Financial District

It had been one of those weird sticky cool summer days in downtown Boston, the kind that are as hot and humid as they’re supposed to be until the breeze blows in off the water and all of a sudden it’s freezing cold and the air stinks of salt and fish and brine. Sloan hates days that start out one way and then turn into something else. They make it harder to dress for work. She had spent most of last night trying to decide what to wear to the office today. Around 3 a.m., she’d settled on the pink summer-weight St. John knit instead of the blue Tahari because Mother loves the St. John. Says it makes her look svelte. Too bad Mother won’t get to see that she’s wearing it for her big day. She tugs the skirt up around her waist, but it sags back and settles on her hip bones. This suit has never really fit, and the dark blue Tahari would have hidden the bloodstains better.

The steady churning of the helicopters grows louder. Sloan flattens against the wall and peeks out into the night from behind one of Trevor’s fancy Japanese shades. With the interior lights blazing, all she can see is her own reflection staring back. More than once she has wanted to rip those silly shades from Trevor’s windows because who has an office on the thirty-seventh floor and covers up the view? Tonight, as flimsy as they are, she is glad to have them.

Her stomach cramps hard and doubles her over. She slides to the floor, which is where Trevor lies faceup, staring at the ceiling with the same look of surprise he died with. Sloan had never seen anyone die, not before today, but she’s been to plenty of funerals. She always assumed that the way you look in the casket is the way you looked when your life ended. But she’s had time to ponder this and it’s now making sense to her. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. The light goes out and there is no time, no spark, no thought or impulse left to change the expression of absolute terror or disbelief or regret-whatever you were feeling the moment the bullet entered your brain and blew half of it out the gigantic hole in the back of your skull.

Her cell phone erupts in what had been until today her favorite Bach sonata. She taps the earpiece. “You said I had twenty minutes.”

“You do, you do. I’m not trying to rush you. I’m just sayin’ it doesn’t mean we can’t do it in less. Or that we can’t spend the twenty minutes talkin’.”

“I need that time. I need to think. I need…” It burns where the earpiece’s hook has irritated the layer of soft skin around the top of her ear. These things were never meant to be worn for five straight hours.

“Talk to me, Sloan. What’s going on up there?”

She wishes she could see her hostage negotiator, but she doesn’t know where he is. He can somehow see her, though. She’s sure of it. Thinking about him watching over her makes her feel calmer, but he has the frustrating habit of asking the same questions over and over.

“I think you know, Officer Tarbox, that what’s-”

“When did we switch back to Officer Tarbox?”

“What’s going on in here, Jimmy, is the same thing that’s been going on for the past five hours, and you promised me another half hour ten minutes ago.”

“I’ll keep my word. You know I will. Have I let you down any? Have I lied to you even once? No. I’m just checking in to see how you are. I want to know that you’re okay and that everything’s still on track. If we’re not talkin’, I don’t know what’s goin’ on.”

“You just want to know how Beck is.”

“How is Beck?”

She glances over at Cornelius Beckwith Nash III, graduate of Exeter, Yale School of Drama, and Harvard Business School; Olympic rowing team alternate and scratch golfer; lead manager on the biggest portfolio of the growth team at Crowninshield Investment Management Company. Yet as impressive as he is, she’s not sure any of those experiences have prepared him for being lashed to a chair for five hours with a telephone cord and computer cables. He’s also sitting in his own sewage, which can’t be comfortable, but it was his own fault for coming into the office to investigate instead of running the other way. He’d soiled his pants almost the second he’d walked in. Between that and Trevor’s brains on the wall, the room smells worse than any paddock she’s ever been in. But you can put up with anything, Sloan has learned, if you have to. You just can’t put up with it forever.

“Beck is fine.”

“Good. That’s good. Can I talk to him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Because she doesn’t want to hear any more about little Max and littler Ian and if she takes off Beck’s gag, all he’ll do is cry about how his sons need him and how they’ll miss him, and she already knows everything she needs to know about little Max and littler Ian. They go to Fessenden, spend summers on Nantucket eating watermelon, and will one day grow up to be strapping blond boys of privilege from the finest business schools who, given the chance, will pass her by. Just as their father had. But she doesn’t like it when Officer Jimmy is not happy with her, so she gets up from the floor keeping her knees closed and turned gracefully to the side, heads over to Beck, takes off the earpiece, and holds it in front of him.

“Make some kind of noise.”

The corners of Beck’s mouth are split and caked with blood and dried spit where his $200 Zegna tie-gag is pinching. She knows he can moan-he’s been doing it on and off for hours-but right now he seems comatose, frozen with his eyes open.

She shakes the earpiece. “Do it.” But he doesn’t and now she has to figure out how to make him. She hates the idea of touching him. The gun would be good for that. It’s too heavy to carry around, so she keeps putting it down. Right now it’s on Trevor’s desk. But Beck is reading her mind. Before she even moves, he rolls out a few dry croaks and she wonders if the back of his throat is somehow pasted to the front.

“See?” She fits the earpiece back on her ear. “He’s fine.”

“All right,” says Jimmy the officer. “That’s good. Now we need to start talkin’ about how to resolve this thing. We’re at this five…going on six hours here, and you still haven’t told me what you want.”

“I was supposed to have half an hour to think about it and you only gave me ten minutes.”

“You know we can’t let this thing drag on forever.” Only he says forevah. For all the things she likes about Jimmy Tarbox, the one thing that grates is his accent. “Let’s talk about how to get you and Beck out of there without anyone else getting hurt. Let’s figure this out together.”

Sloan’s stomach has settled, which means she can fall back into pacing the comfortable loop that runs between the conference table and the bookshelves, past the leather couch, the grandfather clock, and Beck, behind Trevor’s desk, along his wall of photos, and back to the corner where the two walls of windows meet. Trevor is still wearing his raincoat and holding the handle of his soft leather briefcase in his right hand. Falling backwards, his left arm had hooked over one of his conference table chairs and pulled it down on top of him. His right leg is bent underneath him. He looks like a chalk outline. She steps over his head to get back on course.

“I can’t come out. No one will understand what happened here.”

“I understand. I know you didn’t mean for all this to happen. You didn’t get up this mornin’ sayin’, ‘Today I’m going in to plug my boss.’”

