384DENNIS LEHANE

"You brought Quentin here. Left a trail of bread crumbs and he found our door."

Thomas Coughlin said, "You give me too much credit."

Danny rolled his dice and told the lie. "He told me you did, Dad." His father sucked the night air through his nostrils and looked up at the sky. "You'd have never stopped loving her. Connor either." "What about Joe? What about what he just saw in there?" "Everyone has to grow up sometime." His father shrugged. "It's not Joe's maturing I worry about, you infant. It's yours."

Danny nodded and flicked his cigarette into the street.

"You can stop worrying," he said. chapter twenty-three Late Christmas afternoon, before the Coughlins had sat for dinner, Luther took the streetcar back to the South End. The day had started with a bright sky and clear air, but by the time Luther boarded the streetcar, the air had turned indistinct and the sky had folded back and fallen into the ground. Somehow the streets, so gray and quiet, were pretty, a sense that the city had gone privately festive. Soon the snow began to fall, the flakes small and listing like kites at first, riding the sudden wind, but then as the streetcar bucked its way over the hump of the Broadway Bridge, the flakes grew thick as flower heads and shot past the windows in the black wind. Luther, the only person sitting in the colored section, accidentally caught the eye of a white man sitting with his girlfriend two rows up. The man looked weary in a satisfied way, and his cheap wool flat cap was tilted down just so over his right eye, giving a little bit of nothing a little bit of style. He nodded, as if he and Luther shared the same thought, his girlfriend curled against his chest with her eyes closed.

"Looks like Christmas should, don't it?" The man slid his chin over his girl's head and his nostrils widened as he smelled her hair.