”

    “Agreed.” It wasn’t a bad idea, and if it came to it, we’d follow it down, but it didn’t quite fit.

    It goes like this a lot. We sit around the office and bounce ideas off each other and wait for divine intervention. When that doesn’t come, we chase down each possibility, and usually not always, but usually we end up tripping over something that should have been obvious from the beginning.

    I said, “We know she had trouble with creditors a few years back.”

    Angie said, “Yeah. So?”

    “I’m brainstorming here. I never promised pearls of wisdom.”

    She frowned. “She has no record, right?”

    “Except for a bunch of parking tickets.”

    Angie flicked her cigarette out the window.

    I started thinking about the beers in my apartment. Heard them calling me, asking for company.

    Angie said, “Well, if she had all those parking tickets...” We looked at each other and said it together: “Where’s the car?”

TWENTY-TWO

    

    We called George Higby at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. It took us fifteen tries to get past the busy signal, and then, once we did, a recorded voice told us that all the lines were busy. Our call would be taken in the order it was received and please stay on the line. I hadn’t been planning on doing much till the end of the month anyway, so I cradled the phone against my neck and waited.

    The silence ended after about fifteen minutes and the phone rang on the other end once, twice, three times; four, five, six. A voice said, “Registry of Motor Vehicles.”

    I said, “George Higby, Vehicle Registration, please.”

    The voice hadn’t heard me. It said, “You have reached the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Our business hours are nine to five p.m., Monday through Friday. If you need further assistance and have a Touch-Tone phone, please press ‘one’ now.” A sonic beep went off in my ear about the same time I realized it was Sunday. If I pressed “one,” I’d get another computer that would gladly connect me to another computer and by the time I got pissed off enough to throw my phone through the window, all the Registry computers would be having a good old yuck for themselves.

    I just fucking love modern technology.

    I hung up and said, “It’s Sunday.”

    Angie looked at me. “Yes, it is. Tell me the date and you’ll be my idol.”

    “Do we have George’s home number around here?”

    “Possibly. Would you like me to find out?”

    “That’d be peachy.”

    She wheeled her chair over to the PC and entered her password. She waited a moment and her fingers began singing over the keys so fast the computer had a hard time keeping up. Served it right. Probably hung out with the Registry computers on its off days.

    Angie said, “Got it.”

    “Give it to me, baby.”

    She didn’t, but she gave me the number.

    George Higby is one of those hapless souls who goes through life expecting the rest of the world to be as nice as he is. Since he gets out of bed each morning with the desire to make the world a better place, a slightly easier place to get along in he doesn’t understand that there are actually people who get up with the desire to make the rest of the world suffer. Even after his daughter eloped with a guitar player twice her age who left her strung out in a Reno motel room; even after she then ran into some especially nasty people and ended up working her sixteen-year-old body on the back streets of Vegas; even after Angie and I flew out there and took her away from these nasty people with the assistance of the Nevada State Police; even after this sweet apple of his eye blamed the mess she’d made completely on him; even after all this George still meets the world with the nervous smile of someone who only knows how to be open and decent and prays that, maybe just once, the world might reward him. George is the sort of raw material out of which most organized religions create their foundations.

    He answered the phone on the first ring. He always does. He said, “This is George Higby,” and I half expected him to follow it with, “Want to be friends?”

    “Hi, George, it’s Patrick Kenzie.”

    “Patrick!” George said, and I have to admit that the enthusiasm in his voice made me happy to be me all of a sudden. I felt as if I’d been put on this earth for one reason: to call George on July 2 and make his day. He said, “How are you?”

    “I’m great, George. How about yourself?”

    “Very good, Patrick. Very good. I can’t complain.”

    George was the kind who never could.

    I said, “George, I’m afraid this isn’t a strictly social call,” and realized with more than a small measure of guilt that I’d never made a “strictly social call” to George and probably never would.

    “Well, no problem, Patrick,” he said, his voice dropping an octave for a moment. “You’re a busy man. What can I do for you?”

    “How’s Cindy?” I asked.

    “You know kids today,” he said. “At this point in her life, her father is hardly the most important thing to her. That will change, of course.”

    “Of course,” I said.

    “Got to let them grow up.”

    “Sure,” I said.

    “And then they come back to you.”

    “They do,” I said. Sure they do.

    “But enough about me,” he said. “I saw you in the papers the other day. Are you all right?”

    “Fine, George. The media blew it all out of proportion.”

    “They’ll do that sometimes,” he said. “But then, where would we be without them?”

    I said, “The reason I called, George, I need a license number and I can’t wait until tomorrow.”

    “You can’t get it through the police?”

    “No. I need to play this one out by myself for a little while longer before I take it to them.”

    “OK, Patrick,” he said, thinking about it. “OK,” he repeated, brightening a bit. “Yeah, we can do that. You’ll have to give me ten minutes or so to access the computer down there. Is that all right? Can you wait that long?”

    “You’re doing me the favor, George. Take all the time you need.” I gave him Jenna’s name, driver’s license number, and address.

    “OK. Fifteen minutes at most. I’ll call you back.”

    “You have my number?”

    “Of course,” he said, as if we all keep the phone numbers of people we met twice two years ago.

    “Thanks, George,” I said and hung up before he could say, “No, thank you.”

    We waited. Angie shot a Nerf ball through the hoop above the boom box, and I tossed it back to her each time. She’s got a nice arc, but she doesn’t use the backboard enough. She leaned back in the chair and sent one up in a high arc. Before the foam ball swished through the hoop she said, “We going to call Devin in on this one?”

    I tossed the ball back to her. “Nope.”

    “Why not, exactly?” She put another one up and missed.

    “Because we’re not. Use the backboard a little more.”

    She tossed the ball up above her, bouncing it off the ceiling. “It’s not standard procedure,” she said in singsong.

    “Standard procedure? What, we’re the army now?”

    “No,” she said, the Nerf bouncing off her fingers, down her leg, and across the floor. She turned in her chair. “We’re detectives who have a pretty good relationship with the police, and I’m wondering why we’re risking that by not letting them in on evidence in a Murder One investigation.”

    “What evidence?” I leaned out of my chair and scooped up the ball.

    “The picture of Socia and Paulson.”

    “Doesn’t prove anything.”

    “That’s for them to decide. Either way, it was the last thing the murder victim gave you before she was killed. That definitely makes it something they’d be interested in.”

    “So?”

    “So, this should be a dual investigation is ‘so.’We should be telling them we’re going to look at Jenna’s car. We should be asking them for the plate number, not having poor George break into the Registry computers.”

    “And if they were to come across the evidence our clients hired us to find before we do?”

    “Then, once they’re finished with it, they hand it over to

    us.”

    “Just like that?”

    “Just like that.”

    “And if it’s incriminating? If it’s against our clients’ best interests to have the police see it, what then? How good is our business then? If Mulkern wanted to get the police to look for those ‘documents’ he would have. Instead, he hired us. We’re not law enforcement, Ange, we’re private investigators.”

    “No shit, Sherlock. But ”

    “But what? Where the hell’s this coming from? You’re talking like a novice.”

    “I’m no fucking novice, Skid. I just think you should level with your partner about your motives.”

    “My motives. And what are my motives, Ange?”

    “You don’t want the police to get their hands on this, not because you’re afraid of what they’ll do with it. You’re afraid of what they won’t do. You’re afraid it might just be so bad, as bad as Jenna said, and someone in the State House will make a phone call and the evidence will disappear.”

    I kneaded the foam ball in my hand. “You’re suggesting my motives are contrary to the interests of our clients?”

    “You’re damn right I am. If these ‘documents’ are as bad as Jenna said, if they incriminate Paulson or Mulkern, what’re you going to do then? Huh?”

    “We’ll have to see.”

    “Bullshit we’ll have to see. Bullshit. This job should have been over half an hour after we found Jenna in Wickham. But you wanted to play things out, be a goddamn social worker. We’re private investigators. Remember? Not moralists. Our job is to turn over what we’re hired to find to the people who hired us to find it. And if they cover it up, if they buy off the police, fine. Because we’re out of it. We do our job and we get paid. And if ”

    “Wait a minute ”

    “ you don’t do this, if you turn this into some sort of personal crusade to get back at your father through Mulkern, we can kiss this business and this partnership goodbye.”

    I sat forward, my face two feet from hers. I said, “My father? My fucking father? Where’s he come into this?”

    “He’s been in this. He’s Mulkern, he’s Paulson, he’s every politician you ever met who shakes your hand with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other. He’s ”

    “Don’t you talk about my father, Angie.”

    “He’s dead,” she yelled. “Dead. And I’m real sorry to inform you but lung cancer took care of him before you got the chance to do it yourself.”

    I moved closer. “You my analyst now, Ange?” My face felt warm and the blood rippled through my forearms, tingling my fingers.

    “No, I’m not your fucking analyst, Patrick, and why don’t you back the fuck up?”

    I didn’t move. The trip switch on my temper had been kicked over and I stared into her eyes. They were zipping from side to side with bolts of anger. I said, “No, Ange, you back the fuck up, and take your pop psychology degree and your sentiments about my father with you. And maybe I won’t try and analyze your relationship with that Husband of the Year who treats you so well.”

    The phone rang.

    Neither of us moved. Neither of us looked at it. Neither of us softened or backed up.

    Two more rings.

    “Patrick.”

    “What?”

    Another ring.

    “That’s probably George.”

    I felt my jaw unclench a bit, and I turned and picked up the phone. “Patrick Kenzie.”

    “Hi, Patrick. It’s George.”

    “Georgie,” I said, working some false excitement through my vocal cords.

    “Do you have a pencil?”

    “Detectives always have pencils, George.”

    “Ha. Of course. Jenna Angeline’s car is a nineteen seventy-nine Chevy Malibu. Light blue. License number DRW-four seven nine. There’s a boot order in effect on it as of June third.”

    I felt the rush building from the pit of my stomach, the blood pounding into my heart from open valves. “A boot order?”

    “Yes,” George said. “The Denver boot. Ms. Angeline didn’t like paying her parking tickets it seems.”

    The Denver boot. The yellow, immovable tire lock. The blue Malibu Jerome’s friends had been sitting on when I went to Jenna’s place. Parked in front of the house. Not going anywhere anytime soon.

    I said, “George, you are the greatest. Swear to God.”

    “I helped?”

    “Damn right you helped.”

    “Hey, how about having a beer together sometime soon?”

    I looked at Angie. She was peering at something on her lap, her hair covering her face, but the anger hung in the room like exhaust fumes. I said, “I’d really like that, George. Give me a call at the end of next week? I should have wrapped this up by then.” Or died trying.

    “You got it,” he said. “You got it.”

    “Take care, George.”

    I hung up and looked at my partner. She was doing the pencil against her tooth thing again, looking at me, her eyes flat and impersonal. Her voice was pretty much the same. “I was out of line.”

    “Maybe not. Maybe I’m just not ready to probe that part of my psyche yet.”

    “Maybe you’ll never be.”

    “Maybe,” I said. “What about you?”

    “And the Asshole, as you so kindly refer to him?”

    “That guy, yeah.”

    “Things are coming,” she said. “They’re coming.”

    “What do you want to do about the case?”

    She shrugged. “You know what I want to do. But, then, I’m not the one who had to watch Jenna die, so I’ll let you call it. Just remember, you owe me one.”

    I nodded. I held out my hand. “Pals?” She grimaced and reached across and slapped my palm. “When weren’t we?”

    “About five minutes ago.” I laughed.

    She chuckled. “Oh, yeah.”

    

***

    

    We parked at the top of the hill, looking down on Jenna’s three-decker and the blue Malibu parked out front. The yellow boot was apparent even in the fading light. Bostonians get parking tickets and traffic citations with a consistency most pro sports teams would envy. They also tend to wait until their driver’s licenses are about to be renewed before paying attention to them. City officials realized this after a while, took a look at their dwindling coffers, wondered where the graft necessary to put their children through college and their asses on the Vineyard was going to come from, and brought in the Denver boot. It comes, obviously, from Denver, and it clamps around your tire, and that car ain’t going anywhere until all those parking fines are paid in full. Tampering with one is a serious offense, punishable by prison and/or a stiff fine. This doesn’t deter anyone half as much as the fact that the damn things are almost as hard to remove as an old chastity belt. A friend of mine did it once, with a ballpeen hammer, a chisel, and a whack in just the right place. But the boot must have been defective, because he could never repeat the feat. Depressed the hell out of him too; he could have been set for life boot destroyer for hire. Making more money than Michael Jackson.

    If Jenna had hidden something in that car, it would make a perverse bit of sense. Sure, a car sitting untended in Boston for more than four or five minutes usually loses its stereo and speakers, and more often than not, the rest of it as well. But the chopping block market for fifteen-year-old Chevies ain’t what it used to be, and no self-respecting car thief is going to waste precious time screwing around with the boot. So, unless she hid it in her stereo, there was a good chance it was still there. If she’d hidden anything there in the first place. Big if.

    We sat and watched the car, waiting for darkness to fall. The sun had set but the sky still held its warmth, a canvas of beige streaked with wisps of orange. Somewhere behind or in front of us in a tree, on a roof, in a bush, at one with the natural urban world Bubba lurked in wait, his eyes as constant and emotionless as T. J. Eckleburg’s.

    We had no music going, because the Vobeast has no radio, and it was damn near killing me. God only knows how people kept their sanity before rock and roll. I considered what Angie had said about my motives, about my father, about taking my anger out on Mulkern and his cronies, anger at a world that had settled the score with my father before I had a chance to. If she was wrong, we’d find out when we finally got our hands on the evidence and I turned it over for another signed check, including the bonus. If she was right, we’d find out about that too. Either way, I didn’t like thinking about it.

    There was, come to think about it, way too much happening lately that required pauses for introspection. I’ve never made any bones about it I love investigating things, as long as I’m not one of them. But suddenly, there were all these hot-blooded confrontations with people in my life  Richie, Mulkern, Angie. All of a sudden I was being asked to reevaluate myself in terms of racism, politics, and the Hero. My three least favorite subjects. Much more introspection and I’d end up growing a long white beard, maybe wearing a white smock, sipping a glass of hemlock while I read The Crito. Maybe I’d move to Tibet, climb a mountain with the Dalai Lama or head to Paris and wear nothing but black, grow myself a keen goatee and talk about jazz all the time.

    Or maybe I’d do what I always do hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.

    Angie said, “What do you think?”

    The sky was turning to ink, and there wasn’t a working streetlight for miles. I said, “Time for a little B and E.”

    There was no one on the stoops as we came down the hill, but that wouldn’t last much longer on a humid Sunday night. This wasn’t the type of neighborhood where people took off to the Cape for the Fourth of July. We had to get in, find whatever it was we were looking for, and get out. People who don’t have much usually protect what they’ve got in lethal ways. Whether the trigger’s pulled by a Bobby Royce or a little old lady, the damage can often be damn similar.

    Angie pulled the slim jim from her jacket as we approached the car, and before you could say “grand theft auto,” she’d slid it down beside the window and popped the lock. I had no idea what sort of house Jenna had kept the only time I’d seen it someone had gone through it like a storm front but she kept a pristine car. Angie took the backseat, reaching down under the seat and behind it, pulling up the mats, looking for telltale tears in the carpet.

    I did pretty much the same in the front seat. I pulled open the ashtray, found it brimming with Marlboro butts, closed it. I took what looked like warranties and repair records and an owner’s manual from the glove compartment, but I stuffed it all in the plastic bag I’d brought anyway. Easier to check through it all when we got out of here. I reached under the dashboard, ran my hand around, didn’t find anything taped there. I checked the door panels for rips or cuts in the seams. Nada. I took a screwdriver to the running panel on the passenger side; maybe Jenna’d seen The French Connection. I opened it: maybe she hadn’t.

    Angie was doing the same to the panel on the driver’s side. When she removed it, she didn’t shout “Eureka,” so I figured she hadn’t found any more than I had. We were steadily getting nowhere when someone said, “Ain’t they pretty?”

    I sat up in the seat, my hand on my gun, and saw the girl who’d been sitting on the steps the last time I’d been here. Jerome was standing beside her and they were holding hands. Jerome said, “You meet Roland yet?”

    I sat up in the seat. “Haven’t had the pleasure.”

    Jerome looked at Angie, kept looking, not wide-eyed, just interested. He said, “The fuck you doing in his mother’s car, man?”

    “Working.”

    His girlfriend lit a cigarette. She took a drag, blew the smoke in my direction. A thick ring of red lipstick looped around the white filter. She said, “He’s the man was there when Jenna got herself killed by Curtis.”

    Jerome said, “I know that, Sheila. Damn.” He looked at me. “You’re a detective, right?”

    I looked at Sheila’s cigarette again. Something about it annoyed me, but I couldn’t figure out what yet. I said, “Yeah, Jerome. Got a badge and everything.”

    Jerome said, “Beats working for a living.”

    Sheila took another hit off her cigarette, placed another red ring slightly above the first.

    Angie sat up in the seat and lit one too. Carcinogen city.

    I looked at Sheila, then at Angie. I said, “Ange.”

    “Yeah?”

    “Did Jenna wear lipstick?”

    Jerome was watching us with a cocked eyebrow, his arms folded across his chest. Angie thought about it. She took a few more drags off her cigarette, blew the smoke out in slow streams. She said, “Yeah. Come to think of it. It was subtle, a light pink, but yeah.”

    I flipped open the car ashtray. “What kind of cigarettes she smoke, you remember?”

    “Lights, I think. Or Vantage, maybe. Definitely something with a white filter.”

    “But she’d just started again,” I said, remembering Jenna’s claim that she hadn’t smoked in ten years until the events of the past few weeks caused her to start back up.

    The cigarettes in the ashtray had cork filters and no lipstick rings on them. I yanked the ashtray out, swung my legs out of the car. “Step back for a sec’ please, Jerome.”

