On June 21, 1974, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., ruled in Morgan v. Hennigan that the Boston School Committee had “systematically disadvantaged black school children” in the public school system. The only remedy, the judge concluded, was to begin busing students between predominantly white and predominantly black neighborhoods to desegregate the city’s public high schools.

The school in the neighborhood with the largest African American population was Roxbury High School. The school in the neighborhood with the largest white population was South Boston High School. It was decided that these two schools would switch a significant portion of their student bodies.

This order was to take effect at the beginning of the school year, on September 12, 1974. Students and parents had less than ninety days from the date of the ruling to prepare.

It was very hot in Boston that summer, and it seldom rained.

The power goes out sometime before dawn, and everyone at Commonwealth wakes to swelter. In the Fennessy apartment, the window fans have quit in mid-rotation and the fridge is pimpled with sweat. Mary Pat sticks her head in on Jules, finds her daughter on top of her sheets, eyes clenched, mouth half open, huffing thin breaths into a damp pillow. Mary Pat moves on down the hall into the kitchen and lights her first cigarette of the day. She stares out the window over the sink and can smell the heat rising off the brick in the window casing.

She realizes she can’t make coffee only when she tries to make it. She’d brew some on the stovetop — the oven runs on gas — but the gas company grew sick of excuses and killed their service last week. To get the family out of arrears, Mary Pat has picked up two shifts at the shoe warehouse where she has her second job, but she still has three more shifts and a trip to the billing office before she can boil water or roast a chicken again.

She carries the trash can into the living room and sweeps the beer cans into it. Empties the ashtrays from the coffee table and the side table and one she found on top of the TV. It’s there she catches her reflection in the tube and sees a creature she can’t reconcile with the image she’s clung to in her mind, an image that bears little resemblance to the sweaty lump of matted hair and droopy chin dressed in a tank top and shorts. Even in the flat gray of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. Not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot over the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, is an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t aging. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.

She’s peering at her face in the TV, wiping at the damp strands of hair on her forehead, when the doorbell rings.

After a series of home invasions two years back, in the summer of ’72, the Housing Authority sprang for peepholes in the doors. Mary Pat looks through hers now to see Brian Shea in the mint green corridor, his arms full of sticks. Like most of the people who work for Marty Butler, Brian dresses neater than a deacon. No long hair or bandit mustaches for the Butler crew. No muttonchop sideburns or flared pants or elevated shoes. Definitely no paisley or tie-dye. Brian Shea dresses like someone from a decade earlier — white T-shirt under a navy blue Baracuta. (The Baracuta jacket — navy blue, tan, or occasionally brown — is a staple of Butler crew guys; they wear it even on days like today, when the mercury approaches 80 at nine a.m. They swap it out in the winter for topcoats or leather car coats with thick wool lining, but come spring they all bring the Baracutas back out of the closet on the same day.) Brian’s cheeks are shaved close, his blond hair cropped tight in a crew cut, and he wears off-white chinos and scuffed black ankle boots with zippers on the sides. Brian has eyes the color of Windex. They sparkle and glint at her with an air of mild presumption, like he knows the things she thinks she keeps hidden. And those things amuse him.

“Mary Pat,” he says. “How are you?”

She can picture her hair splayed sodden on her head like congealed spaghetti. Can feel every splotch on her skin. “Power’s out, Brian. How are you?”

“Marty’s working on the power,” he says. “He’s made some calls.”

She glances at the thin slats of wood in his arms. “Help you with those?”

“That’d be great.” He turns them in his arms and stands the pile upright beside her door. “They’re for the signs.”

She seems to remember spilling beer on her tank top last night and wonders if the scent of stale Miller High Life is being picked up by Brian Shea. “What signs?”

“For the rally. Tim G will be by with them shortly.”

She places the slats in the umbrella bucket just inside her door. They share space with the lone umbrella with the broken rib. “The rally’s happening?”

“Friday. We’re taking it right to City Hall Plaza. Making some noise, Mary Pat. Just like we promised. We’re going to need the whole neighborhood.”

“Of course,” she says. “I’ll be there.”

He hands her a stack of leaflets. “We’re asking folks to pass these out before noon today. You know — before it gets crazy hot.” He uses the side of his hand to wipe at sweat trickling down his smooth cheek. “Though it might be too late for that.”

She takes the leaflets. Glances at the top one:

“We’re asking everyone to cover specific blocks. We’d like you to cover...” Brian reaches into his Baracuta, comes back with a list, runs his finger down it. “Ah. Like you to cover Mercer between Eighth and Dorchester Street. And Telegraph to the park. And then, yeah, all the houses ringing the park.”

“That’s a lot of doors.”

“It’s for the Cause, Mary Pat.”

Anytime the Butler crew comes around with their hands out, what they’re really offering is protection. But they never exactly call it that. They wrap it in a noble motive: the IRA, the starving children in Wherever the Fuck, families of veterans. Some of the money might even end up there. But the anti-busing cause, so far, anyway, seems totally legit. It seems like the Cause. If for no other reason than they haven’t asked for a dime from the residents of Commonwealth. Just legwork.

“Happy to help,” Mary Pat tells Brian. “Just busting your balls.”

Brian gives that a tired eye roll. “Everyone busts balls in this place. Time I’m done, I’ll be a eunuch.” He tips an imaginary cap to her before heading down the green corridor. “Good to see you, Mary Pat. Hope your power comes back soon.”

“Wait a sec,” she calls. “Brian.”

He looks back at her.

“What happens after the protest? What happens if, I dunno, nothing changes?”

He holds out his hands. “I guess we see.”

Why don’t you just fucking shoot the judge? she thinks. You’re the goddamn Butler crew. We pay “protection” to you. Protect us now. Protect our kids. Make this stop.

But what she says is “Thanks, Brian. Say hi to Donna.”

“Will do.” Another tip of the imaginary cap. “Say hi to Kenny.” His smooth face freezes for a second as he probably recalls the latest neighborhood gossip. He flashes her doe eyes. “I mean, I meant—”

She bails him out with a simple “I will.”

He gives her a tight smile and walks off.

She closes the door and turns back into the apartment to see her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, smoking one of her cigarettes.

“Fucking power’s off,” Jules says.

“Or ‘Good morning,’” Mary Pat says. “‘Good morning’ works.”

“Good morning.” Jules shoots her a smile that manages to be bright as the sun and cold as the moon. “I’m going to need to shower, Ma.”

“So shower.”

“It’ll be cold.”

“It’s fucking ninety degrees out.” Mary Pat pulls her pack of Slims back across the table from her daughter’s elbow.

Jules rolls her eyes, takes a drag, directs the smoke at the ceiling in a long steady exhale. “What did he want?”

“Brian?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know Brian Shea?” Mary Pat lights her second of the day.

“Ma,” Jules says, her eyes bulging, “I don’t know Brian Shea. I know Brian Shea because everyone in the neighborhood knows Brian Shea. What did he want?”

“There’s gonna be a march,” Mary Pat says. “A rally. Friday.”

“Won’t change anything.” Her daughter tries for a tone of casual apathy, but Mary Pat sees the fear swimming in her eyes, darkening the pouches underneath. Always such a pretty girl, Jules. Always such a pretty girl. And now clearly aging. At seventeen. From any number of things — growing up in Commonwealth (not the kind of place that produces beauty queens and fashion models, no matter how pretty they were coming out of the gate); losing a brother; watching her stepfather walk out the door just when she’d finally started to believe he’d stick around; being forced — by federal edict — to enter a new school her senior year in a foreign neighborhood not known for letting white kids walk around after sundown; not to mention just being seventeen and getting into who knows what with her knucklehead friends. A lot of pot around these days, Mary Pat knows, and acid. Booze, of course; in Southie, most kids came out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies. And, of course, the Scourge, that nasty brown powder and its fucking needles that turn healthy kids into corpses or soon-to-be-corpses in under a year. If Jules keeps it to the booze and the cigarettes with the occasional joint thrown in, she’ll only lose her looks. And everyone loses their looks in the projects. But God forbid if she moves on to the Scourge. Mary Pat will die another death.

Jules, she’s come to realize over the last couple of years, never should have been raised here. Mary Pat — one look at her baby pictures and childhood snapshots, all scrunched face and wide shoulders and small powerful body, ready to audition for the roller derby or some shit — looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads. Most people would sooner pick a fight with a stray dog with a taste for flesh then fuck with a Southie chick who grew up in the PJs.

But that’s Mary Pat.

Jules is tall and sinewy, with long smooth hair the color of an apple. Every inch of her is soft and feminine and waiting on a broken heart the way miners wait on black lung — she just knows it’s coming. She’s fragile, this product of Mary Pat’s womb — fragile in the eyes, fragile in her flesh, fragile in her soul. All the tough talk, the cigarettes, the ability to swear like a sailor and spit like a longshoreman, can’t fully disguise that. Mary Pat’s mother, Louise “Weezie” Flanagan, a Hall of Fame Irish Tough Broad who’d stood four-eleven and weighed ninety-five pounds soaking wet after a Thanksgiving dinner, told Mary Pat a few times, “You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”

Mary Pat sometimes wishes she’d found a way to get them out of Commonwealth before Jules finds out which she is.

“So where’s this rally taking place?” Jules asks.

“We’re going downtown.”

“Yeah?” That gets a wry smile from her daughter as she stubs out her cigarette. “Crossing the bridge ’n’ shit.” Jules raises her eyebrows up and down. “Look at you.”

Mary Pat reaches across the table and pats her hand so she’ll look at her. “We’re going to City Hall. They can’t ignore us, Jules. They’re gonna see us, they’re gonna fucking hear us. You kids ain’t alone.”

Jules gives her a smile that’s hopeful and broken at the same time. “Yeah?” She lowers her head. Her voice is a wet whisper when she says, “Thanks, Ma.”

“Of course.” Mary Pat feels something clench in the back of her throat. “You bet, sweetie.”

This may have been the longest she’s sat with her daughter, just talking, in months. She’d forgotten how much she likes it.

A tiny clap of thunder shakes the floor beneath their feet, rattles through the walls, and the lights come on above the stove. The fans start moving in the windows. Radios and TVs in the other apartments return to battle with one another. Someone whoops.

Jules shrieks, “I call shower!” and bolts from her chair like she owes it money.

Mary Pat makes coffee. Takes it into the living room with one of the freshly emptied ashtrays and turns on the TV. They’re all over the news — South Boston and the coming school year. Black kids about to get bused into Southie. White kids about to get bused out to Roxbury. No one on either side happy about the prospect.

Except the agitators, the blacks who sued the school committee — been suing it for nine years because nothing was ever good enough.

Mary Pat has worked alongside too many blacks at Meadow Lane Manor and the shoe factory to believe they’re bad or naturally lazy. Plenty of good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes want the same things she wants — a steady paycheck, food on the table, children safe in their beds. She’s told both her children if they’re going to say “nigger” around her, they better be sure they’re using it about those blacks who aren’t upstanding, don’t work hard, don’t stay married, and have babies just to keep the welfare checks rolling in.

Noel, just before he left for Vietnam, said, “That describes most of the ones I’ve ever met, Ma.”

“And how many have you met?” Mary Pat wanted to know. “You see a lot of coloreds walking up West Broadway, do ya?”

“No,” he said, “but I see ’em downtown. See ’em on the T.” He used one hand to imitate someone holding a subway strap and the other to scratch under his arm like a monkey. “They’s always going to Fo’-rest Hills.” He made chimp sounds and she swatted at him.

“Don’t be ignorant,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be ignorant.”

He smiled at her.

God, she misses her son’s smile; she first saw it, crooked and wide, when he was on her breast, drunk on mother’s milk, and it blew open a chamber of her heart that refuses to close no matter how hard she presses down on it.

He kissed her on the top of her head. “You’re too nice for these projects, Ma. Anyone ever tell you that?”

And then he was gone. Back out to the streets. All Southie kids loved the streets but none more so than project kids. Project kids hated staying in the way rich people hated work. Staying in meant smelling your neighbors’ food through the walls, hearing their fights, their fucks, their toilet flushes, what they listened to on their radios and record players, what they watched on TV. Sometimes you’d swear you could smell them, their body odor and cigarette breath and swollen-feet stink.

Jules comes back into the living room in her old tartan bathrobe, at least two sizes too small at this point, drying her hair. “We going?”

“Going?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“You told me you’d take me back-to-school shopping.”

“When?”

“Like fucking today, Ma.”

“You doing the buying?”

“Ma, come on, don’t fuck with me.”

“I’m not. You notice we don’t have a stove?”

“Who gives a shit? You never cook.”

That gets Mary Pat off the couch with blood in her eyes. “I never fucking cook?”

“Not lately.”

“Because the gas was turned off.”

“Well, whose fault was that?”

“Get a fucking job before I break your head in,” Mary Pat says, “talking to me like that.”

“I have a job.”

“Part-time don’t count, honey. Part-time don’t make the rent.”

“Or keep the stove working, apparently.”

“I will knock you into fucking next week, I swear to Christ.”

Jules raises her fists and dances back and forth in her ridiculous robe like a boxer in the ring. Smiling big.

Mary Pat bursts out laughing in spite of herself. “Put those hands down before your punch your own head, end up talking funny the rest of your life.”

Jules, laughing through her teeth, shoots her the bird with both hands, still doing the ridiculous dance in the ridiculous robe. “Robell’s, then.”

“I got no money.”

Jules stops dancing. Puts the towel back over her head. “You got some. You might not have Boston Gas bill money, but you got Robell’s money.”

“No,” Mary Pat says. “I do not.”

“I’m gonna go to the spearchucker school looking poorer than them?” Her eyes well, and she runs the towel violently over her head to make the tears get no further. “Ma, please?”

Mary Pat imagines her there on day one, this trembly white girl and her big brown eyes.

“I got a few bucks,” Mary Pat manages.

Jules drops into a crouch of gratitude. “Thank you.”

“But you gotta help me knock on a bunch of doors first.”

“Fuckin’ what now?” Jules says.

Jules takes another shower when they get back, and then her poor excuse for a boyfriend, Ronald “Rum” Collins, and her sidekick since second grade, Brenda Morello, come calling. Brenda is short and blond with huge brown eyes and a figure so full and fleshy that it seems designed by God to make men lose their train of thought whenever she walks by. She knows this, of course, and seems embarrassed by it; she continues to dress like a tomboy, something Mary Pat has always liked about her. Jules calls Brenda into her bedroom to ask about what she’s wearing, so Mary Pat gets stuck in the kitchen with Rum, who, like his father and uncles before him, has the conversational skills of a baked ham. Yet he’s mastered the art of saying very little around girls and his peers at Southie High, replacing the natural dullness in his eyes with a lazy contempt that a lot of kids take as a sign of cool. And her own daughter fell for it.

“You look, ah, nice today, Mrs. F.”

“Thank you, Ronald.”

He looks around the kitchen like he hasn’t seen it a hundred times. “My ma said she saw you up the supermarket last week.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Said you were buying cereal.”

“Well, if she says so.”

“What kind?”

“Of cereal?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I like Froot Loops.”

“They’re your favorite, huh?”

He nods several times. “’Cept when they’re in the milk too long and they turn it, like, different colors.”

“That’d be unfortunate.”

“So I eat it fast.” He gets a look in his eyes like he’s putting something over on Kellogg’s.

While her lips say, “That’s quick thinking,” her head says, I pray you don’t breed.

“But, yeah, I don’t like colors in my milk.” He arches his eyebrows as if he just said something wise. “Not. For. Me.”

She shoots him a tight smile. And if you do breed, please don’t breed with my daughter.

“I like milk, though. Without colors.”

She continues smiling at him because she’s too annoyed to speak.

“Oh, hey!” he says, and she turns to see Jules and Brenda coming into the room behind them. Rum steps past Mary Pat and puts a hand on Jules’s hip and kisses her on the cheek.

At least tell her she looks nice. Pretty.

“So let’s get outta here,” he says, and slaps her daughter’s hip, lets loose a high-pitched cackle-yelp that immediately makes Mary Pat want to brain him with a fucking rolling pin.

“Bye, Ma.” Jules leans in and gives her a peck on the cheek and Mary Pat gets a whiff of cigarettes, “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” shampoo, and dabs of Love’s Baby Soft just behind her daughter’s ears.

She wants to grab Jules’s wrist and say, Find someone else. Find someone good. Find someone who might be dumb but won’t be mean. This one will grow mean because he’s only one or two elevator stops above retard, and yet he thinks he’s kind of smart, and the ones who are like that grow mean when they realize the world laughs at them. You’re too good for this boy, Jules.

But all she says is “Try to come home at a reasonable hour,” and returns the quick kiss to her daughter’s cheek.

And then Jules is gone. Lost to the night.

Jules never comes home that night.

Not so unusual. Not a big deal. (Though it gets a vein pulsing in Mary Pat’s throat and throws her stomach off until lunch.) Jules is seventeen. An adult in the eyes of the world. If she were a boy, she could enlist.

Nonetheless, before she leaves for work, Mary Pat calls the Morello house. Brenda’s father, Eugene, answers with a burrish “Hullo.”

“Hey, Eugene,” she says, “did Jules sleep over? She there?”

Eugene says he’ll go check, comes back on the line a minute later. “Neither of them.” She hears him gulp something she assumes is coffee, light a smoke, and take a deep drag. “They’ll turn up when they need money. Gotta go, Mary Pat.”

“Sure, sure, Gene, thanks.”

“G’bless,” he says before hanging up.

G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless.

Blameless, sure, but powerless too.

She heads to work, arrives a minute before start time, still gets a look from Sister Fran, as if a minute early is as bad as a minute late. Sister Fran looks like she’s thinking of whipping out one of her “God favors” nuggets of wisdom, like “God favors the pious for in the pious lives the wisdom of humility” or “God favors the clean because in cleanliness one better sees the reflection of God.” (She uses that one on the window washers a lot.) But Sister Fran merely snorts as she passes behind Mary Pat and leaves her to start her day.

Mary Pat works as a hospital aide at Meadow Lane Manor in Bay Village, a neighborhood that can’t decide if it’s white, black, or queer, two subway stops from Commonwealth on the edge of downtown. Meadow Lane is an old folks’ home (an “old fucks’ home,” she and her coworkers call it after a few beers) run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent DePaul. Mary Pat works the morning shift, seven to three-thirty, Sunday through Thursday, with a half hour off for lunch. She’s been doing it for five years. It’s not a bad job once you make peace with the humiliation that comes with cleaning bedpans, giving daily baths to grown adults, and maintaining an air of servility not just to crotchety old white people but a few crotchety old black ones as well. It certainly isn’t the type of job she dreamed of when, as a child, she’d drift off to sleep. But it’s predictable, and she can do it most days with her mind on other things.

She starts her day with the morning wake-ups, and then she and Gert Armstrong and Anne O’Leary deliver the breakfasts. They’re behind the eight ball the whole morning because Dreamy banged in sick and the morning shift is a four-person job. Dreamy is the only black woman on their shift and, to Mary Pat’s recollection, she’s never been sick. Dreamy’s real name is Calliope, but everyone has been calling her Dreamy, she told them all once, since first grade. It fits her — she always has a look in her eyes like she’s someplace else, she has a light sleepy voice, and she moves like a soft summer rain. When she smiles, it breaks ever so slowly across her face.

Everyone likes Dreamy. Even Dottie Lloyd, who hates the blacks with a passion, allows that Dreamy is a “good nigger.” Dottie said to Mary Pat once, “If they all worked as hard as her, were as polite as her? Shit. No one would ever have a problem with them.”

Mary Pat considers herself kind of friends with Dreamy; they’ve spent many a lunch talking about their lives as mothers. But it’s a white-and-black friendship, not the kind where you exchange phone numbers. Mary Pat asks Sister Vi, one of the decent ones, if she knows what’s going on with Dreamy, Dreamy’s never sick, and Sister Vi gets a weird look in her eyes, the kind of look you’d expect to get from Sister Fran. It feels judgy and distant. She says, “You know I can’t discuss another employee, Mary Pat.”

After breakfast, still behind the eight ball, they’re on to bedpans or helping the ones who aren’t quite at the bedpan stage get to the bathroom, which often involves wiping an ass, an indignity Mary Pat finds even less appealing than cleaning the bedpans. If the old folks need no help getting to the bathroom, then they need no help, and she and the other girls (all the aides are women) move on to the morning baths.

On her lunch break, she calls home, but Jules doesn’t answer. She calls the Morellos again, gets Brenda’s mother, Suze, this time. Suze says nope, she ain’t seen either of them but figures they’ll turn up.

“How many times, Mary Pat,” Suze says, “how many times we been through this with these two? And they always turn up.”

“They do,” Mary Pat says, and hangs up.

Back at work, as they’re prepping the trays for the lunch run, Dottie Lloyd mentions a “nigger drug dealer got hisself killed” at Columbia Station, ended up fucking up the morning commute. Why couldn’t they just lift him off the tracks and let the trains through? He ruins people’s lives selling his shit and now he’s fucking up the morning commute? It’s hard to say which sin is more unforgivable.

“Found him on the inbound track,” Dottie says. “Least he could have had the decency to land on the outbound track. Then he would have only pissed off Dorchester and, you know, fuck Dorchester.”

Mary Pat pulls the large aluminum tray of mini — milk cartons from the fridge and places it on the prep table, starts putting the cartons on the hard plastic trays they bring to the rooms. “Who are we talking about now?”

Dottie hands Mary Pat the afternoon edition of the Herald American, and she reads it over the prep table. man hit by subway car. The article goes on to report that Augustus Williamson, twenty, was found dead under the inbound platform of Columbia Station early this morning and that police have confirmed he suffered multiple head traumas.

It doesn’t say anything about the dead black guy being a drug dealer, but it’s a pretty safe assumption, or otherwise why would he be there? Why come into their part of town? She doesn’t go into theirs. She doesn’t know anyone who says they’ll be spending the afternoon on Blue Hill Ave. to shop for clothes or go pick up a record at Skippy White’s. She stays on her side of town, her side of the fucking line, and is it too much to ask that they do the same? Why do they have to antagonize? You go downtown, okay, fine, that’s where they all intermingle, black and white and Puerto Rican. They work together, they bitch about their bosses, lives, the city together. But then they go back to their own neighborhoods and sleep in their own beds until they have to get up in the morning and do it all over again.

Because the truth is they don’t understand one another. It’s not a plan of Mary Pat’s making, nor is it her desire, that they have different tastes in music, in clothing, in the food they put on their tables. But that’s the way it is just the same. They like different cars, different sports, different movies. They don’t even talk the same. The Puerto Ricans barely speak the language, but most of the blacks she knows have grown up here and still it’s like they didn’t. They speak that jive of theirs, which, truth be told, Mary Pat likes, loves the rhythm of it, loves the way they emphasize different words in a sentence than any white people she knows, have a way of punching out through the ends of their stories with big booming laughs. But it doesn’t sound anything like the speech that leaves the mouths of Mary Pat or her friends. So if you don’t speak like us, Mary Pat wants to ask, and you don’t like our music, our clothes, our food, our ways, why come into our neighborhood?

To sell drugs to our kids or steal our cars. That’s the only answer left.

Something about the newspaper article, though, bugs her the rest of the shift. She can’t put a finger on it, but there’s something in there that sets off an alarm. What? What is it? And then it hits her: “What’s Dreamy’s last name?” she asks Gert.

“Calliope,” Gert says.

Mary Pat frowns. “Did you really just say that?”

“What?”

“Calliope’s her real first name,” Anne O’Leary says with a withering sigh.

“So what’s her last name?” Gert says.

“You’re her friend,” Anne says to Mary Pat. “How do you not know?”

“I mean” — Mary Pat can feel her face pinken — “I just know her as Dreamy.”

There’s a quiet that feels not-quite-awkward-but-awkward’s-on-the-way, and it’s broken only when Dottie, of all people, says, “Williamson.”

“What?”

“Dreamy’s last name. It’s Williamson.”

“How the fuck would you know?”

“I’m a beast for the details.”

Mary Pat moves down the prep table until she finds the Herald. She opens it to the article for the other girls, points at the dead drug dealer’s name — Augustus Williamson.

“So?” Gert says.

Gert is dumber than a busload of retards on a bus driven by a retard.

“So,” Mary Pat says, “Dreamy always talked about her son, Auggie.”

It takes the other girls a minute.

“Oh, shit,” Anne O’Leary says.

Dottie says, “That’s why she didn’t come to work.”

On the way home, Mary Pat doesn’t admit to herself that she’s worried, but she doesn’t dillydally either. No stops, no pop-ins at any of the bars. Just straight home.

Jules is not there. And Mary Pat can tell from a quick glance around their unit that she hasn’t been there during the day.

She calls the Morellos a third time, gets Suze again, but Suze immediately says, “She’s here. Let me get her.”

Mary Pat feels herself slide down the wall but can’t decide if it’s relief or something else. Did Suze say “Jules is here”? Or “She’s here”? In which case “she” could be—

Brenda. Whose voice comes over the line now. “Hey, Mrs. F.”

“Hey, Brenda.” A leaden dread fills Mary Pat’s stomach. “Jules there?”

“I ain’t seen Jules since last night.” Brenda’s words come out a little too fast, as if she’s been preparing them.

“No? Who’d you see her with last?” Mary Pat lights a smoke.

“She was with, you know, Rum and, ah, you know, Rum.”

“Rum and Rum? He comes in a pair now?”

“No, I meant just Rum. She was with Rum.”

“Where was this?”

“Carson.”

Carson is the local beach. Not much of one. No tide. An inlet of the harbor, not the ocean beyond. Mostly a place for kids to go and drink behind the old bathhouse.

“When did you see her and Rum last?”

“Like, midnight?”

“And they just wandered off?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, you know.”

“I don’t know.” Mary Pat can hear the edge in her voice. Hopes Brenda doesn’t hear it to the point that it shuts her down. She softens her voice. “I’m just trying to find her, Brenda.” She lightens the mood further with an embarrassed laugh. “Just being a silly worried mom.”

Nothing on the other end of the line but silence. Mary Pat bites down into her lower lip hard enough to taste blood and nicotine.

“I mean,” Brenda says, “I mean, she walked off with Rum, and that’s the last I saw her.”

“Was she drinking?”

“No!”

“Bullshit,” Mary Pat says. The gloves come off for a second. “Brenda, do not take me for a fool, and I won’t take you for a fucking liar. How drunk was she?”