“No.” God no. This was supposed to have been the best day of her life. After picking the St. John suit, she had fallen into bed and actually slept for two hours. Waking refreshed, she had decided to forego the planned cab ride and walk to work instead. She usually walked for the exercise, but today she had noticed things. People in soft pants and flip-flops out on the Comm. Ave. Mall with their dogs, yawning and standing by with their baggies until there was a pile to clean up. The flowers in the Public Garden. Even the accordion-playing busker on the Common sounded good to her. She’d seen him there often, sitting on the same low brick wall under a tree, squeezing out sad French ballads, collecting tips from the well-dressed army of posers and wannabes making its weary way to the Financial District for another day in the MUTUAL FUND CAPITAL OF THE WORLD! She had never given him a penny. She didn’t believe in rewarding mediocrity. Also, he smelled.

But today she had admired his work ethic. Today she had slipped a twenty into his collection cup because everything was good and everyone was kind and even living in Boston wasn’t so bad because today, after six long years in this second-rate backwater town, she would be named Managing Director. She would cross the magic line, get her ticket punched, and one day soon, get back home to New York where they would surely have to take her seriously now. Best of all, she would never again have to explain to Mother why Bo, James, and Danny had made MD before her. Sure they were two, four, and seven-and-a-half years younger, but they were also young, strapping boys from the finest business schools and the investment industry had no place for smart females-or any females-who didn’t answer phones, fetch coffee, or give blowjobs to important clients.

“Sloan?”

“What?”

“Am I talkin’ to myself here?” Officer Jimmy is making his point, but with a light touch, and she wishes she had learned how to be that way.

“You were saying it makes a difference if I hadn’t planned on shooting Trevor today.”

“Exactly. That it wasn’t premeditated. We can work with that, and we can do some things here so the situation doesn’t get worse than it is.”

Uh-oh. Here it comes. She knows what he’s about to say because he’s said it a hundred times already.

“The biggest thing is you got to let Beck come out.”

She breathes in deeply, pulling in the fetid and humid air that has filled the office ever since they turned off the air conditioners. As they always seem to, her grinding molars find the scar tissue inside her left cheek and the taste in her mouth changes. She’s bleeding.

“Why is everyone so concerned about Beck? Beck is fine. Beck is more than fine. He got promoted today. Or was it yesterday? He gets to be an MD, and do you know how long it took him? A year. I’ve been here six years and I’ve been up for MD the past four. Do you know who the biggest alpha generator around here is?”

“You?”

“For the past two years.”

“What’s an alpha?”

“Alpha generation…it’s just a way of showing who earns the most for the firm, who the best stock picker is, and it’s me. Do you know what they told me last year? ‘We can’t promote you because you’re too volatile. Everyone’s afraid of you.’ And the year before that? ‘We can’t promote you because you’re too quiet. No one ever knows what you’re thinking.’”

“Take it easy. I’m not trying to upset you. I’m trying to get you to think through this thing logically with me. People will be coming to work in a few hours. You and me, we have to be done and out of here by then.”

She takes a turn too fast and nearly bangs into the corner of Trevor’s desk. She uncrosses her arms and takes her fists from her armpits. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be strung along year after year, to get your hopes up and then get told…to have to sit and be told all the things that are wrong with you?”

“No, I don’t know what it’s like to be in your position-your work position or the one you’re in now. But I do know what it’s like to get passed over. I got passed over for this job six times.”

He’s saying all the right words. He’s saying he understands because that’s his job. But she hears it in his tone. You stupid bitch, he’s thinking. You had everything-the money, the Back Bay condo, the friggin’ horse farm in Millbrook. The shopping trips to London. And you do this? This is what you do? You stupid, spoiled rich little bitch.

She grabs the earpiece, holds it directly in front of her mouth. “I made two and a half million dollars last year. What did you make?” Hits the button to end the call, and just like that Jimmy Tarbox is out of her head.

But her head throbs. From the heat, maybe. Or dehydration. She pushes back against it with the heels of her hands against her eyes. She holds her jacket open and fans it, trying to air out. All night she’s resisted taking it off-she never takes her jacket off in public-but it has to come off. It’s too hard to breathe. What to do about Beck? She goes over and grabs the high back of his chair. It annoys her that he doesn’t flinch anymore when she approaches. She turns him to face the wall. He can stare at Trevor’s collection of golf photos.

Instead of gliding off, the jacket’s silk lining sticks to the damp insides of her elbows and she has to wrestle with it. Mother would be mortified. She settles it onto the hanger on the back of the door and stands with her arms wrapped around her. Spider-arms they used to call her, all the girls back at Monsignor Xavier Prep. She looks at Trevor’s face. What had high school been like for him back in Manchester or Sheffield or wherever he was from? Probably no one ever called him names, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know much of anything about Trevor.

Bony Sloany. That was another one. She had hated high school with every fiber in her bony body. Except for the stables. The horses and riding had saved her. These days, all that saves her is Rowan. She closes her eyes and tries to think of him. He can usually calm her down, but right now her head is too jammed.

When she opens her eyes, there is Beck. She should kill him. Put the gun to the back of his head, pull the trigger, and put him down, all without ever having to look upon his classically handsome face again. She’s already killed Trevor. Why not just do it now and let this end?

Because she hadn’t really thought it through with Trevor.

She’d caught him trying to sneak out of the building without talking to her. Not even sneaking. Just walking out as if she hadn’t been sitting in her office all day waiting for his call. As if she hadn’t skipped her daily caramel latte to cut down on trips to the bathroom. As if she hadn’t spent the long hours of the afternoon rocking back and forth at her desk, staring at the blinking cursor on her Bloomberg screen, and pleading with God not to let it happen again because she could feel it happening again. Falling and falling, waiting to hit the concrete, picking up speed with every second that ticked by with no call from Trevor. So she had prayed, asking God not to let her have anything else taken away.

And then she’d heard the vacuum cleaner, and the vacuum cleaner only ran on her floor after 7 o’clock in the evening. She’d come out of her office to find the entire floor abandoned except for the summer intern-Hailey? Hallie?-huddled over the printer. She’d moved toward Trevor’s office, slowing down as she went, not knowing if she was more afraid to find him there or gone. He was there, all right. Impossible to miss. Blustery blowhard Trevor holding forth. The voice on the other side of the conversation hadn’t been as loud, but she had recognized it. Trevor and Beck talking, voices brimming with excitement and manly good cheer. The tone had been clear, but the words were covered by the sound of the approaching vacuum. She’d thought they might be talking golf.

Her phone is singing again. She reaches for the earpiece and finds nothing but ear. Can’t remember taking the thing off. She follows the Bach and finds her cell on the conference table.

“Hello?”

“How you doing, kid?”

“Fine.”

“How’s Beck?”

“Same.”

“I have to ask you to stop hanging up on me. The bosses are getting sick of this thing. You’ve got bosses. You know what I’m sayin’, right?”