    “Yassuh, bawse, whatever you say.”

    “I said ‘please,’ Jerome.”

    Jerome and Sheila took two steps back. I dumped the ashtray on the sidewalk. Jerome said, “Hey, man, some of us got to live here.”

    Metal gleamed up through the pile of ash. I reached down, scattered the ash, and picked up a key. I said, “We got what we came for.”

    Angie said, “Neato,” and got out of the car.

    Jerome said, “Congratulations. Now, pick that shit back up, man.”

    I held the ashtray by the curb and brushed everything back into it. I put it on the seat and got out of the car. I said, “You’re all right, Jerome.”

    Jerome said, “Thanks. Just knowing I please white folks like yourself makes me a complete man.”

    I smiled and we walked back up the hill.

    

***

    

    It was a locker key, number 506. Could have belonged to a locker at Logan Airport or the Greyhound Station in Park Square or the Amtrak Terminal at South Station. Or any number of bus depots in Springfield or Lowell or New Hampshire or Connecticut or Maine or God knew where else.

    Angie said, “So, what do you want to do? Check them all?”

    “Don’t have much choice.”

    “That’s a lot of places.”

    “Look on the bright side.”

    “Which is?”

    “Think of all the overtime we can pay ourselves.”

    She hit me, but not as hard as I thought she would.

TWENTY-THREE

    

    We decided we’d start in the morning. There were a lot of lockers in the state and we’d need all the energy we had; right now, we were running on fumes. Angie went home and Bubba followed. I slept in the office because it was harder to approach than my apartment; footsteps in the empty church would echo like cannon shots.

    While I slept, a knot the size of a seashell worked its way into my neck, and my legs cramped up where they bent on the cot against the wall.

    And sometime while I slept, war broke out.

    

***

    

    Curtis Moore was the first to fall in the line of duty. Shortly after midnight a fire broke out at the nurse’s desk in the prison hospital ward. The two cops on duty by Curtis’s bed got up to take a look. It wasn’t much of a fire a rag doused in rubbing alcohol tossed in a trash can, a match thrown in for combustion. The two cops and the nurse found a fire extinguisher, doused it, and then it didn’t take the cops too long to figure out a possible motive behind it. By the time they burst back in the room, Curtis had a hole the size of a hand in his throat and the initials J. A. carved into his forehead.

    Three members of the Raven Saints met their blaze of glory next. Coming back from a late game at Fenway Park and a little subway wilding for a nightcap, they stepped out of Ruggles Station and had a one-sided conversation with an AK-47 pointed from a car. One of them, a sixteen-year-old named Gerard Mullins, took a burst to his upper thighs and abdomen, but didn’t die. He played possum in the shadows until the car drove away, and then he started crawling toward Columbus Avenue. He was halfway between the subway station and the corner when they came back and stitched a line from just below his ear to just above his ankle.

    Socia was stepping out of a bar on South Huntington, two soldiers a few feet behind him, when James Tyrone, a fifteen-year-old member of the Angel Avengers, stepped from behind a van with a .45 aimed at Socia’s nose. He pulled the trigger and the gun jammed, and by the time Socia’s bodyguards stopped firing, he was in the middle of South Huntington turning the yellow divider line a dark red.

    Three Avengers went down in Franklin Park next. Then, two more Saints caught it while sitting on a stoop in Intervale. Another cycle of retaliation followed that one, and by the time the sun came up, the worst night in Boston gang history leveled out at twenty-six wounded, twelve dead.

    

***

    

    My phone started ringing at eight. I grabbed it somewhere around the fourth ring. I said, “What?”

    Devin said, “You heard?”

    I said, “No,” and tried to go back to bed.

    “Boston’s favorite father-and-son team just went to war.”

    My head dropped off the side of the cot. “Oh, no.”

    “Oh, yes.” He gave me the rundown.

    “Twelve dead?” I said. “Jesus.” Maybe par for the course in New York, but here it was astronomical.

    “Twelve at the moment,” he said. “Probably five or six on the critical list who won’t make Independence Day. It’s a wonderful life, isn’t it?”

    “Why’re you calling me at eight in the morning with this, Dev?”

    “Because I want you down here in an hour.” “Me? Why?”

    “Because you were the last person to talk to Jenna Ange-line, and someone just happened to drill her initials onto Curtis Moore’s head. Because you met with Socia yesterday and didn’t tell me. Because word around town is you got something both Socia and Roland are willing to kill for, and I’m tired of waiting for you to tell me what that is out of the goodness of your heart. You, Kenzie, because lying is second nature to you, but it’s harder to do in an interrogation room. So, get your ass down here and bring your partner with you.”

    “I think I’ll bring Cheswick Hartman with me too.”

    “Go right ahead, Patrick. And that’ll please me so much, I’ll press obstruction charges against you and toss you in jail for a night. By the time Cheswick gets you out, all the fuckers we arrested last night from the Saints and Avengers ought to know your ass real intimately.”

    “I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

    “Fifty minutes,” he said. “The clock started ticking when you picked up the phone.” He hung up.

    I called Angie, told her I’d be ready in twenty minutes.

    I didn’t call Cheswick.

    I called Richie at home but he was already at work. I tried him there.

    “How much you know?” he asked.

    “Nothing more than you guys.”

    “Bullshit. Your name keeps coming up in this one, Patrick. And weird shit’s going down at the State House.”

    I was working my way into a shirt, but I stopped, my right arm sticking out, frozen, like it was in a cast. I said, “What weird shit?”

    “The street terrorism bill.”

    “What about it?”

    “It was supposed to go to floor today. Early. So everyone could beat the traffic up to the Cape for the Fourth.”

    “And?”

    “And no one is there. The State House is empty. Twelve kids died last night in gang violence and the next morning, when a bill that’s allegedly going to start curbing all that shit is supposed to go to floor, suddenly no one’s interested anymore.”

    “I got to go,” I said.

    I could have airmailed the phone to Rhode Island and still heard his voice. “What the fuck do you know?”

    “No more favors, Patrick. No more.” “Love it when you scold me.” I hung up.

    

***

    

    I was waiting in front of the church when Angie pulled up in that brown thing she calls a car. On weekends and holidays, Phil has no need for it; he stocks up on Budweiser and settles into the Barcalounger and watches whatever’s on TV. Who needs a car when Gilligan still hasn’t gotten off the island? Angie drives it whenever she can so she can listen to her tapes; she also claims I’m a lousy driver behind the wheel of the Vobeast because I don’t care what happens to it. This isn’t entirely true; I would care if something happened to it and I’d like some money from the insurance company if it ever did.

    The ride from Angie’s to Berkeley Street took less than ten minutes. The city was empty. Those who had gone to the Cape had left Thursday or Friday. Those who were going to the Esplanade for tomorrow’s concert and fireworks hadn’t started camping out yet. Everyone had taken the day off. During the ride, we saw something few Bostonians ever see empty parking spaces. I kept asking her to stop at each one and back in and out again, just to see what it felt like.

    Upper Berkeley, by Police Headquarters, was different. The block was cordoned off with sawhorses. A beefy patrolman waved us around the block. We could see vans with satellite dishes on top, cables running like overweight pythons across the street, white TV trucks parked on the sidewalk, and the black Crown Victorias of the upper police brass parked three-deep by the curb.

    We swung over to St. James and parked easily enough, then walked back to the rear door of the building. A young black cop stood in front of the door, hands crossed behind his back, legs spread in military stance. He glanced at us. “Press goes through the front door.”

    “We’re not press.” We identified ourselves. “We have an appointment with Detective Amronklin.”

    The cop nodded. “Go up these stairs. Fifth floor, take a right. You’ll see him.”

    We did. He was sitting on a table at the end of a long corridor with his partner, Oscar Lee. Oscar is big and black and just as mean as Devin. He talks a little less but drinks just as much. They’ve been partners so long they even got their respective divorces on the same day. Each has taken a bullet for the other, and penetrating just the surface of their relationship would be as easy as digging through cinder block with a plastic spoon. They noticed us at the same time, looked up, and held their tired eyes on us as we walked down the corridor toward them. They both looked like shit, tired and cranky, ready to stomp on anyone who didn’t give them what they wanted. They both had splotches of blood on their shirts and coffee cups in their hands.

    We entered the office and I said, “Hey.”

    They nodded. If they became more similar they’d be joined at the hip.

    Oscar said, “Have a seat, folks.”

    There was a scarred card table in the middle of the room with a telephone and a tape recorder on it. We took seats on the side closest to the wall, and Devin sat down on my right, beside the phone, while Oscar sat to Angie’s left, beside the tape recorder. Devin lit a cigarette and Oscar turned on the tape recorder. A voice said: “Recording copied August the sixth, nineteen ninety-three. Listed under bar code number 5756798. Evidence room, Boston police headquarters, precinct nine, 154 Berkeley Street.”

    Devin said, “Turn it up a bit.”

    Oscar did, and there were fifteen or twenty seconds of dead air, then the sound of a low rumble and lots of metal on metal sounds, as if a dinner party of ten were all rubbing their knives and forks together. Water dripped somewhere in there too. A voice said, “Cut him again.”

    Devin looked at me.

    The voice sounded like Socia’s.

    Another voice: “Where?”

    Socia: “Fuck do I care? Be inventive. That knee looks sensitive.”

    There was a moment when the only sound was the dripping water, then someone screamed, long and loud and shrill.

    Socia laughed. “I’m doing one of your eyes next, so why don’t you tell me, get it over with.”

    The other voice: “Get it over with. He ain’t fucking with you, Anton.”

    “I ain’t fucking with you, Anton. You know that.”

    A low, wheezing sound. Weeping.

    Socia: “Too many tears coming out of that eye. Take it out.”

    I sat up in my chair.

    The other voice said, “What?”

    Socia: “I stutter? Take it out.”

    There was a soft, unpleasant sound, the sound a shoe makes when it steps into slush.

    And then the scream. Impossibly high-pitched, a mixture of excruciating pain and horrified disbelief.

    Socia: “It’s on the floor in front of you, Anton. Give me the name, fuck. Who turned you?”

    The screaming hadn’t subsided yet. It rang clear and hard and steady.

    “Who turned you? Stop screaming.” A harsh flesh-on-flesh sound. The screaming blew up to a louder pitch.

    “Who fucking turned you?”

    The screaming was defiant now, an angry howl.

    “Who fu Fuck it. Pup out the other one. No, not with that. Get a fucking spoon, man.”

    There was a sound of soft footsteps, squeaking a bit as they walked away from wherever the microphone was.

    The screaming turned into a whimper.

    Socia, in a soft whisper: “Who turned you, Anton? It’ll be over quick, soon as you tell me.”

    The whimper screeched something unintelligible.

    Socia said, “I promise. It’ll all be over, soon as you tell me. You’ll die quick and painless.”

    A torn sob, ragged breathing, gasping for air, a steady weeping that lasted for over a minute.

    “Come on now. Tell me.”

    From the sob came: “Na. Na I ”

    “Hand me that fucking spoon.”

    “Devin. The cop! Devin!” It sounded like the words had been pushed out of the body through a torn hole.

    Devin reached over and shut off the tape recorder. I realized I was sitting rigid in my chair, half out of it, my spine bowed. I looked at Angie. Her skin was white, her fists tight against the arms of the chair.

    Oscar looked bored, staring up at the ceiling. He said, “Anton Meriweather. Sixteen years old. Devin and me turned him in December and he informed on Socia. He was a soldier with the Saints. Oh yeah, he’s dead.”

    I said, “You have this tape. Why’s Socia still walking around?”

    Devin said, “You ever see a jury try to make a decision on a voice ID? You ever seen how many people a defense attorney will find who sound just like the guy on that tape? Did you hear anyone call Socia by name on that tape?”

    I shook my head.

    “I just want you to know who you’re dealing with here, kids. After Anton gave my name up, they worked on him for another ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. Long time to be alive with your eye ripped out. When we found him, three days later, I didn’t recognize him. Neither did his mother. We had to do a dental just to be sure it was Anton.”

    Angie cleared her throat. “How’d you get that recording?”

    Oscar said, “Anton was wearing it. Between his legs. He knew he had the whole thing on tape, all he had to do was say Socia’s name, and his brain froze up and he forgot. Pain’ll do that.” He looked at Devin, then back at me. “Mr. Kenzie, I ain’t going to try and turn this into good cop/bad cop, but Devin’s a friend of yours, and I’m not. I liked Anton a whole hell of a lot though. So I want to know what you know about the shit going on and I want to know now. You figure a way to do that without compromising your clients, that’s OK with me. But if you can’t figure a way, you’re going to tell me anyway. ‘Cause we’re tired of picking bodies up off the street.”

    I believed him. “Ask the questions.”

    Devin said, “What’d you and Socia talk about yesterday?”

    “He thinks I have incriminating evidence on him, things Jenna Angeline gave me. He wants to trade me my life for the evidence. I told him if I died, so did he.”

    “Compliments of Bubba Rogowski,” Oscar said.

    I raised my eyebrows slightly, then nodded.

    Devin said, “What kind of evidence do you have against Socia?”

    “Nothing ”

    “Bullshit,” Oscar said.

    “True shit. I don’t have anything that could get Socia convicted of so much as jaywalking.”

    Angie said, “Jenna Angeline promised us there were things that she had access to, but she died before she could tell us what or where they were.”

    “Word on the street is Jenna gave you something right before Curtis Moore popped her,” Oscar said.

    I looked at Angie and she nodded. I reached into my pocket, pulled out another Xerox of the photo. I passed it to Devin. “That’s what she gave me.”

    Devin looked at it, looked hard at Paulson, flipped it to Oscar. “Where’s the rest of it?”

    “That’s all there is.”

    Oscar looked at it, looked at Devin. He nodded, looked at me. “You’re fucking with the wrong people,” he said. “We will throw your tight ass in jail.”

    “That’s all I got.”

    He slammed a bear’s hand down on the table. “Where’s the original? Where are the others?”

    “I don’t know where the others are, and I have the original,” I said. “And I’m not giving it up. Throw me in jail. Toss me in a cell with a couple of Saints. Whatever. I don’t care. Because I got a lot better chance staying alive in that hole with that picture hidden somewhere than I do out on the street without it.”

    “You don’t think we can protect you?” Devin said.

    “No, guys, I don’t think you can protect me. I don’t have anything on Socia, but he thinks I do. As long as he thinks that, I breathe. Soon as he realizes I’m bluffing, he plays catch-up for Curtis Moore and I end up like Anton.” I thought of Anton and felt nauseous.

    Oscar said, “Soda’s got too much on his slate right now to worry about you.”

    “That’s supposed to make me feel better? What, I got a week or so of happiness before he cleans his slate and remembers me? No way. You want to hear what I think about this, or you want to keep chasing your tails around this point?”

    They looked at each other, communicating the way only guys like them can. Devin said, “All right. Tell us what you think’s going on.”

    “Between Socia and Roland I don’t have a clue. Honestly.” I picked the photocopy off the table, held it up so they could see it. I said, “But I do know the street terrorism bill was supposed to go before the state senate this morning.”

    “So?”

    “So it didn’t. Today of all days, and they’re all acting like suddenly the problem’s disappeared.”

    Devin looked at the photocopy, raised an eyebrow. He picked up the phone in front of him, punched a few numbers, waited. “Patch me through to Commander Willis, State House Police.” He drummed his fingers on the table, looked at the photocopy. He reached out, took it out of my hands, placed it in front of him, looked at it some more. The rest of us had nothing better to do, so we watched him. “John? This is Devin Amronklin....Yeah, I got my hands full....

    Huh?.. .Yeah, I think there’ll be more. Plenty more.... Look, John...I need to ask you something. Any pols come in today?” He listened. “Well, the Guv, of course. What else is he going to do? And... yeah, yeah. But what about that bill they were sup Uh-huh... And who was that?... Sure, take your time.” He let the phone drop to his neck and drummed his fingers some more. He brought it up to his ear. “Yeah, I’m here.... OK, John. Thanks a lot.... No, nothing, really. Just curious. Thanks again.” He looked at the three of us. “On Friday, someone moved that they all enjoy the long weekend like everyone else.”

    “Who was that someone?” Angie asked.

    Devin tapped the photocopy. “A Senator Brian Paulson,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”

    I stared back at him.

    “No cameras or tape recorders in the walls,” he said.

    I glanced at the photocopy. “I can’t reveal the names of my clients.”

    Devin nodded. Oscar smiled. They liked that. I’d just told them exactly what they wanted to know. Devin said, “This is big, isn’t it?”

    I shrugged. Another confirmation.

    Devin looked at Oscar. “You got anything else?”

    Oscar shook his head. His eyes were bright.

    Devin said, “Let’s walk them down. Sound good to you, Detective Lee?”

    When we stepped out the back door, Oscar told the young cop to go get a cup of coffee. He shook Angie’s hand, then mine. He said, “Depending how far this goes, we could lose our badges on this one.”

    I said, “I know.”

    Devin looked around the back of the building. “Bucking city hall’s one thing, the State House is something else entirely.”

    I nodded.

    Oscar said, “Vine,” and looked at Devin.

    Devin sighed. “No shit.”

    Angie said, “Vine?”

    Oscar said, “Chris Vine. Vice cop a few years back. Swore he had evidence on a senator, hinted about it going higher than that.”

    I said, “What happened?”

    Devin said, “Someone found two kilos of heroin in his locker.”

    “Box of hypodermics too,” Oscar said.

    Devin nodded. “Couple weeks later, Vine ate his gun.”

    Oscar gave Devin another look. There was something alien in both their eyes. It might have been fear. Oscar said, “You be careful, the both of you. We’ll contact you.”

    “Agreed.”

    Devin said, “If you’re still tight with Richie Colgan, I’d say now might be a good time to use him.” “Not quite yet.”

    Oscar and Devin looked at each other again, let out big bursts of breath. Oscar looked up at the sky. “Going to be a serious shitstorm any day now.”