Hisses and pops on the line. A dog barking somewhere far off on Brenda’s end. Then: “She was, you know, feeling no pain. She had a few beers, some wine.”

“Pot?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she stumbling drunk?”

“No, no. Just buzzed, Mrs. F. I swear.”

“So, last time you saw her, she was with Rum?”

“Yeah.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since?”

“No.”

“If you do?”

“I’ll call you first thing.”

“I know you will, Brenda.” Putting some steel into the words before adding, “Thank you.”

Brenda hangs up, leaving Mary Pat looking at the phone in her hand and feeling a screeching train of helplessness barrel through her. Jules is seventeen, able to do what she wants. If Mary Pat calls the cops, she knows they can’t do a damn thing about it until it’s been seventy-two hours. At least. And Mary Pat doesn’t have that. So she’s now in the position of sitting on her hands or chain-smoking until her daughter walks back through the door.

She tries it for a bit, finds herself thinking of Dreamy Williamson facing life without her child, and recalls that Dreamy sent her a beautiful card when Noel died. She roots around in a drawer where she put most things related to Noel’s death — his dog tag and war medals, his laminated funeral card, the sympathy cards — and eventually finds the one Dreamy sent her. On the front is a cross and the words May the Lord Grant You Strength in Your Hour of Need. Inside the card, filling up both sides, she wrote to Mary Pat:

Mary Pat sits at the kitchen table staring at the letter until the words blur. This woman wrote to her as if she were a friend. She signed her last name, which Mary Pat couldn’t even recall this afternoon. She called Mary Pat a fine woman and spoke to a friendship that Mary Pat is hard pressed to grasp. Yes, she’s friendly with Dreamy, but friendship is something else entirely. White broads from Southie aren’t friends with black women from Mattapan. The world doesn’t work that way.

For a minute or so, Mary Pat looks for a pen and paper to write a note of condolence to Dreamy, but she can find only a pen and some scrap paper. She resolves to find a proper sympathy card tomorrow and puts the pen back in the drawer.

She takes a beer, her pack of Slims, and an ashtray into the living room and turns on the TV, comes right in on the news and right in on the story about Auggie Williamson. Investigators believe he was fatally struck by the train between twelve and one a.m., and the impact threw his body under the platform. The conductor of the train never felt the impact. Trains raced by the body all last night until they stopped running, and a few went past it this morning before one conductor noticed the corpse in the crevice under the platform. Police won’t confirm rumors that drugs were found on his person, nor will they explain how he came to be on the platform last night or why/if he’d jumped or been pushed into the path of the train.

They put a picture of him up on the screen and she can see Dreamy in his eyes, which were a brown so soft it’s almost gold, and in his chin and lips. He looks so young. But the reporter announces that he graduated high school two years ago and was working in the management trainee program at Zayre.

High school graduate? Management trainee program? Do drug dealers enter management trainee programs?

But, oh, she thinks as she looks through the boob tube into his eyes, you’re just a baby. Her mother used to say that from the time a child took his first steps, every step after took him farther and farther away from his mother. Mary Pat looks at the photograph of Dreamy’s son in the last moment before it’s wiped off the screen, and she imagines her own child’s picture showing up on the same newscast, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next night.

Where the fuck is she?

She turns off the TV. She calls Rum’s place, gets his mother. No love is lost between her and Mary Pat, so the conversation is brief: “No, Ronald isn’t here, he’s at work up the Purity Supreme until ten. No, I haven’t seen Jules in, like, a week, maybe more. Anything else?”

Mary Pat hangs up.

She sits there. And sits there. She has no idea if it’s for an hour or a minute.

Before she knows she’s doing it, she swipes her smokes and her keys from the tray by the recliner and leaves the unit. She goes around the back of her building and then follows the path until she reaches her sister’s door in Franklin. Big Peg has a daughter the same age as Jules; the girls aren’t terribly close, but they do like to get high together. Almost the same thing could be said about Mary Pat and Big Peg — they’re not terribly close, but it never kept them from drinking their weight together if they happened to cross paths.

Mary Pat, not much for travel, has still managed to see parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine in her life. Not Big Peg. Peg married Terry “Terror Town” McAuliffe two days after senior prom. They started dating freshman year at Southie High, and neither of them has an ambition known to anyone beyond the fact that they never want to leave Southie. It’s a big day if they make it to Dorchester, and Dorchester is only six blocks away. And if the world finds their worldview narrow, well, Big Peg and Terror Town don’t give a fuck about the world, they only give a fuck about Southie. They raised seven kids who took their parents’ pride in their neighborhood like gospel from Christ (if Christ had been raised in Commonwealth and was prone, on general principle, to pounding the shit out of anyone who wasn’t). Depending on their ages, those kids — Terry Junior, Little Peg, Freddy, JJ, Ellen, Paudric, and Lefty (who was given the birth name of Lawrence but has never been called it a day in his life) — rule the corners, the project stoops, and the playground sand pits with a pride so bright and unyielding it can’t help but turn violent when even marginally challenged. As a project rat herself, Mary Pat knows all too well what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you. And if they’re wrong about you, then they’re probably wrong about everything else.

Big Peg opens the screen door in a faded housedress, a beer and a lit cigarette in the same hand. “You all right?” she asks her sister with suspicious eyes.

“I’m looking for Jules.”

Big Peg pushes the door open wider. “Come in, come in.”

Mary Pat enters and they stand there just inside the door, these two sisters who were never close. Peg’s unit is a three-bedroom that currently sleeps nine people, the shotgun corridor running from the front door to the kitchen in back, the rooms off the corridor. The noise of the place is, as always, several decibels past the point where most human beings could hear themselves think.

“Oh my God, you so wore these pants.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, I can smell your farty ass in them.”

“Fuck you.”

“I will hit you with a baseball bat.”

“No, you won’t. You can’t find one.”

“Freddy has one.”

“Mom, stop her!”

Jane Jo, aka JJ, comes bolting from one of the rooms and barges across the hall into another. Her little sister, Ellen, comes flying after her, both of them shrieking. And then the room they enter seems to explode. Things get upended in there, toppled, the walls give off dull thuds.

“The fuck you doing in my room?”

“I need your bat.”

“What bat? Get out of my room.”

“Gimme the bat.”

“I’ll hit you in the fucking head with the fucking bat.”

“Just help me find the bat.”

“Why do you want the bat?”

“To hit Ellen with it.”

There’s a pause and then:

“Cool.”

Ellen starts wailing.

Big Peg leads Mary Pat to the kitchen, closes the door. Big Peg says, “When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night. Right around this time.”

Big Peg snorts. “I’ve lost Terror to two-week benders. He always turns up.”

He/she/they always turn up. If Mary Pat hears that one more time tonight, she’s going to stove someone’s fucking head in with her bare fist.

“Jules isn’t Terry,” Mary Pat says. “She’s Jules. She’s seventeen.”

“Little Peg!” Big Peg screams without warning, and twenty seconds later, her eldest daughter, a girl who’s always managed to be twitchy and listless at the same time, comes through the doorway, going, “What’s up?”

“Show some manners. Say hi to your aunt.”

“Hey, Mary Pat.”

“Hi, sweetie.”

Big Peg asks, “You seen Jules? Look at your aunt when you talk to her.”

“Not lately.” Little Peg’s listless/twitchy eyes twitch listlessly at Mary Pat. “How come?”

“Ain’t seen her since last night,” Mary Pat says. She can feel the helpless-hopeful smile she wears around her cigarette. “Just getting a little worried.”

Little Peg stares back at her with nothing in her eyes, her mouth slack and half open. She could be a mannequin in a Kresge’s window.

Mary Pat remembers when Little Peg was five and Mary Pat used to babysit her occasionally. That Little Peg was hilarious and sparked like a snapped electric wire in a storm. She was so aware of herself and the life around her, so joyful.

What takes that from them? Mary Pat wonders.

Is it us?

“So, you ain’t seen her in a bit?”

“No.”

“Like, how long?”

“I saw her up the park last night.”

“Which?”

“Park? Columbia.”

“When?”

“Like, eleven? Maybe eleven-forty-five. No later than that.”

“Why no later?”

“Cuz Ma gives me a beating I don’t walk through the door by twelve.”

Mary Pat looks at her sister, who raises her eyebrows proudly in confirmation.

“So sometime between eleven and twelve?”

“Yeah.”

“Who was she with?”

Now this dead-eyed fidgety girl with the stringy brown hair and acne-inflamed forehead grows cagey. “You know.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I swear to Christ, I don’t.” Mary Pat gets so close she can see her own eye reflected in her niece’s. “Rum?”

A nod.

“And who else?”

“You know.”

“Stop saying ‘You know.’”

Little Peg looks to her mother, but Big Peg’s nostrils flare and her breathing is heavy enough that they can hear it over all the other noise in the house. Always a sign, since Big Peg was a child, that volcanic eruptions are on their way.

“Answer my sister.”

Little Peg turns her head back to Mary Pat but lowers her eyes. “Well, I mean, Rum was with George D.”

Big Peg slaps her daughter on the side of the head. Little Peg barely flinches. “You fucking kidding us?”

Mary Pat says, “You mean George Dunbar.”

“Yes.”

“The drug dealer,” Mary Pat says.

Another slap from Big Peg, same place, same velocity. “The guy who sold the shit to your cousin Noel that killed him? That guy? You’re hanging out with that fucking guy?”

“I don’t hang out with him.”

“Watch your tone with me.”

“I don’t hang out with him,” Little Peg whispers. “Jules does.”

Mary Pat feels her insides seize up — heart, throat, even her guts, everything just clenches.

For all their power, the one thing Marty Butler’s crew can’t get their arms all the way around is the drug traffic in Southie. They try; there are all sorts of stories floating around about small-time dealers found in shallow graves on Tenean Beach or with needles shoved through their eyes in empty warehouses, but still the drugs get in. They come from the blacks, of course, in Mattapan and Jamaica Plain and the sprawl of Dorchester, but it’s the whites like George Dunbar who sell it to their own people. And no one from the Butler crew is going to kill George, the story goes, because George’s mother, Lorraine, is Marty Butler’s girlfriend. Mary Pat has heard that Marty himself has knocked George around a few times, even gave him a shiner one time, but the kid keeps doing it. And he isn’t the only one, so the drugs keep pouring in.

“It’s like when the Japs used to send hordes of kamikazes at my old man and my uncles in Dubaya Dubaya Two,” Brian Shea said to Mary Pat once. “If they send enough of them, a few of them are getting through. And not even the greatest navy in the world can stop it. And we’re just a crew, Mary Pat, we can’t keep it all out.”

This was back when Mary Pat came to Brian (and by extension Marty) for justice in Noel’s death. “But you can punish the people you know are doing it,” she pleaded.

“And we do when we catch them. We punish them hard. Sometimes permanently.”

But not George Dunbar. Because he’s untouchable.

And now this untouchable merchant of poison is hanging around her daughter?

As gently as possible, she says to Little Peg, “Why does George Dunbar hang around Jules?”

“He’s good friends with Rum.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“And he’s, you know—”

“If you say ‘you know’ one more fucking time,” Mary Pat snaps.

“He goes with Brenda.”

“What do you mean — ‘goes’?”

“He’s her boyfriend.”

“Since when?”

“Since, like, I dunno, beginning of the summer?”

“So you saw all four of them together at the park?”

“Yeah, no. What?” For a second, Little Peg looks completely confused. It’s the look of someone, in Mary Pat’s experience, who’s lost the thread of the story she’s trying to keep straight. “I mean, yeah and no, because Brenda and George were beefing, so she left, and then Rum and George and Jules left, and that’s when I left.”

“And this was at Carson Beach?”

“What? No. No, it was at Columbia Park, like I said.”

“Cuz Brenda told me they were all hanging at Carson Beach.”

“Then she’s a fucking liar.”

Her mother gives her another slap upside the head. “Watch your fucking mouth.”

“We were at Columbia Park,” Little Peg says. “That’s where I saw her. If she went to Carson after, I don’t know about it, because I went home.”

Mary Pat and Big Peg exchange a look — the look of all parents when they know a kid has presented a story and will stick to it for now. No use in pushing further; then she might really start to lie.

“Okay,” Mary Pat says. “Thanks, honey.”

Little Peg shrugs.

“You can go,” Big Peg says.

After Little Peg leaves, Peg gets them a couple beers from the fridge and they sit at the kitchen table and drink them. When the small talk runs dry in under a minute or so, the conversation turns to the neighborhood storm cloud everyone’s obsessed with.

Of Big Peg’s older kids, one’s out of high school, and three are in it. All of them won the lottery and will be staying at Southie High. Sheer luck of the draw. No Roxbury for them. No fear of the bathrooms and the corridors and the classrooms for them.

Turns out that’s not good enough for Big Peg. Oh, no.

“I ain’t sending them,” Peg says.

“What?”

She swallows some beer and nods at the same time. “Ain’t sending them. We’re joining the boycott. Weeze would roll over in her grave if she saw a pack of darkies walking down the same corridor as her granddaughter at South Boston High School, Mary Pat. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Weeze” (or “Weezie”) was what they’d called their late mother, Louise. No one else had ever called her that, just her kids, and only, while she was alive, in a conspiracy of silence.

“You’re not wrong,” Mary Pat admits, “but what about their education?”

“They’ll get their education. I give this a month, two at the most. When the city realizes we won’t bend and all we want is what’s ours?” Big Peg winks in a knowing way. “They’ll back down.”

The words — and Big Peg’s confidence — ring hollow. And when they do, the fear that’s been eating away at Mary Pat’s stomach lining all day returns.

Big Peg sees it, sees the tears that well up in her sister’s eyes. “It’s gonna be okay,” Peg says.

Mary Pat looks her sister directly in the eyes for the first time in who knows how long and can hear the rawness of her own voice when she whispers, “I can’t lose another one. I can’t. I can’t lose... anything else.” She wipes at a single tear before it reaches her cheekbone, drinks some beer.

Big Peg says, “You gotta get ahold of yourself, hon. Nothing bad happens to kids from Southie as long as they stay in Southie.”

Mary Pat brings her fist down on the tabletop hard enough to rattle the beer cans. “Noel OD’d in the playground across the fucking street.”

Big Peg is unfazed. “Noel went to some fucked-up country on the other side of the world and came back with his head all screwed up because he left the neighborhood.” Peg’s eyes implore her to see the basic common sense of her argument.

Mary Pat stares back across the table at her sister. Is that what people really think about her son? That it was Vietnam that turned him to drugs? Mary Pat tried thinking that way for a while, but then she faced the sobering truth that Noel didn’t discover heroin in Vietnam (Thai stick, yes, heroin, no); heroin discovered Noel in the projects of South Boston.

“Noel never touched heroin in Vietnam,” she says, and it sounds like a weak argument when it leaves her mouth. “He got hooked here. Right here.”

Big Peg sighs in a way that suggests there’s just no reaching some people, and her gaze clicks off Mary Pat’s face. She stands, draining her beer in one long swallow, and says, “Well, I gotta be up for work in the morning.”

Mary Pat nods. Stands.

Big Peg walks her down the noisy hallway, all seven of the kids fighting about something, paired off into mini-skirmishes with no ability to see the larger war.

At the door, Big Peg says, “She’ll turn up.”

Mary Pat feels too defeated to be annoyed. “I know.”

“Get some sleep.”

Mary Pat laughs at the idea of it.

“You can’t let them rule your life,” Big Peg says, and shuts the door behind her.

She finds Rum out on the loading dock behind the Purity Supreme. Ten at night and the heat still hits like a steamed blanket; the loading dock smells like wilted lettuce and bananas so overripe they split their skin. Rum’s smoking a cigarette and drinking tallboys with the other supermarket punks who’ve just gotten off work from produce, deli, and bagging. The strength in numbers puts a brave look in his eyes when Mary Pat gets out of Bess, and that look turns to amusement when Bess’s door creaks and the engine shudders to a stop.

Bess is Mary Pat’s piece-of-shit station wagon that she has no choice but to drive until it gives up the ghost. Not that she drives much, but every now and then she can’t avoid it. She could have walked here, but she obsessed on an image of the headlights sweeping the back of the loading dock and the punks scattering like rats, except for Rum, who she’d bump with a fender or the car door. What she forgot was that the effect of Bess on just about anyone is not threatening but comic. Bess is a two-toned 1959 Ford Country Sedan. Its rear end sags like an old dog’s ass, rust and winter road salt have eaten away the rims of the wheel wells and the lower third of the paint job, the roof rack is long since gone (no one recalls where or when), both taillights are cracked (but operational), and the tailpipe hangs on with nothing more than Hail Marys and fraying butcher’s twine. About the only thing you can say for Bess anymore is that she was a great car to transport the two kids around in, she has a 352 V8 under the hood that turns her into a rocket on the highway, and the radio works. Bess once sported two different shades of green — “April” and “Sherwood” — but at this point, both shades are so blanched you’d have to take Mary Pat’s word for it.

When she gets out of Bess, the boys in her headlights cut up, except for Rum, who just watches her come with a cocked eyebrow she considers tearing off his face as he guzzles from his tallboy.

She doesn’t go with any preamble. “Where’s Jules?”

“Fuck should I know?”

“Don’t let the beer give you too much stupid right now, Ronald. You might confuse it with courage.”

“What?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“Carson Beach.”

“And then?”

“And then what?”

“Where did she go?”

“She walked home.”

“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at one in the morning?”

“It was twelve-forty-five.”

“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at twelve-forty-five?”

He raises the beer toward his lips. “Uh—”

She slaps the beer out of his hand. “Alone?”

No one’s cutting up anymore on the loading dock. She knows their mothers. They know her. Everyone’s as quiet as a church pew waiting a turn for confession.

“No, no,” Rum says quickly. “She wasn’t alone. George gave her a ride home.”

“George Dunbar?”

“Yes.”

“The drug dealer?”

“What? Yes.”

“Gave my daughter a ride home.”

“Yes. I was too fucked up.”

She takes a step back from him, makes a show of assessing him. “Where you going to be in an hour?”

“What?”

“I asked you a fucking question.”

“I’m gonna be, like, home.”

“Like home? Or home?”

“Home. I’m going home.”

She notices his four-year-old orange Plymouth Duster in the employee parking lot. She’s always hated the sight of that car, as if she’s always known its owner was a sign of bad things to come.

“If George doesn’t back up your story, I’m coming to see you again.”

“Fine,” he says in such a way that she knows he has something to hide.

“You can just tell me now.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“It’ll be better for you if you do.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” She holds out her arms as if to say, This was your choice, how it goes from now on.

She catches his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows, but then he looks at his shoes and the beer can she knocked out of his hand.

She gets back into Bess, and they all stare at her, wide-eyed, as she backs up and drives out of the parking lot.

“I don’t give two shits what he told you,” George Dunbar says to her half an hour later. “It isn’t true.”

She looks at this handsome kid with his smooth demeanor and his heartless eyes who sold her son his own death in a little plastic baggie. He stares back at her with a gaze so flat and stripped of emotion it would look weird on a Ken doll.

She doesn’t sleep more than three hours all night, and none of that sleep strings together but arrives instead in fifteen-minute blocks followed by alert anguish, staring into the black, fidgety and hopeless, followed by another fifteen-minute spurt of sleep two hours later, followed by staring into the black.

Lying in bed, staring up at the dark, she feels seen but not heard by whatever looks down upon her. Eventually, its eyes leave her, and she is alone in the universe.

At work she’s a zombie, stumbling through her shift, hoping no patient codes on her because she won’t be up to the task. Again Dreamy takes a personal day, so again they’re shorthanded. Gossip flies up and down the corridors — Auggie Williamson committed suicide. No, he OD’d and fell in front of a train. There are witnesses, but they haven’t come forward. He was chased onto the platform. It was a drug deal gone bad and he tried to run, slipped on the platform, and fell in front of a train. Ker-runch.

But none of the rumors addresses how it is that the train conductor never noticed the impact. Maybe he hadn’t seen Auggie, but he must have felt the impact. It was in all the papers that Auggie died somewhere between midnight and one, but his body wasn’t found until the morning commute, tucked under the platform. So, what’s it like to get off your shift, go home and sleep eight hours, then wake to the news that you drove your subway car into someone’s head? The poor guy, someone says, he has to live with that the rest of his life.

After work, Mary Pat changes out of her uniform in the locker room and puts on the clothes she arrived in, and then she does something she doesn’t even admit to herself she’s doing until she’s crossing over the Charles River on the Red Line — she takes the subway to Cambridge.

Getting out at Harvard Station, she enters Harvard Square, and it’s as bad as she suspected it would be — fucking hippies are everywhere, the air smells like pot and B.O., every twenty feet or so someone’s playing a guitar and crooning about either love, man, or Richard Nixon, man. Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn almost three weeks ago, but he’s still their bogeyman, these pampered, overeducated, draft-dodging pussies. She loses count of how many of them are barefoot, tromping around dirty streets in their frayed bell-bottoms and their multicolored shirts with their beads and long hair, the girls without bras and their ass cheeks spilling out of their cutoff shorts, filling the air with cigarette smoke and clove cigarette smoke and pot smoke and every one of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents, who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world — a school no poor person could ever get into, that’s for fucking certain — and they return the favor by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.

When she steps onto campus, the ratio of hippies to normal-looking college students drops to about one in three, which is somewhat comforting. The rest of the students look like the college students in movies — square jaws and square haircuts, the girls in dresses or skirts and blouses, hair straightened and shiny, the boys wearing oxfords and chinos and walking with the assured posture of the upper class.

What both groups have in common, though, is a deep-seated confusion about what she could be doing on their campus.

She’s not dressed like a slob from the projects. She’s dressed like many a housewife walking around South Boston (or Dorchester or Rozzie or Hyde Park) at this very moment — red polyester shirt, tan slacks, and a plaid shirt jacket in defiance of the heat. She wore the outfit to work this morning because she wanted to say to anyone who cared to look — I am in control. I have my shit together. Ignore the cuts and bruises on my knuckles and see only the classy lady your eyes behold. But some part of her must have also known that she might not be heading straight home after work, that she might be making a trip across the river into a world so alien she’d feel more at home in another country. Ireland, for sure. Canada, maybe. She’d thought she looked smart, put together, but judging by the sidelong stares she’s getting from the snot-noses and the hippies in Harvard Yard, she sticks out for exactly who she is — a working-class broad from the other side of the river who came into their world in her laughable Sears-catalog best. They presume she took the wrong subway car, ended up wandering the Harvard campus like a child lost in a supermarket, before she’ll return to her grimy world to tell her grimy kids about all the shiny things she’s seen but was never allowed to touch.

She’s visited here once with Ken Fen, just before Christmas two years back, the day after he officially got the job working in the mail room. It was a Saturday in the dead of winter, so there were only a few bundled-up students in the Yard, and no hippies loitered in the square on a 15-degree day. They’d met his boss, whose face she could no longer remember, and he’d given Ken Fen the keys to the room and the master key to the mailboxes and explained the duties of his shift, which would go from noon to eight-thirty every weekday. Then he left them to roam the room themselves.

The mail room was housed in the basement under Memorial Hall, a building so grand and imposing that it’s hard to imagine someone like Ken Fen could work here, day in and day out, without some part of him trembling at the sheer majesty of it.

Kenny Fennessy grew up in the D Street projects, a place so fierce it made Commonwealth and Old Colony look like Back Bay and Beacon Hill by comparison. Huge guy. Six-three. Hands that turned into coiled rebar when he clenched them into fists. If you fucked with him, you better bring three of you because he would not stop fighting until a coroner called it. But if you didn’t fuck with him, Ken Fen would never lay a hand on you. Never bully you or poke at you. He’d much rather listen to your story, hang out with you, find out what you liked to do, and do it with you. Since birth, Ken Fen had no choice but to buy into the violence. He just never bought into the hate.

When she met him, he was recently divorced, paying a king’s ransom in alimony to an ex-wife who’d told him once with bitter pride that she wasn’t capable of love, and if she were, she wouldn’t waste it on him. He and Mary Pat dated for a year before getting married. Ken Fen never had a nickel for himself until he got a job working the mail room at Harvard, which made it look like maybe, in a couple years, once he’d caught up on all his debt, he could move them out of public housing.

As an added benefit of his job, he could attend Harvard lectures for free. Couldn’t get credit, but he could sit in. That’s where the trouble started. Suddenly, he’s coming home with books (Siddhartha is one she remembers, The Tin Drum another), suddenly, he’s quoting people she’s never heard of. Not that she’s heard of a lot of people, but suddenly, he’s quoting, and Kenny was never a quoter.

She finds him sitting alone at a table in the middle of the mail room. She’s timed it so she’ll arrive at his lunch hour, but he doesn’t have any food in front of him, is just sitting there reading (of course). He looks up with a beam of a smile when she enters. The smile dies fast, as if snatched from his face by the quickest of hands, and she realizes in that moment that he was expecting to see someone else.

“Hi,” she says.

He rises from the table. “What’re you doing here?”

“Have you seen Jules?”

He shakes his head. “Why would I have seen Jules?”

“I thought she mighta come to you. I can’t find her.”

“Since when?”

“Night before last.”

“Jesus, Mary Pat.” He comes to her. Takes her by the elbow. “Come sit down.”

Even though he hadn’t wanted to see her, even though he’s still mad at her (or are his feelings for her worse than anger somehow?), even though he had been so irritated and impatient the last time they spoke — in her moment of need, he comes right to her. He’s a rock, Kenny. Always has been. First one to give support, last one to ask for it.

She sags a bit as he leads her to the table and pulls out a chair. Her eyes fill. The fear she’s kept tightly wrapped bursts through its wrapping, and a small moan escapes her lips as he helps her into the chair and pulls up another across from her.

It takes her a few seconds to catch her breath, and when she starts speaking, it’s like she can’t stop. It all just spills.

“I haven’t seen her since the other night, and I have this feeling? I have this feeling, Kenny, and it’s the worst feeling, it’s worse than any I had that whole year Noel was in Vietnam, and worse than the one I had the day Dukie, God rest him, left the house and I never saw him again. It’s like a part of her never left my womb, you know? It stayed in there and became something else, became, like... molded... to my body. The inside of it, with the blood and the organs and all the other shit you can’t survive without? That’s where part of her has always lived. But, but, but I can’t feel her there for the first time since she was born.” She thumps her own chest harder than she intended. “She’s not in here anymore.”