He’s skipping over the fact that her boss is a corpse in a $6,000 Brioni suit and a TAG Heuer watch and that she’s the one who made him that way. He’s acting as if she could surrender to him and then go home tonight, eat a banana for dinner, maybe walk over to Emack & Bolio’s for a scoop of fat-free vanilla yogurt in a cup. Make it last for an hour while she sits and watches the cool kids on Newbury Street smoking and laughing and texting. Then she could come in to work tomorrow, maybe wearing the dark blue Tahari, and show up at the morning meeting as if nothing had happened. Of course, Beck would be the new MD on the growth team, or maybe they would just slot him into Trevor’s job as CIO and promote some other strapping young boy from a fine business school to MD. Pick any of them-Justin, Peter, Shamir. She’d still be a senior portfolio manager. She would always be a senior portfolio manager, which was why she’d had no choice but to take the.22 out of her bag and shoot Trevor through the head.

“I have to ask you this to make sure,” Jimmy says. “Don’t get upset, but your father keeps calling from New York. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to him?”

She knows why Daddy is calling and she knows why Mother isn’t. Mother is lying perfectly still in some dark room with a damp cloth on her forehead and a few dozen milligrams of Percocet coursing through her veins. Daddy would be more worried than upset. Worried about his cash flow. “Doesn’t matter what they call you,” he always tells her, usually in front of her MD brothers, “as long as the bonuses keep rolling in.” Bo, James, and Danny were too smart or too selfish or both to keep investing in his hedge fund, which really meant tithing over some growing percentage of her annual bonus and calling it an investment so that Mother wouldn’t be humiliated by another of Daddy’s busted ventures. Eventually, Daddy had stopped asking her brothers for money. “They’re married,” he’d told her. “They have families of their own to feed.”

Sloan’s legs feel like dead weights, so heavy. She walks to the couch and crashes down. “I don’t want to talk to him, and if you make me, I swear I will hang up and you will never hear from me again.”

“I can’t make you do anything, remember? You’re in charge. We’re doing things your way.”

“Then stop asking. Tell him to stop calling.”

“Consider it done. Is there anyone you want to talk to? Who’s this Rowan?”

She smiles, envisioning Officer Jimmy thumbing quickly through a stack of background information on her that someone has dumped in his lap. “My horse.”

“Your horse?” There is shuffling and mumbling. “Okay, I see it here now. Holy smokes, he’s a beauty. Is he at your horse farm?” More shuffling. “Where is this Millbrook anyway?”

“ New York.”

“ New York is a big state and I’m sitting here without my Google.”

That’s a lie. He’s probably sitting there with every possible source of data at his disposal, but she doesn’t mind playing along with Officer Jimmy. “It’s in the eastern part of the state, close to the Connecticut border.”

“How long’s it take you to get out there?”

“Three and a half hours.”

“You just go 90 west?”

“To Route 22.”

“Yeah, I have no idea where that is.”

“If you keep going on 22 you get to Poughkeepsie.”

“If you say so. How often do you get out there?”

“Every weekend.”

“Wow. You must really like the place.”

There isn’t a word strong enough to describe how she feels out there. Millbrook is her escape. She makes the drive every Friday after work, rain or shine, happy or sad. She stays through Sunday night and drives straight to work on Monday. There is space out there. There is grass and air that smells nice. In the winter there is clean snow that stretches on forever.

And Rowan.

She closes her eyes and conjures him. She smells his barn and feels him moving under her hands as she curries his withers. The grooms always put him on the crossties to clean him, but not Sloan. She scratches all his favorite places and smiles when he curls his neck around to give her a playful nudge every time she finds another with the hard bristles. Then she rides him and feels his calm and coiled anticipation as he gathers himself for a jump, then the explosion, the thrust high into the air and that feeling of flying, just Rowan and her, her face so close that his mane brushes her cheek.

She pushes at the tears with the back of her hand and gets to her feet. “I’m turning off the lights. It’s too hot in here. I’m also putting up one of the blinds, just so you know.”

“Just so you know, I don’t control the snipers. I’m not the one in charge of the scene.”

“I don’t even have the gun. It’s on Trevor’s standing desk.” She looks around for her earpiece so she can have both hands free, hopes the battery hasn’t run down.

“What the hell is a standing desk?”

“All the CIOs have them. It’s a power thing.”

“What’s a CIO?”

“Chief Investment Officer.” She finds the earpiece on the floor near Beck’s chair and switches the call over. “But Trevor didn’t want one like everyone else, so he…actually, he had his assistant Nicole do all the research and she found this mahogany antique that was used by Charles Dickens. It cost the firm over $100,000 to have it restored and shipped from London.”

“A hundred grand? Jeez, that would have covered both my kids’ college tuition.”

The light switch is by the door. This time as she passes Trevor, she reaches down and tips the chair off of him, setting it back on its feet. She flips the lights off and feels instantly better, cooler. She rolls up one of the fancy shades and then, what the hell, does them all. She opens all the windows of the corner office to the nighttime view. It is magnificent, even at 2 o’clock in the morning. She feels as if she’s floating out over the harbor, just another of the lights moving across the water. They must be ships, those lights, and she wonders what life would be like living on a moving vessel. Logan has airport lights: red ones, green ones, bright beacons, flashing fast and slow. The runway lights look like jeweled bracelets laid out on a black velvet pillow.

The glass window feels cool, so she presses her cheek against it, the side without the earpiece. “Will the snipers shoot me?”

“Why would they shoot you while we’re still talkin’? And so long as you’re leaving Beck alone? How is Beck? Does he need any water?”

“Do you care what happens to me?”

“I’ve spent all night talkin’ to you. What do you think?”

“I think you care about what happens to Beck.”

“I do. And I care about what happens to you. That’s no bullshit. I want you to walk out of there.”

Trevor’s body is hard to see in the dark, but she knows it’s there. “Why would you care? Why would anyone care? I’m a murderer.” She’s been trying all night to feel the weight of that word and how to wear it. Mostly she feels how Mother will wear it.

“Listen, kid, I deal with all kinds in this job. I can tell the wackos and I can tell the ones that just got pushed too far. You get pushed around and pushed around until you can’t do it anymore and then something happens. It’s just a wrong-place-wrong-time-bad-chain-of-events kind of a deal, and if one thing had gone different yesterday, maybe none of this happens. Am I right?”

The sky is another sight to behold. The moon lights the clouds from behind, making them seem transparent and solid at the same time as they rush through space.

“What are the names of the islands, Jimmy?”

“What islands?”

“Isn’t there something out there called the Harbor Islands?” She’s seen them a thousand times from Trevor’s office.