    Angie said, “And the four of us without umbrellas.”

    We all got a chuckle out of that. A short one though. Laughter at a wake.

TWENTY-FOUR

    

    We took Boylston down to Arlington and came back around the block to the Greyhound Station. We waded through a listless sea of hookers, pimps, grifters, and assorted terminal cases before we found the dark green metal checkerboard of lockers. Number 506 was at the top of its row and I had to reach up a bit to try the key.

    It didn’t fit. One down.

    We tried a couple of smaller places. Nothing.

    We drove out to the airport. Logan Airport has five terminals, lettered A through E. A had no 506. B terminal had no lockers. C had no 506 in Arrivals. We walked down to Departures. Like the rest of the city, it was a ghost town, the waxed floor still slick and unscuffed, reflecting the bright fluorescents overhead. We found 506, took a deep breath, let it out when the key didn’t fit.

    Same thing in D and E.

    We tried some places in East Boston, Chelsea, Revere  nada.

    We stopped at a sandwich shop in Everett and took a seat by the window. The morning had died and the sky had hardened to a damp newspaper gray. It didn’t seem particularly cloudy, just resolutely sunless. A red Mustang pulled in across the street and the driver looked in the record store in front of him, probably waiting on a friend.

    Angie said, “You think he’s the only one?”

    I shook my head, swallowed a bite of roast beef. “He’s the point man.”

    We both looked across at him. He was parked a good forty yards back, a thin black head shaven till it gleamed. No sunglasses this time. Probably didn’t want anything obstructing his vision when he took a shot at me.

    “Where do you think Bubba is?” I said.

    “If we could see him, he wouldn’t be doing his job.”

    I nodded. “Still, be nice if he fired a flare every now and then, if only for my peace of mind.”

    “He is your peace of mind, Skid.”

    Hard to argue with the truth.

    

***

    

    We led the Mustang back with us through Somerville and up onto 93, heading into the city. We got off at South Station and parked on Summer Street. The Mustang cruised past, following the traffic past the post office. He turned right, and we got out and walked up to the main entrance.

    South Station used to look like a great location for a gangster movie. It’s huge, with enormous cathedral ceilings and parquet marble floors that seem to run on into infinity. Used to be all this space was interrupted only by a wooden newsstand, a shoeshine booth, and a few dark mahogany circular benches, expansive and double-tiered like human water fountains. It was the perfect place to wear powder-blue wool suits and matching fedoras, sit and watch people from behind a newspaper. Then came hard times, forgotten times, and the marble grew brown and scuffed, the newsstand needed a paint job or a wrecking ball, and the shoeshine stand disappeared entirely. Then, a few years ago, refurbishment. Now there’s a hot dog/pizza place with a yellow neon sign, an Au Bon Pain with Cinzano umbrellas over black wrought-iron tables, and a new newsstand that looks like a cross between a fern bar and a bookstore. The whole place looks smaller, the moody dark hues that pooled in shadows around shafts of faded sunlight have been replaced with glaring bright lights and an ambience of faked happiness. Spend all the money you want on ambience, it still won’t change the fact that a train station is a place where people wait, usually without much glee, for a train to come take them away.

    The lockers are in the back near the rest rooms. As we headed toward them, an old guy with stiff white hair and a PA system for vocal cords announced: “The Ambassador bound for Providence, Hartford, New Haven, and New York City, now boarding on track thirty-two.” If the little dink had had a megaphone I would have lost an ear.

    We walked down a dark corridor and stepped into yesterday. No glaring fluorescents, no ferns, just marble and dim yellow lamps that were one step removed from candles. We searched the rows of lockers in the semidarkness, trying to make out the faded, stenciled brass numbers, until Angie said, “Here.”

    I patted my pockets. “You got the key, right?”

    She looked at me. “Patrick.”

    “Where’s the last place we used it?”

    “Patrick,” she said again, only this time her teeth were gritted.

    I held it up. “God, you can’t take a joke anymore.”

    She snatched the key from my hand, slipped it into the lock, and turned it.

    I think she was more surprised than I was.

    The bag inside was blue plastic. The word “Gap” was stenciled in white letters across the middle. Angie handed it to me. Light. We looked back in, felt around. Nothing more. Angie let the door clang behind us and I carried the bag in my left hand as we walked back down the corridor. A veritable spring to our steps. Payday.

    Or Payback Day, depending on your perspective.

    The bald kid who’d been driving the Mustang was coming across the terminal toward us fast. He saw us, surprised, and started to turn away. Then he noticed the bag. Real bright fucking move on my part, not putting it under my coat. Baldie raised his right hand over his head and his left dug under his warm-up jacket.

    Two kids disengaged themselves from the corner of the Au Bon Pain counter, and another one a guy, older than the three of them sauntered toward us from the left, near the entrance.

    Baldie had his gun clear now, holding it down by his leg, walking casually, his eyes never leaving us. The terminal was packed, the oblivious crowd between us and Baldie scooping up their coffee cups and newspapers and luggage and heading out toward the track. Baldie was starting to smile, the crowd and twenty yards all that remained between us. My gun was in my hand now, the bag in front of it. Angie had her hand stuffed in her pocket, both of us taking tender steps forward as the crowd streamed past us, jostling us every now and then. Baldie was moving just as slowly, but with confidence, as if all his movements had been choreographed. His smile was huge, an adrenaline junkie’s smile, sucking its fuel from the tension. Fifteen yards between us now, and Baldie starting to rock forward just a bit as he walked, getting high off it.

    Then Bubba stepped out of the crowd and blew off the back of his head with a shotgun.

    The kid vaulted up in the air, arms spread wide, chest out in a swan dive, and hit the ground on his face. The crowd erupted, scattering across the marble, crashing into one another, no real sense of direction except to get as far away from the corpse as possible, like pigeons without wings, tripping and sliding, trying to scramble back up off the marble before they got trampled. The guy on our left aimed an Uzi, one-handed, straight across the terminal at us and we dropped to our knees as it let loose, the ricochets chucking out pieces of the wall behind us. Bubba’s shotgun went off again, and the guy jerked up in the air like he’d just pulled the rip cord on a parachute. He flew back through a window but only half the glass shattered. He hung there, half in, half out, in a glass web.

    I took aim at the other two kids as Bubba jacked the shells out of the shotgun and slammed two more home. I squeezed off three shots and the kids dove into a fray of black iron tables. It was impossible to get a clear shot with the crowd in the way, so Angie and I fired at the tables, the bullets popping off the black iron legs. One of the kids rolled onto his back as Bubba turned in his direction. He fired a .357 and the round hit Bubba high in the chest. The shotgun shattered the glass six feet above their heads, and Bubba went down.

    A police unit came off Atlantic, bounced straight up onto the curb, and stopped just short of the glass doors. What remained of the crowd seemed to have all come to its senses at once; everyone lay flat on their bellies on the marble, hands protecting heads, luggage providing extra cover like leather retaining walls. The two kids stumbled over the tables and headed toward the tracks, firing in at us from the other side of the windows.

    I started toward the middle of the terminal, toward Bubba, but a second police unit jumped the curb, skidding to a stop. The first two cops were already inside, pumping rounds at the two kids near the tracks. Angie grabbed my arm and we ran toward the corridor. The window to my left shattered, dropping out of the pane in a white cascade. The cops were coming closer, firing with accuracy now as the two kids stumbled into each other, trying to get a clear shot at us. Just before we made the corridor, one of them suddenly spun around like a top and sat down. He looked confused, glass falling around him like snow.

    Angie kicked the alarm bar on the back door and the siren blast filled the terminal, bleating its call onto the street as we ran behind a row of trucks toward the corner. We cut out into traffic and went around the block, charging back up to Atlantic. We stopped on the corner, took a couple of deep breaths, held them as two more cruisers blew past us. We waited for the light, sweat pouring off our faces. When it turned red, we trotted across Atlantic, through the red dragon’s arch and down into Chinatown. We walked up Beach Street, past some men icing down their fish, past a woman tossing a barrel of fetid water off the back of a tiny loading dock, past an old Vietnamese couple, still dressed in the garb they’d worn during the French occupation. A small guy in a white shirt argued with a beefy Italian truck driver. The truck driver kept saying, “We go through this every day. Speak fucking English, goddamnit,” and the small guy said, “No speak English. You charge too fucky much, goddamnit.” As we passed, the truck driver said, “Now ‘too fucky much’ that I can understand.” The small guy looked fit to shoot him.

    We caught a cab at the corner of Beach and Harrison, told the Iranian driver where we wanted to go. He looked at us in the rearview. “Tough day?”

    No matter where you are, “tough day” and “too fucky much” seem to be part of the universal language. I looked at him and nodded. “Tough day,” I said.

    He shrugged. “Me too,” he said and pulled onto the expressway.

    Angie leaned her head against my shoulder. “What about Bubba?” Her voice was hoarse and thick.

    “I don’t know,” I said and looked at the Gap bag in my lap.

    She took my hand and I held on tight.

TWENTY-FIVE

    

    I sat in the front pew of St. Bart’s and watched angie light a candle for Bubba. She stood over it for a moment, her hand cupped around it until the yellow flame grew fat with oxygen. Then she knelt and bowed her head.

    I started to bow mine, then stopped halfway, caught in the middle as always.

    I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or a she or an it, but as something that defies my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

    I stopped praying or bowing, for that matter a long time ago, around the time my prayers became whispered chants pleading for the Hero’s demise and the courage necessary to have a hand in it. I never did get the courage, and the demise happened slowly, witnessed by my impotent stew of leftover emotions. Afterward, the world went on and any contract between God and myself had severed, interred in the hole with my father.

    Angie stood up, blessed herself, and walked down off the carpeted altar to the pew. She stood there, looking down at the Gap bag beside me, and waited.

    Bubba was dead, dying, or severely wounded because of this innocuous-looking bag. Jenna was dead too. So were Curtis Moore and two or three guys in the Amtrak station and twelve anonymous street kids who’d probably felt dead for a long time. By the time this was all over, Socia or I would join those statistics too. Maybe both of us. Maybe Angie. Maybe Roland.

    A lot of pain in such a simple plastic bag.

    “They’ll get here soon,” Angie said. “Open it.”

    “They” were the police. It wouldn’t take Devin and Oscar long to identify the Unidentified White Male and the Unidentified White Female who shot it out at the train station with gang members, aided by a known gunrunner named Bubba Rogowski.

    I loosened the string at the top of the bag, reached in, and my hand closed around a file folder, maybe a quarter-inch thick. I pulled it out and opened it. More photographs.

    I stood and laid them out on the pew. There were twenty-one in all, their surfaces splintered by the triangles of shadow and light cast by the stained-glass windows. Not one of them contained anything I’d want to look at; all of them contained things I had to.

    They were from the same camera and location that produced the photograph Jenna had given me. Paulson was in most of these, Socia in a few. The same scuzzy motel room, the same grainy texture to the film, the same high camera angle, leading me to assume they were stills from a videotape, the camera probably positioned eight or ten feet up, possibly behind a double mirror.

    In most of the photos, Paulson had removed his underwear but retained his black socks. He seemed to be enjoying himself on the small twin bed with torn, stained sheets.

    The same couldn’t be said for the other person on the bed. The object of Paulson’s affection if you could call it that was a child. A young, extremely skinny black boy who couldn’t have been any older than ten or eleven. He wasn’t wearing any socks. He wasn’t wearing anything at all. He didn’t seem to be having as much fun as Paulson.

    He did seem to be in a lot of pain.

    Sixteen of the twenty-one photographs captured the sex act itself. In some of these, Socia appeared, leaning into the frame to give Paulson what appeared to be directions. In one, Socia’s hand gripped the back of the child’s head, yanking it back toward Paulson’s chest, like a rider reining in a horse. Paulson didn’t seem to mind or even notice, his eyes glazed, his lips pursed in pleasure.

    The child seemed to mind.

    Of the five remaining photographs, four were of Paulson and Socia as they drank dark liquid from bathroom glasses, chatting it up, leaning against the dresser, having a swell old time. In one of those, the boy’s slim leg was apparent, just out of focus, tangled in the filthy bedsheets.

    Angie said, “Oh, my God,” in a cracked, high-pitched voice that sounded like it came from someone else. The knuckles of her right hand were in her mouth, and her whitening skin rippled. Tears welled in her sockets. The warm, stilted air in the church closed in on me for a moment, a weight against my chest that left me slightly lightheaded. I looked down at the photographs again, and nausea eddied against the walls of my stomach.

    I forced myself to look down at the photos, to hold my eyes there, and soon, my eyes were drawn to the twenty-first the way they would drift toward and fasten onto a single flame in the corner of a dark screen. This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it. It was not taken during the act, but afterward. The boy sat on the bed, uncovered and oblivious, his eyes taking on the ghostly image of what he’d already ceased being. In those eyes was the shriveled cast of dead hope and a closed door. They were the eyes of a brain and a soul that had collapsed under the weight of sensory overload. The eyes of the walking dead, their owner oblivious to his loss, his nakedness.

    I shuffled the photographs back into a pile and closed the file. Numbness was already settling in, clotting the flow of horror and bewilderment. I looked at Angie, saw the same process taking place in her. The shakes had stopped and she stood very still. It wasn’t a sweet feeling, possibly it was harmful in the long run, but at the moment, it was absolutely necessary.

    Angie looked up, her eyes red but dry. She pointed at the file. “No matter what, we take them down.”

    I nodded. “Going to have to take it to them.”

    She shrugged and leaned back against the baptismal font. “Oh well.”

    I took one photo from the folder one that showed the act the boy, Socia, and Paulson’s body but not his head. Socia was Devin’s, maybe, but Paulson was mine. I took the rest of the folder to one of the rear confessionals, stepped through the heavy burgundy partition, and bent by the floor. I used my penknife on a square of marble that’s been loose since I was an altar boy. I lifted it out and placed the folder down in the two-foot hole. Angie was behind me now, and I held out my hand. She placed her .38 in it and I added the nine millimeter, then closed the hole back up again. The square fit neatly, without any noticeable gaps, and I realized then that I’d co-opted one of the great Catholic traditions: concealment.

    I stepped back out of the confessional and we walked down the center aisle. At the door, Angie dipped her fingers into the holy water and blessed herself. I thought about it, figuring I’d need all the help I could get on this one, but there’s one thing I hate more than a hypocrite: a pious one. We pushed open the heavy oak doors and stepped into the late afternoon sunlight.

    Devin and Oscar were parked out front, leaning over the hood of Devin’s Camaro, a spread of McDonald’s food in front of them. They didn’t so much as look up at us before Devin said, around a mouthful of Big Mac, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Hand me those fries, partner. You have a right to an attorney....”

    

***

    

    It was well into the next morning before they finished with us.

    Devin and Oscar were obviously taking a lot of heat. Gangland shootouts in Roxbury or Mattapan are one thing, but when it rises from the ghettos and rears its ugly head in the heart of the city, when Joe and Suzy Citizen have to stumble over their Louis Vuitton luggage to duck out of the way of gunfire, then there’s a problem. We were cuffed. We were booked. Devin took the photo from me without a word before we got to the station, and they took everything else shortly after.

    I stood in a lineup with four cops who didn’t look remotely like me, and stared into a white light. Beyond it, I heard a cop saying, “Take your time. Look closely,” followed by a woman’s voice: “I didn’t really get a good look. I only saw the big black guy.”

    Lucky me. If there’s gunfire, people usually see the black

    guy.

    Angie and I met up again later when they sat us down on a bench beside a mangy wino named Terrance. Terrance smelled like a banana stew, but he didn’t seem to mind. He gladly explained to me, while brushing his teeth with his index finger, why the world was so out of control. Uranus. The good green folks who inhabit this planet don’t have the technology to build modern cities; Terrance told us they can build farmhouses that would make your mouth water, but skyscrapers are beyond them. “But they want ‘em bad, you see?” Now that we’d built all those skyscrapers, the Urani were ready to take over. They pissed through the rain, filling our water supply with a violence-inducing drug. Within ten years, Terrance confided in us, we’d have all killed each other off and the cities would be theirs. A big green party in the Sears Tower.

    I asked Terrance where he’d be then, and Angie elbowed me in the ribs for encouraging him.

    Terrance stopped brushing his teeth for a moment and looked at me. “Back on Uranus, of course.” He leaned in close and I almost passed out from the smell. “I’m one of them.”

    I said, “Of course you are.”

    They came and got Terrance a few minutes later, took him off to his spaceship or a secret meeting with the government. They left us where we were. Devin and Oscar walked by a few times without glancing our way. A lot of other cops did the same, not to mention some hookers, an army of bail bondsmen, a bunch of PDs with awkward briefcases and the lean faces of those who don’t have time to eat. As darkness fell, then deepened, a lot of hard-looking guys, built like Devin powerful and low to the ground headed toward the elevators, bulky Teflon vests under dark blue windbreakers, M-16s in their hands. The Anti-Gang Task Force. They held the elevators until Devin and Oscar joined them, then they all went down in two cars.

    They never offered us a phone call. They’d do that just before or within the first few minutes of our interrogation. Someone would say, “What, nobody told you you could make a phone call? Jeeze. All our lines must have been busy.”

    A kid in patrolman’s blues brought us some lukewarm coffee from a machine. The old cop who’d taken our prints stood across from us behind a desk. He stamped a stack of papers, answered the phone a lot, and if he remembered us at all, he was doing a good job of hiding it. At one point, when I stood up stretch, he half-glanced my way and out of the corner of my eye I saw a cop appear in the hallway on my left. I got a drink from the water fountain not an easy thing to manage with your hands cuffed and sat back down.

    Angie said, “They won’t tell us about Bubba will they?”

    I shook my head. “If we ask about him, it puts us at the crime scene. If they tell us before we ask, they lose everything, gain nothing.”

    “Pretty much what I figured.”