He hands her tissues he found somewhere, and she uses them, is surprised that they come back sopping in her hand. He takes the wet clump from her and hands her a couple of fresh ones and then a couple more after that until her face is dry and her nose is clear.

“So you haven’t seen her or heard from her?” she asks.

His eyes are sorrowful. “No.”

“She’d reach out to you if she was in some kinda trouble she didn’t want me to know about.”

“Probably, yeah.”

“She loves you.”

“I know.”

“She has your number?”

“Yup.”

That stings a bit. She doesn’t have his number, but her daughter does.

“So, okay,” he says, “let’s back up. Tell me what you know.”

It takes her five minutes.

“So,” he says in that analytical voice he uses sometimes when he’s explaining a play in a football game she didn’t understand or, later in their marriage, when he was explaining what one of his quotes actually meant. “She’s with the kids at the park until midnight. Then she’s at Carson another forty-five minutes. She walks toward home. That’s their story.”

She nods. “And they’re sticking to it.”

“Sounds like horseshit.”

“Why?”

“They’re fucked up, right? Drinking and getting high and shit?”

“Yeah.”

“But they all know the time.”

“To the minute,” she says. “That bothered me too.”

He thinks for a bit, his eyes, as always, brimming with an intelligence he could never fully hide no matter how hard he tried, the thing she loved about him only a little less than she loved his kindness.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “All this mystery — whatever we’re calling it — went down between midnight and one Saturday night, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what’s right across from Columbia Park, Mary Pat?”

She shrugs. “A lot of things.”

“Columbia Station,” he says. “Where that black kid got killed.”

She’s not quite following. “Yeah...”

“Between midnight and one,” he says. “That’s what the papers say.”

“But what does one have to do with the other?”

“I don’t know, maybe these kids saw something.”

She tries to work that around in her head.

“Or,” Ken Fen says, “maybe they were involved somehow.”

She narrows her eyes at him, and in that moment, a black girl with an Afro the size of a toddler walks in the room carrying a bag of food. Mary Pat can smell the food — there’s something fried in there — and she notices two bottles of Coke dangling from the fingers of the black girl’s other hand. Sees the warmth in her smile as her eyes fall on Kenny.

So, Mary Pat thinks with a shock of disgust and embarrassment, this is her.

This is who you left me for.

This nigger.

The girl — goddamn, she’s gorgeous, Mary Pat thinks before she can stop herself — is smiling uncertainly now at Mary Pat, and for some reason the first thing Mary Pat thinks to say is, “How old are you?”

“Jesus Christ.” Ken Fen pushes his chair back from Mary Pat.

The girl is coming toward them now with a small private smile on her face. “I’m twenty-nine.” She places the food down on the table and stands behind Kenny. “You?”

Mary Pat can’t help but chuckle inside, but she doesn’t let it show.

An odd silence settles into the room. The longer it goes on, the more uncomfortable it grows. And yet none of them breaks it for the longest time.

Until Mary Pat stands and says to Kenny, “Let me know if you hear from Jules.”

Kenny grimaces. He indicates the black girl-woman, who has moved around to his hip. “Mary Pat, this is—”

“I don’t want to know her fuckin’ name.”

The black girl-woman lets out a startled hoot of a laugh, and her eyes widen.

Mary Pat can feel the rage pulsing behind her eyes. She can feel them redden. She has an image of these two crossing the Broadway bridge, her small black hand in his big white one. It’s almost unbearable to imagine — the looks they’d get! The humiliation that would crest like a wave and crash down on Mary Pat and Jules and even stain the memory of Noel, God rest his soul.

Kenny Fennessy of the D Street projects returns to Southie a race traitor, a fucking jungle-bunny lover.

Whether Ken Fen and Afro Girl lived or died on their little walk — and Mary Pat doubted they’d make it to C Street alive, definitely no farther than E — the shame that would follow Mary Pat and Jules, as long as they held on to the Fennessy name and probably for decades after, would be impossible to surmount.

But it’s Kenny and the black girl-woman staring at her with contempt. How’d that happen?

“How you live with yourself,” she hisses at Kenny, “is anyone’s guess.”

“How I live with myself?” Kenny says as the woman grabs at his arm, but he walks right through it to reach Mary Pat.

She feels suddenly at sea. She didn’t want this. For a moment she can’t think of anything to say, she just wants to slink out of here, she just wants to go back to searching for Jules. But it’s been building up for so long, ever since Kenny left her, and the words just fall out of her mouth.

“We were happy.”

He says, “We were happy?”

It hits her — they weren’t. She was. But he never seemed to be.

“We hit a few bumps.”

He says, “Those weren’t bumps, Mary Pat. They were our fucking lives shriveling. From the time I could walk, all I ever saw was hate and rage and people pounding booze so they wouldn’t feel it. Then they’d get up the next day and do the same fucking thing all over again. For fucking decades. I spent my whole life dying. Whatever time I got left, I’m living it. I’m sick of drowning.”

The beautiful black girl is looking at them with a calm Mary Pat finds both admirable and insulting.

Mary Pat looks back at Kenny and can see past his anger (and her own) to the hope in his eyes — teeny-tiny but flaring — as if it’s saying, Live this new life with me.

And some part of her almost says, Yes, let’s go. Some part of her almost grabs his face and crushes her lips against his and says through gritted teeth: “Let’s fucking go.”

But somehow the words that leave her mouth are, “Oh, so you’re too good for us?”

A desperate pop escapes his lips. A sound caught somewhere between a soft scream and a loud sigh. Whatever micro-sliver of hope lived in his eyes hops the bus out of town, and now he’s looking at her with dead pupils, dead irises, dead everything.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he says softly. “If Jules shows up, I’ll send her your way.”

Five o’clock comes and goes without a word from Brian Shea.

Six and seven o’clock do the same.

She walks to the Fields. There’s a sign on the door: Closed for Private Function.

What the fuck does that mean? she wants to shout. The whole bar is a private function.

Mary Pat knocks on the door. At least a dozen times. Enough to waken the aches in her right hand that have been there since she beat the shit out of her daughter’s useless excuse for a boyfriend.

No one answers the door.

She tries Brian Shea’s house next. Over on Telegraph Hill, it’s one of the original redbrick townhomes that front the park. His wife, Donna, answers the door. Donna and Mary Pat (and Brian too) were in the same grammar school class, same class at Southie High too. At one point, Mary Pat and Donna were thick as thieves, but that was before their lives curved in different directions and Mary Pat ended up raising two kids in the projects while Donna Shea (née Dougherty) married a marine, traveled the world, and then came back when said marine got fragged by his own guys in a place called Binh Thúy. Donna came back childless, moved in with her senile mother, and looked to be staring at a long slow decline to her own senility when she hooked up with Brian Shea instead and changed the whole course of her life. Her mother died, Brian got bumped up to second in command of the Butler crew, they moved into a townhouse on Telegraph Hill, and Brian bought her a two-toned Mercury Capri right off the lot. No kids, no pets, no struggle. Donna Shea hit the trifecta. All she has to worry about now are canceled nail appointments and any unexplained lumps on her chest.

Donna looks at Mary Pat from the other side of the threshold and says, “What can I do for you?”

As if Mary Pat knocked on her door selling term life.

“Hey,” Mary Pat says. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay.” Donna looks bored. Glances over Mary Pat’s shoulder at the street. “What’s up?”

“I’m looking for Brian.”

“He ain’t here.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Why do you want to know where my husband is?”

“He was looking into something for me.”

“What?”

“Where my daughter might be. She’s been missing since the night before last.”

“What’s that gotta do with him?”

“He offered to look into it.”

“So wait for his answer.”

“He said he’d get back to me by five tonight.”

“Well, he ain’t here.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“So.”

“So.”

“I just...”

“What?”

“I’m just trying to find my daughter, Donna.”

“So, find her.”

“I’m trying,” though what she wants to say/scream is Why are you being such an asshole? She can’t think of anything more to say, so she turns and walks down the steps.

“Mary Pat,” Donna says softly.

Mary Pat looks up the stairs at her. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me.”

She invites Mary Pat into her home.

The two guys leaning against the faded brown sedan parked out in front of her building look so much like cops they should have just stayed in uniform. The younger and taller of the two has a bandit mustache and long sideburns. His thick hair reaches the shoulders of his black pleather car coat, and a gold chain around his neck catches the streetlight and winks at her as she approaches. Mary Pat would bet he’s seen Serpico at least three times.

The other one is shorter, fleshy and on his way to fat if he’s not careful. He has the kind of face she usually associates with boxers and loan sharks. He wears a porkpie hat. His clothes are too tight on him, and his tie has been askew since the day he bought it. Divorced, she guesses, lots of TV dinners and drinking alone. A description, she quickly realizes (and just as quickly banishes), could describe her. Upon closer inspection, she puts his age at mid-thirties, ten years younger than her initial assumption, but hard years are baked into those decades somewhere.

They flash their badges. The young one identifies himself as Detective Pritchard. The older one is Detective Coyne.

“Is Julie around?” Coyne has a surprisingly gentle voice that doesn’t match the rest of him.

“No, she’s not.”

“May I ask where she might be?” Again, his tone is almost courtly.

“I don’t know. I’ve been looking for her myself.”

“Since when?” This comes from the young cop in the car coat. His voice is curt and without a hint of kindness.

“Haven’t seen her in” — something catches in her throat as she realizes it — “forty-eight hours.”

“You report it to anyone?”

“To who?”

“To us?”

“What’re you gonna do? Would you actively search for her?”

“Without clear evidence of foul play?” The older one shakes his head. “No, we don’t do that.”

“So what good would reporting it do?”

They look at each other and nod-shrug at the same time. Fair point.

“Can we come inside?” Coyne asks.

Mary Pat’s not going to be seen voluntarily walking two cops into her building. That would be like bringing a pornographer to Christmas dinner. “It’s a mess,” she says.

Coyne smiles politely, but his eyes say he doesn’t believe her.

“There’s a bench over there.” She indicates it with her head.

They sit on a bench facing a basketball court with no basketball hoops, just poles and backboards, under lights that turn the air the color of brown mustard. Every now and then a bat flies overhead in a crazed kilter, like a kite caught in a storm.

Coyne says, “So, the last time you saw Julie, she—”

“Jules.”

“Sorry?”

“Nobody calls her Julie. It’s Jules.”

“Got it. Last time you saw her?”

“Night before last. Around eight o’clock.”

Pritchard writes that in his notebook.

“Can we skip this back-and-forth shit?” she says.

“Of course,” Coyne says easily, and she likes his easiness. Maybe he’s the first cop she’s ever met who’s not a drunken, philandering asshole. Or maybe he’s just perfected the art of resembling a decent man.

Mary Pat puts a cigarette in her mouth, and Coyne’s there with a Zippo before she can find her Bic. The Zippo has the Marine Corps emblem on it — eagle, globe, anchor — and dates of service she can’t make out. She nods once her cigarette glows, and he removes the lighter with a quiet click.

“My daughter,” she begins, “didn’t come home Saturday night. I been looking for her since. I figured out she was with several people who claim they were at Columbia Park and then Carson Beach between eleven and twelve-forty-five. Those people were Ronald Collins, Brenda Morello, George Dunbar, and my niece, Peg McAuliffe.”

She waits for Pritchard to get the names into his little notepad before she continues.

“There were other kids there too, but I don’t know exactly who. My niece left before midnight. George Dunbar and Ronald Collins claim my daughter left them at twelve-forty-five to walk home, and that’s the last anyone ever saw of her.”

“You believe that story?” Pritchard asks, still writing in his notepad.

“No.”

“Is that why you beat the piss out of Ronald Collins in Marty Butler’s bar last night?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Coyne laughs. “It’s all over town, Mrs. Fennessy.”

Pritchard says, “You snip his fucking balls while you were at it?”

“Hey,” Coyne says sharply.

“What?”

“You don’t swear around a woman. You don’t talk about genitalia.”

“Gena-what?”

Mary Pat shoots a look of gratitude at Coyne. It’s a neighborhood thing — if you don’t know a woman, you don’t curse around her, even if she herself swears like a drunken trucker. It’s considered discourteous. Same rule applies to discussing private parts.

“Where you from?” she asks Coyne, because now she knows he’s a ’hood rat from somewhere.

He tilts his head toward Dorchester. “Savin Hill.”

“Stab-n-Kill,” she says.

“You got a nerve to talk,” he says, looking around at the redbrick wasteland of Commonwealth.

She shoots him a touché smile. “Jules ain’t contacted anyone, not me, not her stepfather, not her friends — at least according to her friends. A mother knows things about her kids.”

“And what do you know?”

“She’s in trouble,” Mary Pat says through a wet exhale of gray smoke. “Why’re you looking for her?”

“Why do you think?” Coyne’s eyes never leave hers.

She looks out at the empty basketball court, can hear the bat up there somewhere pinwheeling desperately across the sky. She recalls what she’s known since the moment Ken Fen raised the possibility. “It has something to do with Auggie Williamson. The kid who died at Columbia Station.”

Coyne’s face is unreadable. “Why would you say that?”

“Because she was in the area with some of her asshole friends, and now you’re here asking about her. One plus one.” She flicks her cigarette through the chain-link fence onto the empty court.

Coyne lights his own and places the lighter on the bench between them. She catches half the word — “Viet” — peeking out of the shadow that falls on the bench. “Where did you serve?”

He can’t follow for a second but then notices the focus of her gaze. “I was all over. It wasn’t a war yet. I was an ‘adviser.’”

“Was it already a fucked-up place?”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “It was just prettier. We hadn’t blown a lot of it up yet. Charlie neither. But you knew it was going to go sideways even back in ’sixty-two. You know someone who served?”

She nods. “My son.” She catches Pritchard giving Coyne a let’s move her along look, but Coyne just stares the younger man down.

“He make it home?” Coyne asks her.

“Kinda,” she says.

“What’s ’kinda’?” He looks around the basketball court as if Noel might be hanging out there right at this moment.

“He OD’d.” She looks at Coyne. “So, he kinda made it home and he kinda didn’t.”

For a moment it seems like he forgot how to move. His chalk white skin manages to find an even whiter shade, and she suspects he’s lost someone close to him — a son or a brother — to the brown powder. When he lifts his lighter off the bench and pockets it, she notices the faintest of tremors in his hand. He exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fennessy.”

She says, “You know what neighborhood sent the most kids to Vietnam?”

He guesses. “Southie?”

She shakes her head. “Charlestown. But Southie was second. Then Lynn. Then Dorchester. Roxbury. I got a cousin works for the draft board. She told me all this. You know who didn’t send a lot of kids to Vietnam?”

“I can guess,” he says with a bitterness so old it comes out as apathy.

“People in Dover,” she says. “In Wellesley and Newton and Lincoln — their kids get to hide in college and grad school and have doctors who say they got fucking tinnitus or fallen arches or bone spurs or whatever other bullshit they can come up with. These are the exact same people who want me to bus my kid to Roxbury but wouldn’t let a black guy take two steps into their neighborhood once the lawns have been cut and the sun goes down.”

“I ain’t arguing with you,” Coyne says. “How does Jules feel about being bused?”

She stares at him for so long he finishes his cigarette and starts to look uncomfortable.

“Mrs. Fennessy?”

She sees where this is going now. “A black kid runs in front of a train, and you think some white kids were somehow involved because they were pissed off about busing?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“And the kid didn’t run in front of any fucking train,” Pritchard says.

Coyne’s jaw tightens and his kind eyes flash, cold and unkind, at his partner.

“How’d he die?” Mary Pat says.

“Still waiting on a final determination of that,” Coyne says.

“Why don’t you ask your daughter?” Pritchard says.

“Vince,” Coyne says to his partner, “will you shut up, please? Just do me that courtesy.”

Pritchard rolls his eyes and shrugs like a teenager.

Coyne turns back to Mary Pat. “We have witnesses who saw Auggie Williamson exchange words with a group of white kids on the outskirts of Columbia Park around midnight. Those kids then chased him into Columbia Station, where he died. We can’t confirm whether your daughter was one of those kids, but it would be very smart for her to come to us before we come to her. So, Mrs. Fennessy, if you know where she is, do yourself a huge favor and tell us.”

“I don’t know where she is,” Mary Pat says. “I’ve torn my hair out trying to find her.”

He holds her gaze with his own. “I want to believe you.”

“I could give a shit whether you believe me, I just want to find my daughter. So if you guys want to go on the hunt for her, please, be my fucking guest.”

Coyne nods. “Do you know any place she could be hiding out?”

If Jules is hiding, she’s hiding in her secret life. The one that may involve Frank Toomey. Which would, by association, involve Marty Butler. And saying anything to a cop that leads them to Marty Butler would be the same as sticking her head in an oven, turning on the gas, and firing up one last cigarette.

“I don’t.”

She’s trying to keep the hope from her eyes and voice because something finally makes sense — if Jules was involved in some stupid shit that led to the death of that black kid, then she could very well be hiding somewhere within a ten-block radius of where Mary Pat sits right now. And if that’s the case, well, Mary Pat can address any bad shit her kid may have gotten up to, she can deal with that.

Coyne hands her a business card — Det. Sgt. Michael Coyne, BPD Homicide Div.

Homicide. Hom-i-cide. This is not your everyday bad shit that would bring a cop calling. It’s not a shoplifting beef or check kiting. This is as serious as a tumor on an ovary.

Coyne points at the card. “If she pops her head up, you call that number and have them put you through to that extension. Or you just ask for me by name.”

“Detective Michael Coyne.”

“Bobby,” he says. “Everyone calls me Bobby.”

“Why?”

He shrugs.

“What’s your middle name?”

“David,” he says.

“But everyone calls you Bobby?”

He shrugs. “This life. You know? Try and make sense of it.”

“Okay, Bobby.” She pockets the card.

He stands and brushes at the wrinkles in his trousers. Pritchard flips his notepad closed.

“If you see your daughter,” Coyne says, “do the smart thing, Mrs. Fennessy.”

“And what would that be?”

“Have her call us first thing.”

She nods.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a nod.”

“As in you’ll think about it?”

“As in I heard the words that left your mouth.”

She scoops up her cigarettes and walks back to her building, lets herself in.

She falls asleep in the La-Z-Boy and wakes an hour later when someone pounds a fist against her door. She runs to the door and opens it without checking who’s on the other side, her body throbbing with the scream of a hope that it’s her, it’s Jules, it’s her.

But it’s not Jules. It’s not anyone. No one’s there. She looks up and down the hall. Still no one. She looks back in at her apartment. It’s empty in a way it was never empty after Dukie or Ken Fen or even Noel left. It’s empty the way graveyards are empty — filled to bursting with the remains of what can never be again.

Back in seventh grade, Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void.

It was an eternal separation from love.

What love?

God’s love.

Anyone’s love.

All love.

The pain from a pitchfork or even from an eternal flame cannot compare to the pain of that void.

“Everlasting exile,” Sister Loretta said, “the heart forever untouched and forsaken.”

Mary Pat steps back inside long enough to grab her smokes and her lighter.

When she reaches the Fields, the sign is still up — Closed for Private Function — and the lights behind the single high window are dim, but she starts knocking and she doesn’t stop. She uses her left hand because the right is still barking from the contact with Rum’s woodchuck head. She’s been pounding a solid minute when someone throws the locks on the other side of the door. Three of them. One after the other. And then nothing. It’s her last warning — if you want in, you open the door. Final chance to walk away.

The fear is not small. Suddenly, it’s the only thing she can feel. A full-bodied presence. As real and substantial as another human being standing on the sidewalk beside her. Other people have gone through this door, she knows, and never come back out. This door is not just the door to a building; it’s a border between worlds.

She flashes on Jules dancing around the kitchen in her bathrobe the other morning, pretending to box, smiling that lopsided toothy smile of hers, and Mary Pat pushes the door open.

The guy standing behind the bar has a lit cigarette between his lips and squints at the smoke floating into his right eye as he pours himself a shot of rum. He’s a guy everyone calls Weeds because he’s skinny and unpleasant to look at. Has a harelip, a left eye that floats in the socket, and is rumored to have pushed his little brother off a roof when they were kids just to hear the sound of the poor bastard landing. He’s not wearing his Baracuta jacket tonight, just a T-shirt that looks soiled in the dim light.

Larry Foyle sits at a table along the wall. Larry’s body looks like a set of tires stacked atop one another, and his neck isn’t much smaller. His head is enormous, like the head of a statue. His hands could cup a moose in one palm. He still lives with his parents and can often be found pushing his grandfather in his wheelchair along Day Boulevard. Larry is usually affable, a sly cutup, but tonight he looks at his beer and not once at Mary Pat. Like Weeds, he’s stripped down to a T-shirt. She can’t make out the state of it, or even the color, but she can smell his body odor from twenty feet.

They’re the only two men in the room. Down at the end of the bar, the back door is open; she looks at Weeds. His eyes pulse once in the poor light, an indication she’s to head to that back door. Then he downs his shot and pours himself another.

During the walk down the bar, she waits to hear the scrape of chair legs, the rustle of limbs, footsteps rushing up behind her. A vein pulses in a part of her throat she never knew a vein to exist. The bar area gives way to a thin dark corridor that leads to the bathrooms and the back door. It smells of Lysol and urinal cakes. The night breeze feels damp and warm on her face.

Brian Shea is waiting out back. She’s never been out here before and is mildly surprised they’ve made a kind of grotto out of it, with cobblestone covering the ground and lights strung from the exterior walls of the bar and the body shop next door. A few wrought-iron tables and chairs share space with potted plants and the occasional beer keg. At the far end stands a blue three-decker house with white trim. That house has been the subject of dozens of rumors over the years — it’s Marty Butler’s true residence; it’s a stash house; it’s a high-end casino; it’s a high-end bordello; it’s where they keep all those paintings that were stolen from the Fogg Museum back in ’71. Until tonight she’d never seen it full-on, only the top floor from the street. It looks like nothing much, like every other three-decker in Southie and Dorchester, though the paint’s been kept up.

Brian Shea doesn’t offer her a seat, but she takes the one across from him anyway. The first thing he says, with a hint of cruelty in his tiny smile, is “You went to my house?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You didn’t keep your word.”

“My what?”

“Your word. You told me you would reach out to me by five o’clock. You didn’t.”

The smile grows a little larger, a little crueler. “You’ve been around long enough, Mary Pat, to know that someone like you doesn’t make demands of someone like me.”

“And you’ve been around long enough, Brian, to know I don’t give a fuck what you think I’ve been around long enough to know.”

He puts his palm to the back of his neck and stares at her with his Windex eyes. His T-shirt isn’t as soiled as Weeds’s was, but she notices streaks of chalky residue on his arms and a spot of it on his cheek.

Did these guys break into a schoolhouse? Or hot-wire a cement mixer?

“Did you know my Jules was having an affair with Tombstone?”

“He doesn’t like that nickname.”

“He’d prefer Child Molester?”

“She’s seventeen.”

“So you did know.”

A small downward flick of the eyes. “I knew.”

She feels light-headed for a moment. As if she might fall out of her chair. “Is she with him now? With Frankie?”

He shakes his head. “Frank hasn’t seen her in days.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. I promised you I’d ask around, I did.”

“I’ll ask him myself.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. There’s a thin wisp of fury in his voice, and she knows it’s a far bigger threat because it isn’t a threat but a promise. “Frank has a wife and kids and probably twenty-four-hour BPD or fed surveillance on him. You are not going to go making a scene at Frank Toomey’s house. You hear me?”

“So where is she?”

“I asked if you fucking heard me.”

“I heard you.”

The cords in his neck relax. He sits back.

“So where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you asked around.”

“Yes.”

“And what did you hear?”

“That the last anyone saw of Jules was when she walked home that night.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Cops came by my place.”

“You sure you didn’t go to them?”

She grimaces.

He widens his eyes. “Well, I dunno, Mary Pat. I don’t know who you are right now. You’re off your fucking nut.”

“My daughter is missing.”

“Girls her age go missing all the time. Maybe she’s hitchhiking to San Francisco or, I dunno, fucking Florida.”

“The cops said—”

“You’re quoting cops now?”

“They said she was mixed up in that thing where the boy got killed.”

“What boy?”

“The boy at the train station.”

“The nigger drug dealer?”

“How do you know he was a drug dealer?”

A snort. “Oh, okay, he was looking for the Peace Corps office and got lost. Make you happy?”

“The cops said—”

“Stop saying ‘the cops said,’ ‘the cops told me.’ Are you out of your fucking mind? We don’t talk to cops around here.”

“I didn’t talk to them, they talked to me. They told me a group of white kids chased the black kid into the station. They think those white kids might have been George Dunbar, Rum, Brenda Morello, and my daughter.” She lights a cigarette.

Brian is watching her with an expectant look in his eyes that gradually fades. “That’s it? Cops tell you some white kids who might have been your daughter and her friends might have chased a nigger drug dealer into Columbia Station where he might have fallen on his spearchucker head and fucking died? And you want to do what with this information?”

“Find out if it’s true so it’ll help me find my daughter.”

He notices the chalk on his arms and slaps it off with his hands. He indicates something she hadn’t noticed before — a sledgehammer resting against a toolbox by the steps to Marty’s three-decker.

“I been working my ass off all day, helping the boss renovate his house, and I’m fucking bushed. Exhausted. Meanwhile, you go to my house and disturb my wife and dump a beer all over my dining room table like a slob with no manners. Then you fucking come here — twice — while we’re busting our asses to make the boss’s living room look nice. And why, Mary Pat? Why? Because your fucking daughter is probably off getting high or getting laid and forgot to call? Or because she said, ‘You know what? Enough of this shit, enough of this town, enough with them about to bus a bunch of fucking chimpanzees into my school, I’m going to Florida.’ Because I will bet you a thousand bucks of my own money that that’s where she’s headed. So I suggest you think of your daughter in Florida, sipping drinks, getting a tan. I suggest you remember that kids leave, that’s what kids do, but neighbors are forever. They shovel your walk when you’re sick, tell you when someone’s looking at your house funny, that kinda thing.” He lights his own cigarette, his pale blue eyes holding hers through the flame. “But you, right now, you are not being much of a neighbor. And we’re all getting pretty tired of it.”

“You’re getting tired of it?”

“Everyone is.”

“Well, tell everyone I’m just warming up.” She stands.