“Sure, but there’s somethin’ like forty”-fawty-“of ’em out there. You never went to any of them?”

“I never did. Tell me some of the names.”

“Long Island, Sheep Island…There’s a little one called Grape. I went swimming once with my brothers at Spectacle. It used to have great beaches, but then the city used it for dumping all the Big Dig dirt, so I don’t know what it’s like now. Deer Island is where they have the shit plant.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sewage plant. One of the Brewsters has the oldest lighthouse ever. Georges Island has a Civil War fort. I went to both of those on school field trips when I was a kid. There’s a Sarah’s Island. I always remember it because that was my ma’s name.”

“Where are you from?”

“ Haverhill.”

“Where are you right now?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

She scans the building at State Street and Congress, the only one tall enough for him to be looking down at her. But it’s a huge black mirrored tower that reveals nothing. “Can I see you?”

“I’ll spend all the time in the world with you, but you gotta let Beck come out of there. And you need to come out too. What you have to keep in mind is that you’re still young and you deserve to come out of there in one piece. You need to give yourself that chance.”

Another requirement. Another trade-off. Another contingent offer. She slides down the window and sits with her back to the north, looking out over the water. “Was it supposed to rain today, Jimmy?”

“If it was supposed to, it never did.”

“It just struck me as so odd that he was wearing a raincoat because I hadn’t heard anything about rain today and the whole time we were having our meeting he never took it off.”

“Trevor?”

“I was standing outside his office listening to him talking to Beck. And then Beck came out and I wanted to go in. I assumed it was my turn, that he was just running late with his meetings. I didn’t want to look too eager, so I went to my office and packed my things and came back.”

“Make it look all casual, huh? Like you were just leaving and stopped by.”

“I was standing there trying to get up the courage to walk in, then he walked out and nearly ran me over. He wasn’t happy to see me, I could tell, but he wouldn’t show it. You know what he said? ‘Brilliant!’ As if it was a stroke of grand good luck that I was standing right there. ‘Of course I’m still here, you bastard. You told me yesterday not to leave today without seeing you because you would have good news for me, which is why I spent the entire day locked in my office afraid to go to the bathroom, because I was waiting for you to call me, you pompous, self-centered ass.’”

“You said that to him?” Officer Jimmy’s voice holds a hint of respect, and for a moment Sloan feels as if they really are buddies in a foxhole. But she hadn’t actually said any of those things to Trevor.

“We came into the office and he stood behind his desk.”

“His hundred-thousand-dollar standing desk?”

“I’ve never seen him use that. No, he stood behind his sitting desk, but he didn’t sit and I could tell he didn’t want me to sit, but I did anyway. Then he opened his desk drawer and without looking reached in and took out an envelope, and I tried as hard as I could to come up with a good reason why my bonus check was the only one left in the drawer, and why it was after 7 o’clock and the only reason he was talking to me at all was because I’d caught him trying to slip out, and why if it was good news he hadn’t already given it to me.”

“I hear you.”

“When he pushed the envelope across the desk, he gave me one of his looks where he cocks up an eyebrow. ‘I think you’ll be very pleased with that.’” She tries to capture not just his accent, but his condescending tone. “I just sat there with this pain in my stomach and a horrible sensation running up and down my back and I thought…I really thought I was just going to die sitting right there waiting for him to tell me.”

“You sound like you were in shock.”

“But he just stood there, still in his raincoat, doing one of those things where you glance at your watch without wanting someone to see that you’re doing it.”

“Prick.”

“Then he said, ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ and I said, ‘I didn’t get it, did I? I didn’t get MD.’ He looked at me and I could see what he was thinking right on his face. You bitch. You ungrateful little cunt. I know that’s what he was thinking because I’ve heard him say that word before and he wasn’t even trying to hide it, how much he hated me. How much he loathed me for not letting him go home or to the cigar bar or…wherever. That’s when I knew.”

“What did you know?”

“That I was never going to get MD.”

Sloan pushes herself up from the floor, but falls back against the window. Her skirt comes all the way up her thighs as she tries to find her balance. No food for almost two days. No water since early afternoon. The heat. It’s all starting to catch up with her and she’ll pass out soon. She finally makes it to her feet.

“No matter how good I was, no matter how much money I made for them, they were going to keep telling me I was this close and to hang in there and that next year would be my year. And then next year would come around and they’d promote someone like Beck because they like Beck and they can talk about golf with him.”

One by one, she pulls the shades down.

“What are you doing up there, Sloan. What’s going on now?”

Maybe she’s memorized this room, because how else can she walk across the office through the dark without bumping into things? She finds the gun on the standing desk.

“Talk to me, kid. I need to hear you.”

“Trevor told me he had this wired. He told me there was no way I wasn’t getting it, that this was my year. When I reminded him of this, he said, ‘Who can fathom what goes on behind those closed doors? Certainly I can’t. One answer goes in and a different answer comes out. It’s damn confounding, damn confounding, but you can’t take it personally.’”

“He’s still a prick, but what are you doing?”

“That’s when I started to think about it. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to grab him by his tie and squeeze until his head popped off, which wasn’t a real option. But I did have the gun.”

“Do you have the gun now?”

“You know how you just said that if one thing had gone differently yesterday, maybe none of this would have happened?”

“Yes.”

“It was Sunday. The thing that happened. I had to use the gun on Sunday in Millbrook. It was still in my travel bag. I forgot to take it out, so there it was.”

Officer Jimmy says nothing for a few seconds. “You didn’t hurt anybody out in Millbrook, did you?”

The tears come again. She tries to hold them back-she’s never cried in front of anyone-but it’s no use, and then she’s wailing into Officer Jimmy’s ear. “The only one who got hurt out there was me.”

She’s standing behind Beck now, looking over his shoulder at Trevor’s framed photos on the wall. There’s a light from somewhere, because she can see it clearly, the one he was most proud of: Trevor with Nick Price. The first time she’d ever heard of Nick Price was the first time she’d been in Trevor’s office, the day of her first interview. The pro golfer, he’d explained, patiently filling in the unfortunate gaps in her knowledge. “Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet” is what he’d said. Later she’d learned that it was what he said to everyone who came into his office. Price had written in bold black strokes across his own red shirt, To Trevor, Keep your head down, my friend. All the best, Nick.

Sloan couldn’t hear anything, too much noise outside, but she could see Beck struggling. He couldn’t see her, but he must have sensed her standing behind him with the gun. “He won the British Open,” Sloan says, repeating to Jimmy what Trevor had said to her at just the wrong moment, in just the wrong tone. If he had just taken off his raincoat…

“Who did?”