    She slept for a while, her head on my shoulder, her knees close to her chest. The weight of her body probably would have cramped a muscle after a while if there’d been any left to cramp; after nine or ten hours on this bench, a simple stretching exercise would have been orgasmic.

    They’d taken my watch, but the darkest blue of night had already begun to give way to the first false light of early morning by the time Devin and Oscar returned. I guessed it was around five. Devin said, “Follow us, Kenzie,” as he passed.

    We peeled ourselves off the bench and staggered down the hallway after them. My legs refused to straighten completely and my lower back felt like I’d swallowed a hammer. They led us into the same interrogation room where’d we’d met about twenty hours before, let the door swing back into my face as I approached. I pushed it open with my cuffed hands and we did our Quasimodo imitations through the doorway.

    I said, “You ever hear of the ACLU?”

    Devin tossed a walkie-talkie down on the table in front of him. He followed with a huge ring of keys, then sat back in a chair and watched us. His eyes were ragged and red, but darkly vibrant, an amphetamine vibrancy. Oscar’s looked the same. They’d probably been up forty-eight hours straight. Someday, when all this was over and they were both spending Sundays in their La-Z-Boys watching football games, their hearts would finally play catch up, do what no bullet had ever managed. Knowing them, they’d probably go the same day too.

    I held out my hands. “You going to take these things off?”

    Devin looked at my wrists, then at my face. He shook his head.

    Angie sat down. “You’re an asshole.”

    “I am,” Devin said.

    I took a seat.

    Oscar said, “Case you two are interested, they upped the ante in the war tonight. Someone fired a grenade through the window of a Saints’ crack house. Took out damn near everyone inside, including two babies, couldn’t have been more than nine months, the oldest. We’re not positive yet, but we think two of the dead might have been white college kids, there on a buy. Probably the best thing could have happened. Maybe somebody’ll care now.”

    I said, “What’d you do with that photograph?”

    “Filed it,” Devin said. “Soda’s already wanted for questioning on seven deaths in the last two nights. If he ever comes to ground, that photo will be one more thing to nail him with. The white guy in the photo, the one on top of the little kid somebody tells me who he is, maybe we can do something about it.”

    “Maybe if I was allowed back out on the street, I could do something in ways you couldn’t.”

    Devin said, “Like shoot up another train station?”

    Oscar said, “You wouldn’t last five minutes on the street anymore, Kenzie.”

    Angie said, “Why’s that?”

    “Because Socia knows you have incriminating evidence on him. Hard evidence. Because your main protection, Patrick, ain’t in the game anymore and everyone knows it. Because your life ain’t worth a nickel bag as long as Socia’s still walking around.”

    “So what’s the charge?” I asked.

    “Charge?”

    “What’re you charging us with, Devin?”

    Oscar said, “Charging?” Couple of parrots, these two.

    “Devin.”

    “Mr. Kenzie, I have nothing to hold you on. My partner and I were under the impression that you might have been involved in some nasty business down at South Station early yesterday afternoon. But, since no witnesses can place you there, what can I say? We fucked up. And we’re too sorry about it, believe me.”

    Angie said, “Take the cuffs off.”

    “Would that we could find the key,” Devin said.

    “Take the fucking cuffs off, Devin,” she said again.

    “Oscar?”

    Oscar pulled out all his pockets.

    “Oscar doesn’t have them either. We’ll have to call around.”

    Oscar stood up. “Maybe I take a look around, see if I can scare them up.”

    He left and we sat there, Devin watching us. We watched him back. He said, “Think about protective custody.”

    I shook my head.

    “Patrick,” he said in a tone my mother used to use, “it’s a rolling battleground out there. You won’t make it until sunrise. Angie, neither will you if you’re with him.”

    She tilted her chair back, turned her beautiful, weary face toward me. She said, “‘Nobody hands me my guns and says run. Nobody’“Just like James Coburn in The Magnificent Seven. Her full mouth burst wide, the smile that blew into my chest was devastating. At that moment, I think I knew what love was.

    We looked at Devin.

    He sighed. “I saw the movie too. Coburn died in the end.”

    “There’s always reruns,” I said.

    “Not out there, there isn’t.”

    Oscar came back through the door. He said, “Well, lookee here,” and held up a small key ring.

    “Where’d you find ‘em?” Devin asked.

    Oscar tossed them onto the table in front of me. “Right where I left them. Funny how that works sometimes, huh.”

    Devin pointed at us. “They think they’re cowboys.”

    Oscar pulled back his chair and settled heavily into it. “Then we’ll bury them with their boots on.”

TWENTY-SIX

    

    We couldn’t go home. Devin was right. I had no more cards to play, and Socia had nothing to gain as long as I continued breathing.

    We sat around for another two hours while they finished up some paperwork and then they took us out a side door and drove us a few blocks away to the Lenox Hotel.

    As we got out of the car, Oscar looked over at Devin. “Have a heart. Tell ‘em.”

    We stood on the curb, waited.

    Devin said, “Rogowski’s got a broken collarbone and he lost a shitload of blood, but he’s stable.”

    Angie sagged against me for a moment.

    Devin said, “Been swell knowing you,” and drove off.

    The folks at the Lenox didn’t seem too pleased we’d chosen their hotel at eight in the morning, sans luggage. Our clothes, appropriately, looked as if we’d sat on a bench all night, and my hair was still speckled with chips of marble from the shoot-out at South Station. I gave them my Visa Gold Card and they asked for more ID. While the concierge copied the numbers of my driver’s license onto a pad of paper, the reservations clerk called in my Visa number for authorization. Some people you can never please.    

    After they ascertained that I was who I said I was and that we probably wouldn’t make off with much more than a bath towel and some sheets, they gave us a room key. I signed my name and looked up at the reservations clerk. “Is the TV in our room bolted to the wall or could it just roll on out of there?”

    She gave me a very tight smile but didn’t answer.

    The room was on the ninth floor, overlooking Boylston Street. Not a bad view. Directly below us wasn’t much a Store 24, a Dunkin’ Donuts but beyond, a nice stretch of brownstones, some with mint-green roof gardens, and beyond them, the dark, rolling Charles striped against a pale, gray sky.

    The sun was rising steadily. I was dead tired, but more than sleep, I needed a shower. Too bad Angie’s quicker than I am. I sat in a chair and flicked on the TV. Bolted to the wall, of course. The early news was running a commentary about yesterday’s gang violence in South Station. The commentator, broad-shouldered with bangs that looked as if they’d been sharpened to points with a razor, was damn near quivering with righteous anger. Gang violence, he said, had finally reached our front doors and something had to be done about it, no matter what.

    It’s always when it reaches our “front doors” that we finally consider it a problem. When it’s confined to our backyards for decades, no one even notices it.

    I turned off the TV, switched places with Angie when she came out of the bathroom.

    By the time I’d finished, she was asleep, lying on her stomach, one hand still on the phone where she’d hung it up, the other still closed around the top of the towel. Beads of water glistened on her bare back above the towel line, her slim shoulder blades rising and falling with each breath.

    I dried off and went to the bed. I pulled the covers out from under her and she groaned softly, raising her left leg closer to her chest. I placed the sheet over her and shut off the light.

    I lay down on the right side of the bed, a few feet away from her on top of the sheet, and prayed she didn’t roll over in her sleep. If her body touched mine, I was afraid I’d dissolve into it. And probably not mind.

    That being the major problem, right there, I turned onto my side, facing the wall, and waited for sleep.

    

***

    

    Some time shortly before I woke up, I saw the boy in the photos. The Hero was carrying him down a dank hallway, both of them enshrouded in shower steam. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling. I yelled something to the boy, because I knew him. I knew him in that dank hallway as his legs kicked out from under my father’s arm. He seemed small in my father’s arm, smaller still because he was naked. I called to him and my father turned back toward me; Sterling Mulkern’s face was under the dark fireman’s helmet. He said, “If you had half the balls your old man had...” in Devin’s voice. The boy turned too, the face craning around my father’s elbow bored and disinterested, even as his bare legs flailed. His eyes were empty, like a doll’s, and I felt my legs buckle when I realized nothing would ever shock or scare him again.

    I woke up to Angie kneeling over me, her hands on my shoulders. She said, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” in a soft whisper.

    I was very aware of her bare legs against mine as I said, “What?”

    “It’s OK,” she said. “Just a dream.”

    The room was pitch dark but light exploded behind the heavy curtains. I said, “What time is it?”

    She stood up, still wearing the towel, and walked to the window. “Eight o’clock,” she said, “p.m.” She opened the curtain. “On the Fourth of July.”

    The sky was a canvas of explosive colors. Whites, reds, blues, even some orange and yellow. A clap of thunder rocked the room and a starburst of blue and white ignited the sky. A shooting star of red rocketed through the middle and set off a smaller starburst that bled all over the blue and white. The whole display hit its peak then collapsed at once, the colors arcing downward and sputtering out in a cascade of dying embers. Angie opened the windows and the Boston Pops boomed Beethoven’s Fifth as if they had a wall of speakers wrapped around the Hub.

    I said, “We slept fourteen hours?”

    She nodded. “Shoot-outs and interrogations will do that to you, I guess.”

    “I guess so.”

    She came back to the bed, sat on the corner. “Boy, Skid, when you have a nightmare, you have a nightmare”

    I rubbed my face. “Sorry I woke you.”

    “Had to get up some time. Speaking of which, do we have a plan of any sort?”

    “We have to find Paulson and Socia.”

    “That’s an objective, not a plan.”

    “We need our guns.”

    “Definitely.”

    “Probably not going to be easy getting to them with Socia’s people all over the place.”

    “We’re the inventive type.”

    

***

    

    We took a cab back to the neighborhood, gave the driver an address about a half-mile past the church. I didn’t see anyone lurking in the shadows as we passed, but you’re not supposed to: that’s why there are shadows; that’s why they lurk. Some kids ten or twelve years old at most were shooting bottle rockets at the passing cars, tossing packs of firecrackers out into the middle of the avenue. The car directly behind us took a direct hit to its windshield and screeched to a halt. The guy jumped out running, but the kids were gone before he’d even reached the curb, hopping fences like hurdlers, disappearing into their own backyard jungle.

    Angie and I paid the cabbie and walked through the backyard of the public grammar school the “project” school we called it when we were kids, because only the kids from the housing projects went there. In the back of the schoolyard, hanging in a loose pack around the fire escape, twenty or so of the older neighborhood kids pounded back some beers, a boom box tuned to WBCN, a few passing around a joint. When they saw us, one of them turned the boom box up louder. J. Geils Band’s “Whammer Jammer.” Fine with me. They had already decided we weren’t cops and now they were deliberating how bad they were going to scare us for being stupid enough to walk through their hangout.

    Then a few of them recognized us as we passed under a streetlight and seemed pretty depressed can’t scare people who know your parents. I recognized their leader, Colin, right off. Bobby Shefton’s kid; good-looking, even if he was as obviously Irish as a potato famine tall, well-built, a short-cropped head of dirty blond hair around a chiseled face. He was wearing a white and green BNBL tank top and a pair of pleated walking shorts. He said, “’S up, Mr. Kenzie?”

    They nodded to Angie. No one wants to get too well acquainted with a woman whose husband’s jealous streak is legend.

    I said, “Colin, how’d you guys like to make fifty bucks before the liquor store closes?”

    His eyes lit up for a moment before he remembered how cool he was. He said, “You go in and buy the shit for us?”

    “Of course.”

    They kicked the idea around for a second and a half or so. “You got it. What do you need?”

    I said, “It involves screwing with people who might be packing.”

    Colin shrugged. “Niggers ain’t the only ones with guns anymore, Mr. Kenzie.” He pulled his own from under his tank top. A couple of other kids did too. “Since they tried to take over the Ryan playground a couple months back, we stocked up a bit.” For a moment I thought back to my days on this fire escape the good old days of tire irons and baseball bats. When a switchblade was rare. But the ante kept getting upped, and obviously, everyone was willing to meet it.

    My plan had been to get them to pack around us as we walked back up to the church. With hats, in the darkness, we could probably pass as kids, and by the time Socia’s people figured it out, we’d be in the church with our guns. It had never been much of a plan. And I realized now that I’d missed the obvious because of my own racism. If the black kids had guns, only went to figure, the white kids would have them too.

    I said, “Tell you what. I changed my mind. I’ll give you a hundred bucks and the booze for three things.”

    Colin said, “Name ‘em.”

    “Let us rent two of your guns.” I tossed him my car keys. “And go boost my car from in front of my house.”

    “That’s two things.”

    “Three,” I said. “Two guns and one car. What’re they teaching you kids these days?”

    One of the kids laughed. “Helps if you go to school.”

    Colin said, “You just want to rent the guns? You’ll definitely bring them back?”

    “Probably. If not, we’ll kick in enough to buy you two more.”

    Colin stood, handed me his gun, butt first. A .357, scratched along the barrel, but well oiled. He slapped a buddy’s shoulder and the buddy handed his gun to Angie. A .38. Her favorite. He looked at his buddy. “Let’s go get Mr. Kenzie’s car.”

    While they were gone, we walked across the street to the liquor store and filled their order five cases of Bud, two liters of vodka, some OJ, some gin. We carried it back across the street and had just given it to the kids when the Vobeast came hurtling down the avenue and smoked rubber the last quarter block to the curb. Colin and his pal were out of it before it stopped rolling. “Get going, Mr. Kenzie. They’re coming.”

    We scrambled into the car and pulled off the curb as the headlights loomed large and malevolent in back of us. There were two sets of headlights and they were right behind us, three silhouettes in each car. They started firing half a block past the school, the bullets ripping into the Vobeast. I cut across the wrong lane of traffic and jumped the divider strip as we entered Edward Everett Square. I banged a right past a tavern, punched the pedal as we lit down the small, densely packed street, the cars fat on both sides. In my rearview, I saw the first car spin around the corner and straighten out cleanly. The second car, though, didn’t make the turn. It bounced off a Dodge and the front axle snapped in two. Its fender plowed into asphalt and it flipped up onto its grill.

    The first car was still firing away, and Angie and I kept ducking our heads, not sure which explosions came from a gun muzzle and which came from the barrage of fireworks in the sky overhead. Straight out, like this, there was no way we’d last. A Yugo could outrun the Vobeast, and the streets were growing tighter and tighter with less cover and more parked cars.

    We crossed over into Roxbury and my back window imploded. I took enough shards of glass in my neck to think I’d been shot for a moment, and Angie had a cut on her forehead that was bleeding a thick river down her left cheekbone. I said, “You OK?”

    She nodded, scared but pissed off too. She said, “Goddamn them,” and swiveled on the seat, pointing the .38 at the space where the window used to be. My ear exploded as she squeezed off two shots, her arm steady.

    Angie’s one hell of a shot. The windshield of the car splattered into two big spiderwebs. The driver spun the wheel and they rammed a white panel truck, bounced back into the street sideways.

    I didn’t stop to check their condition. The Vobeast careened onto a badly paved stretch of road that rocked our heads off the ceiling. I spun the wheel to the right and turned onto a street that was only marginally better. Someone screamed something at us as we went past, and a bottle shattered against the trunk.

    The left side of the street was one big abandoned lot, scorched overgrown weeds pouring up out of piles of gravel, crumbled cinder block and brick. To our right, houses that should have been condemned a half-century ago sagged toward the earth, carrying the weight of poverty and neglect with them until the day they’d spill into one another like dominoes. Then the right side of the street would look identical to the left. The porches were crowded and no one seemed too pleased with the whiteys in the rolling piece of shit tearing down their street. A few more bottles hit the car, a cherry bomb blew up in front of us.

    I reached the end of the street, and just as I saw the other car appear a block back, I took a left. The street I turned onto was even worse, a bleak, forgotten path through brown weeds and the skeletal remains of abandoned tenements. A few kids stood by a burning trash can tossing firecrackers inside, and behind them two winos tackled one another for the rights to that last sip of T-bird. Beyond them, the condemned tenements rose in crumbling brick, the black windows empty of glass, singed in places by some forgotten fire.

    Angie said, “Oh, Christ, Patrick.”

    The street dead-ended, no outlet, twenty yards away. A heavy cement divider and years of weeds and rubble stood in our way. I looked behind me as I began to apply the brakes, and saw the car turning the corner toward us. The kids were walking away from the barrel, smelling the battle and getting out of the line of fire. I stood on the brakes and the Vobeast gave me a belligerent “fuck you” in reply. Metal clacked against metal, and I might as well have been in a Flintstone car. It seemed to almost pick up a last burst of speed just before we hit the divider.

    My head popped off the dashboard and a rush of metal taste fragmented within my mouth as the impact shook me. Angie had been a little more prepared. She snapped forward, but her seatbelt held her in place.

    We barely looked at one another before we jumped out of the car. I scrambled across the hood as the brakes behind us squealed on the torn cement. Angie was sprinting like an Olympian across the lot of weeds and cinder block and broken glass, her chest out, her head thrown back. She was a good ten yards ahead of me by the time I got going. They fired from the car, the bullets chunking into the ground beside me, what remained of natural soil spitting up between the garbage.

    Angie had reached the first tenement. She was looking at me, waving me to go faster, her gun pointed in my general direction, craning her head for a clear shot. I didn’t like the look in her eyes at all. Then I noticed the shafts of light jerking up and down in front of me, shining off the tenement, jagged where my body blocked them. They’d driven in after us. Exactly what I’d been afraid of. Somewhere in all these weeds and gravel, roads had existed before this area was condemned. And they’d found one.

    A burst of gunfire stitched a pile of torn brick as I jumped over it and reached the first tenement. Angie turned as I came through the doorway and we ran inside, ran without thinking, without looking, because we were running into a building that had no back wall. It had crumbled some time ago, and we were just as out in the open as we’d been before.