He flicks his cigarette into her chest. He does it casually, then stares at her blankly as she swipes at the sparks and pieces of coal before they can burn the fabric of her shirt.

“Shitty things,” he says as he reaches for a fresh cigarette from his pack, “happen to shitty neighbors.”

She can’t think of a comeback — she can’t really think of anything at this point; her brain swims — so she leaves.

The next morning, she goes into work feeling so jagged it’s like she’s got sharpened quills sticking out of her. By this point, all the other girls know she hasn’t seen her daughter in three days, and they give her a wide berth. A few look like they’re considering offering sympathies or... something, but are too wary to approach.

In the break room, over coffee, all the talk centers on Auggie Williamson.

By now, the reporters have pieced together some of the facts from that night. Auggie Williamson’s car — a ’63 Rambler — broke down on Columbia Road. That left Auggie a couple options, neither ideal. The first was to walk along Columbia Road for about a mile until he reached Upham’s Corner and turned onto Dudley Street, at which point he would be among his kind. But that would be a long mile through a white neighborhood into a slightly mixed neighborhood before he reached a mostly brown one.

The second option, and the one he took, was to walk a few hundred yards to Columbia Station. There he could board the subway southbound, hope he didn’t run into any white gangs in the four stops it took him to reach Ashmont Station, where he could transfer to a bus that would take him into Mattapan, where he could, again, find safety among his own kind.

That was the option Auggie Williamson chose, but within those few hundred yards, he either talked some shit to the wrong people or tried to pull some nigger bullshit like stealing another car to get himself home or sticking someone up for carfare.

And he got what was coming.

At least that’s the sum total of the theories of the girls in the break room.

She reads the newspapers as the girls gossip.

Auggie Williamson had been returning from his job at the Zayre department store off Morrissey Boulevard. He’d worked until midnight because they were taking inventory that weekend and he was in the management trainee program. According to the papers, Auggie Williamson was twenty. He had lettered in baseball at Boston English, where he carried a consistent B-minus average through all four years. After graduation, he worked for a year at a pizza joint in Mattapan Square before being accepted to the management trainee program at Zayre.

Some of this information, Mary Pat suspects, she’s half heard from Dreamy over the years. Half heard because she was only half listening.

Dreamy has two daughters, Ella and Soria, who Mary Pat knew about, though she could never quite recall their names. Raised in the same household as Auggie, created by the same man, Dreamy’s husband, Reginald, a sweet, respectful, polite man. Dreamy works with Mary Pat, Reginald works as a clerk at the DPW, Ella’s in high school, Soria’s in seventh grade. The whole family sounds like a straight-up working-class family on the rise. Auggie had no criminal history.

She comes across a picture of Auggie in his baseball uniform in yesterday’s Herald American.

“Look how they try to make him look like a saint.” Dottie’s suddenly standing over her, a butt sticking out of her mouth, unlit. She lights it now. “Keep talking about how he was a hard worker, his father’s a hard worker, blah blah blah. We’ll see.” She nods at the rest of the girls. “We’ll see.”

“But,” Mary Pat says quietly.

“What?” Dottie leans down to hear her.

“But he’s Dreamy’s kid. And we all know Dreamy, all know what a hard worker she is.”

The other girls murmur and exchange looks of possible agreement.

Dottie’s having none of it. “The mothers can be saints — you see that on the ten o’clock news all the time. But the sons, the sons, Mary Pat, we all know, are born to crime. They have no fathers, so they—”

“He had a father.”

“And look where it got him.” Dottie snorts and takes in the rest of the room. “As nice as Dreamy might be, who would leave her son in here alone with their purse? Anyone?”

All the girls shake their heads.

Dottie turns on Mary Pat. “How about you?”

“Let her be, Dot,” Suse says. “She’s going through something.”

Dot smiles warmly at Mary Pat. “I’m just asking — would you leave your purse unattended with this Auggie Williamson?”

“No,” Mary Pat says. But before Dot can crow, she adds, “I wouldn’t leave it alone with anyone.”

“Okay. Would any of us leave our daughters alone with him?”

A round of headshakes. Dot looks at Mary Pat in triumph. Takes a step back when she sees what lives in Mary Pat’s eyes.

Mary Pat stands, a crumpled paper in her hands that she doesn’t remember crumpling. “I can’t leave my daughter alone with anyone, because I can’t fucking find her.”

Dottie holds up a hand. “Mary Pat, I’m sorry.”

Mary Pat cocks her head at that. “Are you? Because you run your mouth a lot, Dottie, about the niggers and how they’re all lazy and from broken homes and how the men all fuck around and don’t stick around to raise their kids.”

A nasty little smile finds Dottie’s little green eyes. “Because it’s the truth.”

And a question that’s been nagging at Mary Pat for a while — maybe her whole life, who knows? — finds her tongue. “It’s your truth too, though, ain’t it?”

A few of the girls make audible noises, something between gasps and moans.

“What’d you fucking say?” Dottie asks.

“Aren’t you from a broken home? Didn’t your husband fuck around and then leave you to raise the kids by yourself? I’ve noticed the people who bitch most about the coloreds and their bad qualities, they usually have those qualities themselves. I mean, when’s the last time you did even half the amount of work around here the rest of us do?”

Dottie clenches her fist and steps hard up to Mary Pat. “You listen to—”

“Dottie, you’re gonna unclench that fist before I snap it off at your wrist and shove it straight up your fat fucking ass.”

Dottie looks at the rest of the girls. After a few seconds, she tries a laugh. But when she looks back at Mary Pat, her little green eyes swim with fear.

“I am not going to repeat myself,” Mary Pat says.

Dottie’s fingers unfurl slowly from her palm. She wipes the palm on her slacks. “You’re not yourself.” She turns to the girls. “She’s not herself. And who can blame her?” She takes a drag off her cigarette, her elbow cupped in her palm to steady the shakes. Turns her eyes back on Mary Pat. “Who can blame you?” She crinkles her face in something that’s supposed to resemble sympathy. Her eyes pulse once — just once — to let Mary Pat know this moment will not be forgotten. Or forgiven. And then she smiles sadly, playing to the room. “You poor dear.”

Bobby Coyne and Vincent Pritchard drive through Southie to interview the final witness on their list — thus far — to the last night of Auggie Williamson’s life. The witness, a tower crane operator named Seamus Riordan, agrees to meet them at Boyd Container Terminal along Summer Street during his lunch break.

The moment they cross into Southie, Bobby feels a difference in the air. Bobby grew up only a few miles south in Dorchester, in a parish that was wholly white and predominantly Irish; he presumes that in most places in America, a distance of a few miles between two enclaves that share identical ethnic characteristics doesn’t represent a seismic difference in culture. But crossing the border into Southie always gives him the feeling that he’s just entered the rain forest of an unknowable tribe. Not specifically hostile, not dangerous by their nature. But, at their heart, opaque.

Driving along Broadway, he sees a young guy exit a bus and then turn to help an old woman who was waiting to board that bus. In his entire life, Bobby’s never seen more people help little old ladies cross streets, avoid puddles or potholes, carry their groceries, or find their car keys in purses overstuffed with rosary beads and damp tissues.

Everyone knows everyone here; they stop one another in the streets to ask after spouses, children, cousins twice removed. Come winter, they shovel walks together, join up to push cars out of snowbanks, freely pass around bags of salt or sand for icy sidewalks. Summertime, they congregate on porches and stoops or cluster in lawn chairs along the sidewalks to shoot the shit, trade the daily newspapers, and listen to Ned Martin calling the Sox games on ’HDH. They drink beer like it’s tap water, smoke ciggies as if the pack will self-destruct at midnight, and call to one another — across streets, to and from cars, and up at distant windows — like impatience is a virtue. They love the church but aren’t real fond of mass. They only like the sermons that scare them; they mistrust any that appeal to their empathy.

They all have nicknames. No James can just be a James; has to be Jim or Jimmy or Jimbo or JJ or, in one case, Tantrum. There are so many Sullivans that calling someone Sully isn’t enough. In Bobby’s various incursions here over the years, he’s met a Sully One, a Sully Two, an Old Sully, a Young Sully, Sully White, Sully Tan, Two-Time Sully, Sully the Nose, and Little Sully (who’s fucking huge). He’s met guys named Zipperhead, Pool Cue, Pot Roast, and Ball Sac (son of Sully Tan). He’s come across Juggs, Nicklebag, Drano, Pink Eye (who’s blind), Legsy (who limps), and Handsy (who’s got none).

Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t.

They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.

He has no idea where it all comes from — the loyalty and the rage, the brotherhood and the suspicion, the benevolence and the hate.

But he suspects it has something to do with the need for a life to have meaning. Bobby is a child of the ’40s and ’50s. When, as he recalls, you knew who you were. Without question.

And it’s the “without question” that’s bothered him ever since. While he tromped through Vietnam. While he danced with the needle. While he worked patrol in the heart of the city’s black communities — Roxbury and Mattapan, Egleston Square and Upham’s Corner.

He wants to question. He needs to question. A Vietnamese hooker he’d thought was a friend once walked up to him in a club in Saigon and tried to cut his throat with a razor blade in her teeth. Bobby thought she’d been leaning in to give him a kiss until the last microsecond, when he felt a voice in his chest scream-whisper, No. Fuck no. Even as he chucked her off his lap, he felt an odd sympathy for her — if he were a Vietnamese bar girl, he’d want to kill his ass too.

Looking out at Southie now, as the bustle of Broadway passes by in its uniform whiteness — white baby pushed in a stroller by white mother as three white muscle-heads in their straining white T-shirts exit the drugstore and pass an old white couple sitting on a bench and a gaggle of white girls runs along the sidewalk past a white boy sitting on a mailbox looking forlorn, and all around them, in the background and in the foreground, are other white people — Bobby recalls a taxi girl in Hué telling him she could never go back to her village now that it was known she’d slept with a white man. (Not Bobby; some guy way before Bobby.) It shocked him, this idea that she could be looked down upon because she’d slept with a white man. That made no fucking sense, where Bobby came from. He told her that. He said, “We’re the people who solve problems. That’s why we’re here.”

His taxi girl, Cai, said, “People should be left to themselves.”

Is that the key? he wonders as he looks out on Broadway. Should everyone just leave everyone else the fuck alone?

Seamus Riordan seems to think so. Those are the first words out of his mouth when they meet up with him in the break-room trailer at Boyd Container Terminal: “Couldn’t you’ve just left me be?”

Seamus Riordan is from Southie, so he’s a hard case. He’ll bust their balls as a matter of course.

“Why were you on the platform that night?” Bobby asks.

“Coming home.”

“From?” Vincent asks.

“Being out.”

“Out where?” Bobby wonders.

“Of the house.”

“So, you’re out of the house,” Bobby says pleasantly. “Any place specific?”

“Yup,” Seamus says, and folds his arms.

“Where?”

“Specifically?”

“Yes.”

“I was, ya know.”

“I don’t.”

“Hanging out with someone.”

“A friend?”

“Sure.”

“Hey!” Vincent says. “Why don’t you cut the shit?”

Vincent looks ready to pop out of his skin. Like a lot of guys who try too hard to act like they deserve respect, he has very low tolerance for people he correctly perceives don’t respect him. This leads to Vincent getting in a lot of confrontations, which has led to two excessive-force complaints being leveled against him in the last eighteen months. So the fact that, at a relatively young age, he’s reached Homicide, the very tip-top of the career ladder, means he’s inexplicably failing upward, which can only mean he’s connected to someone with major juice in the department. He’s someone’s nephew, someone’s cousin, someone’s rent boy.

He doesn’t play Bad Cop well, though. He comes off more as Bitch Cop or Whiny Cop or Embarrassing Teenage Son Cop.

Which is what elicits Seamus Riordan’s black hole of a smile. “Cut the what?”

“The shit.” Vince lights a cigarette and exhales the gray smoke through his nostrils, which is why his nose hairs are more prevalent than they should be on a guy in his late twenties.

Seamus Riordan looks at Bobby. “Am I a suspect in something?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m just a potential witness?”

“That you are.”

“So if I don’t like this dickhead’s attitude, I can just walk away, go climb back up in my crane, am I right?”

Bobby places a hand to a surging Vincent’s chest. “You can.”

Seamus Riordan gives Vincent a fuck you glare. “Then you should check your fucking attitude, Serpico.”

Now Vincent’s torn — between embracing the comparison to his idol (not Serpico the man, whose ethics he doesn’t share, but Al Pacino as Serpico, his fashion hero) or taking the comparison for the insult Bobby is sure Seamus Riordan intends it to be.

Vincent leans into the former. “Check your fucking attitude, little man.”

Seamus gives Bobby a wry smirk of the eyes, as if to say, Kids these days, am I right?

Bobby lights his own cigarette. Offers Seamus the pack. Seamus takes one and Bobby lights it for him and then lights Vincent’s and suddenly they’re all friends. Ready to go to the bar together once they’re done, that kinda vibe.

“It was over by the time I got out of the train,” Seamus says.

“Tell me,” Bobby says.

“There were these four kids...”

“White?”

“Yeah.”

“Male or female?”

“Two boys, two girls. The inbound train had just left and they were standing on the edge of the platform and the boys were screaming at each other, one of them calling the other a retard, I heard that. And one of the girls was, like, just screaming? Like losing-her-fucking-mind screaming. And then the other girl slapped her and she shut up.”

This is now as far as Bobby and Vincent have gotten into the timeline of the night. The other witnesses have taken them through:

From that point, all recollections of the first five witnesses grew hazy. Those were four loud, violent kids on that platform. No one wanted to catch any of their eyes by mistake. No one wanted to be dragged into this. Be the next person to hear they were in the wrong neighborhood.

So they looked away.

Then three walked off. Left the station. Took their chances hailing cabs.

Two waited for the outbound train that Seamus Riordan arrived on. Kept their eyes focused on the tracks until they could see the lights of the incoming train. But neither looked back at those four kids and whatever they were doing to the kid they’d been chasing.

The outbound train arrived. The two witnesses got on.

Seamus Riordan got off. At twenty past midnight, he was the only passenger to exit.

“And that’s when I seen the five of them.”

“You mean four.”

“The four of them and the spook kid.”

“Wait,” Bobby said, “what?”

“The four white kids and the black kid,” Seamus said. “Four plus one makes five.”

“But he’d fallen off the platform by then.”

Seamus Riordan narrows his eyes. “He was lying at their feet.”

“After the train left the station?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not making this up?” Vincent says.

“Who the fuck would make that up? Your parents raise any kids who aren’t fucking retarded?”

Bobby Coyne watches Vincent for signs of impending violence, but by now he’s like a ball-snipped dog. If Seamus gives him much more abuse, he’ll roll on his back for a belly rub.

“So,” Bobby says, “the train’s gone, the victim’s still on the platform with the kids standing over him?”

“Yup.”

“And then?”

Seamus’s eyes bug. “I don’t fucking know. I didn’t make it to forty-three in this fucking town because I linger when I see four people standing over a body.”

“So he was dead?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said ‘a body.’”

“Yeah, like, someone lying on the ground. He was kinda moving from side to side. I could see that much. Then I left.”

“But he was on the platform.”

“How many times I gotta say it? You wanna try a new language? Fucking, I dunno, Flemish, that be better? He was on the platform. Rolling back and forth a bit. Wait, not rolling. More like... flapping.” He shrugs. “Like a, I dunno, a fish just came off the hook.”

Vincent peers at Seamus Riordan. “But what kind of fish?”

“A black cod,” Seamus says. And he and Vincent laugh their asses off.

Not for the first time in his life — or even the eightieth — Bobby hates humanity. Wonders if God’s great unforgivable crime was creating us in the first place.

“And then you left?” he asks Seamus Riordan.

Seamus Riordan’s laughter trails off. “Yeah, I left.”

“And a kid died.”

Something catches in Seamus Riordan’s eyes. A glint of shame, perhaps. Or maybe Bobby’s just being hopeful.

Because in the next breath, Seamus shrugs and says, “Wasn’t my kid.”

After his shift, Bobby has a few pops with a couple of Robbery detectives at JJ Foley’s and then heads home to the house on Tuttle Street where he lives with his five sisters and his brother, Tim, the failed priest. None of the Coyne siblings is married. Three, Bobby among them, tried and failed. Two came close to the altar but didn’t make it the whole way there. The other two have never even had a long-term relationship.

This is a source of great mystery in the extended family of Coynes and those families the previous generations married into — the McDonoughs and Donnellys and Kearneys and Mullens — as well as to the neighborhood at large, because several of the Coyne girls were real lookers, or had been in their youth, anyway.

The house is one of the last of the sprawling single-family Victorians that’s stayed a single family on Tuttle Street. Most of the rest of them, built for large Irish families between the big wars of the first half of the century, have been converted into two-family houses. Some have even been cut up into multiple-unit buildings. But not the Coyne house. It remains exactly as it was when they all grew up here, learning its creaks and hiding places and the source of its sad groans on heartless winter nights.

He finds Nancy and Bridget sitting at the kitchen table, nursing their nightly highballs and smoking their cigarettes — Parliaments for Nancy, Kents for Bridget. He grabs a beer from the fridge and a fresh ashtray and joins them at the table. Nancy, who works in urban planning, is bitching about a coworker to Bridget, who’s an ER nurse at City. Nancy, still a stunner in her early forties, can talk paint off a wall; Bridget, meek and mousy and perpetually pickled when not working, barely utters a full sentence in a given day.

Nancy finishes her rant about someone named Felix and the coffee maker in the break room and flicks her eyes at Bobby. “You need to lose a few pounds, Michael. Don’t you think he needs to lose weight, Bridge?”

Bridget looks down at her knees.

“That’s a rather unkind way to greet a man.” Bobby peels back the tab on his beer.

“I want you to live a long life.”

“You used to tell me I was too skinny.”

“But that was the heroin.”

The word “Oh!” pops out of Bridget’s mouth in horrified surprise.

“Well, it’s not a secret!” Nancy says.

“Actually,” Bobby says, “it kinda is.”

“To the outside world.” Nancy waves at the windows. “Not in here.”

Claire comes through the side door off the driveway and hangs her umbrella on a hook. “What’s not in here?”

“We’re talking about Michael’s problem.”

“The drug thing?” Claire pulls the cork from a bottle of red, pours herself a glass. Kisses Bobby’s head lightly as she comes around him to take a seat.

“Yes, the drug thing,” Nancy says. “He thinks we’re going to blab it to the world.”

“Why would we do that?”

“No one said you would,” Bobby says. “I just find it uncomfortable to talk about.”

“You’re a fucking hero,” Claire says, and Bobby is touched to see Bridget look at him with wide eyes and an emphatic nod. “You know how many people kick that shit?”

“Very few,” Bobby admits.

“But you did.” Claire raises her glass to him and drinks.

“I was just telling him he could lose a few pounds,” Nancy says, “and it turned into this thing.”

“What thing?” Bobby says.

“See, he’s getting upset.”

“I’m not getting upset.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Like I just said. Upset.”

Bobby sighs and asks Claire how her day was.

“We,” Claire says, turning her wineglass in a small circle on the table, “have a real storm of shit coming. I don’t think anyone realizes yet.”

Claire is a secretary at the Metropolitan District Commission Police barracks in Southie. MDC cops work the beaches and the parks and leave the project crime to city cops. So most city cops think MDC cops are pussies, but Bobby’s always found them to be the most knowledgeable source of information for all things Southie.

“This the busing thing?” Bobby asks.

Claire nods. “We’re getting some ugly intel. Mass-unrest kinda ugly.”

“It’ll blow over,” Bobby says, just to be optimistic.

“I don’t think so,” Claire says. “You’re working that colored kid’s death, right?”

“I am.”

“Was he a dealer?” Nancy wants to know.

Bobby shakes his head.

“Well, what was he doing there?”

“Car broke down.”

“He shoulda taken better care of it.”

“Oh, so it’s his fault,” Claire says with a roll of her eyes.

“I’m not saying it’s his fault,” Nancy says, “just that if he’d taken better care of his car, it wouldn’t have broken down and he wouldn’t have died.”

Claire says, “Sounds like you’re saying it’s his fault.”

“I said the exact opposite!”

Claire turns to Bobby. “You making arrests soon?”

“Not unless we catch some big breaks. Pretty sure we know who did it. But knowing it and proving it, you know, big difference.”

“Well, give us a heads-up if you think you’re gonna bust anyone white from Southie anytime near the first day of school. Cuz this city is about to go boom.” She refills her glass of wine.

“I dunno,” he says, suddenly weary.

“You don’t know what?” his sister Diane asks. Coming down the front hall now, just off her shift at the public library in Upham’s Corner. Goes immediately to the stove and turns on the kettle for her tea.

“We’re talking about the kid got killed at Columbia Station,” Nancy says.

“You caught that?” Diane asks Bobby.

“I did.”

“I heard Marty Butler’s guys were involved,” Claire says.

“Eh. More like wannabe — Marty Butler guys. But” — Bobby thinks of George Dunbar for a second — “if he takes a personal interest, he could cause headaches, sure.”

The Butler crew has a lot of cops on their payroll. At both a local and a state level. Even if you’re not a dirty cop, you’re reluctant to cross or expose the ones who are (or could be; you rarely know for sure). If you do go forward and make a case against Marty or one of his boys, evidence has a way of vanishing, witnesses contract acute amnesia, and the cases tend to die a quick death in open court. Whereupon the cops at the center of them have a history of being demoted or reassigned. So, if you take a run at the Butler crew, you cannot fucking miss. Not if you’re fond of the little things — a living wage, a pension at the end of it, or a roof over your head. Shit like that.

Claire knows the ins and outs of police culture the way the rest of them don’t. She pats Bobby’s hand and says, “Be careful. No one’s life is worth your own.”

Bobby has fought a war — okay, a “police action” — in a country nine thousand miles away trying to prove the opposite.

Nancy, always the first to go for the jugular, chimes in. “And you gotta think about Brendan.”

Brendan is Bobby’s son. He’s nine and lives with his mother except on weekends, when he comes here and spends forty-eight hours with his father, five crazy, doting aunts, and gentle, bleak-hearted Uncle Tim, the failed priest. Bobby loves Brendan in a way that defies every notion he ever had about love before his son entered the world. He loves him beyond all capacity for rational thought. He loves him more than he loves all other people or things or dreams — including himself, including his own — combined.

“Nobody,” he says to his sister, “not even Marty Butler, is crazy enough to come after a cop. And even if he was, he sure as shit wouldn’t come after a cop’s kid. Not if he wants to see the next day of his life. Where do you come up with this shit, Nance?”

Nancy, never one to admit a mistake, pivots. “I wasn’t talking about physical harm, Michael, I was talking about you losing your job, your pension. And then what will that treacherous cow you used to be married to do to our weekends with Brendan?”

“It’s a fair point,” Diane says, and even Bridget nods in agreement.

Bobby’s family loves his son almost as much as Bobby does. Even Tim, floating in a fog of bitterness and the most esoteric reading material Bobby’s ever come across, manages to visibly lighten on weekends. And it’s not just because Brendan is the sole nephew (or niece). Brendan is, simply put, a wonderful individual. Nine years old and he’s thoughtful, empathetic, profoundly curious, funny as fuck, and warm. It’s as if he somehow inherited the best traits of his blood relatives but none of their damage. Yet, anyway.

His sisters would say, “That’s only because Shannon doesn’t have him all to herself,” but the truth is that Shannon is a good mother. Terrible wife and didn’t come highly recommended as a daughter or sibling, but she loves her son, and she’s dedicated herself to his upbringing in a way she never dedicated herself to anything or anyone in her life.

“I won’t lose my job or my pension or my boy,” Bobby tells his sisters now.

“As long as you don’t fuck with Marty Butler.”

“He’s a fucking criminal,” Bobby says. “I’m a cop.”

“He’s a connected criminal,” Claire reminds him.

It isn’t just fellow cops Marty Butler has in his pocket. There are judges for sure, probably at least one congressman or state senator, and maybe, just maybe, the darkest of the dark whispers say, someone or maybe a half-dozen someones in federal law enforcement. Over the years, far too many potential witnesses against Marty or his associates — whose identities were kept under lock and key, mind you — have vanished or been killed.

“I know,” Bobby assures them all. “It was kids chased Auggie Williamson into the station. And no matter what I find out, it’s not looking like first-degree murder. Might not rise much higher than involuntary manslaughter.” He yawns into his fist, exhausted. “I’m gonna hit it, ladies.”

He puts his beer can in the trash, gives each sister a peck on the cheek, and heads up to bed.

The next morning Bobby sends out four cruisers to pick the kids up. The uniforms come back with only two of the kids, though. Julie Fennessy still seems to be in the wind; no one’s seen her since the night Auggie Williamson died. The rumor on the street is that she’s down in Florida, but nobody knows where specifically. It nags at Bobby — the mother was clearly worried about her daughter’s whereabouts. But if the girl was involved in a death, taking off to Florida might make sense, particularly to a seventeen-year-old.

The other miss is George Dunbar, the drug dealer. He’s the son of Marty Butler’s main piece of ass, which might mean the patrolmen didn’t look too hard for him or maybe didn’t even look at all.

Which means when Bobby and Vincent go down to holding, the only two assholes waiting for them in the interview rooms are Ronald Collins and Brenda Morello. Ronald Collins, a Southie kid from a line of Collinses who go back to the potato famine, is as dumb as his older brothers, his father, and his three uncles, most of whom, per Bobby’s recent research, have done time. He’s a hard case not because he’s particularly hard but because he’s too fucking stupid to know there’s any other way to be.

Brenda Morello, on the other hand, with her wet eyes and her shaky chin, is the jackpot. She’s been ready to blab since the moment she was picked up walking to her summer job at Sullivan’s on Castle Island. When Bobby and Vincent enter the interview room, she looks up at them with her tear-streaked face, and the first words out of her mouth are “Can I please go home?”

Bobby takes the seat across from her.

Vincent remains standing, which, of course, makes Brenda more nervous.

Bobby gives her his friendliest smile. “Just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

“And then I can go home?”

She can walk right out the door right now — she hasn’t been charged with anything — but she doesn’t grasp that, and it’s not part of their job description to enlighten her.

“Can you tell us what you did Saturday night?”

Brenda pretends to think about it, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. “I dunno. Hung out.”

“Where?”

“You know.”

“We don’t.”

“Around.”

“Around Columbia Park?” Bobby says.