“I was sitting in my chair completely devastated. I couldn’t stand to look at Trevor, so I looked past him and I must have been staring at Nick Price and it occurred to me that Beck had gotten MD.” Her hands shook so much she had a hard time releasing the safety. “I didn’t get MD. Beck did. That’s what they were talking about. That’s what they were laughing about.”

“I’m hearing you, Sloan, but you have to slow things down. Do me a favor and take a breath. Please.”

“I’ve decided what I want, Jimmy.”

“Tell me.”

“I want you to mix my ashes with Rowan’s.”

Officer Jimmy is breathing harder now. She pictures him standing, maybe doing some pacing of his own. “Don’t start talkin’ like that. No one’s going to be ashes at the end of this because then I’m going to look bad and neither one of us wants that.” He tries for one of his light chuckles but it’s not like before. “Besides, you don’t want anything happening to that beautiful horse of yours.”

“He’s dead.”

For the first time in their conversation, Officer Jimmy has nothing to say. Then, finally, “What happened?”

“He spooked. He ran into a car and I had-” She tries for a breath, but it catches in her chest. “I called the vet but it took too long and he was so broken and suffering too much and I couldn’t watch him like that so I had to-” Her head pounds with the effort to get each word out, but she’s determined. No more requirements. No more contingencies. “I put him down. He was never going to be all right again. I had to put him down.” This time when she takes a breath the air goes deep, and she feels calm. Rowan could always calm her down. “His ashes are in the box on the table in my condo.”

“Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking there’s nothing left for you, right? You’re thinking there’s no way outta this, but it’s not true…”

Jimmy’s voice fades away. When did this gun get so heavy? She can barely lift it. “Do one other thing, Officer Jimmy.” She presses the barrel against her forehead, puts both thumbs on the trigger. “Please tell Trevor’s family that I’m sorry.” She closes her eyes and thinks about Rowan.

“Go! Go! Go! Go!”

The door explodes behind her. Her hands stop shaking. She holds the gun steady and pulls the trigger.

Dorchester

Bob found the dog in the trash.

It was just after Thanksgiving, the neighborhood gone quiet, hungover. After bartending at Cousin Marv’s, Bob sometimes walked the streets. He was big and lumpy and hair had been growing in unlikely places all over his body since his teens. In his twenties, he’d fought against the hair, carrying small clippers in his coat pocket and shaving twice a day. He’d also fought the weight, but during all those years of fighting, no girl who wasn’t being paid for it ever showed any interest in him. After a time, he gave up the fight. He lived alone in the house he grew up in, and when it seemed likely to swallow him with its smells and memories and dark couches, the attempts he’d made to escape it-through church socials, lodge picnics, and one horrific mixer thrown by a dating service-had only opened the wound further, left him patching it back up for weeks, cursing himself for hoping.

So he took these walks of his and, if he was lucky, sometimes he forgot people lived any other way. That night, he paused on the sidewalk, feeling the ink sky above him and the cold in his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the evening.

He was used to it. He was used to it. It was okay.

You could make a friend of it, as long as you didn’t fight it.

With his eyes closed, he heard it-a worn-out keening accompanied by distant scratching and a sharper, metallic rattling. He opened his eyes. Fifteen feet down the sidewalk, a large metal barrel with a heavy lid shook slightly under the yellow glare of the streetlight, its bottom scraping the sidewalk. He stood over it and heard that keening again, the sound of a creature that was one breath away from deciding it was too hard to take the next, and he pulled off the lid.

He had to remove some things to get to it-a toaster and five thick Yellow Pages, the oldest dating back to 2000. The dog-either a very small one or else a puppy-was down at the bottom, and it scrunched its head into its midsection when the light hit it. It exhaled a soft chug of a whimper and tightened its body even more, its eyes closed to slits. A scrawny thing. Bob could see its ribs. He could see a big crust of dried blood by its ear. No collar. It was brown with a white snout and paws that seemed far too big for its body.

It let out a sharper whimper when Bob reached down, sank his fingers into the nape of its neck, and lifted it out of its own excrement. Bob didn’t know dogs too well, but there was no mistaking this one for anything but a boxer. And definitely a puppy, the wide brown eyes opening and looking into his as he held it up before him.

Somewhere, he was sure, two people made love. A man and a woman. Entwined. Behind one of those shades, oranged with light, that looked down on the street. Bob could feel them in there, naked and blessed. And he stood out here in the cold with a near-dead dog staring back at him. The icy sidewalk glinted like new marble, and the wind was dark and gray as slush.

“What do you got there?”

Bob turned, looked up and down the sidewalk.

“I’m up here. And you’re in my trash.”

She stood on the front porch of the three-decker nearest him. She’d turned the porch light on and stood there shivering, her feet bare. She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and came back with a pack of cigarettes. She watched him as she got one going.

“I found a dog.” Bob held it up.

“A what?”

“A dog. A puppy. A boxer, I think.”

She coughed out some smoke. “Who puts a dog in a barrel?”

“Right?” he said. “It’s bleeding.” He took a step toward her stairs and she backed up.

“Who do you know that I would know?” A city girl, not about to just drop her guard around a stranger.

“I don’t know,” Bob said. “How about Francie Hedges?”

She shook her head. “You know the Sullivans?”

That wouldn’t narrow it down. Not around here. You shook a tree, a Sullivan fell out. Followed by a six-pack most times. “I know a bunch.”

This was going nowhere, the puppy looking at him, shaking worse than the girl.

“Hey,” she said, “you live in this parish?”

“Next one over. St. Theresa’s.”

“Go to church?”

“Most Sundays.”

“So you know Father Pete?”

“Pete Regan,” he said, “sure.”

She produced a cell phone. “What’s your name?”

“Bob,” he said. “Bob Saginowski.”

Bob waited as she stepped back from the light, phone to one ear, finger pressed into the other. He stared at the puppy. The puppy stared back, like, How did I get here? Bob touched its nose with his index finger. The puppy blinked its huge eyes. For a moment, Bob couldn’t recall his sins.

“Nadia,” the girl said and stepped back into the light. “Bring him up here, Bob. Pete says hi.”

Beacon Hill

After nearly twenty years at the United Nations, his wife was offered a position with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and she was thrilled. He was not. “Jeff, are you sure you’ll be all right leaving here?” she asked. What could he say? A fair-minded man would acknowledge she’d sacrificed for his career.

During the first week in town, they were invited to a cocktail party in Cambridge. “How long had you lived in New York?” inquired one of her new colleagues.

“Forty-nine years,” he replied.

“And you are…?”