    The car came across the middle of the building, rocketing over an old metal door ahead of us. I took aim because there was nothing to hide behind. The front passenger and the guy in the backseat were sticking black weapons out the windows. I got off two shots that punched the front door before they let loose, tongues of fire bursting from their muzzles. Angie dove to her left, landing behind an overturned bathtub. I went up in the air, nothing to cover me, and I was halfway down when a bullet burned across my left bicep and snapped me around in midair. I hit the ground and fired again, but the car had gone out the other side and was circling for another pass.

    Angie said, “Come on.”

    I got up and saw what she was running for. Twenty yards ahead of us were two more tenement towers, intact it seemed, and packed close together. Between them was a dark blue alley. A hazy yellow streetlight shone at the end of it, and it was much too thin for a car to work its way into. Silhouettes of misshapen hulks of metal stood out in dark shadows between the two towers.

    I ran across the open lot, hearing the engine coming off to my left, blood pouring down my arm like warm soup. I’d been shot. Shot. I saw their faces again as they fired, and I heard a voice that I soon realized was mine saying the same thing, over and over again: “Fucking niggers, fucking niggers.”

    We reached the alley. I looked behind me. The car was stalled by something in the gravel, but the way they were rocking it from the inside, I didn’t think they’d stay that way long. I said, “Keep going.”

    Angie said, “Why? We can pick them off as they come in.”

    “How many bullets you got left?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “Exactly,” I said. “We could run out trying to pick them off.” I worked my way over an upturned dumpster. “Trust me.

    Once we made it to the end of the alley, I looked back and saw the headlights arcing to the left, moving again, coming around to meet us. The road at the end of the alley was a faded yellow cobblestone. We stepped out onto it, hearing the big engine roaring closer. The yellow streetlight we’d seen was the only one for two blocks. Angie checked her gun. “I have four bullets.”

    I had three. She was the better shot. I said, “The street-light.”

    She fired once and stepped back as the glass fell in a small shower to the street. I jogged across the street into a mass of brown weeds. Angie climbed down behind a torched car directly across from me. Her eyes peered over the blackened hood, looking at me, both of our heads nodding forward, the adrenaline rippling through us like fission.

    The car fishtailed around the corner, hurtling over the torn cobblestone toward us, the driver craning his head out the window, looking for us. The car began to slow as it got closer, trying to figure out where we could have gone. The shotgun passenger turned his head to his right, looked at the scorched car, didn’t see anything. He turned back, and started to say something to the driver.

    Angie stood up, took aim over the blackened hood, and fired two shots into his face. His head snapped to the side, bounced off his shoulder, and the driver looked at him for one moment. When he looked back, I was running up to the window, gun extended. He said, “Wait!” through the open window and his eyes loomed large and white just before I pulled the trigger and blew them out through the back of his head.

    The car went left, hit an old shopping cart on its way to the curb, bouncing up and over it before ramming a wooden telephone pole and cracking the wood at a point about six feet off the ground. The guy in the backseat shattered the window with his head. The telephone pole wavered in the fragrant summer breeze for a moment, then dropped forward and crushed the driver’s side of the car.

    We approached slowly, guns pointed at the hole in the back window. We were about three feet away, side by side, when the door creaked open, the lower corner hitting the sidewalk. I took a deep breath and waited for a head to show.

    It did, followed by a body that dropped to the pavement, covered in glass and blood.

    He was alive. His left arm was twisted out behind him at an impossible angle and a large flap of skin was missing from his forehead, but he was trying to crawl anyway. He got two or three feet before he collapsed, rolling over onto his back, breathing hard.

    Roland.

    He spit some blood onto the sidewalk and opened one eye to look at me. The other eye was already beginning to swell under the mask of blood. He said, “I’ll kill you.”

    I shook my head.

    He managed to sit up a bit, resting on his good arm. He said, “I’ll kill you. The bitch too.”

    Angie kicked him in the ribs.

    All the pain he was in and he rolled his head at her and smiled. “’Scuse me.”

    I said, “Roland, you got this all backward. We’re not your problem. Socia’s your problem.”

    “Socia dead,” he said, and I could tell a few of his teeth were broken. “He just don’t know it yet. Most of the Saints coming over with me. I get Socia any day now. He lost the war. Just a matter of picking his coffin.”

    He managed to open both eyes then, for just a moment, and I knew why he wanted me dead.

    He was the kid in the photographs.

    “You’re the ”

    He howled at me, a stream of blood jetting from his mouth, trying to lunge for me when he couldn’t even get off the ground. He kicked at me and banged his fist off the ground, probably driving shards of glass all that much farther into the skin and bone. His howl grew louder. “I fucking kill you,” he screamed. “I fucking kill you.”

    Angie looked at me. “We let him live, we’re both dead.”

    I considered it. One shot is all it would take. Out here on the cusp of the urban wasteland with no one around to question. One shot and no more Roland to worry about. Once we settled with Socia, back to our regular life. I looked down at Roland as he arched his back and jerked up, trying to stand, like a bloody fish on newspaper. His sheer effort scared the shit out of me. Roland didn’t seem to know pain or fear any longer, just drive. I looked at him steadily, considering it, and somewhere in that raging, hulking mass of hatred, I saw the naked child with the dying eyes. I said, “He’s already dead.”

    Angie stood over him, gun pointed down, hammer pulled back. Roland watched her and she stared back at him flatly. But she couldn’t do it either, and she knew no amount of standing there would change that. She shrugged and said, “Have a nice day,” and we walked toward the Melnea Cass Boulevard, four blocks west, shining like civilization itself.

TWENTY-SEVEN

    

    We flagged down a bus and climbed on. Everyone on it was black and when they saw us bloody, torn clothes  most of them found some sort of excuse to move to the back. The bus driver closed the door with a soft whoosh and pulled off down the highway.

    We took seats near the front, and I looked at the people on the bus. Most of them were older; two looked like students, one young couple held a small child between them. They were looking at us with fear and disgust and some hatred. I had an idea what it must be like to be a couple of young black guys in street clothes boarding a subway car in Southie or White Dorchester. Not a nice feeling.

    I sat back and looked out the window at the fireworks in the black sky. They were smaller now, less colorful. I heard an echo of my voice as a carload of murderers chased me across an open lot firing bullets at my body, and my hatred and fear distilled into color. “Fucking niggers,” I’d said, over and over. I closed my eyes, and in the darkness, they still took note of the fight bursting above me in the sky.

    Independence Day.

    The bus dropped us at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Columbia. I walked Angie back to her house and when we reached it, she touched my shoulder. “You going to get that looked at?”

    For all the pain, when I looked at it on the bus, I realized it had only grazed me, cutting the skin like the slash of a good knife hardly lethal. It needed cleaning and it hurt like hell, but it wasn’t worth a cosmetic job in an overcrowded emergency room at the moment. “Tomorrow,” I said.

    Her living-room curtain parted slightly: Phil, thinking he was the detective. I said, “You better go in.”

    The prospect didn’t seem to appeal to her all that much. She said, “Yeah, I guess I better.”

    I looked at the blood on her face, the cut on her forehead. “Better clean that up too,” I said. “You’re looking like an extra in Dawn of the Dead?

    “You always know the right thing to say,” she said and started toward the house. She saw the parted curtain and turned back toward me, a frown on her face. She looked at me for almost a full minute, her eyes large and a little sad. “He used to be a nice guy. Remember?”

    I nodded, because I did. Phil had been a great guy once. Before bills came and jobs went and the future became a vicious joke of a word, something to describe what he’d never have. Phil hadn’t always been the Asshole. He’d grown into it.

    “Good night,” I said.

    She crossed the porch and went inside.

    I walked up onto the avenue, headed toward the church. I stopped in the liquor store and bought myself a six-pack. The guy behind the counter looked at me like he figured I’d die soon; a little over an hour ago one that seemed like a lifetime now I’d bought enough liquor to start my own company, and now I was back for more. “You know how it is,” I said. “Fourth of July.”

    The guy looked at me, at my bloody arm and dirty face. “Yeah,” he said, “tell that to your liver.”

    I drank a beer as I walked up the avenue, thinking about Roland and Socia, Angie and Phil, the Hero and me. Dances of pain. Relationships from hell. I’d been a punching bag for my father for eighteen years, and I’d never hit back. I kept believing, kept telling myself, It’ll change; he’ll get better. It’s hard to close the door on optimistic expectations when you love someone.

    Angie and Phil were the same way. She’d known him when he was the best-looking guy in the neighborhood, a charmer and natural leader who told the funniest jokes, the warmest stories. He was everyone’s idol. A great guy. She still saw that, prayed for it, hoped against hope no matter how cynically she viewed the rest of the world that people change for the better sometimes. Phil had to be one of those people, or what gave anything purpose?

    And then there was Roland taking all that hate and ugliness and depravity that had been shoved into him since childhood at every turn, and spinning around and spewing it back at the world. Waging war against his father and telling himself that once it was done, he’d be at peace. But he wouldn’t. It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can hope to do is control it, to force it all into one tight ball in one tight place and keep it there, a constant weight.

    I reached the belfry still less risky than my apartment and went inside. I sat at my desk, drank my beer. The sky was empty now, the celebration ended. The fourth would be the fifth soon and the migration back from the Cape and the Vineyard had probably already begun. The day after a holiday is like the day after your birthday everything seems old, like tarnished copper.

    I placed my feet up on the desk and leaned back in the chair. My arm still burned and I straightened it out in front of me and poured half a beer on it. Homemade anesthesia. The cut was wide but shallow. In a few months the scar tissue would pale from a dull red to a duller white. It would barely be noticeable.

    I raised my shirt, looked at the jellyfish on my abdomen, the scar that would never fade, never be mistaken for anything innocuous, for anything but what it was: a mark of violence and depraved indifference, a cattle brand. The Hero’s legacy, his stamp on this world, his attempt at immortality. As long as I was alive, carrying this jellyfish on my stomach, then so was he.

    When I was growing up, my father’s fear of flame burgeoned in direct proportion to his success in fighting it. By the time he reached the rank of lieutenant, he’d turned our apartment into a battle zone against fire. Our refrigerator contained not one, but three boxes of baking soda. Two more in the cupboard below the sink, one above the oven. There were no electric blankets in my father’s home, no faulty appliances. The toaster was serviced twice a year. Every clock was mechanical. Electrical cords were checked twice a month for cracks in the rubber; sockets were investigated every six weeks. By the time I was ten, my father pulled all plugs from the sockets nightly to minimize any stray currents of malevolent electricity.

    When I was eleven, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table late one night, staring at a candle he’d placed before him. He was holding his hand over the flame, patting it occasionally, his dark eyes fixed on the ropes of blue and yellow as if they could tell him something. When he saw me, his eyes widened, his face flushed, and he said, “It can be contained. It can,” and I was stunned to hear the thinnest chords of uncertainty in the deep timbre of his voice.

    Because my father’s shift began at three in the afternoon and my mother worked nights as a cashier at Stop and Shop, my sister, Erin, and I were latchkey kids long before the term became fashionable. One night, we tried to cook blackened redfish, something we’d had during a trip to Cape Cod the previous summer.

    We poured every spice we could find into the skillet, and within minutes, the kitchen had filled with smoke. I opened the windows while my sister unlatched the front and back doors. By the time we remembered what caused the smoke in the first place, the pan had caught fire.

    I reached the oven just as the first fat parachute of blue flame floated into a white curtain. I remembered the fear in my father’s voice. “It can be contained.” Erin picked the pan up off the burner and brown grease splattered her arm. She dropped the pan, and the contents spread across the top of the oven like napalm.

    I thought of my father’s reaction when he discovered we’d allowed it into his home, the embarrassment he’d feel, the rage that his embarrassment would turn into, thickening the blood in his hands until they turned to fists and came looking for me.

    I panicked.

    With six cartons of baking soda in reach, I grabbed the first liquid I saw off the top of the fridge and poured a half-pint of eighty proof vodka into the middle of a grease fire.

    A tenth of a second after, I realized what was going to happen and I tackled my sister just before the top half of the room exploded. We lay on the floor and watched in awe as the wallpaper above the oven stripped away from the wall, as a cloud of blue, yellow, black, and red mushroomed across the ceiling, as a hundred fireflies erupted into the side of the fridge.

    My sister rolled away and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the hall. I got one from the pantry, and as if the last five minutes hadn’t happened, as if we were truly the children of an illustrious firefighter, we stood in the center of the kitchen and doused the oven, the wall, the ceiling, the fridge, and the curtain. Within a minute, black-and-white foam covered our bodies like birdshit.

    Once our adrenal glands had closed their floodgates and our shakes had stopped, we sat down in the center of our ruined kitchen, and stared at the front door where my father entered every night at eleven-thirty. We stared at it until we both wept, kept staring long after we’d run out of tears.

    By the time my mother returned from work, we’d fanned all the smoke out of the apartment, wiped all scorch marks off the fridge and oven, and thrown away the charred strips of wallpaper and what remained of the curtain. My mother looked at the black cloud burned into her ceiling, at the scorched wall, and sat down at the kitchen table and stared blankly at something in the pantry for a full five minutes.

    Erin said, “Mum?”

    My mother blinked. She looked at my sister, then at me, then at the vodka bottle on the counter. She tilted her head toward it and looked at us. “Which of you... ?”

    I couldn’t speak, pointed a finger at my chest.

    My mother walked into the pantry. For a small, thin woman, she moved as if she were overweight, with slow lumbering steps. She returned with the iron and ironing board, placed them in the center of the kitchen. In times of crisis, my mother always clung to routine, and it was time to iron my father’s uniforms. She opened the window and began pulling them from the clothesline. With her back to us, she said, “Go to your rooms. I’ll see if I can talk to your father.”

    I sat on the corner of my bed, hands in my lap, facing the door. I left the lights off, closed my eyes in the darkness, my hands clasped tight.

    When my father came home, his usual thumping about the kitchen tossing his lunch box on the table, rattling ice cubes in a glass, falling heavily into a chair before pouring his drink was mute. The silence in the apartment that night was longer and thicker and more pregnant with dread than I have ever experienced since.

    My mother said, “A mistake, that’s all.”

    “A mistake,” my father said.

    “Edgar,” my mother said.

    “A mistake,” my father said again.

    “He’s eleven. He panicked.”

    “Uh-huh,” my father said.

    Everything else that happened seemed to unfold in that weird compression of time that people experience just before they get in a car wreck or fall down a flight of stairs  everything speeds up and everything slows down. A lifetime passes, in all its minute detail, in the space of a second.

    My mother screamed, “No!” and I heard the ironing board topple to the kitchen linoleum, and my father’s footsteps hammered the floorboards toward my room. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but when he kicked the door in, a splinter grazed my cheekbone, and the first thing I saw was the iron in my father’s hand, the electrical cord and plug missing. His knee hit my shoulder and knocked me back on the bed and he said, “You’re so desperate to find out what it feels like, boy?”

    I looked in his eyes, because I didn’t want to look at the iron, and what I saw in those dark pupils was an unnerving mixture of anger and fear and hatred and savagery and yes, love, some bastardized version of that too.

    And that’s what I fixated on, clung to, prayed to, as my father ripped my shirt up to my sternum and pressed the iron against my stomach.

    

***

    

    Angie once said, “Maybe that’s what love is counting the bandages until someone says, ‘Enough.’“

    Maybe so.

    Sitting at my desk, I closed my eyes, knowing I’d never sleep with the adrenaline doing its stock-car derby in my blood, and when I woke up an hour later, my phone was ringing.

    I managed to say, “Patr ” before Angie’s voice tumbled over the line. “Patrick, come over here. Please.”

    I reached for my gun. “What’s the matter?”

    “I think I just got divorced.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

    

    When I got there, there was a squad car double-parked in front of the house. Directly behind it was Devin’s Camaro. He was standing on the porch with Oscar, talking to another cop, a kid. Too many cops were starting to look like kids to me, I thought, as I climbed the steps.

    They were standing over a huddled lump of flesh by the railing, the young cop giving it smelling salts. It was Phil, and my first thought was, Jesus Christ, she killed him.

    Devin looked at me and raised his eyebrows, a smile the size of Kansas on his face. He said, “We answered the call because we asked that anything at her or your address be rerouted to us.” He looked down at Phil, at the contusions that covered his face like lesions. He looked back at me. “Oh happy day, huh?”

    She was wearing a white shirt over a pair of faded cobalt shorts. There was a red bubble on her lower lip and mascara ran down her face. Her hair was in her eyes as she stepped gingerly out onto the porch in bare feet. She saw me then and came toward me in a rush. I held her and her teeth dug into my shoulder. She was crying softly.

    I said, “What did you do?” trying to keep the happy surprise out of my voice, but probably not succeeding.

    She shook her head and held on tightly.

    Devin was leaning against Oscar, the two of them happier than I’d seen them since they both stopped paying alimony on the same day. Devin said, “Wanna know what she did?”

    Oscar said, “Make him beg.”

    Devin reached into his pocket, giggling. He held a Taser gun up in front of my face. “This is what she did.” “Twice,” Oscar said.

    “Twice!” Devin repeated gleefully. “Damn lucky he didn’t have a friggin’ coronary.”

    “Then,” Oscar said, “she laid a beating on him.”

    “Went nuts!” Devin said. “Nuts! Booted him in the head, the ribs, punched the fuck out of him. I mean, look at him!”

    I’d never seen Devin so thrilled.

    I looked. Phil was coming to now, but once he felt all that pain, I’m quite sure he would’ve preferred sleep. Both eyes were almost completely swollen. His lips were black. He had dark bruises over seventy-five percent of his face at least. If what Curtis Moore had done to me had made me look like I’d been in a car accident, Phil looked like he’d been in a plane crash.

    The first thing he said when he came to was, “You’re arresting her, right?”

    Devin said, “Of course, sir. Of course.”

    Angie stepped out of my arms, looked at him.

    Oscar said, “You’re pressing charges, sir?”