She stares back at him, her mind working furiously now that his question confirms all her fears about why she’s there.

“You were there with Ronald Collins, George Dunbar, and Jules Fennessy.”

“Maybe?” she tries.

“No fucking maybe about it,” Vincent says as he walks behind her.

Her eyes fill. Vincent walks behind her again and she tenses, expecting a slap.

“Brenda,” Bobby says gently, “look at me.”

She does.

“We know you were there. And then something happened.”

“What happened?”

“Why don’t you tell us?”

Bobby can see it consuming her suddenly — this terrible knowledge she’s kept inside of her for almost a week now.

But she replies, “Nothing happened. Nothing I remember.”

Bobby pops open his briefcase, removes a photo of Auggie Williamson, and places it on the table. It’s not just any photo. Bobby goes for the jugular — it’s the morgue photo.

It has the desired effect. Brenda’s face half crumbles, and she puffs air like a fish in a bucket.

“No,” she says. “Nothing happened.”

Now Vincent does hit her. Just a quick flick of his fingers off the back of her head. She yelps. In outrage more than pain.

Bobby puts a finger on the photo. “This young man is dead. And we have it on good authority, Brenda, that you were one of the last people to see him alive.”

She shakes her head several times. “No.”

Vincent stands directly behind her. “Say no again, you little twat, and see where it gets you. You ever spent time in an ICU?”

Bobby flicks him a dial it back glance and then waits for Brenda to look at him again before he asks her, “Were you the one who said, ‘You run slow for a nigger’?”

Brenda’s mouth forms an O of shock. “I never said that.”

“No?” Bobby looks at Vincent for a moment. “We heard you did.”

“Well, then someone’s fucking lying, cuz I didn’t say that.”

“But you were on the platform at Columbia Station when someone said it.”

“I — What? No, I was — No, I was not on any platform. I was at Columbia Park with my friends, and I got in a fight with my boyfriend and I left. And they went to the beach.”

“We have witnesses who place you on the subway platform.”

“Well, they’re lying.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I dunno. Ask them.”

“We can put you in a lineup.”

That puts a fresh quiver in her chin.

“If we put you in a lineup, this lady you knocked down, she’s gonna remember you, Brenda.”

“I didn’t knock any lady down,” Brenda says with clear indignation.

“That’s not what she said,” Vincent says.

“Well, she’s lying.”

“Everyone’s lying, aren’t they, Brenda?”

“Maybe not, but she is.”

“She was pretty convincing,” Bobby says. “Has her elbow all scraped up. Says she stepped off the outbound train and you slammed into her.”

“We weren’t on the outbound side of the platform,” Brenda says. “We were on the inbound.” She realizes her mistake a second too late. Lowers her head, stares at her shoes.

When she raises her head, Bobby can see in her eyes that they broke her. She’ll tell them everything now. She won’t stop talking until sunup.

There’s a soft rap on the door, and Vincent opens it on Tovah Shapiro, attorney at large. Even before Tovah Shapiro crosses the threshold, she’s already telling Brenda, “Don’t say another fucking word.”

Tovah Shapiro is the worst kind of defense attorney — she used to be a prosecutor, so she knows how cops think. Plan. Act.

“Did they read you your rights?”

Brenda has no idea who this woman is.

“Did they?”

“No,” Brenda manages.

“My name is Tovah Shapiro. I’m your attorney.” She sits at the table by her “client.”

“Don’t you mean you’re Marty Butler’s attorney?” Bobby asks.

Tovah cocks her head at him. “Hey, Bobby. How you been?”

“Been good, Tovah. You?”

“Never better. Still living at Mommy and Daddy’s house?” Before Bobby can answer, she turns back to Brenda. “So you weren’t Mirandized.”

“What?”

“Did anyone say the words ‘You are under arrest’ to you?”

“No.”

“Then we can go.”

“Right now?”

“Right now, sweetheart.”

As Brenda stands, she chin-gestures at Vincent. “He hit me.”

Tovah whistles slowly, says to Vincent, “With complaints already pending against you? Oh, Vinny, you make it so easy.”

Bobby holds up the photo of Auggie Williamson in front of Brenda. Brenda looks and then quickly looks away. “He was a human being, Brenda. You know what happened to him. We can offer you a deal.”

Tovah gives that a sharp laugh. “You have to be able to charge someone with something, Bobby, before you offer a deal.”

“We’ll make that happen real soon.”

Tovah rolls her smoky eyes at him. Everything about Tovah is smoky. Smoky and sexy as hell — the way she moves, the way she laughs, the way she chews her bottom lip before she delivers one bomb or another.

“You’ve got nothing.” She searches his eyes for confirmation.

Bobby hopes he’s giving her dead eyes in return. He’s trying like hell. “We’ve got plenty.”

Her eyes keep searching his. Roving. If she keeps it up much longer, he’ll need a cold shower. “I repeat — you’ve got nothing.”

They exit the interview room and find Rum Collins standing in the hallway alongside Boon Fletcher of Fletcher, Shapiro, Dunn & Levine. Boon gives Bobby a withering roll of his eyes, as if to say he expected better of him, and Bobby uses his middle finger to scratch the bridge of his nose.

He and Vincent stand in the hall and watch the two Southie kids walk out with two lawyers they couldn’t afford if they hit the number every day for a month straight, and Bobby knows that if they want to close this case now, it just got a hell of a lot fucking harder.

The phone rings and rings. Mary Pat stares at it, no idea how long she’s been sitting on the couch in the living room, no idea how long that phone’s been ringing. It stops. And then, a minute later, it starts again. Stops after nine rings. A minute of silence. Maybe more. Maybe five minutes. And then the phone ringing. Once. Twice. Three times. It’s halfway through the fourth ring when Mary Pat gently removes the cord at the back.

It must be Meadow Lane. She’s supposed to be at work right now. That realization almost breaks through the numbness that has defined her since she opened the bag Marty Butler gave her. But the numbness is still too strong. It’s head-to-toe Novocain. It’s numbness with weight — there’s nothing gentle or calming about it. It clamps down on her skin, blood, brain, and nerve endings. Like a hand gripping the back of her neck and pressing her face against the ground because it fears what will happen should she ever get to her feet.

It needn’t fear. She can’t imagine regaining her feet. Not in any way that matters. She definitely can’t imagine going back to work for a while. Doubts there’ll be a job still waiting for her by the time she’s ready to return. And that’s fine.

She’s found a station on her radio — WJIB — that plays only classical music, and she can’t stop listening to it. She doesn’t turn it off even when she goes to sleep (not that there’s much sleep happening in her life these days). She’s been a Top 40 girl her whole life, never into any particular band, just always liking the music of the day. This summer it’s been “Rock the Boat” and “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and her favorite, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” But all that music sounds silly to her now, because it wasn’t made with someone like her in mind. Even that lyric “Losing everything is like the sun going down on me” feels insufficient, because losing everything doesn’t feel like the sun going down on her, it feels like an atom bomb went off inside her and she’s now part of the mushroom cloud, a thousand little pieces of her breaking apart and floating out into space in a thousand different directions.

With classical pieces, she doesn’t know the song names or the names of the composers (unless the DJ chimes in at the end of a four- or five-song block, at which point the early songs are too far back to place a name to the appropriate tune), but the music speaks to her grief in a way nothing else can. It slides through the Novocain. Not enough to find her heart but enough to find her head. She floats through the notes as if the notes are currents in a larger body of water — a dark body of water, she’s sure, a wide river at night — and travels into a space in her mind where her entire history and that of her family before her and the family she’s made are all intertwined. She can sense — though not feel or articulate — a connection between all who have lived and died in her bloodline. Of course, part of the connection is ethnic heritage — they were all Irish and all married only other Irish since the first of them, Damien and Mare Flanagan, stepped off the boat at Long Wharf in 1889 — but the other part of the connection is more elusive. And yet, riding the current of Beethoven or Brahms or Chopin or Handel, she can touch a part of herself that feels far more true than factual, an Original Mary Pat, a Mother Eve Mary Pat, a Mary Pat rooted so far back she may have breathed her last on a peat bog in the village of Tully Cross in the townland of Gorteenclough back in the twelfth century. And that Original Mary Pat understands something in the music about the ties that bind them all in this family — from the firstborn American Flanagan (Connor) to the lastborn American Fennessy (Jules) that gives meaning to the story of the bloodline. Present-Day Mary Pat can’t put her finger on what that is, but she listens to the notes in numb belief that she might one day.

A bust goes down outside her window. Two cops chase one of the Phelan brothers (who knows which one; there’re like nine of them, all heading to jail from the moment they left the maternity ward) into Commonwealth and tackle him on the asphalt in front of the Morris Building. A Phelan brother getting busted is no big deal — like a leaf falling from a tree — but one of the cops is black. That brings out the neighbors with their loud mouths screaming nigger this and nigger that, and then some kids get up on the roofs, and the bottles and the rocks rain down. Pretty soon, black-and-whites and paddy wagons pull down the small lanes that twist between the buildings. They screech to a stop. Car doors snap open and closed.

The parents back off, but the kids on the roofs find some bags of garbage somewhere and start pelting the cops with rotten lettuce and empty cans of Dinty Moore, soft potatoes that explode when they hit cars or heads. After a while, the kids bolt, and it all settles down. One of the cops looks around at the off-white splatter of potato everywhere and the windows pocked with fresh cracks and splinters from rocks and the shattered bottles all over the ground, and he calls out to all the window screens surrounding the spot where the melee took place: “You can clean this yourselves. We ain’t sending Sanitation, you fucking animals.”

And they pull out of there like an occupying army disgusted by those they’re forced to govern.

Later, the women and the kids who did it (several with fresh abrasions or black eyes courtesy of the men who fathered them) come out with brooms and dustpans and buckets and set to cleaning up the mess. Normally, Mary Pat wouldn’t blink before she hopped to and helped them — that’s what community is based on, she’s always thought, pitching in — but she just can’t get off the couch. It’s like she’s nailed to it.

And where is that community for her? By this point, she knows the gossip has to be all over the neighborhood — no one has seen Jules Fennessy in six days. Word will also be out that it’s best no one ask about her either. So everyone knows, as she does, that her daughter is dead.

But no one visits. No one checks in.

Big Peg came once. Banged on the door a few times, but Mary Pat didn’t answer. She knew no matter what evidence she presented to Big Peg that Marty Butler’s crew had killed Jules, Big Peg would reject it. Marty isn’t just Southie’s protector. He isn’t just Southie’s favorite son. Marty isn’t just the rebel for them all who thumbs his nose at the outside establishment. Marty is Southie. To believe Marty is evil — not merely criminal, not a practitioner of hijinks and shenanigans, not just running an underworld that needs to be run by someone, so why not him? — is to believe Southie is evil. And Peg could never do that. So, instead of baring her soul to a sister who would turn her back to that soul and ask it to put its clothes back on in the name of common decency, Mary Pat didn’t answer the door.

She finally does answer the door when the SWAB Sisters come calling. There’re half a dozen of them, unrelated by birth or marriage, but so called because they’ve been friends for at least twenty years and were the first group to form against the school committee’s decision to even hear the case of the colored families who sued in Morgan v. Hennigan. SWAB stands for Southie Women Against Busing. Mary Pat attended one of their earliest meetings, way back in ’71, long before anyone truly believed this could turn into anything real; she’d just shown up for the donuts and the Riunite Lambrusco. Back then, SWAB consisted solely of the six women who now show up at her door on the seventh day since she’s seen Jules — Carol Fitzpatrick, Noreen Ryan, Joyce O’Halloran, Patty Byrnes, Maureen Kilkenny, and Hannah Spotchnicki (née Carmody).

Mary Pat agreed to become an actual member in 1973, when it was starting to appear like, holy shit, this busing bullshit might actually happen, but she isn’t what you’d call an avid member. She’ll do something if asked, but she never seeks them out. Most of the women in SWAB — and there are a couple hundred now — are like Mary Pat, but the SWAB Sisters, the original six, those bitches are evangelical.

The face of their leader, Carol Fitzpatrick, looms in the eyehole in Mary Pat’s door, the other five fanned out behind her. Mary Pat is fresh from a shower she can’t remember taking, standing there in a robe that saw better days before the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and feeling number than ever. The women on the other side of the eyehole look like something from a cartoon — if not harmless, certainly comical. Carol has to knock only a few times before Mary Pat opens the door.

They seem taken aback, as if they didn’t truly expect to see her. Or, if they did, they expected her to look better.

“Mary Pat!” Carol says, and claps her hands joyfully. “Where have you been?”

“Here.” Mary Pat steps aside to let them in.

No one seems to notice the overflowing sink and overflowing ashtrays, the empty beer cans everywhere, the glasses sticky with liquor sediment, the takeout pizza boxes, the takeout fish-and-chips box, the McDonald’s bags crumpled on the kitchen counter.

“We need to get you ready,” Joyce says.

“Ready for what?” Mary Pat asks, and they all laugh.

“Ready for what!” Patty Byrnes says. “Oh, you’re a caution.”

“Come, come.” Maureen Kilkenny leads her down the hallway toward her bedroom.

A second later, or so it seems, Carol has joined them in there, and the two women are going through Mary Pat’s meager closet. They toss one dress on the bed, followed by another. Then a blouse-and-skirt combo. Next come the shoes — Mary Pat has only two pairs of dress-up shoes, one heels, one flats, so that immediately narrows it down to a 50/50 choice.

They hold each dress and then the blouse-and-skirt combo up to Mary Pat’s body, and she watches herself let them, can hear them chirping about which one looks best and which could go with the shoes — Has to be the flats, Carol says, no one can wear heels as long as they’ll be standing, plus it sends a conflicting message. Mary Pat sees herself standing in her bedroom but it’s not her, it’s Novocain Mary Pat, the lost, the numb, the beaten. Carol and Maureen decide on the blouse and skirt. The blouse is the red of wine and the skirt is a plaid number, vaguely tartan. The flats are black. Once the clothes are on, they work on her hair and makeup in the bathroom, and Mary Pat catches sight of herself in the mirror and feels a strange pride in acknowledging that she looks like a ghoul, like something that has been siphoned of all blood but nonetheless walks among the living.

They whisk her back out to the main room, where the other four wait. The fast-food boxes and beer cans are gone, the ashtrays are emptied, the glasses are drip-drying in the dish rack.

“Where are we going?” Mary Pat asks.

Again, they all laugh at the absurdity of the question.

But then Hannah Spotchnicki bursts out with “The rally!”

“At City Hall,” Carol says.

“Oh,” Mary Pat manages. “Right.”

“Can’t go there without you, silly!” Noreen Ryan says way too chirpily when you consider the fear in her eyes.

“We need everyone,” Carol says. “Everybody we can lay our hands on.”

The absurdity of the sentence in her present circumstances is not lost on Mary Pat. She smiles at Carol. “Every body you can lay your hands on?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What if you can’t?”

“What?”

“Lay your hands on the body?”

Mary Pat has no idea how long everyone just stares at her — could be a second, could be five minutes — but most of them seem like they’d prefer to run right out the fucking door.

Maybe, Mary Pat thinks, I’ll become one of those women who pushes her belongings around town in a shopping cart and sleeps in playgrounds.

“You need fresh air,” Carol says. “You need to be a part of something meaningful. You need purpose, Mary Pat. Now more than ever.”

Now more than ever.

So they do know.

“Okay,” Mary Pat hears herself say.

They move her out that door like she’s on a hand truck.

The first thing Mary Pat thinks when she reenters her apartment is that her place got robbed while she was at the rally. Nothing looks familiar. She wonders if she somehow let herself into the wrong unit — same layout as hers, yes, but the kitchen counters are clean, the floors have been swept, the ashtrays emptied. Not a beer can or sticky glass or pizza box in sight.

But in the next breath, she remembers...

Those bitches cleaned my home.

Was that why she took such pleasure in pounding the fuck out of them?

Possibly. Quite possibly.

She wanders down the hall to her bathroom and stands over the sink and looks in the mirror. She’s got a mouse growing under her left eye, scratches on her forehead (none deep), one on her neck (very deep; the blood soaks the collar of her blouse), a fat upper lip. In addition, what the mirror doesn’t show is the deep ringing in her right ear, like a fucking phone that won’t quit. She’s also twisted her left knee pretty good, and someone stomped the ankle of the same leg.

She goes to work first on the scratch in her neck with a series of cotton swabs and hydrogen peroxide, catches her reflection smiling even as she winces from the pain. “Pain means the peroxide’s working,” her mother always said. “Getting clean hurts.”

Mary Pat applies a large flesh-colored bandage to the cut once it’s clean. She’s got a basketful of Band-Aids, bandages, gauze, iodine, surgical shears, and antiseptic under that sink. It’s like the ER at City down there. Back when Dukie was in the Life, she needed it, of course. After he passed, she kept it around for Noel, who never met a conflict he couldn’t escalate into a fistfight.

Like mother, like son.

She smiles again. The truth is, she’s loved fighting ever since she can remember. Literally. Her first concrete memory of any length is of Willie Pike riding his bike through a puddle in front of the spit of lawn where four-year-old Mary Pat sat fussing over the hair of her Raggedy Ann doll. She saw the gleeful look in the little fucker’s eyes as he aimed the bike for the puddle. And he saw that she saw it. He pedaled faster, the little shit. Smashed his tires through the puddle and covered Mary Pat and Raggedy Ann in the slimy water that probably hadn’t come from rain — those puddles just sprang up all over Commonwealth, even during weeks of dry weather, and smelled of sulfur and bleach. She chased Willie Pike past four buildings before he wiped out on a turn. And when she got to him, she didn’t pause — a harbinger: she never paused in a fight — she unleashed. He was six and a boy, so there was no way she was going to win, but he was bleeding from both nostrils and crying like a pussy by the time he did get on top of her. He got a few licks in before Old Lady McGowan pulled him off and slapped him a few times around the head for good measure. Sure now, Old Lady McGowan told him, his father needed to strap his bottom black and blue for hitting a little girl. Old Lady McGowan thumb-poked him in the shoulder a few more times for emphasis before she walked Mary Pat back to the puddle to get her Raggedy Ann. When Mary Pat picked the doll up, it felt like lifting a trophy.

She’d have at least twenty more fights before she reached sixth grade — and those were the ones outside her door. Inside the Flanagan home, it was Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots from seven a.m. wake-up to ten p.m. shutdown. The boys — John Patrick, Michael Sean, Donnie, Stevie, and Bill — lived in one room. At one point, John Patrick’s senior year at Southie High and Bill’s first year in second grade, all five of them were living in there at the same time. Mary Pat’s father, those times she could remember him actually being home, would say the room smelled like a fish’s asshole. After John Patrick left — hitching a ride west; no one had heard from him in twenty years — a battle ensued for his top bunk. Donnie, who was stronger than Michael Sean, got it for the first six months, but Michael Sean spent all that year working out at L Street until he was stronger. About a week of fistfights and two broken noses later, Michael Sean got the top bunk, but Stevie hated the sound of Michael Sean snoring through his broken nose, so he tried to smother his brother with a pillow — Stevie, possessor of the scariest glare Mary Pat had ever seen, was always fucked in the head — and their mother had to break it up. Stevie, who was thirteen at that point, small and feral like their mother, slammed their mother’s head against the window and broke the pane. That it was it for Stevie, they shipped him off to St. Luke’s Home for Troubled Boys and never spoke of him again, even when they saw his name in the papers ten years later for that stickup that went horribly wrong in Everett.

The stitches — black, thick, and hard as metal, all seven of them — remained in the back of their mother’s head for three weeks, and when they came out, it wasn’t much better. For the rest of her life, Louise Flanagan’s hair grew around the scar and refused to fall over it, so it looked like all her thoughts, secrets, and shames could be accessed by pulling down on a red zipper in the back of her skull.

Not that her mother couldn’t dish it out as well as she took it. To this day, Mary Pat can’t look at a wooden spoon without recalling the sting of one against her wrist, her cheek, the poke of the tip in her stomach. And that was for the minor offenses. For the major offenses — Weezie’s shoe. She had three pairs, all prewar, all built to last. Every five or six years, she’d get the soles replaced, and then everyone walked on eggshells for weeks, hoping to not be chosen as the one she’d use to break them in.

If the old man was around, you had to watch out for his hands — the backs of the knuckles as hard and pointed as lug nuts, the flick of his index finger springing off his thumb into your temple, the grip of his fingers in your hair to drag you across the floor toward his belt (as he had the night Mary Pat got all Ds on her report card). Jamie Flanagan loved that belt most of all. He hung it on a hook just outside the bathroom door for that purpose only, used a different one to hold up his pants.

Then there were the internal skirmishes — between brother and brother, sister and sister, brother and sister, or, the worst of them all, two siblings against one. After Stevie and his faulty-hand-grenade temper were removed from the house, Donnie and Big Peg were given the widest berths because you never knew where you stood with them. But Mary Pat and Bill, once he grew up, were the ones everyone avoided getting really mad because neither had an off switch.

Her last fight with Big Peg, Mary Pat had spent two nights in the hospital with a concussion and compound fractures to the head because Big Peg had hit her full in the face with a brick, but what no one ever forgot was that before the ambulance arrived, Mary Pat returned to consciousness and finished that fucking fight before passing out again.

“I hit you with a brick,” Big Peg said when they wheeled her into the hospital room to visit Mary Pat. “A brick.”

“Next time use a cinder block,” Mary Pat said.

She hasn’t seen any of her brothers in years. Michael Sean joined the Merchant Marines and drops occasional Christmas cards from ports of call she otherwise would be unaware of — Cabo Verde, Maldives, South Sandwich. Donnie lives in Fall River and installs gutters. There’s no bad blood between them, just the unspoken acknowledgment that blood itself is all that ever tied them together. Last anyone heard of Bill, he was doing ten years for a stabbing in New Mexico, which was a surprise. Not the stabbing, the New Mexico part. Hot weather always made him irritable, which, come to think of it, might explain the stabbing.

Mary Pat finishes cleaning up and tosses all the bloody swabs in the wastebasket and wipes down the sink with a splash of rubbing alcohol. She considers herself in the mirror. Her face looks like she was dumped from the back of a truck into a pile of gravel. Her hands are screaming — not just the knuckles but the wrists. Her ribs ache. Ear still ringing away. Knee and ankle in need of ice.

She gets some from the freezer. Props the leg up on a kitchen chair, puts one napkin full of ice on the ankle, another on the knee. Outside the window, Commonwealth is eerily quiet. Everyone must still be at the rally or in the bars around City Hall. She sits there and smokes, flicking the ash into a spotless ashtray. She can’t believe how clean her kitchen is. They really did a nice job. Professional grade, she thinks with a smile.

For the first time in a week, she loves how she feels — bruised and scabbing up, the taste of blood in her mouth that some describe as bitter but she’s always felt was kind of buttery. She reaches behind her and turns on the radio, and the DJ, just coming out of commercial, welcomes her to settle in and listen to some Mozart, a boy genius who started composing at five.

“The Piano Sonata Number Eleven,” the DJ says in a voice as smooth as toffee, “is also known as the Rondo Alla Turca. Composed as a trifle, it has, over time, become one of his most popular pieces the world over.”

The DJ’s voice feels as if it’s coming from the darkest of rooms. She pictures him in the black, surrounded by the inky shadows of bookshelves.

The music begins and Mary Pat closes her eyes, floats in the light dance of the piano keys.

Mozart knew what he was supposed to do. He didn’t hunt down what he was good at — at five, he wasn’t searching. It found him. Greatness. Just as it found Ted Williams’s arm and eyes and legs. Just as it found James Joyce’s pen. (Not that she’d ever read Joyce, but she knows he’s the greatest Irish writer of all time.) Work only gets you so far. You have to lean into what you were born to do.

Mary Pat, since as long as she can remember, has been getting slapped, sometimes lightly, sometimes hard. She’s been punched, tripped, hit with hangers, hit with broomsticks, Wiffle-ball bats, those wooden spoons, her mother’s shoes, her father’s belt. Donnie once threw a bar of brown soap at the back of her head and knocked her completely off her feet. On the streets, she fought girls, boys, and packs of both. Anytime one person attacked her, she fought back against all of them, throughout her history, who’d ever hit her or twisted her hair or ear or nipple, anyone who’d ever screamed at her or snapped at her, hit her with a belt or a shoe. Everyone who had ever made her feel like a frightened little girl wondering what kind of fucked-up fire she’d been born into.

She can’t remember that girl, but she can feel her. She can feel her bafflement and terror. At the noise and the fury. At the storm of rage that swirled around her and spun her in place until she was so fucking dizzy from it, she had to learn to walk in it without falling down for the rest of her life.

And she learned well. She’s happiest when she’s opposed, most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.

She’s lost the last four days of her life to mourning.

Okay.

The mourning is not over — not by a long shot — but she decides, as she rises and tosses the ice into the sink, that it can be paused for a bit.

She opens every beer can in the fridge, one by one, drains them in the sink, and tosses the cans in the trash. She follows the cans with the bottles — of whiskey, of vodka, of — who the fuck brought this into my house? — peach schnapps. She rinses the sink until the smell is gone and wipes it down with the napkins that held the ice and throws those in the trash too.

She looks at the counters and resolves for them to stay that way. From here on out, it’s clean counters. Clean counters and a clear head.

She refills the liquor bottles with water from the tap and puts them in a cardboard box. Adds toilet paper and bags of chips and peanuts, a loaf of bread. She goes through the apartment with another box and adds any clothes she’ll want to wear over the next few days. She removes the basketful of medical supplies from under the bathroom sink. She takes the two boxes and the basket out to Bess and loads them in the trunk.

Back inside, she digs Dukie’s kit bag out of the corner of her closet. That’s what he always called it — his “kit” bag. It’s dark green canvas and, if caught on his person, could have added years to a burglary sentence. It contains the tools of his trade: lockpicks, a glass cutter and suction cup, electrical tape, a stethoscope, two bolt cutters (one small, one large), several watches (the batteries long since dead), nylons to use as masks, several pairs of gloves, a lock punch, duct tape, binoculars, and a pair of handcuffs and key.

Jesus, Dukie, she wonders, why the handcuffs?

“Never mind,” she says out loud. “I don’t wanna know.”

She leaves the dead watches behind, goes into the kitchen, and sweeps all the sharp knives into the bag. She gets Marty’s bag of money from the dresser drawer and walks those two bags out to Bess’s trunk too.