“Forty-nine,” he said, scratching his two-day growth.

“Oh my goodness,” said the man’s wife, “I wonder what you’ll make of us.”

When they were leaving, the host called him Joe.

They settled over by the Museum of Science, and he explored the music clubs-the Dise and T.T. the Bear’s, mostly. He went to shows at the Orpheum, where he had opened for Jesse Colin Young long ago, and concerts at the colleges and at Berklee, roaming by himself while Maya prepared for her lectures. A few musicians he worked with in the ’80s played the Garden, and he walked over, hunched and shivering in a biting wind as he crossed the Charles. Backstage, hugs all around and “What are you up to?” “You know,” he shrugged.

He called Club Passim and asked if he could do a set or two. Thank you, no.

Soon Maya said they were better suited to Beacon Hill, near where several of her colleagues lived, and she found a condo on Beacon Street, two floors in a brownstone built in 1848, the former French consulate, reasonably priced by Manhattan standards, an investment in a down market, and with space for his music room. “Your call,” he said, since he’d made only $6,200 in royalties in the previous year.

She said that she felt revitalized by the new city, that Harvard was a miracle of intelligence and discourse. She was learning, and having fun. He noticed that she no longer asked if he wanted to go back to New York. Boston was becoming her home, while he felt he’d been exiled.

With little else to do, he soundproofed an upstairs bedroom and brought in his equipment-his upright piano, his guitars, a classic Fender bass, his old reel-to-reel tape recorder, mikes and stands, cables, and silver tape. He put baffle over the windows, his old Persian rug on the floor. His platinum album went downstairs in the living room. The label had sent one to every songwriter who contributed to the Grammy-winning soundtrack album. His tender love song was performed at weddings, and even people with little interest in pop music knew the words he’d written. This went on for years, the money rolling in. Then a comedian did a version on Letterman, mugging it up as he serenaded a pig in a straw bonnet. No one took the song seriously from then on. You couldn’t listen to the original version without thinking of the comedian, his rubbery face, squealing voice, and the damned pig. In time, his publisher dropped him. Who’d sing any tune written by a man whose music was so easily ridiculed? Fortunately, they’d set aside enough money for their son to finish at Stanford. His wife had preached frugality even in his best years: before the chaos of his sudden acclaim, they’d planned on having more children. They tried even when it seemed too late.

Watertown

Promptly at 7:19, right in the middle of Jeopardy!, the entire house went black; no electricity! and she’d had to rustle through her drawers to find candles to light up the kitchen so she could see to eat a tin of sardines with crackers and slog through half a bottle of Chardonnay. Later she had crept upstairs, weary and slightly depressed, to read peacefully a book on uncertainty she’d been trying to sink her teeth into for some time. She had not long settled into the chapter on “discomfort” when she heard the knocking on the front door downstairs, which was immediately perplexing for she did not really know anyone in the area that intimately, she’d just moved near six months now, had told no one of her whereabouts except her best friend Rhonda, and she was not expecting Rhonda, nor expecting that Rhonda would’ve disclosed her location to Fred. And yet who could it be knocking on her door at this hour-11 according to the clock on the bedside table. Who could it be?

She swung out of bed irritated as hell, padded over to the window, and flung back the lace curtains. Outside the night was impenetrable and the trees swayed drunkenly and against the frosted window, the silvery slanted rain. It had been raining all day, and now it was dark, with big winds howling through the walls and the rain battering the roof, and outside, outside was the black and sodden night. She was wearing a long see-through pink gown that in the early years of her marriage used to excite her husband greatly. But that was another story altogether. She hauled on a white duster over her gown, pulled on satin slippers, and looked around quickly for something big, something heavy, something that with just one blow would carry off the culprit. She found a screwdriver, which she slipped into her pocket, and a big heavy-duty metal flashlight she switched on at once, lighting her way downstairs to put an end to the disturbance.

Her name was Perle, she was forty-seven, and just six months ago she got up one morning and decided she was leaving her marriage. She was not leaving her children, mind you, who were away at college, she was leaving Fred, as things between them had been dead for some time, the two of them like ships passing in the night en route to some unknown destination. The truth was, early on she had lost herself, had given it over, thinking that was love, did not know where he ended and she began, and now she wanted to retrieve herself, for she had stopped living, she was just coasting now, on the sea of life. It sounded like a cliché, she knew, but that was how she saw it. She did not say a word to him the morning she left. She waited until he was gone to the hospital to visit the sick and the dying-he was an evangelical minister who believed in the laying on of hands-then she packed one suitcase full of clothes, another of her face products as she had a tendency to break out into boils, and she called the movers to collect the upright her mother had given her. Heading west, she slowly drove away from her life that morning in the white Pontiac, stopping only once to fill it with gas and to buy a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water. She rented a semi-furnished one-bedroom in Watertown, a sleepy little place that had a river running through it. She knew no one, no one knew her, and except for the tortured sonatas she played in the early mornings upon arising, she interacted only with the hairdresser where she went for a weekly rinse and set, the cashier at the bank for she was living off some CDs she’d put away for a rainy day, and the Armenian grocers that lined both sides of the main drag with their dark overstocked little shops full of Mediterranean goods.

Who is it? she cried weakly, and then she muscled up herself, for this was ridiculous. Who is it? she snapped, her voice unrecognizable even to her, and the pounding stopped at once. A face was pressed up against the glass, a dark face wet and wild with a falling-down mustache and a felt hat pulled so low she could barely see the eyes, but she could sense the desperateness in them. And when a sliver of lightning lit up the porch, she saw it was a white man slightly stooped, or maybe he was holding something, his raincoat glowing in the brief light.

It was crazy what she was about to do, she knew all the stories, knew them up and down, knew too there were white men who preyed on black women, and yet she yanked open the door and he stumbled in, wet and heavy and dank with the smell of dread.

What? she cried. What’s the matter! She ushered him into the kitchen, where he leaked water all over her floor, perhaps even blood, she could smell iron. She had the light pointed on his face, which looked gray and swollen, and on his pin-striped suit, on the untied shoes that looked slightly small for his long slim frame. She had the screwdriver poised for his heart at her side.

Help me, he gasped, leaning on the kitchen counter, and holding his arm that looked unhinged. They’ve shot me.

Blood was seeping onto her clean white Formica table and collecting into black pools.

She did not ask who had shot him; she did not want to know. She lit the candles on the counter, grabbed the light, and flew upstairs, pulling out towels and antiseptic fluids and ammonia and bandages and gauze, a pair of scissors, tweezers, pliers, and pain relievers, whatever she could find. She had a well-stocked medicine cabinet.