    Phil used the railing to get to his feet. He held onto it like it might just up and run away any second. He started to say something, then leaned over the railing and threw up into the yard.

    “Pretty,” Devin said.

    Oscar walked over to Phil, put a hand on his back as he retched some more. Oscar talked to him in a low soft voice, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, as if he was used to carrying on conversations with people who vomited all over their lawns. “See, sir, the reason I ask if you’re going to press charges is ‘cause some people don’t like to do that in this sort of situation.”

    Phil spit a few times into the yard, wiped his mouth with his shirt. Always the gentleman. He said, “What do you mean ’this sort of situation’?”

    “Well,” Oscar said, “this sort of situation.”

    Devin said, “Sort of situation where a tough guy like yourself gets his ass handed to him by a woman couldn’t weigh more than a hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet. Sort of situation that can become real popular conversation in neighborhood bars. You know,” he said, “sort of situation that makes a guy look like a serious pussy.”

    I coughed into my hand.

    Oscar said, “Won’t be so bad, sir. You just go on into court, tell the judge your wife likes to beat you up every now and then, keep you in line. That sort of thing. Ain’t like the judge’ll check to see if you’re wearing a dress or anything.” He patted him on the back again. Not hard enough to send him down the block, but close. He said, “You feeling better now?”

    Phil turned his head, looked at Angie. “Cunt,” he said.

    No one held her back because no one wanted to. She came across the porch in two strides as Oscar stepped out of the way and Phil barely got an arm up before she clocked him in the temple. Then Oscar stepped forward again, pulled her back. She said, “Phillip, I’ll kill you if you ever come near me again.”

    Phil put a hand to his temple and looked on the verge of tears. He said, “You guys saw that.”

    Oscar said, “Saw what?”

    Devin said, “I’d take the lady at her word, Phillip. She has a gun and a permit to use it from what I understand. It’s a miracle you’re still breathing as it is.”

    Oscar let Angie go and she walked back to Devin and me. I thought I saw smoke coming out of her ears for a moment. Oscar said, “You going to press charges or not, Phillip?”

    Phil took a moment to consider it. Thought about the bars he’d be unable to show his face in. Everyone in this neighborhood for sure. Thought of the whistles and homosexual jokes that would follow him to the grave, the bras and panties that would show up in his mailbox on a regular basis. He said, “No, I’m not pressing charges.”

    Oscar tapped his cheek with his hand. “That’s real manly of you, Phillip.”

    The young cop came out of the house carrying Angie’s suitcase and set it in front of her.

    “Thank you,” she said.

    We heard a sound like a cat lapping at wet food, and when we looked over, we saw that Phil was weeping into his hands.

    Angie gave him a glare of such withering and final scorn that the temperature on the porch must have dropped by ten degrees. She picked up her suitcase and walked to Devin’s car.

    Oscar slapped Phil’s hip and Phil’s face came out of his hands. He looked up into Oscar’s huge face and Oscar said, “Anything happens to her while me and him” he pointed at Devin ”are alive, I mean anything, like she gets hit by some lightning or her plane crashes or she breaks a nail, anything and we’re going to come play with you, Phillip. Know what I mean?”

    Phil nodded and then the convulsions returned and he began sobbing again. He hit his fist against the railing and got them under control and his eyes fell on mine.

    I said, “Bubba really misses you, Phil.”

    He began to shake.

    I turned and as I walked down the steps, Devin said, “Hey, Phil, is payback a bitch, or what?”

    Phil turned around and got sick again. We walked down to Devin’s car and I sat in the backseat with Angie. Camaros have just enough legroom in their backseats to make a dwarf comfortable, but tonight I wasn’t complaining. Devin pulled down the street, looked in his rearview at Angie a few times. “No accounting for taste, is there?”

    Oscar looked back at Angie. “Boggles the mind. Absolutely boggles the mind.”

TWENTY-NINE

    

    Devin said, “Socia’s definitely lost the war. He’s been underground for two days, and half his guys have gone over to the Avengers. No one counted on Roland being such a tactician.” He looked back at us. “Marion won’t last the week. Lucky for you, huh?”

    “Yeah,” I said, thinking, that still leaves Roland.

    “Not for me,” he said. “I lost a hundred bucks in the fucking pool.”

    Oscar said, “Should have bet on Roland.”

    “Now you tell me.”

    They dropped us off at my apartment. Oscar said, “We’ll have a unit roll the block every fifteen minutes. You’ll be fine.”

    We said good night, walked up to the apartment. There were eight messages on my answering machine but I ignored it. I said, “Coffee or beer?”

    “Coffee,” Angie said.

    I put some in the filter, turned on the Mr. Coffee. I took a beer from the fridge, came back into the living room. She was curled in the corner of the couch, looking smaller than I’d ever seen her. I sat across from her in an armchair and waited. She placed an ashtray on her thigh, lit a cigarette, her hand trembling. She said, “Hell of a Fourth, huh?”

    “Hell of a Fourth,” I agreed.

    She said, “I came home and I was not in good shape.”

    “I know.”

    “I mean, I just killed someone for God’s sake.” Her land trembled so badly the ash dropped off the cigarette onto the couch. She brushed it into the tray. “So, I came in ana there he is, bitching at me about the car still being parked down at South Station, about me not coming home last night, asking me no, telling me that I was fucking you. And I think to myself, I just got in the door, damn lucky to be alive, blood all over my face, and he can’t think of anything more original to say than ‘You’re fucking Pat Kenzie’? Christ.” She ran a hand up her forehead, pulled the hair back off her face, held it there. “So, I said, ‘Get a life, Phillip,’ or something to that effect and I start walking by him and he goes, ‘Only thing you’ll be able to fuck once I get finished with you, babe, is yourself.’“She took a drag on the cigarette. “Nice, huh? So, he grabs my arm and I get my free hand in my purse and I shoot him with the stun gun. He hits the floor, then he half gets up and I kick him. He’s off balance, goes tumbling back out the door onto the porch. And I hit him with the stun gun again. And I’m staring down at him, and it all went away. I mean everything every feeling I ever had for him just sort of flushed out of my system and all I saw was this piece of shit who had abused me for twelve years, and I... went a little hoopy.”

    I doubted that part about the feelings. They’d come back. They always did, usually when you were least prepared for them. I knew she’d probably never love him again, but the emotion would never leave, the reds, the blues, the blacks of all the different things she had felt during that marriage, they’d reverberate time and again. You could leave a bedroom, but the bed stayed with you. I didn’t tell her this, though; she’d learn it soon enough on her own.

    I said, “Judging by what I saw, you went a lot hoopy.”

    She smiled slightly, let her hair fall back in front of her eyes. “Yeah. I suppose so. Long time coming though.”

    “No argument,” I said.

    “Pat?” She’s the only person who can call me that without setting my teeth on edge. On those rare times she does, it sounds OK, it feels kinda warm.

    “Yeah?”

    “When I was looking down at him, afterward, I kept thinking about the two of us in that alley with the car heading around the block toward us. And I was terrified then, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t half as terrified as I could have been, because I was with you. And we always seem to make it through things if we’re together. I don’t doubt things as much when I’m with you. You know?”

    “I know exactly,” I said.

    She smiled. Her bangs covered her eyes and she kept her head down for a moment. She started to say something.

    Then the phone rang. I damn near shot it.

    I got up, grabbed it. “Hello.”

    “Kenzie, it’s Socia.”

    “Congratulations,” I said.

    “Kenzie, you have to meet me.”

    “No, I don’t.”

    “Jesus, Kenzie, I’m a dead man you don’t help me.”

    “Listen to what you just said, Marion, and think.”

    Angie looked up and I nodded. The softness in her face receded like surf from a reef.

    “All right, Kenzie, I know what you’re thinking, sitting there all safe, saying, ‘Socia done now.’ But I ain’t done. Not yet. And I have to, I’ll come looking for you and make sure I take you with me on the way to the grave. You got what I need to stay alive and you gone give it to me.”

    I thought about it. “Try and take me out, Socia.”

    “I’m a half mile from your house.”

    That stopped me, but I said, “Come on over. We’ll have a beer together before I shoot you.”

    “Kenzie,” he said, suddenly sounding weary, “I can get to you and I can get to your partner, that one you look at like she hold all the mysteries to life. You ain’t got that psycho with the hardware to protect you no more. Don’t make me come for you.”

    Anyone can get to anyone. If Socia made it his sole objective to make sure my funeral preceded his by a few days or a few hours, he could do it. I said, “What do you want?”

    “The fucking pictures, man. Save both our lives. I’ll tell Roland if he kill me or you, those pictures definitely see the light. That’s exactly what he don’t want, people saying Roland take it up the bunghole.”

    What a prince. Father of the Year.

    I said, “Where and when?”

    “Know the expressway on-ramp, beside Columbia Station?”

    It was two blocks away. “Yeah.”

    “Half an hour. Underneath.”

    “And this’ll get you both off my back?”

    “Fucking right. Keep me and you breathing for some time.”

    “Half an hour.”

    

***

    

    We got the photographs and guns from the confessional. We xeroxed the photos on the machine Pastor Drummond uses for his Bingo sheets in the basement, put the originals back in their place, and went back to my apartment.

    Angie drank a tall cup of black coffee and I checked our weapons supply. We had the .357 with two bullets left, the .38 Colin had given us and the .38 Bubba had acquired for us, the nine millimeter, and the .45 I’d taken off Lollipop, silencer attached. We also had four grenades in the fridge, and the Ithaca twelve-gauge.

    I put on my trench coat and Angie put on her leather jacket and we took everything but the grenades. Can’t be too safe with people like Socia. I said, “Hell of a Fourth,” and we left the apartment.

    Part of I-93 stretches over the neighborhood. Underneath it, the city leaves three deposits sand, salt, and gravel for emergencies. These three cones rise up twenty feet, the bases about fifteen feet wide. It was summer, so they weren’t in all that much use. In Boston though, you have to be prepared. Sometimes Mother Nature plays a joke or two on us, drops a snowstorm on us in early October just to show what a card she is.

    You can enter the area from the avenue or from the back entrance of the Columbia/JFK subway station or from Mosley Street if you don’t mind climbing over some shrubs and walking down an incline.

    We climbed some shrubs and walked down the incline, kicking clouds of brown dirt in front of us until we reached bottom. We stepped around a green support beam and came out between the three cones.

    Socia was standing in the middle, where the bottoms converged into a ragged triangle. A small kid stood beside him. Unformed cheekbones and baby fat betrayed his age, even if he thought the wraparounds and the hat on his head made him look old enough to buy a pint of scotch. If he was any older than fourteen, he aged well.

    Socia’s hands hung empty by his sides, but the kid’s were dug into the pockets of a team jacket, and he flapped them back and forth against knobby hips. I said, “Take your hands out of your pockets.”

    The kid looked at Socia, and I pointed the .45 at him. “Which word didn’t you understand?”

    Socia nodded. “Take ‘em out, Eugene.”

    Eugene’s hands came out of the jacket slowly, the left empty, the right holding a .38 that looked twice as big as his hand. He tossed it into the salt pile without my asking, then started to place his hands back in his pockets. He changed his mind and held them out in front of him as if he’d never noticed them before. He folded them across his chest eventually and shifted his feet. He didn’t seem to know exactly what to do with his head either. In quick, rodent’s motions, he looked at me, then at Angie, over at Socia, back at the place where he’d tossed the gun, then up at the dark green underside of the expressway.

    All the salt and exhaust fumes and cheap wine aromas down here, and the stench of the kid’s fear hung in the air like a fat cloud.

    Angie looked at me and I nodded. She disappeared around the cone on our left while I watched Socia and Eugene. We knew no one was hanging around on the expressway above, because we’d checked as we came down Mosley. No one was on the roof of the subway station; we’d scoped it out coming down the hill.

    Socia said, “Just me and Eugene. No one else.”

    I didn’t see much reason to doubt him. Three days had aged Socia faster than four years in the White House had aged Carter. His hair was mangy. His clothes hung on him like they’d hang on a wire hanger, and there were beige food stains on the fine linen. His eyes were pink, a crack head’s eyes, all burning adrenaline and shadow seeking. His thin wrists trembled and his skin had the pallor of a mortician’s handiwork. He was on borrowed time, and even he knew he was way past due.

    Looking at him, for a twentieth of a second or so, I felt something akin to pity. Then I remembered the photos in my jacket, the skinny boy he’d killed, a hardened robot rising up from the ashes who looked like the boy, talked like the boy, but had left his soul back in a motel room with stained sheets. I heard the tape of him popping Anton’s eye from the socket. I saw his wife going down in a hail of bullets on a soft summer morning, eyes glazed with eternal resignation. I thought of his army of Eugenes, who closed their glass eyes and hurtled forward to die for him, inhaled his “product,” and exhaled their souls, I looked at Marion Socia and it wasn’t about black or white, it was about hate. Just knowing he existed made me hate the nature of the world.

    He nodded toward Eugene. “Like my bodyguard, Kenzie? Am I scraping the bottom of the barrel, or what?”

    I looked at the boy, could only imagine what those words did to the eyes behind those glasses.

    I said, “Socia, you’re a fucking pig.”

    “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He reached into his pocket and I placed the .45 against his throat.

    He looked down at the silencer nestled against his Adam’s apple. “Think I’m foolish?” He pulled a small pipe from his pocket. “Just grabbing some lightning.” I took a step back as he extracted a thick rock from his other pocket and placed it in the pipe. He lit it and sucked back hard, closing his eyes. In a frog’s voice he said, “You bring what I need?” He opened the lids again and the whites of his eyes fluttered like a bad TV.

    Angie came up beside me, and we stared at him.

    He chucked the smoke from his lungs in a blast and smiled. He handed the pipe to Eugene. “Aaah. What you two looking at? Little repressed white children appalled by the big black demon?” He chuckled.

    “Don’t flatter yourself, Socia,” Angie said. “You’re no demon. You’re a garden snake. Hell, you aren’t even black.”

    “Then what am I, missy thing?”

    “An aberration,” she said and flicked her cigarette off his chest.

    He shrugged, brushed at the ash on his jacket.

    Eugene was sucking the small pipe as if it were a reed poking above a waterline. He handed it back to Socia and tilted his head back.

    Socia reached out and slapped my shoulder. “Hey, boy, give me what I come for. Save us both from that crazy dog.”

    ‘“That crazy dog’? Socia, you created him. You stripped him bare and left him with nothing but hate by the time he was ten.”

    Eugene shifted on his feet, looked at Socia.

    Socia snorted, toked from the pipe. The smoke flowed slowly out of the corners of his mouth. “What do you know about anything, white boy? Huh? Seven years back, that bitch took my boy away from me, tried to teach him all about Jesus and how to behave for the white man, like he had a chance in the first place. Little nigger boy from the ghetto. She try and slap a restraining order on me. On me. Keep me away from my own child so she could fill his head with a lot a shit about the American Dream. Shit. American Dream to a nigger is like a centerfold hanging in a prison cell. Black man in this world ain’t nothing unless he can sing or dance, throw a football, make you whiteys happy.” He took another hit off the pipe. “Only time you like looking at a nigger is when you in the audience. And Jenna, bitch tries to pass all that Tom bullshit onto my boy, tell him God will provide. Fuck that. Man does what he does in this world and that’s it. Ain’t no accountant up above taking notes, no matter what the preachers say.” He tapped the pipe hard against his leg, dumping the ash and resin, his face flushed. “Come on now, Kenzie, give me that shit and Roland leave you alone. Me too.”

    I doubted that. Socia would leave me alone until he was secure again, if that ever happened. Then he’d start worrying about all the people who had something on him, who’d seen him beg. And he’d wipe us all out to preserve his illusion of himself.

    I looked at him, still scrambling to decide if I had any options other than the one he offered. He stared back. Eugene took a step away from him, a small one, and his right hand scratched his back.

    “Come on. Give it here.”

    I didn’t have much choice. Roland would definitely get to me if I didn’t. I reached into my pocket with my free hand and extracted the manila envelope.

    Socia leaned forward slightly. Eugene’s right hand was still scratching at his back and his left foot tapped up and down on the cement. I handed the envelope to Socia, and Eugene’s foot picked up speed.

    Socia opened the clasp and stepped back under the streetlight to survey his handiwork. “Copies,” he said.

    “Very good. I keep the originals.”

    He looked at me, saw it wasn’t negotiable, and shrugged. He looked at them one by one, taking his time, as if they were old postcards. A couple of times, he chuckled softly.

    I said, “Socia, there’s something I don’t get.”

    He smiled, a ghostly one. “Lot you don’t get, white boy.”

    “Well, at this particular moment in time, then.”

    “What is it?”

    “Did you transfer the original photos from videocassette?”

    He shook his head. “Eight millimeter home movie camera.”

    “So, if you have the original film, why are all these people dying?”

    He smiled. “Don’t have the original.” He shrugged. “First house Roland’s boys hit was a place I keep on Warren. Firebombed it, hoping I was in it. I wasn’t.”

    “But the film is?”

    He nodded, then looked back down at the Xeroxed photos.

    Eugene was leaning forward, craning his head to get a look over Socia’s shoulder. His right hand was buried behind his back now and his left scratched furiously along his hip. His small body rippled, and I could hear a hum coming from his mouth, a low buzzing sound I doubt he knew he was making. Whatever it was that he was getting ready to do, it was coming soon.

    I took a step forward, my breathing shallow.

    Socia said, “Well, how about all this? Boy could have been a movie star. Eh, Eugene?”

    Eugene made his move. He bounced forward, a stumble almost, and his hand cleared his back with a pistol in it. He jerked his arm up but it glanced off Socia’s elbow. Socia was turning away as I stepped forward, pivoting as I grasped Eugene’s wrist, turning my back in toward his chest. Socia’s ankle turned against the pavement. He tipped toward the ground and the gun boomed twice in the still humid air. I snapped my elbow back into Eugene’s face and heard bone crack.