Her last trip to the apartment, she stands inside, taking it in for a minute. She’s lived here since she was twenty-two. Maybe she’ll see it again.

Maybe she won’t.

Bobby comes out the back of the BPD headquarters to find Mary Pat Fennessy sitting on the hood of the ugliest fucking car he’s ever seen, just past the back of the parking lot. Bobby takes the T to and from work, and the exit of the parking lot leads to an alley that unwinds in a lazy curve to the rear of the subway station. Mary Pat and her “car” are parked right at the mouth of the alley, clearly waiting on him.

Bobby stops by the car and lights a cigarette. “Is this thing street-legal?”

“Hundred percent,” Mary Pat says.

Bobby walks once around the car. It has the look of something that if you blow on it, even slightly, it’ll come apart like in a cartoon. He smiles at the tailpipe — cooking twine is definitely not legal to secure a tailpipe — and marvels at the complete lack of tread on the tires. A baby’s ass was never so smooth. He bends, looks under the chassis, can’t see any engine parts or brake pads dangling down there. So, that’s something. He returns to the front and Mary Pat. “Hundred percent, huh?”

She gives him a tiny smile. “Maybe ninety.”

“Try sixty,” he says.

As he gets closer, he sees her face looks like she was attacked by live trees in a fairy tale. They just whacked at her with their thin branches until she reached the other side of the haunted forest. She sports a large flesh-colored bandage that almost blends in with her neck. Her hands are bruised, the knuckles swollen. She wears a sleeveless white-and-yellow-checked blouse over blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs and low-top canvas Converse sneakers. When she looks back at him, her eyes are a little too bright for Bobby’s taste. It’s a brightness he’s seen before in the eyes of people who can’t be reached.

He eyes her cuts, her bruises and bandages. “Happened to you?”

She shrugs. “You should see the other girls.”

“Plural?”

She nods. “Never could respect bitches who forget that if you start a fight you should damn well fucking know how to finish one.”

He feels the smile find his face a second before he thinks to pull it back. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Fennessy?”

“Call me Mary Pat.”

“What can I do for you, Mary Pat?”

“I was wondering if you were still looking for my daughter.”

“You betcha. Happen to know where she is?”

Something dislodges in the brightness of her eyes for a moment, a flash of uncertainty and pain, but then it disappears, and the brightness returns.

“I don’t,” she says.

“So why are you here?”

“It might help me find her if I knew — really knew — why you were looking for her.”

He cocks his head at her, waits her out.

“What?” she asks.

“You know why I’m looking for her.”

“Because you think she was on the platform when Auggie Williamson died.”

“It’s gone a little beyond ‘think.’”

“Okay,” she says. “So how come no one has been arrested?”

“Because there are laws against just arresting people willy-nilly without hard evidence.”

“But you can bring them in for questioning.”

“Who says we haven’t?”

“If you had, you would have gotten some evidence.”

“Is that how it works?” He chuckles as he flicks his cigarette into the alley. “Wasn’t your first husband Dukie Shefton?”

She cocks her head at him. “Someone’s been doing his homework.”

“And Dukie was in the Life. I mean, man was a legend among thieves.”

Mary Pat feels a small flush of ancient pride well up in her at the memory of her first husband and his street rep. “He was.”

“And he was an independent, correct?” Bobby says. “Wasn’t affiliated with a crew.”

“He was independent, all right.” Mary Pat lights her own cigarette.

“But,” Bobby says, hitting the word for emphasis, “he still kicked up a percentage of his take to Marty Butler.”

She shrugs. “That’s the way it is in Southie.”

“‘That’s the way it is in Southie.’ We’re in agreement then, Mary Pat. So, if I bring people in for questioning but can’t get any evidence at all out of them because they don’t even get to talk to me for five minutes before a lawyer raps on the door, what does that tell you?”

She looks at him for a long while, rolling the cigarette up and down between her fingers. “Tells me those people are a lot less afraid of you than they are of someone else.”

“Yup.”

She takes a thoughtful drag, exhales a series of smoke rings that drift toward the alley before dissipating one by one. “So you’re saying the crime will go unsolved?”

“Hell, no,” he tells her. “No one’s letting this one drop.”

“Because a black kid died?”

“Because a black kid died on the dividing line between Southie and Dorchester on the eve of busing. It makes for the kinda story line newspapers tend to squeeze a lot of mileage out of.”

“Yet no one’s in jail.”

“Because we haven’t broken the logjam. But we will. And when we do, the dominoes will fall.”

“Or the bodies will.”

“Excuse me?”

She shifts on the hood, pulls one leg up there with her, grips the ankle. “You know as well as me that if any of this leads back to Marty Butler, all the kids on that platform that night are as dead as Auggie Williamson.”

“Why’d you say it that way?”

“What way?”

“You said ‘all’ the kids like some of them are gonna be dead regardless.”

“If Marty Butler doesn’t have success paying your legal bills,” she says eventually, “he’ll cut bait and pay for your funeral.”

“Which could be why we’re not turning up the heat too quickly.”

“But if you wait too long, they’ll get their stories straight, Marty will pay off people to be their alibis, and you’ll get nowhere at all.”

“That’s the risk.” He puts a foot on the fender.

“You think my daughter was involved, and I know she wasn’t. If we can prove what happened, I can prove her innocence.”

“And then maybe she’ll come out of hiding?”

She drifts on him for a moment. Like she just — poof — leaves her body, and he’s left staring at a statue perched on the hood of a car.

Then she comes back, but her voice is small and thin. “Yes. Then she’ll come out of hiding.”

He’s been watching her face as close as he can. “She is in hiding? Yes?”

She plucks at one of her sneaker laces. “She’s in hiding for sure.”

“Then,” he says, “you’ll just have to be patient, Mrs. Fennessy.”

“Mary Pat.”

“You’ll have to be patient, Mary Pat. If I want this to stick, I have to do it right.”

He can tell from the look on her face that she thinks he’s not only lying to her, he’s lying to himself.

“What if I talked to them?” she says.

“To who?”

“The people who don’t want to talk.”

“No,” he says. “Bad idea.”

“Why?”

He indicates her hand and face. “Your type of negotiation is called coercion under duress. It doesn’t stand up in court.”

“Only if” — she strikes the air with her cigarette — “an officer of the law had prior knowledge of it.”

“What’d you read a law book?”

“I was married to Dukie. He managed to stay out of prison most of his life and rob everything of fucking value that wasn’t nailed down in this city at one time or another. He was a law book.”

“What ever happened to Dukie?” Bobby asks.

“He didn’t take a knee.”

“To who?”

“The person you’re supposed to take a knee to.”

Standing there, taking her in, he gets a sudden whiff of her utter solitude. Of the series of traumas, big and small, that’s passed for her life.

“Mrs. Fennessy, please go home.”

“And do what?”

“Whatever you do when you’re home.”

“And then what?”

“Get up the next day and do it again.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not living.”

“It is if you can find the small blessings.”

She smiles, but her eyes shine with agony. “All my small blessings are gone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“Then find new ones.”

She shakes her head. “There aren’t any left to find.”

Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go.

Because they’re going. Make no mistake. They are fucking going.

“Mary Pat,” he says gently, and she looks up at him, “do you have someone you can talk to?”

“About what?”

“About whatever you’re going through right now?”

“I’m talking to you.”

Fair enough.

“And I’m listening.”

Mary Pat studies his face for a bit. “But you’re not hearing.”

“What am I not hearing?”

Sitting on the hood of that ugly car, her eyes still far too bright for Bobby’s liking, she points a finger at the sky, twirls it, and answers him. “The silence.”

Bobby tries to formulate some kind of response, but nothing occurs to him.

Mary Pat comes off the hood, walks to door of her heap, and gets behind the wheel. She backs up, then pulls forward, and gives no indication she even sees him as she drives away.

A few hours later, Bobby has dinner with Carmen Davenport at Jacob Wirth, a German restaurant in the theater district. Bobby picks it because it’s just upscale enough to feel special for two civil servants, but not so upscale he’ll have to go to a loan shark to cover the tab. His mind keeps drifting, though; he can’t shake his odd encounter with Mary Pat. This is not where he wants his head to be on the first date he’s managed to get in ten months. But he can’t quit thinking of that finger of hers, twirling, as she pointed it at the sky and spoke of “the silence.”

What fucking silence?

“So, out with it,” Carmen says.

“What?”

“Whatever’s got you distracted.”

“Maybe I’m just nervous.”

“Mmmm, nah.” She places her napkin on her lap, settles her chair in relation to the table. “You’re not here. In this restaurant. With me. And I look kinda nice, in case you overlooked it.”

She wears a white peasant blouse over a denim skirt and knee-high boots the same mahogany color as the bar. Her hair is combed a little different than the night they met, falling a bit more into a curve over her eyes, and she’s wearing more jewelry — a silver choker that matches the bracelet on her left wrist, thin white-gold hoop earrings. The green of her eyes is so pale it’s almost translucent; it gives Bobby the impression she can see straight through the back of him.

Bobby tells her she looks beautiful.

“About time,” she says. “Okay, you can stop squirming — what’s on your mind?”

“You.”

She chuckles and shoots him the bird. “I would rather you tell me what’s preoccupying you than you stay preoccupied and eventually piss me off.”

Their drinks come — red wine for her, a draft for Bobby — and they pause to toast their first date before they drink.

Bobby tells her about Auggie Williamson and all the witnesses who saw the four kids chase him near the train. And how Auggie ended up being found dead on the tracks the next morning. And how some of the witnesses corroborated who those kids could have been — four kids from Southie, two girls and two boys. And how, just when they had two of them in their hands, lawyers associated with Marty Butler showed up and bailed them out.

“What about the other two kids?” she asks.

“One’s a hard case. The hardest case of the four, actually, and he’s got a personal connection to Marty, so he’s not gonna say shit.”

“And the other one, the girl?”

“No one knows where she is.”

“Is she dead?”

“Rumor is she’s in Florida.”

“You don’t sound like you believe it.”

“I’m wavering on the theory,” he admits. “Of the four kids, I don’t see why she would be singled out as a threat. That’s what I keep bumping against.”

Carmen thinks on that as she takes a sip of wine, staring at him with a calm intensity that he finds so attractive he immediately wants to duck from it. It’s a Coyne family trait — if you feel happiness, duck. Because the only thing that could possibly follow happiness is pain. Thanks, Mom, Bobby thinks. Thanks, Dad. What an outlook you gave your children. What a pair of fucking pips you were.

Carmen says, “You have this girl who may have witnessed a murder.”

“May have been involved in it.”

“Or not.” Her pale eyes widen to emphasize the idea. “She’s just with them when they do it. Then maybe she got an inconvenient attack of conscience.”

“That would do it,” he agrees. Bobby flashes on Mary Pat today. That too-bright light in her eyes, those sudden micro-bursts of despair and agony.

The silence.

“You got kids?” he asks Carmen.

She nods. “I got one. He’s in college now. One thing I didn’t fuck up. I got him all the way through high school before the wheels came off.”

Bobby reappraises her. “Did you have him when you were in high school?”

She smiles. “Such a silver-tongued devil, you are. No, Bobby, I didn’t have him in high school. I was nineteen. And now he’s nineteen, so do the math.”

Bobby opens his mouth in mock horror. “You’re four years older than me.”

“Yeah, but I’ve clearly taken far better care of myself.”

Bobby laughs. Can’t remember the last time he did that so freely. After a second, Carmen laughs too. She takes his hand in hers, runs her thumb down the center of his palm.

“Should we order?” she says.

“Sure.”

But they don’t for a bit. They just sit there, taking each other’s measure.

“Do you have kids?” she asks.

“One. He’s nine. Lives with his mom weekdays.”

“Well, let me ask you — what would you do if someone hurt your child and the police refused to do anything about it?”

Bobby can see Brendan and his hopeful eyes and hopeful smile, his kind demeanor and clear desire for everyone around him to be happy, a desire that frightens Bobby as much as it moves him. If the world hurt him — really hurt him — would there be anything left of Bobby to pick up and put back together?

He says to Carmen, “I’m not sure what I’d do. I mean, I’ll be honest — I know what I’d want to do — but I’m a man who obviously believes in law and order. If we were, I dunno, out in the wild, part of the wagon-trail west a hundred years ago, and someone hurt my son? Then, yeah, they’d be fucking deader than Abe Lincoln.”

She nods. “I think the same thing most days — how easy it is to say you’d kill someone who hurt your child. But there are laws. And consequences. You kill someone, you go to prison. Your kid grows up without you.”

“The rule of law is all that separates us from the animal kingdom.”

“Do the parents of this girl feel that way?”

“It’s just her mother.”

“And what’s she like?”

Bobby chuckles. “She’s a piece of work. If I’d had half a dozen of her in my platoon at the beginning of Vietnam, we probably would have staved off the whole fucking war.”

“This is a woman we’re talking about?”

“Project chick from Southie. They breed them a little different there.”

“You like her.”

“I do,” he admits. Then, seeing her eyes, “No, no, no. Not like that. Not like I like you.”

“So how?”

“She’s...” He thinks about it. How to describe Mary Pat Fennessy? “Nobody ever told this woman how to quit. Probably nobody ever told her it was okay.”

“To quit?”

“To ease up. To, I dunno, cry? Feel?” He thinks about it. “Feel something besides anger, anyway. Every time I see my son? I hug him so tight he complains. I smell his hair and his skin. I put my heart to his back sometimes, just so I can hear his blood and the beat of his heart. I mean, he’s of the age he’s gonna get sick of it soon, so I’m just getting it in while I can.”

She nods, her eyes gone soft, her thumb even softer against his palm.

“I’ll bet you money,” he says, “Mary Pat Fennessy was never held like that in her life.”

“I suspect you’re a good father,” she says.

“Call no man a good father until after he is dead.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s not the quote.”

He smiles at her. “You know ancient Greek?”

“I know my classics,” she says. “The nuns made sure of it.”

“I don’t like nuns,” he blurts out.

“I don’t like ’em either,” she says. “Though they’ve got a raw gig. The priests get all the booze and all the credit, the nuns get, what? A convent?”

The waitress appears and they withdraw their hands so they can look at their menus and order.

After the waitress leaves, Carmen puts her hand back on the table and raises an eyebrow at him. He gives her his hand, and she places her other hand over it.

“Does this woman have other kids?”

“She had a son, but he died.”

“Husband?”

“She’s had two. Both left her, one by getting legally declared dead.”

She removes a hand to take another sip of wine. “So, if something terrible did happen to her daughter, what does she have to live for?”

In that moment, a ghost walks straight through Bobby. It’s perfectly sized to his body and touches every inch of him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet before exiting through his chest.

“I don’t have an answer for that,” he tells Carmen.

Around the time Bobby and Carmen Davenport are ordering their first round of drinks at Jacob Wirth, Mary Pat Fennessy is watching Rum Collins and another stoner supermarket employee share a joint on the back of the loading dock of the Purity Supreme. Mary Pat is parked next door under a tree in the lot of a Henry’s Hamburgers that went under in ’72 when someone took a couple of the burgers to a lab and discovered they were a whole lot of horse and very little cow.

Two cars in the Purity Supreme lot — Rum’s Duster and a Chevy Vega that Mary Pat presumes belongs to his dope-smoking buddy. Everyone else is gone, including the security guard. They set the alarm inside, pulled the grates down, and locked them; that’s the full extent of the night security for the Purity Supreme.

Rum’s buddy produces a roach clip, and they huff the remainder of the joint, looking like a pair of fish as they do it, then swipe five with each other and walk to their cars. This is the tricky part. If Rum’s buddy lingers by his car or takes too long to start it, the whole plan falls apart. Everything depends on Stoner Pal pulling away before Rum starts his engine.

Stoner Pal gets in his car first, but he doesn’t start it right away. And now Rum is opening his own door and about to get behind the wheel. Mary Pat scrambles out of her car and searches around until she finds a rock the size of a Matchbox car. She hurls it high, like a pop fly, and for a moment she’s not sure if she threw it with any accuracy. But then she hears the distant whap of it hitting the roof of Rum’s Duster.

Rum gets out of his car. Stoner Pal, oblivious, guns his engine to life. He rolls down the window and asks Rum something. Rum is looking at his car roof. He looks around for any nearby trees. He holds up a hand to tell his friend it’s all okay.

And Stoner Pal drives off.

Rum looks around the parking lot. For a moment he even seems to be looking beyond the Purity parking lot into the old Henry’s Hamburgers parking lot. But he doesn’t look hard and he doesn’t look long.

He gets back in the Duster. Turns the key in the ignition. The engine rumbles to life.

And dies.

He tries again. This time there’s a noticeable lag before the engine kicks over.

And it immediately dies.

His next four tries get nowhere. Just a high-pitched whirring noise as the engine tries to engage with an empty gas tank. After she siphoned out all the gas, Mary Pat poured in a pound of brown sugar for good measure. The only way Rum Collins’s orange Plymouth Duster is leaving that parking lot is by a tow truck.

Rum gets out of the car. Looks under the hood. After a while, he closes the hood. Sticks his head back in the car. After a minute or so, comes back out. Goes to the back and slides under. He puts his ear to the gas tank, then raps his knuckles against it.

He stands, frowning. Does that for a bit. Looks back and forth at the gas tank a couple times.

He looks across at Henry’s Hamburgers. Boarded up. Driveway sporting weeds. Weeds under the phone booth by the old front door too. But it is a pay phone, and it is lit up.

Rum reaches into his pocket. Glances at what she presumes are coins in his hand.

He trudges across the Purity parking lot, cuts through the missing partition of sagging fence, and makes his way toward the phone booth. Mary Pat’s been idling the whole time, and she slips the gearshift into drive, rolls Bess slowly out of her parking spot, headlights off, depressing the gas pedal with increasing pressure, so that she’s almost on top of Rum by the time he hears the car and thinks to turn and look. She punches the gas and shoots around to his right, the front tire missing him by no more than a foot but the driver’s door swinging wide and hitting his body hard enough to lift him off his feet and chuck him over a patch of grass into the old drive-through lane (a first in the neighborhood; huge deal at the time).

By the time he gets to his feet, she’s bunched his shirt in her hand. He stumbles and wobbles as she drags him over a curb and through the side door of the restaurant, which she’d jimmied hours ago. She throws him to the floor in the remains of the old kitchen. When he tries to get up, she delivers a one-two-three-four combination to his face, relying on the vicious speed of it over any real force to break his spirit. Which it does. He lies back and groans and covers his face and drops the hands only when he feels her unbutton his jeans. Before he can stop her, she’s pulled his jeans and his Fruit of the Looms down to his knees and straddled him with a box cutter in her hand, one of the thin ones that looks like a large stick of Juicy Fruit but, he must know from his supermarket experience, can slice the top off a carton of canned goods like the cardboard’s made of tissue.

Before he can believe she’s really pulled his pants off, she’s already yanked his ball sac toward her and flicked the blade along the underside.

She’s going to venture a guess he’s never screamed so loud or so high in his life. The blood flows freely from the cut.

“Tell me everything about the night on the platform at Columbia Station.”

He tells her. Doesn’t stop until she’s fairly confident he’s told her everything he knows. He even tells her the parts that don’t reflect well on Jules, don’t make Jules look good at all.

When he’s done, she places her knees on his shoulders. Looks down at him for a bit. Casually, almost as if she’s curious what could happen, she flicks the razor blade off his throat and neck a few times. The tears, hot as tea, she presumes, flow from the corners of his eyes and down into his ears.

“You’re gonna kill me.”

“Thinking about it.” She shrugs. “Where’s Jules?”

“I don’t know.”

She flicks the razor off the flesh beneath his chin. “But you know she’s dead.”

He scrunches his eyes and the tears flood from them. “Yes.”

“How?”

“Everyone knows,” he says simply.

“Open your eyes.”

He does.

“You’re gonna call the police. And you’re gonna tell them what you told me. If you don’t, Rum, you listening? Say you’re listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you don’t, I’ll come back for you. Nothing will stop me. Nothing will save you. No matter what happens, Rum, no matter who you think you know or who you think can protect you, they can’t. Not against me. I’ll get to you just like I got to you tonight. And I will cut off your balls. Then I will cut off your dick. And I will throw them down a sewer for the rats to eat while you bleed to death where I leave you.” She stands. “Go out to that pay phone and call the police and tell them you want to confess to Auggie Williamson’s death.”

She starts to walk out and then stops. Turns back. Of all the beliefs she holds chambered in her heart, the one she holds dearest is the one she could now put at hazard simply by asking a question. It’s the belief that Jules was the best part of her. That Jules was better than her or Dukie or Noel. And that wherever her soul ended up, it ended up where the good souls go.

She clears her throat. “Those things you said Jules did — did she do them?”

Rum gets a look on his face like he knew he should have changed that part of the story.

“Did she do them?” Mary Pat repeats, enunciating every word. “Don’t fucking lie or I’ll know it.”

“Yes,” he says.

She stands in the doorway a long time, her lower lip quivering.

“Well, I raised her, didn’t I?” she says. “So I guess that’s my sin.”

She lets herself out.

Bobby’s not even through the door of the station house when Pete Torchio, the duty sergeant, holds a phone aloft and says, “For you.”

“Who?”

Pete winks. “Says his name is Special.”

“What?”

“Special Agent Stansfield.”

Pete thinks he’s hilarious. That’s why he’s on his third wife and he’s only thirty-two.

Bobby points at his desk as he passes through the gate. “You can put him through.”

“Fills me with a deep pleasure, Bobby. Tickles my warm parts. You know that.”

Bobby gets to his desk and the phone is ringing, the button for line two blinking. He presses it and puts the phone to his ear. “Giles?”

“Bobby. How’s tricks?”

“Oh, you know. You?”

“You hear the busing protesters busted up one of the windows to our building?”

“I did.”

“They were chanting ‘Niggers suck’ for over half an hour, Bobby.” There’s a tone in his voice that suggests somehow Bobby either a) is responsible or b) can explain the behavior. “I mean, half an hour.”

“That’s a long time for one chant,” Bobby says. “You’d think they would have mixed it up.”

“Should be kept in cages, people like that.”

Giles Stansfield grew up in Connecticut. Went to Brown, then Yale Law. Until he joined the Bureau, he probably never met a black person who didn’t work a service job for the Stansfields or for Yale. Same went for poor whites.

“What’s up, Giles?”

“I hear you’re sniffing around the Butler crew.” His voice is suddenly convivial, as if they’re chatting over a bowl of punch at a garden party.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I’m just thinking you might want to communicate with us, so no signals get crossed.”

“What signals could get crossed?”

“Just, well, signals.” Giles’s voice is still convivial but also a bit fretful, like the conversation is playing out differently than it had played out in his head.

“Why don’t you tell me what those signals could be, and I’ll know whether I could cross them with my own?”

He can hear Giles trying not to sigh. “I blame Nixon.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Bobby puts his service revolver in his desk drawer, adds his car keys for good measure.

“He created that Drug Enforcement Administration horseshit. Took the Bureau of Narcotics and folded them in with the ODEA. Then they grabbed a bunch of cowboys and rejects from precincts all over the Northeast, and now they call it an agency.”

“I thought they called it an administration.” Bobby doesn’t know why he loves to fuck with Bureau guys so much, but he does.

“Whatever they call it, those little worms with guns, those little gerbils with badges, they’re up on the Butlers too, apparently, which we didn’t know until they busted one of his guys.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He was our guy. Been working one of Marty’s chop shops for six months, and DEA went and cocked the whole thing up.”

“That’s too bad.” Bobby pats his pockets for his cigarettes, gets a bolt of panic when he realizes they’re not there. He looks around wildly, spies them right there on his desk, where he laid them about thirty seconds ago.

Across the bullpen, Vincent sticks his head out of Interview Room B and bulges his eyes at Bobby with a clear Get in here message. He scowls and closes the door again.

“Yeah, it is too bad,” Giles is saying. “Duplication of effort doesn’t help anyone. The solution is to just pick one team to run point.”

Bobby scoops up his cigarettes and matches. “Great idea,” he says, grinning from ear to ear. “We’ll take it.”

“Oh, no,” Giles says quickly, “you guys got enough on your plate. Why don’t you let us run point?”

“Why don’t we schedule a meeting over it?”

“Sure, but until then we could just have a handshake deal that—”

“I’ll have my girl reach out to your girl. We’ll get a meeting on the books.”

“Okay, but Bobby—”

“Gotta go, Giles.” Bobby hangs up.

My girl reach out to your girl. Where does he come up with this shit?

According to Rum, after Frank Toomey told them to go back and “finish the job,” he stayed where he was. Leaning against his car.

“So he didn’t go with you?”

“No.”

“And he didn’t elaborate on what ‘finish the job’ meant?”

“No.”

“He didn’t get any more specific?”

Rum shakes his head. “Uh-uh.”

Bobby can already see Frank’s defense attorney going, “So, ‘finish the job’ could have meant going home for the night, cleaning up the bottles you broke, or could have even meant helping get Auggie Williamson to a doctor.”

Finishing the job, Bobby knows, could mean fucking anything.

When it came down to what they did do when they returned to the platform, Rum was sure that someone rolled Auggie Williamson onto the tracks but was somehow unsure who that someone could have been.

And how could that be?

“I was taking a piss,” Rum informs them.

This fucking job, Bobby thinks. You have them, they’re on the ropes, ready to talk, and then some pestilent germ of a polluted idea works its way into their hamster brain and they think, I can get out of this.

And you’re back to square one.

Bobby’s too tired — and on his night off — to go back to square one.

“Rum,” he says, “it takes two people to roll a body. Otherwise, the body goes right when you want it to go left, or left when you want to go right, it’s a whole thing. So, you and George, you rolled Auggie Williamson off the platform. And he fell and hit the back of his head and died. You didn’t mean it, but it happened.”

Rum says, “That’s not what happened.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay, we rolled him off the platform, okay, we did that.”

Bobby nods.

“But then he got up.”

“He what?”

“He got up. Like he rose to his feet?”

Vincent stops writing. They watch Rum Collins. He’s not looking up and to the right anymore — a sure sign someone’s lying. He’s looking in — a sure sign someone’s remembering.

“He got up. And then he fell back down. And then he kinda got to his knees. And the girls were crying cuz it was, like, pathetic? So we climbed down there with him?”

“All of you?”

Rum looks at them. Nods.

“And then what happened?”