Downstairs he had removed the jacket, and his shirt was soaked with blood and the blood was still dripping on the floor she had just mopped that morning and he was whimpering like something half dead. Should I call an ambulance? she asked him. Should I call the police? Take you to the hospital. She tried to remember where she’d seen one.

And he turned to look at her, perhaps for the first time, and the hardness on his face disquieted her. I wouldn’t do that if I were you, he said coolly.

A fat piece of rage flew into her chest suddenly. Was he threatening her, was this fucker threatening her in her own house after she had dragged him in, that piece of shit? She let the rage hang there between them for a minute. Finally she said, Well, just so you know, mister, you can’t stay here, okay, you can’t fucking stay here. She was out of breath, winded. She could see the phone and she tried to think who she could call if this joker tried to play the fool. She’d rented the house from an older lesbian couple who were psychiatrists and who lived two houses down with their adopted son Ron, who they said had Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, but that term, she’d come to learn, was just a euphemism for crabby and rude and antisocial behavior. She could call them. Or, if she screamed, there was George the electrician across the street, she’d met him just yesterday, and there was the woman to her right whose dog was always shitting in her yard; there was the old geezer on the other side who leered at all the young women who passed his porch. Chuck. But even if she screamed, who would hear her with all this rain battering down?

Help me, he whimpered like a half-dead dog, help me clean this up, please. He was losing massive amounts of blood, she could see that now, and his face looked scared and at the same time slightly suprised. His full lips were loose and leaking.

She could just let him bleed to death, she was thinking. But she was not that kind of person. She didn’t think she could do that. Here, she said, dropping some pills into his hand that shook mightily and giving him a glass of juice. He swallowed them quickly, his Adam’s apple sliding up and down. Then she set to work, boiling water on the gas stove, helping him out of his shirt that smelled like shit and sulphite, hauling him over to the sink where she proceeded to extract the bullet with her assortment of instruments, and to bathe and dress and bandage the wound. She was good at this; she’d been an emergency room nurse until a few years ago. She was gentle and patient, as she tended to be with all things maimed. The whimpering soon subsided. She could see he was impressed, but more than that, relieved. Perhaps even grateful. He could have bled to death or the wound could’ve turned septic. It took a good thirty minutes, and during that time she felt his eyes moving up and down her chest-she was stacked-and around her neck and arms which were strong and scented with ginger and musk oil.

Have you eaten? she asked him.

He nodded wearily. And she saw that he was not a bad-looking man, his face was bony and square, his eyes big and long-lashed, and he wore his hair cut close and even to his head. The mustache made him look older than he probably was; she put him to be slightly past fifty. He was not a very big man; she could take him down, she decided, if it came to that, she was strong. Still, he was muscle-bound, as if he’d spent a lot of time in jail or at the gym. She did not think it was the latter. He wore a layer of defeat about him that reminded her of Russell.

You have family around here? she asked him. You married? She made her voice hard.

Twice, he said. Two kids. One at community college. The girl. You?

She shook her head and remembered that she was wearing her duster-and underneath that her pink gown-and she pulled the string tighter around her waist and pressed down her hair, which felt big and heavy suddenly. Did she have toothpaste on her face? Sometimes she used toothpaste to stop the swelling boils. Her fingers edged up toward her cheeks to check. She breathed in relief.

Divorced, she said when she saw that his eyes were still moving on her honey skin, and then she could’ve kicked herself. My boyfriend should be coming home about now, she added, and glanced at the clock on the wall, which had stopped at 7:19.

Got in with the wrong crowd, he said, as if he hadn’t heard that her man was coming home. And now they’re on my ass.

Coke. She said this softly. She didn’t even know why she said it. But he seemed like he’d do it big. He looked the kind who would want to impress.

He sighed without answering. Then: They think I have the money.

She nodded.

I ditched the car and then hoofed it. Fuckers shot me.

She didn’t look at him, she didn’t want to encourage him; she didn’t want details. Here was another boy playing at being a man. She knew that crowd. Did he even ask his wife about the cocaine, did he even say to her, Look, love, things piling up, I have this plan? Did he even allow her to talk him out of it? How about this, she might have said, instead? No, he had a scheme, some get-rich-quick scheme, some half-baked idea with a bunch of criminals. But everyone wants to be the hero. Russell too wanted to be a hero. She thought his mustache was ridiculous. He didn’t earn it.

She was exhausted. It was late. She had wiped up the blood from off the floor and the counter and disposed of the rags and the bullet. She was ready for him to go now so she could get back to her life. Except he didn’t look like someone ready to move. She grabbed two glasses from the cabinet and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She poured him a finger, which he sucked down at once; she poured him another and one for herself, which she sipped slowly there at the kitchen table, the rain coming down outside, the flickering candles between them, the light low and soft on their drugged and morbid faces, their shadows skittering off the walls.

She missed Fred something furious; she had not missed him all this time-but tonight suddenly she wanted his taste on her tongue, his long dark neck, his beautiful mouth with the lips shaped like a heart, his breath jagged and harsh. She imagined him picking up the phone, his surprise at first, which he would immediately cover up by hardening his voice. Then it would be like pulling teeth trying to get anything out of him, anything warm. It was close to 12:30, by this time he’d be asleep or perhaps reading still and sipping the glass of port he took at night before bed, his feet covered in socks no matter how warm the night; it helped him sleep, he said. And what would she tell him? She’d let a white man into her house. A man who could kill her. A man she did not know from Adam.

She found another candle, lit it, and gave it to him.

The bathroom is upstairs to the left, she said, you’ll find towels too, and soap.

She turned away from his eyes like coals in the night, and busied herself in the kitchen as he trailed away with the light and started heavily up the stairs. She heard the door close, heard him tinkling, heard the toilet flush, and now the tub was filling with water.

She had to call somebody, needed to call somebody. But when she picked up the phone and put it to her ear, she saw that it was dead and that the line was cut.

Motherfucker! she thundered up at him, the panic eating at her now. Where was her cell, where the fuck was her cell? She scrambled around in the dark, knocking over bottles, crashing into bins; a glass fell on the floor and shattered. Jesus Christ! The terror was at her throat. She couldn’t find her purse. She couldn’t find her keys. She couldn’t find anything at all. She turned Jack Daniel’s to her head, gulped down a mouthful, and when that didn’t produce the desired result, she swiftly swallowed several more. Fred’s favorite sermon was about evil. You had to defeat it, he said. You can never let the seeds of it flourish. It is like cancer, he liked to tell the crowd, the worst, most virulent form, it spreads like wild fire. And when she’d tried to follow his reasoning about what this evil was, it was always the unknown, it was the surprise, and it was the challenge, the unpredictability. He was a careful man, that Fred. She’d left because of her faith, or maybe her lack of it. She didn’t have conviction. She didn’t have belief. She didn’t have strong boundaries against evil, and how could she when she was always so curious about the unknown?