    Socia bounced off the pavement and rolled into the salt cone, the photocopies exploding in a flurry. Eugene dropped the gun. I let go of his slick wrist and he fell straight back to the pavement, a soft pop as his head hit cement.

    I picked up the gun and looked at Angie. She stood in a target shooter’s stance, her arm steady as it swung the .38 back and forth between Socia and Eugene.

    Eugene sat up, hands on his legs, blood flowing from a broken nose.

    Socia lay against the salt pile, his body slack in the dark shadow of the expressway. I waited, but he didn’t move.

    Angie stepped over to him and looked down. She reached out for his wrist and he rolled over on his back. He looked at us and laughed, a rich, explosive bellow. We watched as he tried to get control of it, but it was beyond him. He tried to sit up straight against the cone, but the movement loosened the salt above him and it cascaded down inside his shirt. This made him laugh even harder. He slid back down into the salt like a drunk on a waterbed, slapping it with his hand, the laughter rippling into the atmosphere and momentarily overpowering the din of cars passing overhead.

    Eventually he sat forward, holding his stomach. “Hoo boy. Ain’t there no one to trust in this world no more?” He giggled and looked at the boy. “Hey, Eugene, how much Roland pay you to Judas me?”

    Eugene didn’t seem to hear him. The color of his skin had taken on the unhealthy hue of someone fighting back nausea. He took deep breaths and held a hand to his heart. He seemed oblivious to the broken nose, but his eyes were wide with the enormity of what he’d just attempted and what it had gotten him. Unfathomable terror swam in his irises, and I could tell his brain was scrambling to get past it, searching his soul for the courage necessary to achieve resignation.

    Socia stood and brushed some salt from his suit. He shook his head slowly, then bent to pick up the scattered photocopies. “My, my. Ain’t going to be a hole deep enough or a country wide enough to hide your ass in, child. Roland or no Roland, you dead.”

    Eugene looked at his shattered sunglasses lying on the ground beside him and threw up on his lap.

    Socia said, “Do that all you want. Won’t help you none.”

    The back of my neck and the lower half of my ears felt sickly warm, the blood boiling in a whirlpool just below the skin. Above us, the metal expressway extension rattled as a convoy of semis roared over in a screaming cacophony.

    I looked down at the boy and I felt tired horrendously tired of all the death and petty hate and ignorance and complete and utter carelessness that had assaulted me in a maelstrom this last week. I was tired of all the brick-wall debating the black versus white, the rich versus poor, the mean versus innocent. Tired of spite and senselessness and Marion Socia and his offhand cruelty. Too tired to care about moral implications or politics or anything except the glass eyes of this boy on the ground who didn’t seem to know how to cry anymore. I was exhausted by the Socias and the Paulsons, the Rolands and the Mulkerns of this world, the ghosts of all their victims whispering a growling wind of pleas into my ear to make someone accountable. To end it.

    Socia was searching the shadows between the cones. “Kenzie, how many of these pictures were there?”

    I pulled back the hammer on the .45 as the truck tires overhead slapped the heavy metal with relentless fury, roaring onward to a destination that could have been a thousand miles away or right next door.

    I looked at the nose I’d broken. When did he forget how to cry?

    “Kenzie. How many fucking pictures you give me?”

    Angie was staring at me, and I knew the sounds that howled from above raged in her head too.

    Socia scooped up another photocopy. “Fuck, man, this better be all of it.”

    The last of the trucks rattled past, but the wail continued, pounding at a fever pitch against my eardrums.

    Eugene groaned and touched his nose.

    Angie looked over at Socia as he searched the ground in a crablike walk. She looked back at me and nodded.

    Socia straightened and stepped under the light, holding the photocopies in his hand.

    I said, “How many more will it take, Socia?”

    He said, “What?” shuffling the edges of the photocopies into a neat stack.

    “How many more people are you going to chew up before it’s finally enough? Before even you get sick of it?”

    Angie said, “Do it, Patrick. Now.”

    Socia glanced at her, then over to me, his eyes a blank. I don’t think he understood the concept of my question. He stared at me, waiting for me to elaborate. After a minute or so, he held up the photocopies. His thumb rose up the front one, pressing between Roland’s bare thighs. He said, “Kenzie, is this all of it or not?”

    “Yeah, Socia,” I said, “this is all of it.” I raised the gun and shot him in the chest.

    He dropped the photocopies and raised a hand to the hole, stumbling back but staying on his feet. He looked at the hole, at the blood on his hand. He seemed surprised, and for a brief moment, terribly afraid. “The fuck you do that for?” He coughed.

    I pulled back on the hammer again.

    He stared at me, and the fear left his eyes. The irises peppered over with a cold satisfaction, a dark knowledge. He smiled.

    I shot him in the head and Angie’s gun went off at the same time. The bullets hammered him back into the salt pile, and he rolled onto his back and slid to the cement.

    Angie’s body was shaking a bit, but her voice was steady. “Guess Devin was right.”

    I looked down at Socia. “How’s that?”

    “Some people, you either kill them or leave them be, because you’ll never change their minds.”

    I bent down and began picking up the photocopies. Angie knelt by Eugene and cleaned his nose and face with a handkerchief. He didn’t seem surprised or elated or disturbed by what had happened. His eyes were glazed, somewhat off-center. Angie said, “Can you walk?”

    “Yes.” He stood up unsteadily, closed his eyes for a few seconds, then exhaled slowly.

    I found the photocopy I was looking for, wiped it off with some gravel, and placed it in Socia’s jacket. Eugene stood firmly now. I looked at him. “Go home,” I said.

    He nodded and walked off without a word. He climbed the incline and disappeared on the other side of the shrubs.

    Angie and I took the same route a minute later, and as we walked toward my apartment, I slipped my arm around her waist and tried not to think about it.

THIRTY

    

His last week alive, my father's six-foot two-inch frame weighed 112 pounds.

In his hospital room at three in the morning, I listened to his chest rattle like shards of broken glass boiling in a pot. His exhalations sounded as if they were forcing their way out through layers of gauze. Dried spittle whitened the corners of his mouth.

When he opened his eyes, the green irises seemed to swim, anchorless amid the white. He turned his head in my direction. “Patrick?

I leaned in toward the bed, the child in me still cautious, still watching his hands, ready to bolt if they moved too suddenly. He smiled. “Your mother loves me.”

I nodded.

“That’s something to ” He coughed and the force of it bowed his chest, brought his head off the pillow. He grimaced, swallowed. “That’s something to take with me. Over there,” he said and rolled his eyes back into his head as if they could catch a glimpse of where he was going.

I said, “That’s nice, Edgar.”

His feeble hand slapped my arm. “You still hate me, do you?”

    

I looked in those unhinged irises and nodded.

“What about all that shit the nuns taught you? What about forgiveness?” He raised a tired, amused eyebrow.

“You used it all up, Edgar. A long time ago.”

The feeble hand reached out again, grazed my abdomen. “Still mad about that little scar?”

I stared at him, giving him nothing, telling him there was nothing left to take anymore, even if he were strong enough.

He waved the hand in a dismissive gesture. “Fuck ya, then.” He closed his eyes. “What’d you come for?”

I sat back, looked at the wasted body, waiting for it to stop having an effect on me, for that poisonous sludge of love and hate to quit sluicing through my body. “To watch you die,” I said.

He smiled, eyes still closed. “Ah,” he said, “a vulture. So you are your father’s son, after all.”

He slept for a while after that, and I watched him, listening to the broken glass rattling through his chest. I knew then that whatever explanation Yd been waiting for my whole life was sealed in that wasted frame, in that rotted brain, and it was never coming out. It was going to ride with my father on his black journey to that place he saw when he rolled his eyes back into his skull. All that dark knowledge was his alone, and he was taking it with him so he’d have something to chuckle about during the trip.

At five-thirty, my father opened his eyes and pointed at me. He said, “Something’s burning. Something’s burning!” His eyes widened and his mouth opened as if he were about to howl.

And he died.

And I watched him, still waiting.

THIRTY-ONE

    

    It was one-thirty in the morning on the fifth of July when we met Sterling Mulkern and Jim Vurnan at the Hyatt Regency bar in Cambridge. The bar is one of those revolving lounges, and as we flowed around in a slow circle, the city glittered and the red stone footbridges on the Charles seemed old and good and even the ivy-covered brick of Harvard didn’t annoy me.

    Mulkern was wearing a gray suit over a white shirt, no tie. Jim was wearing an angora crew-neck sweater and tan cotton pants. Neither of them looked pleased.

    Angie and I wore the usual and neither of us cared.

    Mulkern said, “I hope you have a good reason for calling us out at this hour, lad.”

    I said, “Of course. If you wouldn’t mind, please tell me what our deal was.”

    Mulkern said, “Come now. What’s this?”

    I said, “Repeat the terms of the contract we made.”

    Mulkern looked at Jim and shrugged. Jim said, “Patrick, you know damn well we agreed to your daily fee plus expenses.”

    “Plus?”

    “Plus a seven thousand dollar bonus if you produced the documents that Jenna Angeline stole.” Jim was irritable; maybe his blond Vassar wife with the Dorothy Hamill do was making him sleep on the couch again. Or maybe I’d interrupted their bimonthly tryst.

    I said, “You advanced me two thousand dollars. I’ve worked on this for seven days. Actually, if I wanted to be technical, this is the morning of the eighth, but I’ll give you a break. Here’s the bill.” I handed it to Mulkern.

    He barely glanced at it. “Ludicrously exorbitant, but we hired you because you allegedly justify your fees.”

    I sat back. “Who put Curtis Moore on to me? You or Paulson?”

    Jim said, “What in the hell are you talking about? Curtis Moore worked for Socia.”

    “But he managed to begin tailing me about five minutes after our first meeting.” I looked at Mulkern. “How convenient.”

    Mulkern’s eyes showed nothing, a man who could withstand a thousand suppositions, no matter how logical, as long as there was no proof to back them up. And if there was proof, he could just say, “I don’t recall.”

    I sipped my beer. “How well did you know my father?”

    “I knew your father well, lad, now get on with it.” He looked at his watch.

    “You knew he beat his wife, abused his children.”

    Mulkern shrugged. “Not my concern.”

    “Patrick,” Jim said, “your personal life is irrelevant here.”

    “Somebody has to have a concern here,” I said. I looked at Mulkern. “If you knew about my father, Senator, as a public servant, why didn’t you do something about it?”

    “I just told you, lad not my concern.”

    “What is your concern, Senator?”

    “The documents, Pat.”

    “What is your concern, Senator?” I asked again.

    “The Commonwealth of course.” He chuckled. “I’d love to sit here and explain the utilitarian concept to you, Pat, but I haven’t the time. A few cuffs on the side of the head from your old man is not a call for action, boy.”

    A few cuffs. Two hospital stays in the first twelve years of my life.

    I said, “Did you know about Paulson? I mean, everything?”

    “Come now, boy. Complete your contract and let’s go about our separate ways.” His upper lip was slick with perspiration.

    “How much did you know? Did you know he was fucking little boys?”

    “There’s no need for that sort of language here,” Mulkern said and smiled, looking around the room.

    Angie said, “Tell us what sort of language fits your sense of propriety and we’ll see if it applies to child molestation and prostitution and extortion and murder.”

    “What’re you talking about now?” Mulkern said. “Crazy talk is what I’m hearing. Crazy talk. Give me the documents, Pat.”

    “Senator?”

    “Yes, Pat?”

    “Don’t call me ‘Pat.’ It’s something you do to a dog, not something you call a person.”

    Mulkern sat back and rolled his eyes. I obviously had no grip on this edge of the planet. He said, “Lad, you ”

    “How much did you know, Senator? How much? Your aide-de-camp is doing little kids and people end up dying all over the place because he and Socia took a couple of home movies for themselves and things got out of hand. Didn’t they? What’d Socia blackmail Paulson so he’d change the nature of his pressure on the street terrorism bill? And Paulson, what’d he have a few too many drinks mourning his lost innocence, and Jenna found them? Found photos of her son being molested by the man she worked for? Maybe even voted for? How much did you know, Senator?”

    He stared at me.

    “And I was the magnet,” I said. “Wasn’t I?” I looked at Jim and he stared back, blank-faced. “I was supposed to lead Socia and Paulson to Jenna, help them clean up the mess. Is that it, Senator?”

    He met my anger and indignation, and he smiled. He knew I had nothing on him, just questions and suppositions. He knew that’s all anyone ever had, and his eyes hardened in victory. The more I asked, the less I’d get. The way of things.

    He said, “Give me the documents, Pat.”

    I said, “Let me see the check, Sterl.”

    He held out his hand and Jim put a check in it. Jim was looking at me as if we’d been playing the same game together for years, yet only now was he realizing that I had no grasp of the rules. He shook his head slowly, a den mother’s motion. Jim would’ve made some fine convent a good nun.

    Mulkern filled in the “pay to the order of” part of the check but left the amount blank. He said, “The documents, Pat.”

    I reached down to the seat and handed him the manila envelope. He opened it, took the photos out, held them on his lap. He said, “No copies this time? I’m proud of you, Pat.”

    I said, “Sign the check, Senator.”

    He leafed through the rest of the photos, smiled sadly at one, put them back in the envelope. He picked up the pen again, tapped it against the tabletop lightly. He said, “Pat, I think you need an attitude adjustment. Yes. So I’m going to cut your bonus in half. How about that?”

    “I made copies.”

    “Copies don’t mean a thing in court.”

    “They can make a hell of a stink though.”

    He looked at me, sized me up in a second, and shook his head. He bent toward the check.

    I said, “Call Paulson. Ask him which one’s missing.”

    The pen stopped. He said, “Missing?”

    Jim said, “Missing?”

    Angie said, “Missing?” just to be a smart-ass.

    I nodded. “Missing. Paulson can tell you there were twenty-two in all. You got twenty-one in that envelope.”

    “And where would it be?” Mulkern asked.

    “Sign the check and find out, dickhead.”

    I don’t think Mulkern had ever been called a “dickhead” in his life. He didn’t seem too fond of it either, but maybe it would grow on him. He said, “Give it to me.”

    I said, “Sign that check, no ‘attitude adjustments,’ and I’ll tell you where it is.”

    Jim said, “Don’t sign it, Senator.”

    Mulkern said, “Shut up, Jim.”

    I said, “Yeah, shut up, Jim. Go fetch the Senator a bone or something.”

    Mulkern stared at me. It seemed to be his main method of intimidation and it was lost on someone who’d just spent the past few days getting shot at. It took him a few minutes, but I think he got it. He said, “Whatever happens, I’ll ruin you.” He signed the check with the proper amount and handed it over.

    “Shucks,” I said.

    “Hand over the photograph.”

    “I told you I’d tell you where it was, Senator. I never said I’d hand it over to you.”

    Mulkern closed his eyes for a moment and breathed heavily through his nostrils. “Fine. Where is it?”

    “Right over there,” Angie said and pointed across the

    bar.

    Richie Colgan stuck his head out from behind a fern. He waved to us, then looked at Mulkern and smiled. A big smile. The corners of his mouth damn near reached his eyelids.

    Mulkern said, “No.”

    Angie said, “Yes,” and patted his arm.

    I said, “Look on the bright side, Sterl you didn’t have to write Richie a check. He fucked you over for free.” We stood up from the table.

    Mulkern said, “You’re done in this town. You won’t even be able to get welfare.”

    I said, “No kidding? Hell then, I might as well just go over to Richie and tell him you gave me this check for my help in covering up your involvement in this whole affair.”

    Mulkern said, “And what would you have then?”

    “I’d have you in the same position you’re ready to put me in. And hell if it wouldn’t make my day.” I reached down, picked up my beer, finished it. “Still want to wreck my name, Sterl?”

    Mulkern held the envelope in his hand. He said, “Brian Paulson’s a good man. A good politician. And these photos are almost seven years old. Why bring this to the surface now? It’s old news.”

    I smiled and quoted him: “‘Everything but yesterday seems young,’ Senator.” I nudged Jim with my elbow. “Ain’t that always the way?”

THIRTY-TWO

    

    We tried to have a conversation with Richie in the parking lot but it was like trying to talk to someone as he passed by on a jet. He was rocking forward on his feet and he kept interrupting to say, “Hold that thought, would you?” Then he’d whisper something into his handheld tape recorder. Probably wrote most of his column standing in the parking lot of the Hyatt Regency.

    We said our good-nights and he bounced on the balls of his feet all the way to his car. We might have killed Socia, but Richie was going to bury Paulson.

    We took a cab home; the still streets were littered with the residue of fireworks; the wind carried a bitter tang of gunpowder. The rush of burying Mulkern’s whipping boy in front of him was already beginning to dissipate, leaking out of the cab onto those desolate streets, drifting off somewhere into the shadows that swept over us between the streetlights.

    When we reached my place, Angie went straight to the fridge, took a bottle of zinfandel from the door. She took a glass too, though after watching her drink it, there didn’t seem much point; the only way she could have gone through it any faster would have been intravenously. I took a couple of beers and we sat in the living room with the windows open, listening to the breeze blow a beer can down the avenue, tipping it against the asphalt, rolling it steadily toward the corner.

    I knew that in a week or so, I’d look back on this with pleasure, savor the look on Mulkern’s face as he realized he’d just paid me a large sum of money to blow a hole in his life. Somehow I’d managed to pull off the rarest of feats I’d made someone in the State House accountable. In a week or so, that would feel good. Not now though. Now we were facing something else entirely, the air heavy with the impending weight of our own consciences.

    Angie was halfway through the bottle when she said, “What’s going on?”

    She stood up, the wine bottle hanging loosely between her index and middle fingers, tapping against her thigh.

    I got up, not sure I was ready to face this yet. I got two more beers, came back. I said, “We killed someone.” It sounded simple.

    “In cold blood.”

    “In cold blood.” I opened one beer, placed the other on the floor beside the chair.