“Someone found a rock.”

“Who?”

Rum looks at them and says nothing.

“Who found the rock?”

Rum says, “It wasn’t me.”

“So who was it?”

Rum grits his teeth. “It wasn’t me.”

Bobby watches him for a bit. Looks at Vincent, who gives him a tiny headshake — they’re at the part of the dance where they could lose this kid.

“Let’s forget about who has the rock for a minute,” Bobby says. “Just tell me what they did with it.”

Rum turns that over in his brain for a bit. He’s too stupid to know at this point that he’s already copped to half a dozen felonies, including attempted murder.

He opens his mouth and, in a sentence, ties himself to it for life. “They — the person — hit him in the back of the head with the rock.”

“Hit Auggie Williamson.”

“Yeah.”

And this was the piece that has never lined up with every story they’ve heard or every theory they’ve surmised about what happened that night — how did Auggie Williamson get the fracture at the base of his skull?

Now they know.

“And what happened to Mr. Williamson then?”

“Mr. Who?”

That gets to Bobby for some reason. If you’re going to kill someone, at least know their fucking name. “Williamson,” Bobby says through gritted teeth. “The black guy.”

“He went down on his face. Never moved again.” Rum stares at his thumbs for a bit before he looks up at Bobby and Vincent, blinking under the fluorescent. “Now that I told you what happened, can you square things with her?”

“With who?”

“The, uh, ya know, the broad who threatened to cut off my dick.”

Bobby says, “I don’t think you gotta worry about her anymore.”

Rum lets out a loud sigh. “Fuckin’ A.”

Vincent says, “Ronald Collins, you’re charged with murder in the second degree in the death of Augustus Williamson.”

Rum, chewing a hangnail, says, “What?”

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say—”

“Wait a minute! Fucking what now?”

“—can and will be used against you—”

Rum looks at Bobby. “I didn’t do it.”

“You were there,” Bobby says, “and you didn’t stop it. In the eyes of the law, that makes you just as guilty as whoever swung that rock.”

“No,” Rum says. And then more emphatically: “No.”

Vincent says, “Your only shot of walking the streets of Southie again before, I dunno, two thousand and four? Is to tell us who swung that rock.”

“I want my lawyer.”

“Tell us.”

“I want my lawyer.”

“Tell us!”

“I want my lawyer.” He looks at them, tears streaming down his face but eerily calm. “Right fucking now.”

Bobby and Vincent stand. “Okay.”

“You’re a hard guy?” Vincent says. “That’s good. Cuz you’re gonna do hard time with lots and lots of hard guys.” He grabs his crotch. “Hard as drill bits.”

“Over a nigger?” Rum stares at them in utter disbelief.

Bobby nods. “Bet your dumb white ass, motherfucker.”

George Dunbar’s two main dealers — Joe-Dog Fitz from H Street and Quentin Corkery from Old Colony — are working the gazebo at Marine Park for him. But George himself never shows up. Midway through the second day, after a big noontime rush from construction workers and some truckers from Boston-Buffalo, Joe-Dog and Quentin have an urgent discussion with their runners, all of them talking fast by the base of the gazebo. Mary Pat, with Bess’s window down, can hear a few words and phrases from twenty yards away, the most important of which is “low on beauties and Pepsi,” which she presumes means they’re running out of speed and cocaine. Heavens, she thinks, I hope you’re still well stocked on heroin, dear ones.

Quentin Corkery leaves the roost. He walks down the slope of Marine Park and hops in a yellow Datsun Z parked near the statue. He peels off the curb with a long screech. Mary Pat follows him back down Day Boulevard where, after less than two miles, he pulls off into Old Colony. The two housing projects in this section of Southie — Old Colony and Old Harbor — are sister projects to Commonwealth. They were all built within ten years of one another, all laid out with similar footprints. Mary Pat hangs back, puttering slowly up the thin road Quentin took to a rear parking lot. He pulls up directly in front of a small black stoop, hops out of the car, and runs inside the building. Mary Pat once dated a guy who lived here — Paul Bailey, doing eight to ten at Walpole, last she checked — and remembers the layout’s the same as Commonwealth: shotgun hallway going straight up the center, doors to the units branching off that main vein. She can’t get into position in time to see which unit Quentin enters, but she’s set up on the little stoop with a clear view through the yellow door glass when he exits, and she clocks him coming out of the fourth door down on the left. She puts her butt on the top of the short railing and swings her body around, drops down off the railing, and is already tucked along the side of the building by the time Quentin exits, hops in his Datsun, and drives off, once again laying enough rubber to make Mary Pat wonder if he deals drugs just to keep himself in tires. Mary Pat walks back to Bess, sitting in the corner of the parking lot where she left her. She pops the trunk and rummages through Dukie’s bag until she finds what she thinks she’ll need, then closes the trunk.

She puts on gloves before she reaches the main door. Once she’s inside, she notices the hallway smells a bit different from the ones at Commonwealth. Still smells of Lysol, spilled beer, and the potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef boiled inside at least a quarter of the units every Sunday. But there’s something else, a hint of mold, maybe? The scent of a damp April sidewalk or a nearby swimming pool, but there aren’t any swimming pools around here, that’s for sure. Four doors down on the left is number 209. She knocks and waits, her ear against the door. She hears nothing. She knocks a second time to be sure. She’s got the lock punch tucked under her shirt against her spine, just in case, but Dukie’s pick goes through the lock as if it’s a key. It takes less than thirty seconds, and she’s in.

The unit smells of pot smoke, cigarette smoke, and poor hygiene. In the back room, she finds a flop bed with no sheets and a single pillow, dark with old sweat. In the living room, there’s a torn couch, several plastic beach chairs, and a black-and-white TV sitting on top of a stack of five Yellow Pages, four of them still wrapped in plastic. The bathroom looks like it’s never been cleaned; it’s possible the whiff of mold she got in the hallway stems entirely from this one bathroom, because the wall behind the sink is black, and woolly gray mold-fingers sprout up the tile from the edge of the tub.

She checks the toilet tank, but there’s nothing stashed in there. Checks under the sink, the same. Bedroom yields nothing and neither does the kitchen sink. But on the fifth try — using a broomstick on the drop ceiling in the hallway closet — Ziploc bags plop to the top shelf or plummet all the way to the floor. She finds a chair and steps up to get her hand all the way in there and scoop the other bags out. Once that’s done, she feels something else back there, just the edge of it, something hard. She extends her body and then her fingers, and she knows it’s a gun the moment she wraps her fingers around the grip. She pulls it out — a .38 Smith & Wesson snub nose with a heavily nicked grip that’s beginning to shed rubber. She steps down off the chair and opens the cylinder. It opens easily, so at least the gun’s oiled and maybe even properly cared for. Six bullets nest inside.

She climbs back up, reaches in there a final time, and comes back with a small cardboard box that rattles. She opens it to find another half a dozen bullets inside.

She places all the bags on the kitchenette table, a greasy Formica top with more chips in it than her own. The extra-large Ziplocs contain weed, some of it green and pungent, some of it less green and crumbly, littered with stems; the large Ziplocs contain brown powder she recognizes immediately, with a pang in her heart, or white powder she assumes is cocaine. She knows a bag of black beauties as such right off (Dukie loved his amphetamines) and presumes the other pills are, respectively, ludes, LSD, and mescaline. It’s not a lot of drugs, not for a dealer; if she had to guess, she’d say they’ve sold maybe two thirds of their latest stash by this point. Losing it isn’t going to hurt them in the long run, but it will hurt them tomorrow.

She takes it all.

And the gun.

Back in Southie, George leads them down the dark, empty blocks of cab companies and trucking depots. It’s past one now, and Mary Pat kills her lights so George won’t notice her behind him. There’s no one down here, it seems, just the two of them bumping along old cobblestone streets in the dark. Few functioning streetlights, one bar that caters to Teamsters and closes at eleven. Mary Pat slows to a crawl. Even with her headlights off, if he rolls down his window, George will probably be able to hear her lurching along the cobblestones behind him. She hangs back a full two blocks and does her best to avoid potholes.

He pulls into a parking lot in front of a low-slung stretch of one-car garages. Gets out. Unlocks the third garage from the right and pulls up the door. He fishes in his pockets before entering the garage and walking to the back of a Chevy Nova. He opens the trunk. Comes back out, grabs the duffel bag from the Impala trunk. Without the rifles, it’s much lighter than it was when he and Brian Shea lugged it across Bayside Road, but it’s still heavy enough that his right shoulder dips a bit and his head tilts along with it as he carries the bag to the Nova and deposits it in the trunk.

He closes the trunk, locks it. Closes the garage door. Locks that too. Gets in the Impala.

And off they go again.

It’s a few moments before she can speak.

She remembers the day she forced her way into the Fields. Larry Foyle and Weeds sported dirty T-shirts, their bodies sweaty and ripe with B.O. And then Brian Shea, his skin speckled with chalky residue, claimed he’d been helping “renovate” Marty’s house. A sledgehammer rested against a toolbox in the rear grotto. Brian had been indignant because she’d gone to his house and questioned his wife in the disappearance of her daughter. He’d been threatening. Flicked a cigarette at her.

Insinuated that she was a bad neighbor.

Acted self-righteous.

And all the while, her daughter’s body lay just twenty feet away in a cellar.

Brian Shea, with whom she’d had clammy, forgettable high school sex in his mother’s bedroom.

Brian Shea, for whom Dukie had put in a word when he was just another kid on the make, trying to get in with Marty Butler.

Brian Shea, to whom Dukie once loaned money, only to have to chase him down to get it back.

Brian Shea, who was at the party they threw after Jules’s christening.

Had been in their home, had eaten at their table, had drunk their liquor and beer.

Brian Fucking Shea.

“Why you crying?” George Dunbar, his back against the Nova, is watching her with a loose, sleepy gaze.

“Am I?” She dabs under her eyes with the heel of her hand.

He doesn’t even hear her. He’s already floating again.

She squats down by him and snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Did you see her?”

“Who?”

“Jules.”

“When?”

“When you reset the basement floor?”

“Whose?”

“Marty’s.”

“Nah, nah, nah. We, um, we brought in the Quikrete. It’s the stuff they should have used from the start. Concrete but sand too. It’s good shit, dries fast...” He lowers his head, seems to fall asleep.

She slaps his face. His eyes snap open, meet hers. “You never saw Jules?”

“No, no. She... I mean, there was a hole in the floor, and it had been patched over, and then they poured the bad cement mix over that. So they busted up all the bad cement, and we came in and laid the Quikrete down, and that’s where she is.”

“Under the Quikrete.”

He doesn’t answer. He’s into another nod.

She slaps him again.

“George! Is she under the Quikrete?”

“Yeah. She’s there.” His words are a muddy slur at this point. “She’s there.”

“George,” she says before she loses him, “does anyone come to this garage besides you?”

He smiles and rolls his head on his neck. “No one knows it’s here.”

“No one?”

“Not a soul,” he slurs.

If he notices when she handcuffs him to the handle of the car door, he doesn’t seem to mind.

Though the OPEC oil embargo officially ended five months earlier, a major side effect of the gas shortages of ’73 is that no one drives around with a tank that’s any less than half full. You never know when the Arabs are going to hold the oil hostage again, and no one wants to get stuck sitting for hours on end in those fucking lines.

So the cars parked out front of the Fields of Athenry that night are all sitting on gas tanks at least two thirds full. Most, including Marty Butler’s AMC Matador, are topped up all the way. When someone tears a man’s shirt — what arson investigators will later determine was the dress uniform of a U.S. Army corporal — into strips, ties the bottom of each strip to a small stone, and drops those strips into the gas tanks of every car parked in front of the Fields, it would take only a match, a firm hand, and balls the size of fucking ostrich eggs to light one hell of a fire.

Which is what happens.

The men in the bar notice the light playing off the windows. It almost seems like Christmas lights, maybe strung in a garland between two streetlamps and lifting in the winter breeze. But it’s not winter, and those aren’t Christmas lights. By the time they all get out to the sidewalk, it’s like the end of the world or some fucking thing. Six cars in a row — half a block of them — are bonfires. Smoke and heat roil off the shells in oily waves.

They pull the hoses out from behind the bar and grab every fire extinguisher they can lay their hands on to keep the flames from hitting the bar itself, but the heat is like the heat of hell, and when the car windows start to blow out, guys get blasted with pebbles of glass. Poor Weeds catches a bunch of it in his right ear, enough to turn it into ground pork, as if his face weren’t already bad enough, and they drag him back into the bar and someone goes looking for tweezers.

By the time the firemen show up, sparks drizzle off the roof and fat blue flames dance along the exterior walls of the bar. Everyone’s evacuated. So they’re standing there on the street — Marty and Frankie and Brian Shea and about fifteen other guys in the most feared crew on the south side of the city — and they’re all sooty and bewildered, and the firemen push them back like they’re regular citizens, everyday fucking schmoes.

It’s Brian Shea who looks beyond the roof of the bar to the top of the building behind it and says, “Oh my God.”

The firemen see it too, and they start shouting and pointing and calling for backup.

They’d all thought the bar was on fire, but the bar has just a couple of sparks and flames to deal with, flames that are already dying under the weight of the water smashing into them. But the house behind the bar — the house where Marty has done his deals and run his girls and his casino nights for wiseguys all across New England — that’s got towers of flame shooting twelve feet high off the top of it.

They try to get to it, but the firemen push them back. Now the police are there and EMTs and, fuck, even reporters from 4, 5, and 7 and the Globe, the Herald, the Argus, and the Patriot Ledger.

Marty watches it all burn and says to Frankie, “If this is who I think it is, it falls on you, Tombstone. All on you.”

Bobby and Carmen’s first time together is awkward and fumbling at the outset. There’s no sense of rhythm; it’s like trying to dance after someone turns off the music. He has no idea what her body will respond to, and he makes a few poor guesses. But then he gets a whispered “Yeah, right there” and a quickening of her breath in his ear. Her heel glides along the back of his calf, and he moves his hip just a tad to his left, and she says “Yup” in such a way that yup becomes his favorite sound that week.

In the end they find a groove that works. It’s not fireworks, but it’s promising. The fireworks could be just up around the next bend. They’ll find out next time.

After, they lie in her bed and listen to the sounds of Chandler Street three stories below on a humid night in early September, and Bobby embraces a sentiment he’s never grown sick of since he returned from the war — It’s wonderful to be alive.

She gets out of the bed. “Would you like some water?”

“Love some.”

She walks naked into the kitchen. When she returns with two glasses of water, he notices that one of her breasts is slightly larger than the other, and her green eyes carry a shimmer in the half dark. She sits on the bed and hands him his water, and they look at each other for a bit, saying nothing.

“I like how considerate you are,” she says.

“When?”

“In general,” she says, “but in bed too. You listened to my body. A lot of guys don’t do that.”

“You’ve had a lot of guys?”

“For sure,” she says easily. “You?”

“Guys? No. But women, yeah.”

“So we won’t judge each other’s histories.”

“Nothing good ever comes of that.”

She slides down in bed beside him and holds her water aloft as she gives him a long kiss. Her hair tickles the side of his face. The kiss is warm and unhurried. Another of life’s blessings, he thinks, the leisurely kiss.

When Carmen pulls out of the kiss, she glances at the clock on the bedside table. “Didn’t you say you were on TV tonight?”

“I said I could be on TV. They filmed us walking those kids into their arraignment.”

She crawls down the bed and turns on the small black-and-white on top of her dresser.

WCVB is wrapping up its intro. They cut to the studio and then cut in close on the anchor desk, and suddenly, there’s Bobby in a little box to the right of Chet Curtis’s shoulder. (Lead story, he thinks. Damn.) Bobby and Vincent and Rum Collins and George Dunbar, the latter two trying to keep their heads down, are frozen in the shot as Chet talks about the big break in the death of a young Negro on the eve of the city’s controversial desegregation of two public high schools.

And just like that, they cut away from Chet and run footage of the latest anti-busing protest, this one over by Broadway Station.

“My new boyfriend,” Carmen says, “a TV star.”

“I’m your new boyfriend?”

“You’re not?”

“I just wasn’t sure I’d achieved that status.”

“Oh, you got the status, m’ man.”

On the screen, the protest turns predictably violent. The camera jerks a few times. A fleshy guy from the school committee talks into a bullhorn, throws around words like “tyranny” and “subjugation.”

“If the school committee had just acted in good faith years ago,” Carmen says, “instead of trying to throw a wrench in things from the start, maybe we wouldn’t be here.”

“You’re definitely not wrong,” he says. “But how come it’s always the poor who are expected to eat the food that’s good for them no matter how it tastes? You don’t see anyone in the rich neighborhoods dealing with this.”

“Because they’re not part of Boston Public Schools.”

“Right. They don’t want to be part of the public school system, and they don’t want subway lines or bus lines coming into their towns because they don’t want to mix with poor people in general and black people in particular. Or so it would seem.”

“Not all the suburbs are white.”

“Name one that isn’t. Just one.”

She tries. “Um...”

He waits.

“I can feel your look,” she says. “It’s very smug.”

“Our suburbs,” he says, “are designed to escape the melting pot. But now they’re telling all the people they left behind precisely how they should go about rubbing elbows.”

“But the schools are segregated,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “And they shouldn’t be. You’ll get zero argument on that from me. It’s racist bullshit, and it’s unforgivable. But this is not the solution.”

“What is?”

He opens his mouth, still caught up in the rhythm of the debate. Then freezes. “I have no idea.”

“And that’s the problem. If no one can come up with a solution, but a solution has to be found, then this — by being any kind of solution at all — is the best solution by default.”

He says nothing for a bit.

“You don’t look convinced,” she says.

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.”

“Phew,” she says. “You’re cynical.”

“I prefer skeptical.”

“You can’t compare the public schools here to the private schools in the suburbs. It’s not apples and oranges.”

“Why not?”

“Because people pay for the right to...” She turns in the bed and looks at him. “Ooooh, you bastard.”

“Right?”

“You set me up.”

“I did not.”

After a bit, she says, “But something had to be done.”

He flashes on Mary Pat Fennessy in the morgue the other day. Talk about someone who believes something has to be done, no matter what the fallout is. Jesus.

“Yeah, something had to be done,” he agrees.

“Because if not now, when?” she asks.

He sighs and stubs out his cigarette. “There’s the rub.”

“Can I ask you something... delicate?”

“I’ll gird my loins.”

“You’re an Irish cop from Savin Hill,” she starts.

He knows exactly where this is going. “How come I’m not a racist? Is that the question?”

“Kinda. Yeah.”

He drinks some water. “My parents were, let’s say, difficult people. They’d both given up their dreams when they married, so to be their kid was, uh, not fun. They were angry and hated each other and couldn’t admit to themselves that they were angry and hated each other. So they drank and they fought and they found a million different ways to make us kids proxy soldiers on their battlefield. Then my mother got sick and died. And my father realized he’d loved her as much as he’d hated her. And that fucked him up even worse. So, when I say my parents weren’t saints, probably weren’t even good people, you can believe me.”

She’s watching him with a curious half smile. “Okay.”

“But they also weren’t racists. Something about the idea of it — the pure irrationality of it — offended them. They didn’t think black people were necessarily good, don’t get me wrong, they just thought everyone — regardless of what color they were — was probably an asshole. And to say you were less of an asshole because your skin was lighter was reprehensible to them. It just made you a bigger asshole.” He smiles, remembering their utter core contrariness. “There were only two big sins in the house on Tuttle Street — feeling sorry for yourself and racism, which, when you think of it, are two sides of the same coin.”

“I think I might have liked your parents.”

“Until the fifth drink,” he admits, “they could be a lotta fun.”

“What were their dreams?”

“Hmm?”

“You said they’d given up their dreams.”

“My father was a painter. Not a housepainter — well, he was that too — but a genuine artist.”

“And what did your mother want to be?”

“Anything but a mother. Or a housewife. I think she just wanted to be free.” He can feel her looking deeper into him than anyone’s cared to look for a long time. “What about your parents?”

“They wanted me to marry well. And live in the suburbs. And not need a job. I was always fairly certain I’d been a disappointment to them. But just before my mother died, she told me, ‘We never approved, but we were always proud.’ Isn’t that a weird thing to tell your kid?”

He thinks about it. “It’s nice, actually. She’s saying you took your path, and it wasn’t what she would have chosen, but you did well.” He finds himself flashing on Mary Pat Fennessy again, a woman robbed of both her children. Christ, he wonders, what could possibly give her the strength to get out of bed in the morning?

Fury.

Anguish.

Rage.

“You come from the upper middle class,” he says to Carmen, “but you left it all behind to help people. To actually fucking matter in this world. If I was your parent, I’d be proud of you.”

She taps his nose with her index finger. “If I was your mom, I’d be proud of you.”

“This is a weird conversation to have naked.”

“Ain’t it?”

She rolls on her side and he tucks in tight behind her and they fall asleep with the windows open to the night and the TV still on.

Mary Pat spends a night in a motel on Huntington Avenue, just across from the Christian Science Mother Church. The motel accepts cash and doesn’t ask for ID and, most importantly, has an underground garage where she can tuck Bess away in a dark corner that smells of oil. She sits in the motel room in the near dark and looks across the street at the church plaza. She doesn’t know much about architecture or anything about Christian Scientists, but the mother church is an impressive structure. Two buildings — the smaller, sharper one with a pointy granite steeple is something she’d expect to see in Paris, maybe; the larger one behind it makes her think of pictures she’s seen of Rome: a big dome at the top, presiding over wide arches and thick columns, all of it mirrored in the long, narrow reflecting pool that stretches the length of the plaza.

If Jules had come to her just two weeks ago and said she was converting to Christian Scientology, or whatever they call it, Mary Pat would have disowned her. Fennessys and Flanagans were Roman Catholics. Always had been, always would be, end of story. But now Mary Pat finds the whole idea — of disowning someone for choosing to believe in a different interpretation of God — ridiculous. If Jules lies right now in the embrace of the Christian Scientist God or the Buddhist God or whatever the Episcopalians believe in, Mary Pat cares only that it’s an embrace. And that her daughter no longer knows anything of fear. Or hate.

She turns on the small TV on the dresser and, after fiddling with the antenna, finds the clearest picture on Channel 5. She catches the last half hour of a Harry O episode she’s seen before, floats away sitting there, has no idea where she goes or that she went anywhere at all until she snaps back from wherever she was to find that the news is now on.

This has been happening a lot lately, these little episodes of vanishing within herself. She doesn’t fall asleep or even doze, but time vanishes nonetheless. And she seems to vanish with it.

Halfway through the news, just before sports, they mention that “Funeral services will be held tomorrow morning at Third Baptist Church for Augustus Williamson, the young Afro-American man who died tragically at Columbia Station, further inflaming racial tensions on the eve of desegregation of our schools.”

She recalls the note Dreamy wrote to her when Noel passed. If Mary Pat could write half as well as Dreamy, maybe she’d consider writing a note of her own. But she can’t. Not only is her grammar bad, her handwriting is atrocious.

She finds herself staring across the street again at those remarkable buildings reflected, along with several other local buildings, in the long pool of water. We pass on and the buildings remain. And eventually, even buildings as magnificent as these crumble.

I’m not afraid to die, she tells those buildings, the room, God. Not even a little bit.

Then what are you afraid of?

Living in a world without her.

Maybe she feels the same way.

Jules?

No, you idiot. Dreamy.

The headquarters for the Global Liberian Liberation Front sit inside a former synagogue on Dudley Street in a section of Roxbury that looks like the ash heap of the Urban American Dream. The three leaders of the GLLF sport horn-rimmed glasses and tower-of-power Afros, black turtlenecks and checked pants, matching Vandykes and airs of intellectual pretension, but Bobby knows all their reading matter was encountered first in a prison library. Whether the GLLF ventured into drug dealing as a means to finance a “higher end,” or the “higher end” was conceived as a cover for the drug dealing, is irrelevant. They’re fucking drug dealers, first and foremost.

The guys and girls who work under the main leadership are representative of the truth of the organization and rumored to be the ones who gave them the more authentic gang-sounding nickname, the Moorlocks. They’re kids, mostly, who don’t go in for turtlenecks or Vandykes or horn-rimmed glasses. They wear black leather car coats and wide-brimmed hats and shoes with three-inch heels. They deal drugs all over Roxbury, Mattapan, and Jamaica Plain, and they fuck up anyone who gets in their way. They’re cowboys (and cowgirls) who don’t give a shit. This recklessness makes them dangerous but, conversely, predictable if anyone decides to take a real run at them.

Vincent, who watches way too many movies and reads Guns & Ammo the way other guys read Hustler, wants to stage a pseudo-paramilitary raid on the GLLF building. Just go in there blasting and call it a plan. Several of the major weapons companies have been sending urban police departments amped-up military-grade weapons for years. New law enforcement philosophies coming out of L.A. and New York have begun to advocate for special teams of combat-ready police cells. In L.A., the first of these has been given a name, SWAT, and they took on the Black Panthers and the SLA in sustained firefights that armchair John Waynes love to believe put the order back in law and order. In reality, Bobby knows, those gunfights led to limited results, a shitload of property damage, and a new micro-generation of substandard cops who think they can compensate for bad instincts, poor people skills, and limited intelligence with high-powered weaponry.

One day, Bobby knows, the Vincents of the department will get a chance to prove their theories correct or not. Whether they’re proved right or wrong, the genie will be out of the bottle, and it will be probably hard, if not impossible, to put it back in. Until that day, though, Bobby outranks Vincent. He comes up with a plan for Operation Moorlock that involves a team in Narcotics while an ad hoc group of detectives from across Division handles surveillance on GLLF headquarters to make sure no one goes unaccounted for until Operation Moorlock has its shit locked down tight.

Thursday morning, after Bobby gets all he needs from Narcotics, he and Vincent and two other detectives, Colson and Ray, knock on the front door of the GLLF and are welcomed inside by Rufus Burwell. The other two who take up the masthead, Ozzie Howard and Simeon Shepherd, are waiting in a large study that has only a few books on the shelves and smells of incense and pot.

“We’re here for the guns,” Bobby says once they’re all seated.

Rufus strokes his Vandyke like he watched too many Charlie Chan movies as a kid. “We have no guns.”

“Yeah, you do,” Bobby says. “Look, we can go back and forth and then drag you down to the station and lose your booking slips for a few days while we toss the shit out of this place and any other places you’re associated with. We can go that route. Or you can just give up the guns that Brian Shea and Marty Butler gave you and tell us why they gave them to you, and we’ll never speak of it again. You won’t do a night in jail, you won’t get charged with anything.”

Rufus, Ozzie, and Simeon exchange smug, lazy looks before Rufus turns back to Bobby. “I remain unconvinced of your sincerity or, frankly, your power.”

“Okay.” Bobby reaches into his pocket. He removes the booking photos of Rufus’s nephew, Ozzie’s girlfriend, and a yellow-eyed kid rumored to be Simeon’s boyfriend. He lays the photos down amid the coke dust on the coffee table. “Those were taken half an hour ago. We’ve got every single one of them dead to rights on narcotics trafficking. Not possession, Rufus. Not possession with intent, Ozzie. Not intent to distribute, Simeon. Straight-up, good, old-fashioned, made-in-America motherfucking trafficking. That’s a nickel each hard time before we even consider their priors. So you want to spend the rest of this decade visiting your nearest and dearest in prison? Keep telling me you got no guns.”

Rufus and the other two share a few looks.

“They’re in the basement,” Rufus says.

The line about Frank Toomey you always hear around Southie is that he’s not all that hard to find because who, in their right mind, would go looking for him? But now, with everyone on high alert for a sighting of Mary Pat, her milling about anywhere near Frank Toomey’s known hangouts or places of business is out of the question. And she has to figure if they assume she’s coming for him, visiting the street where he makes his home is out of the question too.

But his wife, Agnes, a thin woman with a birdlike face and shoulders, is quite active in ROAR, the sister group of SWAB. Restore Our Alienated Rights was formed by Louise Day Hicks, a member of the Boston School Committee, to protect the “vanishing rights of white citizens.” The only reason SWAB and ROAR haven’t folded into the same organization yet is because Carol Fitzpatrick, the leader of SWAB, and Louise Day Hicks, the leader of ROAR, hate each other, dating back to some spat they had in kindergarten. Rumor has it the source of the lifelong animosity is a broken crayon, but that’s never been confirmed. SWAB is in disarray at the moment anyway, in no small part because Mary Pat knocked out some of the members’ teeth and broke at least one nose, so the ladies of SWAB don’t look particularly “match fit,” as her grandfather used to say, for a rally. But ROAR has been planning their rally for a month. And Agnes Toomey has utilized the manpower of all her husband’s underlings in the Butler crew to get the word out. So Agnes, who’s spent her life in the shadow of her fearsome husband, is taking her place front and center at tonight’s rally. And since the Butler crew has spent endless man-hours getting the word out, it’s possible — not probable, mind you, but possible — that Frankie will show up to support the Cause.

Mary Pat uses some of the blood money Marty gave her to go shopping at Filene’s Basement. She buys a pair of large oval sunglasses that remind her of Jackie O’s. She adds a black wig and a tan kerchief to her cart. She buys a powder blue gabardine pantsuit, a white blouse, and a pair of white nursing shoes. She treats herself to some lipstick, rouge, foundation, and false eyelashes that match the black of the wig. She splurges on a new purse for her gun.

After purchasing everything, she takes it to the dressing room and transforms herself. She’s a little surprised the nursing shoes bite at her heels; the whole point of nursing shoes, she’s always heard, is that they’re comfortable and you don’t have to break them in. Other than that, her shopping spree is a grand success. She looks in the mirror of the ladies’ dressing room at Filene’s Basement, and a stranger stares back at her. It’s a bit disconcerting how easily she vanished. She takes the glasses off, and okay, there she is, if someone got up close and personal, those are Mary Pat’s blue eyes for sure. But with the glasses back on, she has to peer hard at her profile to identify herself. And straight on, forget about it — she’s another person entirely.

Last year, right before they ended, she and Ken Fen went to the movies at the Bug House on Broadway and saw a spaghetti western, My Name Is Nobody, with Henry Fonda and Terence Hill.

That’s who she is now as she looks in the mirror: nobody.

A ghost.

With a gun.

Castle Island in South Boston is not an island, though it used to be. It’s a peninsula, connected by a main road, Day Boulevard, that dead-ends in a parking lot, plus the two walking paths that lead out to the Sugar Bowl, forever tainted for Mary Pat as the site where Marty Butler used a bagful of money to tell her she had no children left walking this earth. Just as the island isn’t an island, the castle isn’t a castle; it’s a fort. Fort Independence, specifically. The current structure, built in the mid-1800s on the site of two previous forts that dated back to Pilgrim times, is made of granite.

Edgar Allan Poe was stationed here at one point. The experience is said to have inspired one of his most famous short stories, though Mary Pat has never read any Edgar Allan Poe, so she holds no opinion on the matter. She knows from her school days that throughout its history — first as a Pilgrim stronghold, then as a British fort, next as an American one, and finally, as a historic monument in the possession of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — no shots have ever been fired in a military action from its walls. But just like anything else in Southie, she thinks as she approaches, it was built to fight at the drop of a hat.

Frank has been passed out for a few minutes when she drives over the curb by Sullivan’s fast-food hut at the end of the parking lot. Frank wakes with a yelp. He’s disoriented and probably only half lucid from the blood loss. She can hear his handcuffs jingle a bit as he realizes they’re attached to his wrists. She loops down the path along the north side of the fort. It’s bumpy. Frank grunts a lot.

Bess is going to need all the help for what comes next, so Mary Pat steadily depresses the gas pedal as they go. When they reach the northwest corner of the walls, she comes fully out of her seat and stands on the pedal. Bess fishtails, and Frank falls of the backseat with a scream. Mary Pat grinds her foot into that fucking pedal and growls through gritted teeth as she wills Bess straight up the hill. Right near the top, the back wheels give, and she knows they’re not going to make it. They’re going to slide backward and probably sideways, and then they’re going to tip and flip and roll.

“We’re going out together, Frank!” she calls. Frank yells back something that sounds like “You crazy cunt, Mary Pat.” But Bess, bless her ancient old-lady heart, finds one last breath in her engine, one last surge, and the back wheels catch dirt instead of grass and the car bursts over the top of the hill.

Mary Pat is not prepared for four bald tires at full acceleration to hit damp grass on a humid summer night, and they shimmy crazily all over the field leading up to the doors of the fort. She gets control of the car just before smashing into the doors, and the moment the car comes to a full stop, Bess expires. The engine shudders to a halt, and little metallic pings and gasps rattle around under the hood, and the frame shakes and surges like it’s having a heart attack. Plumes of brown smoke shoot out from the back of the car and then spill from under the hood.

For a moment it feels like losing a pet. Mary Pat pats Bess’s side after she exits. She tries to come up with the proper words, but all that finally occurs to her is a simple “Thanks” to the only car she’s ever owned outright.

While Bess continues to pass through her death throes, Mary Pat picks the rusty old lock on the main door of the fort and pushes it open. She goes back for Frank, pulling him off the floor of the backseat by his hair.

She would have expected more rage from him. Tough-guy talk. Threats. But he’s plaintive. Surprised, it seems, by her barbarity. When he hits the ground, he cries, “Come on! Please! Please, Mary Pat, I’m holding my fucking guts in here!” She hoists him to his feet and pushes him through the door in a wild stumble, which ends almost immediately when he puts weight on his mangled leg and falls down again. She lets him lie there for a bit, grinding his head into the grass.

The interior of the fort is an oval — parade grounds and storage rooms down below. Parapets and cannon slots up above.

She drags Frank into the first room she sees. The rooms just off the main parade ground are barely rooms. They have no doors, no furniture, nothing. They feel like prison cells, but she’s pretty sure she’s heard they stored gunpowder, armament, and food back in the long-ago. She drops Frank with his back to the wall to discover he’s passed out again.

Pussy.

She removes the gun she took off him. A Colt .45 1911, almost identical to the one her uncle Kevin brought back from World War II. Uncle Kev would bring it out when she was a little girl and they went over to his apartment, and he’d let her sit on his lap with it after he’d stripped it and checked the chamber. He’d tell her he kept it for two reasons: 1) to always remind himself of the savagery man was capable of against his fellow man; and 2) in case the niggers came for them all some night.

In the end, he used the gun on himself, Christmas morning 1962.

She searches Frank. Finds a spare clip for the .45 in his pocket and adds it to her bag. She removes his coat, bunches it up, and presses it to his wound. He mumbles but doesn’t wake, and she uses the duct tape to wrap the bunched-up coat as tightly as she can around the wound.

She gets a look at his leg and almost throws up. Jesus. No wonder he can’t stand on it. The foot is pointing in the opposite direction, and the bones in his calf punch out through the skin like broken sticks. It gives her the idea, though, to pull off his remaining boot.

Where she finds a knife.

She considers it. Is this the knife? The one he drove up under her daughter’s rib cage and into her heart?

She finds him looking at her. His breathing is very shallow. “You know you’re a dead woman?”

She shrugs. “You’ll be strolling — oops, sorry, crawling — into hell before me, Frank. Bank on it.”

“Not if you get me to a hospital.” His voice is friendly. Reasonable.

She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “No car, Frank. It’s dead too.”

“Just walk down the hill to the pay phone by Sullivan’s.” A helpful smile joins the friendly voice.

“To... do what, again?”

“Call me an ambulance. Or call Marty.”

She waits a bit before answering. Long enough to watch the hope flower in his eyes. “Frank,” she says as softly as possible, “you are going to die tonight.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off.

“There is no way out for you,” she explains. “No threat, no promise, no bribe can buy you one more day of this life.”

Until that moment, he’d thought he had a chance. But now he realizes — truly grasps — he’s living in his own nightmare. Wide awake for every second of it.

He searches her eyes, and she allows him full access. Somewhere beyond the walls of the fort, a seabird cries out.

Frank Toomey’s face grows dark and cold with outrage. “No!” He jerks at the cuffs on his wrists. “You hear me, bitch? No! You will—”

She slams the heel of her hand into his forehead, rams the back of his head into the granite wall. “How is it,” she says as he tries to clear the tweeting birds from his fucking brain, “that you have any rage left in your soul for me? You took my child. You took my child, Frank. And the baby inside of her. You used her. Chewed up her life while she could have been living it and then plunged a knife up under her rib cage and into her heart? And you call yourself a human being?” She holds up the blade of his knife to his face. “Is this the knife?”

Frank stares at her with his dead eyes.

“Don’t give me your fucking eyes,” she says. “Like you’re too cool for my pain. This is my pain.” She slices his cheek.

“Jesus!”

“I said lower your fucking eyes.”

He glances at his own blood on the knife blade and then looks down at his lap.

“You’re only alive right now because I honestly want an answer — how can you raise children of your own? How can you know something of love and yet kill a child?”

“I’ve killed lots of people in my life, Mary Pat.”

“I know. But a child, Frank?”

He makes a shrugging motion, his hands cuffed against the wall. “I don’t think about it.” The blood drips off his cheek in fat drops. Plop. Plop. Plop.

“About what?”

“About any of it. Killing someone, it’s like shoveling snow — I don’t like doing it, but if it’s gotta be done, it gets done. And my kids have nothing to do with it. They’re my kids. A separate thing. Your daughter—”

“Say her name.”

“Jules,” he says. “She was a problem. She was talking shit about telling my wife she was pregnant, and she killed that kid so—”

“She didn’t kill him. She was with them when—”

He’s shaking his head. “She used the rock on him. It was her.”

She smashes her fist down on his shattered leg. The scream he lets out is like something from the animal kingdom, the screech of prey being eaten alive in the high grass. He topples to the dirt floor. Lies there with his mouth open, eyes wide with shock.

“She didn’t use the rock,” she says. “You’re just trying to make shit up. You weren’t even on the platform.”

“Why would I make that up?” he gasps. Tears fill his eyes when he says, “Please don’t hit my leg again, but why would I make that up? How’s it serve me? And of course I was on the platform.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She looks out at the parade grounds under the light of a half-moon.

“I think...” he manages as he works his way back into a sitting position, “I think she did it as a small mercy.”

She looks back at him. “What?”

“Possibly,” he says.

“Mercy from what?”

He doesn’t say anything for a bit.

“Mercy from what?”

“I told them to fry him.”

“Huh?”

“Throw him on the third rail,” he explains. “Fry him. Show the rest of the spooks in this city what happens if they come down to our part of town.” He looks at the blood slowly consuming his coat and the tape she’s wrapped around it. His skin is the blue-white of mackerel. “Jules didn’t like that. She kept saying let him go.” He snorts. “We couldn’t let him go. No. I told them, ‘Fuck that. Fry him.’ The boys, they listened — boys do that. They picked the kid up and were about to toss him between the second and third rail, and yeah, that’s when she hit him. Which ended any idea that it was a fucking accident, thank you very much. He was dead the second he hit the ground.”

She watches him steadily. Thinks it’s odd how the worst of us look no different than the best of us. Like someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s father. Loved. Capable of love. Human.

“And you couldn’t forgive her, could you?” she asks. “For the mercy?”

He hisses against the pain for a moment. “If she was weak there, where else would she be weak? In a police station? On the stand? I’m sorry, Mary Pat, but you know there’s a code down here. Live and die by it.”

She reaches into her bag, comes out with her .38, and is about to blow his fucking brains all over the granite behind him when she hears a vehicle approaching.

The car pulls right into the fort. Doors open. Headlights sweep the parade grounds.

Marty Butler calls, “Time for a reckoning, Mary Pat.”

Bobby’s let it be known throughout Division that he’d appreciate being notified should anything violent connected to the Butler crew occur in the next week or two.

It doesn’t take long.

Bobby shows up on West Ninth in front of Tombstone Frankie Toomey’s house and listens to the witnesses — a neighbor, Frank’s wife, and Frank’s eight-year-old daughter — give their statements. Both the neighbor and Agnes Toomey conclusively identify Mary Pat Fennessy as the assailant and kidnapper. The kidnapping is problematic — by all rights, they should call in the FBI immediately and hand over the case.

Another day, perhaps, Bobby decides. Not tonight.

They find blood on the sidewalk and Frank’s boot on the street. More blood there from the impact with the car and also streaks of it where Mary Pat dragged him. It takes Bobby a moment to realize what looks like a decapitated mop head lying in a puddle of blood is a wig.

Bobby calls in to headquarters from his radio, gets through to Vincent, and asks him to spread the word to anyone who has a source in Southie. Someone has to have seen a crazed blond woman driving a piece-of-shit ’59 Ford Country, racing through the night with a gutshot hit man in the backseat.

Bobby’s back at the station when a beat cop working City Point calls in that he saw a car racing up Day Boulevard about twenty minutes ago, filled with what looked to be Butler guys.

There’s only one possible destination at the end of Day Boulevard.

Bobby says, “Heading toward the castle?”

“Well, it’s a fort actually, Detective.”

Bobby closes his eyes and opens them. Takes a breath. “Heading for the fort, Officer?”

“Yes, Detective.”

“Thanks.” Bobby hangs up, speed-walks to his lieutenant’s office.

Marty calls out a second time, “The more you make us wait, the longer we’ll draw out the pain.”

Frank opens his mouth to call back, and she puts the muzzle of the .38 to his nose. Raises her eyebrows at him. He shuts his mouth.

Judging by the strength of the headlight beams, the volume of Marty’s voice, and the stray scuffing she hears as they mill around out there, she guesses they’re pretty close. Maybe fifteen yards. No more. She counted four car doors opening and closing, so that means there’s at least four of them, maybe six if they went full clown-car. But that would have been conspicuous, and Marty’s not known to be conspicuous.

Four, then.

She can hear them spreading out, footsteps of varying distance on the dirt of the parade grounds. And one set of footsteps is growing very close.

She lifts Frank to his good foot and leads him toward the doorway.

The footsteps outside the doorway stop. The owner, she assumes, can hear them.

Mary Pat steps out with her gun to Frank Toomey’s neck.

Brian Shea, caught by surprise three feet from Mary Pat, starts to raise his gun.

“No, no, no,” Mary Pat says.

Brian takes one look at Frank Toomey — the mangled leg, the bloody coat duct-taped around his bloody waist — and lowers his gun.

“Drop it to the ground,” Mary Pat says. “This is my only warning.”

He looks in her eyes. Looks in Frank’s. Drops the gun.

The other three are fanned out in a crescent about ten yards past Brian. Larry Foyle is the farthest away, taking up the left side of the crescent. Marty stands in the middle of the curvature, like one bad tooth in an ugly smile, and Weeds loiters to the far right. They all have pistols held loosely by their sides.

“You all right there, Frank?” Marty asks.

“Pretty far from that, Marty,” Frank says.

“We’ll get you patched right up.”

“I know you will, Marty. Thanks.”

“You sure about that?” Mary Pat pulls the trigger and blows a tunnel from one side of Frank Toomey’s neck to the other.

For men used to casual violence, none of them seems to have prepared for this moment. Larry and Weeds just look shocked, mouths agape.

Marty screams, “Noooooooo!” as if his heart is breaking for the first time in his life.

Brian Shea reaches for his gun.

Frank drops to the ground, his body nothing but a bag for nonfunctioning organs, his soul already halfway to hell.

She shoots Brian somewhere in the middle of his body and hears him scream.

Marty is raising his pistol when she fires right at him — Bang! Bang! Bang!

She has no idea if she hits him, only that he’s not there anymore as the other two return fire, the bullets hitting high on the walls behind her, Larry and Weeds running for cover behind the car and not taking much aim as they shoot.

She grabs the back of Brian Shea’s collar. He’s arching his back and kicking his heels against the ground. Making loud yips and yelps. She stays low, keeps his body in front of her as best she can, and pulls him back into the storage room with her. Once they’re in there, he grabs her around the knees and slams his head into her stomach. She boxes his ears, one of her hands holding that heavy .38, and he lets go.

She pushes him into the corner and she kicks the ever-living shit of him. Literally kicks. Over and over, fast and dirty and indiscriminate. She doesn’t stop until long after she knows he’s no longer a danger.

“Is that all you motherfuckers understand?” she hisses at him. “Is there nothing else?”

He curls into a ball and she gives him a minute in case he might puke, then she comes behind him and pulls him tight to her, straddling him, her legs hooked over his. She tosses aside the .38 — she emptied it out there — and reaches in her bag for Frank’s .45. She pulls it out, flicks the safety off, places the extra clip on the dirt floor beside her. There’s no way out for her, but there’s only one way in. They have to stick their heads through that doorway if they want to get to her. She keeps Brian in front and points the .45 at the doorway.

“You just fucking killed him,” Brian Shea says eventually, as if he can’t comprehend the tragedy of Tombstone Frank Toomey’s death. As if he’s just been stripped of all the illusions he’s held of a gentler world.

“Sure did.”

“And you blew my fucking hip off.”

“Well, if you make it out of here, Brian, you’ll have a bad limp and a good story.”

Outside, she can hear more scuffing sounds. Judging by the distance, she suspects they’re over by the car.

“You just fucking killed him.”

“Why are you shocked by this? You kill people all the time.”

“We,” he says. “Not you.”

Beyond the doorway, someone opens the trunk of the car.

She snakes her arm around Brian’s abdomen and puts the muzzle of the big .45 against his crotch.

“The fuck you doing?”

“Were you there when my daughter was killed?” she whispers in his ear.

“I wasn’t there,” he says wearily. “I was called after.”

She hears a thump on the ground outside, followed by the clack of metal against metal. To look, she’d have to move Brian off her and stick her head into the doorway, risk getting it blown right the fuck off, so she’ll let them do whatever they’re doing out there, thank you very much. But she admits to being curious.

“Who was there when my daughter was killed?” she asks Brian.

“Frank. Marty was in another room.”

“So what happened?”

“I heard her and Frankie got in a fight, she kept coming at him, he whipped out a knife and, ya know.”

“‘Ya know,’” she says bitterly.

“Yeah.”

She removes the gun from his crotch.

Outside, more scuffing, more metal sliding against metal, and then Marty’s voice. “Grab the tripod.”

The tripod?

Brian exhales heavily through his nostrils. She suspects it’s his attempt at managing his pain.

“’Member in sophomore year,” he starts, “when we—”

“Here we go. Memory lane.”

He chuckles. “No, no, it was funny. We rigged all those toilets in the teachers’ bathroom with—”

“Firecrackers,” she says. “Yeah, I remember.”

“We had a lot of laughs back then.”

“We sure did,” she says. “You think it’ll save me?”

He says nothing.

She nods. “So why the fuck should it save you?”

His face grows flat again. “Marty can’t let you live now. He loved Frank like a brother.”

“Like a brother?” she says.

“Yeah. What else?”

“The way he screamed when I killed Frank? You tell me.”

He gives it some thought, and his face grows panic-stricken. “You’re sick.” He spits on the wall across from him. “Fucking depraved.”

She laughs. “You flood our community with heroin. Rent women out to fuck strangers for money. You molest children. Turn other children into worse versions of you. You rob. And you kill. But I’m sick. I’m depraved. Oh, okay, Brian.”

From somewhere off in the dark, Marty calls: “Mary Pat, dear.”

“Marty, dear!” she calls back.

His chuckle carries on the light breeze. “Let my friend Brian go and we’ll let you walk out of here.”

“No, you won’t.”

For a moment the only sound is the night.

“No, I suppose we won’t.” Another chuckle. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“That was a lot of money I gave you.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you just take it and go away?”

“And do what?”

“Make a better life for yourself?”

“I had my better life. Frank destroyed it.”

“But I didn’t,” he says, all guileless innocence. “Yet you came at my whole organization.”

“Oh, Marty,” she says. “Oh, Marty.”

“What’s that, Mary Pat?”

“This is all you. All this sick fucking ugliness. You drive it and it drives you.”

“I’ve lost you — what drives me, dear?”

“Fear,” she says.

“Fear?” He hoots. “What could I be afraid of, Mary Pat?”

“Shit, Marty, that’s between you and God, but I’m pretty sure it’s a long, sad list.”

Silence follows for quite some time. She can hear the distant water lapping softly against the shore.

Marty asks, “Do you know what I did in the war, hon?”

Whatever’s coming, Mary Pat knows it’s coming soon.

“I don’t, Marty, no.”

“I was a rifleman,” he calls.

“Uh-huh...”

“More to the point,” he says, “I was a sniper.”

She hears the report of the rifle only after the bullet has punched its way through the bone and tissue of her right armpit. She pivots in an instant, a survival instinct as old as her body itself, and the next round turns Brian Shea’s face to cherry pie.

He doesn’t make a sound. He probably never realized he died.

She scrambles back into the corner of the room, and now the handguns go off, and she watches two more rounds hit Brian Shea’s body — one through the chest, the other exploding his right kneecap.

“Cease fire,” Marty calls.

Larry and Weeds stop shooting, but her ears continue to ring.

Marty calls to her again. “Do you know what you just received there, hon?”

She can’t speak. She can’t breathe. All her insides have seized up, like a large, cold hand is squeezing her heart as hard as it can.

“That was a 7.62-millimeter steel-jacketed bullet traveling twelve hundred miles an hour, Mary Pat. Once the shock and the adrenaline wear off, which should be any moment, your body will start to react to the damage. I suspect breathing will become difficult. Your blood will grow cold. It’ll be hard to speak. Or think. But I want you to lie there and try. I want you to think about all your mistakes — first and foremost of which was an utter lack of respect for my generosity and my friendship. I want you to ruminate on that,” Marty says, “because I am not going to finish you off. I’m going to sit here and enjoy a cigarette and the night air until you bleed out, you traitorous fucking cow.”

The back of Mary Pat’s throat suddenly fills with hot phlegm. She coughs it up only to realize it’s not phlegm at all. It’s blood.

Well, shit.

She’s known from the moment Marty handed her the bag of money that she would not stop until everyone involved in her daughter’s death answered for their sins. She never got to Marty himself, and that’s too bad, but it’s hard to get to the king. It’s always been hard to get to a king.

But man, did she fuck up the king’s court.

And now he’s telling her to lie here. To bleed out. To wait for the rats.

Be nice to see Dukie again (even if she’ll yearn for Ken Fen all the while). Maybe they can have a few beers and remember how much fun they used to have in the early days of their marriage.

“Hey, Marty,” she calls, alarmed by how feeble she sounds.

“Yes, hon?”

She gets to her feet and the room spins and she falls sideways into a wall. “How did you come under the impression...?” She steadies herself. Her lungs feel as if someone’s dipped them in glue.

And Noel. Won’t it be swell to see her Noel?

“What’s that?”

“Under the impression,” she repeats, “that I would ever take orders...”

She sticks tight to the wall on her left. Steps over Brian Shea and his missing face.

“I can’t hear you,” he calls.

“That I would ever take orders from a gutless... nothing like you?”

Coming home, Jules. Coming home, my baby girl.

She steps through the doorway into the half-moonlight and raises the gun. Actually gets a round off, maybe even two, before they return fire.

Desegregation of the Boston Public Schools takes effect on Thursday morning, September 12, 1974. The buses that transport black students to South Boston High School are accompanied by police escorts. The police wear riot gear. As the buses near the school, several hundred white protesters — adults and children — line the streets. Chants of “Niggers go home” give way to “Niggers suck” and “Hell, no, we won’t go.” Several protesters hold up pictures of monkeys. One brandishes a noose.

The bricks come from a construction site on West Broadway. Other people use rocks. But the bricks make the most noise and do the most damage when they hit the windows of the buses. The children on the buses discover the safest place during the pelting is under the seats, and the only reported injury is to a teenager who gets glass in her eye; she requires medical attention but doesn’t lose the eye.

Inside South Boston High, the black students are met with something they’ve known forever at their own schools but didn’t expect here — no white kids.

On the first day of school, not a single white student attends South Boston High School.

When word of this fact spreads through the demonstrators, their chant turns to “Vic-tor-y. Vic-tor-y.”

Infinite gratitude to:

My editor, Noah Eaker, who pushed me to be a more precise and more economical writer.

The earliest readers — Kary Antholis, Bradley Thomas, Richard Plepler, and David Shelley.

The later readers — Michael Koryta, Gerry Lehane, Mackenzie Pietzak, and David Robichaud.

My wife, Chisa. I wrote most of this novel in New Orleans while running a TV show during frequent COVID outbreaks and lightning strikes in the furnace of a Louisiana summer. Oh, and then a hurricane hit. Throughout it all, you gave me more love, support, and wise counsel than I could have ever dared hope for. This one’s for you, babe.