    She drained her glass, poured some more. “He wasn’t dangerous to us.”

    “Not at that moment, no.”

    “But we killed him anyway,” I said. It was numbing and repetitious, this conversation, but I had the feeling we were each trying to say exactly what we’d done, no bullshit, no lies to come back and haunt us later.

    “Why?” she asked.

    “Because he repulsed us. Morally.” I drank some beer. It could have been water for all I tasted it.

    “A lot of people morally repulse us,” she said. “We going to kill them too?”

    “I don’t think so.”

    “Why not?”

    “Not enough bullets.”

    She said, “I don’t want to joke about this. Not now.”

    She was right. I said, “Sorry.”

    She said, “In the exact same situation, we’d do it again.” I thought of Socia holding up the photograph, running his finger between his son’s legs. I said, “Yes, we would.”

    “He was a predator,” she said.

    I nodded.

    “He allowed his child to be molested for money, so we killed him.” She drank some more wine, not quite inhaling it anymore. She was standing in the middle of the floor, pivoting slowly on her left foot every now and then, the bottle swinging like a pendulum between her fingers.

    I said, “That’s about the size of it.”

    She said, “Paulson did similar things. He molested that child, probably hundreds of others. We knew that. We didn’t kill him.”

    I said, “Killing Socia was an impulse. We didn’t know we were going to do it when we met him.”

    She laughed, a short harsh sound. “We didn’t, huh? Why’d we take a silencer with us?”

    I let the question fall between us, tried not to answer it Eventually I said, “Maybe we did go there knowing we’d kill him given half an excuse. He deserved it.”

    “So did Paulson. He’s alive.”

    “We’d go to jail if we killed Paulson. Nobody cared about Socia. They’ll chalk it up to the gang war, be happy he’s gone.”

    “How convenient for us.”

    I stood up, came across to her. I put my hands on her shoulders, stopped her lazy pivot. I said, “We killed Socia on impulse.” If I said it enough, maybe it’d become true. “We couldn’t get to Paulson. He’s too well insulated. But we took care of him.”

    “In very civilized fashion.” She said “civilized” the way some people say “taxes.”

    “Yes,” I said.

    “So we took care of Socia according to the laws of the jungle, and we dispatched Paulson in accordance with the laws of civilization.”

    “Exactly.”

    She looked into my eyes and hers were swimming with alcohol and exhaustion and ghosts. She said, “Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.”

    Not much I could argue with there. A black pimp was dead and a white child molester was preparing a press release over a bottle of Chivas somewhere, each one as guilty as the other.

    People like Paulson would always be able to hide behind power. They might face disgrace, they might even do six months in a federal country club and face public castigation, but they’d breathe. Paulson might actually come out of this OK. A few years back, a congressman who’d admitted to having sex with a fifteen-year-old boy was reelected. I guess, to some people, even statutory rape is relative.

    And people like Socia could slip through for a while, maybe a long while. They’d kill and maim and make the lives of everyone around them ugly and bleak, but sooner or later, they usually ended up like Socia himself brain leaking out under an expressway. They ended up on page thirteen of the Metro section and the cops shrugged and didn’t work too hard to find their killers.

    One disgraced, one dead. One breathing, one dead. One white, one dead.

    I ran my hands through my hair, felt the grit and oil from the last day, smelled the trash and waste on my fingers. At that moment, I truly hated the world and everything in it.

    L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it’s simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won’t have to hear the screams of the drowning.

    They tell us it’s about race, and we believe them. And they call it a “democracy,” and we nod our heads, so pleased with ourselves. We blame the Socias, we occasionally sneer at the Paulsons, but we always vote for the Sterling Mulkerns. And in occasional moments of quasi-lucidity, we wonder why the Mulkerns of this world don’t respect us.

    They don’t respect us because we are their molested children. They fuck us morning, noon, and night, but as long as they tuck us in with a kiss, as long as they whisper into our ears, “Daddy loves you, Daddy will take care of you,” we close our eyes and go to sleep, trading our bodies, our souls, for the comforting veneers of “civilization” and “security,” the false idols of our twentieth-century wet dream.

    And it’s our reliance on that dream that the Mulkerns, the Paulsons, the Socias, the Phils, the Heroes of this world depend upon. That’s their dark knowledge. That’s how they win.

    I gave Angie a weak smile. “I’m tired,” I said.

    “Me too.” She gave me her own weak smile. “Exhausted.” She walked to the couch, spread the sheet I’d left across it. She said, “We’ll figure it out someday. Right?”

    “Yeah. Someday,” I said, walking toward my bedroom.

“Sure.”

THIRTY-THREE

    

    The photograph we’d given Richie showed Senator Paulson in all his glory. It showed very specifically what he got his sense of glory from. Roland’s body took up a third of the frame and you got a good sense of his age, of the youth in the body under Paulson. No doubt about his sex. But unlike most of the other photographs, you couldn’t see Roland’s face, just his small ears and head. Socia was standing in the bedroom, watching with a bored expression on his face, smoking a cigarette.

    The Trib ran the photo with appropriate softening and black bars over the places you’d imagine. Beside the photograph was another one of Socia lying on his back in the gravel, his body looking like an inflatable doll someone had forgotten to inflate. His head was thrown back, the small pipe still in his hand. Over the photo it said: MAN IN PAULSON PIC KILLED GANG-LAND-STYLE.

    In addition to his column, Richie’s byline ran over the Socia murder story too. He said the police had no suspects as of yet, that any fingerprints could have been obscured if the killer had had the sense to rub his hands in the gravel before he touched anything. The killer had. He mentioned that the Xerox of the Paulson photo had been discovered in Socia’s bloody linen jacket. He mentioned Socia’s common-law marriage to Jenna Angeline, the same Jenna Angeline who’d been a cleaning woman for, among others, Senators Paulson and Mulkern. They reran her death photograph too, the State House looming up behind her.

    It was the biggest local scandal since the DA bungled the Charles Stuart case. Maybe bigger. We’d have to wait until it all came out in the wash.

    One thing that wouldn’t come out in the wash was Roland. I doubt Paulson knew the identity of the child he’d been with that day; over the ensuing years, I’m sure there were so many more. And if he did know, I doubted he’d be shouting it from the rooftops. Socia wasn’t up to much public speaking these days, and Angie and I were unequivocally not involved.

    Richie was one hell of a reporter. He tied Paulson to Socia and Socia to Jenna by the third paragraph, then noted that Paulson had gone on record in Friday’s legislative session motioning for an extra day off, the precise day the street terrorism bill was scheduled to come to the floor. Richie never insinuated, he never accused. He just laid fact after fact down on everyone’s breakfast table and let them draw their own conclusions.

    I had my doubts about how many of them would get it, but I figured enough would figure it out.

    Paulson was reportedly on vacation at the family home in Marblehead, but by the time I caught the morning news on TV, there were Devin and Oscar in front of the cameras in Marblehead. Oscar said, “Senator Paulson has one hour to turn himself in to the Marblehead Police Department or we’re going in after him.”

    Devin didn’t say anything. He stood beside his partner, beaming, a cigar the size of a Boeing in his mouth.

    The reporter said to Oscar, “Sergeant Lee, your partner looks rather pleased about this.”

    Oscar said, “He’s so happy he don’t know whether to shit or ” and they cut to a commercial.

    I flipped around, saw Sterling Mulkern on Channel Seven. He was coming up the State House steps, an army of people trotting beside him, Jim Vurnan trying to keep pace a few steps back. He sliced through the mass of microphones like an oar through a dead sea, a chant of “No comment,” coming from his lips all the way through the front doors. I was kind of hoping he’d keep things lively, throw in a few “I don’t recalls” to break up the monotony, but I guess pleasing me wasn’t at the top of his “to do” list this morning.

    Angie had been awake for a few minutes by this time, her face propped up on the arm of the couch where she’d slept, her eyes puffed with sleep, but alert. She said, “Sometimes, Skid, this job ain’t half bad.”

    I was sitting on the floor at the foot of the couch. I looked at her. “Does your hair always stand on end first thing in the morning?”

    Not a smart thing to say when you’re sitting near someone’s foot. The next thing I said was, “Ouch.”

    She got up, tossed the sheet over my head, and said, “Coffee?”

    “I’d love some.” I pulled the sheet off my face.

    “Make enough for the both of us then, would you?” She stumbled into the bathroom and turned the shower on.

    On Channel Five, the two anchors were in early, promising to stay with me until all the facts were in. I wanted to tell them they’d be having pizzas delivered to the station for the next ten years if that’s what they were waiting for, but I let it slide. They’d figure it out.

    Ken Mitchum, on Channel Seven, said it was possibly the biggest scandal since the Curly years.

    Channel Six was doing the Charles Stuart comparison by the time I caught up with them, paralleling the racial overtones that had tinged both cases. Ward was smiling as he reported this, but Ward always smiles. Laura, on the other hand, looked pissed off. Laura is black; I didn’t blame her.

    Angie came back out of the shower, newly dressed in a pair of my gray shorts and a white Polo sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was mine too, but damn if she didn’t look better than me in it. She said, “Where’s my coffee?”

    “Same place as the bell. Let me know when you find the both of them.”

    She frowned, brushing out her hair, head tilted to one side.

    The photograph of Socia’s corpse flashed on the screen. She stopped brushing for a moment. I said, “How do you feel?”

    She nodded toward the TV. “Fine, as long as I don’t think about it. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

    “And go where?”

    “Well, I don’t know about you, babe, but I want to spend some of that bonus money. And,” she said, straightening up, tossing her long hair behind her, “we have to visit Bubba.”

    “Have you considered that he may be angry with us?”

    She shrugged. “You got to die some time, right?”

    I picked up a Nintendo Gameboy for Bubba, bought a bunch of Kill-the-Commie-Terrorist games to go with it. Angie bought him a Freddy Krueger doll and five issues of Jugs magazine.

    There was a police guard at his door, but after making a few phone calls, he allowed us to go in. Bubba was reading a worn copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook when we entered, learning all sorts of new and nifty ways to build a hydrogen bomb in his backyard. He looked up at us, and for the single longest second of my life, I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not.

    He said, “’Bout time someone I liked showed up.”

    I learned how to breathe again.

    He was paler than I’d ever seen him and the whole left side of his chest and arm was in a cast, but take away the cast and I’ve seen people with a bad cold who looked less healthy. Angie bent over and kissed his forehead, then suddenly pulled his head to her chest and held it there for a moment, her eyes closed. “I was worried about you, you maniac.”

    “What don’t kill me only makes me bloody.”

    Bubba. Deep as always.

    

    He said, “A Freddie Krueger doll! Hot shit!” He looked at me. “What’d you bring me, homeboy?”

    

***

    

    We left after a half hour or so. The doctors had initially thought he’d be in ICU for at least a week, but now they were saying he could be released in another two days. He’d face an indictment, of course, but he assured us, “What’s a witness? Really. I never met one. They those people who always seem to get amnesia just before I’m supposed to go to trial?”

    We walked down Charles Street into the Back Bay, Angie’s credit card burning a hole in her pocket. Bonwit Teller never stood a chance. She hit the place like a cyclone and by the time we left, we were carrying half the first floor in paper bags.

    I did a half hour’s shopping at Eddie Bauer, another twenty minutes at the Banana Republic in Copley Place, my stomach beginning to churn in the atmosphere of four-story marble waterfalls and solid gold window frames and Neiman-Marcus displays of eighty-five-dollar argyle socks. If Donald Trump puked, Copley Place is probably what would hit the toilet.

    We took the back entrance out of there, the best place to find a cab in the city in midafternoon. We were trying to figure out where we were going to eat lunch, when I saw Roland standing at the bottom of the escalator, his huge frame spread lazily across the exit way, one arm in a cast, one eye closed shut, the other looking steadily at us.

    I reached under my untucked shirt, got a firm grip on the nine millimeter, cold against my stomach but warm in my hand.

    Roland stepped back. “I want to talk.”

    I kept my hand on my gun.

    Angie said, “So talk.”

    “Take a walk with me.” He turned and walked out through the revolving door.

    I’m not quite sure why we followed him, but we did. The sun was strong, the air warm but not too humid as we walked up Dartmouth, away from the staid hotels and the quaint shops, the yuppies sipping cappucino amidst the illusion of civilization. We crossed Columbus Avenue and went down through the South End, the restored brown-stones eventually giving way to the sorrier-looking ones, those that hadn’t been touched by the frontier mentality of the fern-and-Perrier crowd yet. We kept going, none of us saying a word, farther down into Roxbury. As soon as we crossed over the border, Roland said, “Just want to speak to you a minute.”

    I looked around me, saw nothing that gave me comfort, but somehow, I trusted him. Having checked inside the hollows of the sling that supported his arm and seeing no gun there, I had one concrete reason to feel this way. But that wasn’t all of it. What I knew of Roland, he wasn’t like his father. He didn’t lull you into death with a few words and a hypnotist’s inflection. He just came straight at you and sent you to your coffin.

    Another thing I was realizing, for sure the kid was huge. I’d never been this close to him when he’d been on his feet, and it was damn near awe-inspiring. He was closing in on six foot four or so and every inch of skin that covered his body was bunched tight with coiled muscle. I’m six feet even and I felt like a dwarf.

    He stopped in a worn-out field, a construction site waiting to happen, the next place big business would go to encroach and keep encroaching, pushing Roxbury west or east until it became another South End, another place to have a good drink and hear underground music. And its people would roll east or west too, while politicians cut ribbons and shook the hands of entrepreneurs and talked of progress, pointed to declining crime statistics in the area with pride, while ignoring the rising crime statistics in the areas where the displaced had settled. Roxbury would become a nice word again, Dedham or Randolph a bad one. And another neighborhood would dissolve.

    Roland said, “You two killed Marion.”

    We didn’t say anything.

    “You think it would...please me? That it? Keep me from your door?”

    I said, “No. Didn’t have much to do with you at the time, Roland. He pissed us off. Simple as that.”

    He looked at me, then off beyond the lot. We weren’t too far from the decrepit tenements where he’d chased us the night before. All around us were worn buildings and sparse fields of city growth. Not much more than a stone’s throw from Beacon Hill.

    He seemed to read my thoughts. He said, “That’s right. We’re sitting on your doorstep.”

    I looked back, saw the skyline glittering above us in the midafternoon sun, close enough to kiss. I wondered what it must be like, living here, this close, knowing you’d never get to taste it. Not for free. A couple of miles and a world away.

    I said, “Oh well.”

    Roland said, “You can’t keep doing this to us forever. Can’t hold us back.”

    I said, “Roland, ‘we’ didn’t create you. Don’t try and put that off on the white man too. Your father and you made you what you are.”

    “And what am I?” he said.

    I shrugged. “A sixteen-year-old killing machine.”

    “Damn right,” he said. “Damn right.” He spit on the ground to the left of my foot. He said, “But I wasn’t always.”

    I thought of the skinny boy in the photographs, tried to imagine what benevolent, possibly hopeful thoughts had run through his brain before someone had burned it out of him, overloaded the circuits until the good had to go just to make way for all the bad. I looked at the sixteen-year-old man in front of me, the massive, bulked-up stone with the bad eye and the arm in the cast. I couldn’t, for the life of me, connect the two.

    I said, “Yeah, well, we were all little boys once, Roland.” I looked at Angie. “Little girls too.”

    Roland said, “The white man ”

    Angie dropped her shopping bag and said, “Roland, we’re not going to listen to this ‘white man’ shit. We know all about the white man. We know he has the power and we know the black man doesn’t. We know the way the world works and we know that way sucks. We know all that. We’re not too pleased with ourselves either, but there you are. And maybe if you had some suggestions on how to change things for the better, we’d have something to talk about. But you kill people, Roland, and you sell crack. Don’t expect violins.”

    He smiled at her. It wasn’t the warmest smile I’d ever seen Roland has about as much warmth in him as a polar cap but it wasn’t completely cold either. He said, “Maybe. Maybe.” He scratched at the skin just above his cast with his free hand. “You kept... that thing out of the papers, so maybe you think I owe you.” He looked at us. “I don’t. Don’t owe nobody nothing, because I don’t ask for nothing.” He rubbed the skin beside his bad eye. “But, then, I don’t see much point in killing you no more either.”

    I had to remind myself he was sixteen years old.

    I said, “Roland, let me ask you something.”

    He frowned, seemed bored suddenly. “Go ahead.”

    “All this hate, all this anger in you any of it go away when you found out your father was dead?”

    He turned a cube of cinder block over with his foot and shrugged. “No. Maybe if I’d been able to pull the trigger myself, maybe then.”

    I shook my head. “Doesn’t work that way.”

    He kicked at another hunk of cinder block. “No,” he said, “I suppose it don’t.” He looked off beyond the weeds and the tenements on the other side of the lot, past the torn brick blocks with coils of soldered metal sticking out of them like flags.

    His empire.

    He said, “You two go on home. We forget about each other.”

    I said, “Deal,” but I had a feeling I’d never forget Roland, even after I read his obituary.

    He nodded, more to himself than us, and started to walk off. He’d crested a small slope of industrial waste, when he stopped, his back to us. Somewhere, not far away, a siren rang hollowly. He said, “My mother, she was all right. Decent.”

    I took Angie’s hand in mine. “She was,” I said. “But she was never needed.”

    His shoulders moved slightly, possibly a shrug, possibly something else. “Can’t say that she was,” he said and started walking again. He crossed the lot as we watched him, shrinking slowly as he neared the tenements. A lone prince on his way to the throne, wondering why it didn’t feel as sweet as it should.

    We watched him disappear through a dark doorway as a breeze cool for this time of summer came off the ocean and swept north past the tenement, past us with chilled fingers that mussed our hair and widened our eyes, moving on into the heart of the city. Angie’s warm hand tightened around mine as we turned and sidestepped the rubble, following the breeze back to our part of town.