Suddenly there were footsteps thudding up the stairs at the front of the house. There were voices out there, men talking, there was banging on the front door again, banging on the glass, and she stood up with a start, her heart pounding again. This time the bell was ringing too, and she sat down and got up again, she heard sirens wailing outside, and whirling lights filled the room. It was the police. She ran to the door with the candle; she flung it open wide with a wild and certain joy.

Officer?

He was young and fat, his cheeks like apples.

Ma’am? He sounded surprised to see her. Maybe it was because she was black, or because she was in her duster, with her hair unsuppressed about her face. Ma’am, he said again, sorry to bother you.

Her face must’ve looked weary at this point. And she was weary.

Ma’am. He thrust a picture in her face. Ma’am, this man is very dangerous. Just escaped from Walpole. Maximum security. We’re going around the neighborhood looking for him. We have the stolen car outside, so we know he isn’t far. Have you seen anyone?

She felt faint suddenly. She remembered when they came for Russell, fifteen of them for one little nineteen-year-old boy. She must’ve rocked unsteadily, for the officer caught her under the arms.

You’re okay, ma’am?

She opened her mouth to speak, to tell them that the piece of shit they were looking for was upstairs now in her tub, naked as the day he was born, that she’d patched him up, patched up the arm nice and good and extracted the bullet, and how did he thank her, he cut the telephone wire, that’s what he did, he cut the wire. And despite herself, despite herself, she yawned loud and staggering. Then she yawned again and again, as if her brain needed an extraordinary amount of oxygen.

Sorry to wake you, ma’am. It’s just that the stolen car is right outside.

She paused to peer into the night but all she saw were the circling lights from the police cars and Russell spread-eagle, fifteen guns pointed at his head. And then, in the distance, George’s house, and faces pressed against the windows watching.

Look, ma’am, if anyone comes by asking for help, do not let him in, do you hear me? We might have shot him, and he might be bleeding. In fact, call us at once, call 911. I’m Officer Derrick. Tom Derrick. He took her hand, which was limp and slightly damp. Sorry to bother you like this. He was about to walk away and then he reconsidered.

Ma’am, we’re just going to take a look around the back; make sure you’re safe. Then we’re going to check next door. Thanks again for your time.

She watched them traipse down the stairs, must be about six of them. She watched them fan out, turning the corner to the side of the house, shining their big lights. She heard them unlock the gate and step across the garden, their shoes sluicing through mud. She could hear them banging on the door of the woman next door whose dog often shat in her yard. She could hear them rooting around for some time before they slammed back into their cars and drove away. She looked out at the everlasting falling rain and at the streak of white light zigzagging the sky from the west. She waited for the thunder-clap to blast through the heavens. And then she cleared her throat to make sure her voice box was still in operation. Hello, she cried into the night so she could hear herself. Hello! The air felt good on her skin; in fact, it was warmer outside than it was inside her house, which was freezing.

She turned back to her house, locked the door behind her, and leaned against it; a sigh sounding like a wail heaved out of her chest.

Fucking pigs!

She reeled at the sound of his voice so near her neck and ran smack into him, his chest like steel against her duster, which had flown open. She screamed then, and immediately caught herself and whacked him hard across the face with the flashlight. He cried out. She whacked again and again until he found her wrists and grabbed them. He thrust her against the wall, his breath acrid against her neck. And for a long time they stayed in that dance. She could tell he was thinking, thinking what exactly to do with her. He could not read her motives.

Cool it! he barked, his nails biting into her flesh. Don’t get crazy now, okay, bitch? Don’t get fucking crazy.

She could not see his eyes, but she imagined they were small and mean, the eyes of a man who could kill and maim people, the eyes of a man who could rape and murder and end up in maximum security.

She pulled away and moved back into the kitchen, and when she couldn’t figure out what she wanted there, she went back to the living room, back to the door where she lingered for some time watching the night, and then she headed upstairs which was damp with the steam and sweat and oils from his bath, and inside her room she bolted the door and shoved the antique dresser against it and sat down at the edge of the bed. Her face, she realized now, was wet and her hands were trembling. She sat on them and tried to calm her breathing. Her book on uncertainty stared up at her from the floor.

Fred, she moaned quietly into the night. Fred. She was afraid. Deathly afraid. But what could she do? She had to do something. She had to come up with a plan. She had to get out of there. Or get him the hell out. She saw that she was still shivering, that her hands were trembling, even her teeth were chattering. Her entire face was on fire. She grabbed a bottle from the bedside table and sprinkled some pills into her mouth. Then she stood up, blew out the candle, and crawled under the blanket, pulling and tucking it under her chin, and with her breath, she waited.

North End

A moment of your time, Anna Hoyt.”

Anna slowed and cursed to herself. She’d seen Adam Seaver as she crossed Prince Street, and for a terrible moment thought he was following her. She’d hoped to lose him amid the peddlers and shoppers at the busy market near Dock Square, but she couldn’t ignore him after he called out. His brogue was no more than a low growl, but conversations around him tended to fade and die. He never raised his voice, but he never had a problem making himself heard, even over the loudest of Boston ’s boisterous hawkers.

In fact, with anxious glances, the crowd melted back in retreat from around her. No one wanted to be between Seaver and whatever he was after.

Cowards, she thought. But her own mouth was dry as he approached.

She turned, swallowed, met his eyes, then lowered hers, hoping it looked like modesty or respect and not revulsion. His face was weathered and, in places, blurred with scars, marks of fights from which he’d walked away the winner; there was a nick above his ear where he’d had his head shaved. Seaver smiled; she could see two rows of sharp, ugly teeth like a mouthful of broken glass or like one of the bluefish the men sometimes caught in the harbor. Bluefish were so vicious they had to be clubbed when they were brought into the boat or they’d shear your finger off.

He didn’t touch her, but she flinched when he gestured to a quiet space behind the stalls. It was blustery autumn, salt air and a hint of snow to come, but a sour milk smell nearly gagged her. Dried leaves skittered over discarded rotten vegetables, or was it that even the boldest rats fled when Seaver approached?

“How are you, Mr. Seaver?” she asked. She tried to imagine that she was safely behind her bar. She felt she could manage anything with the bar between her and the rest of the world.

“Fair enough. Yourself?”

“Fine.” She wished he’d get on with it. “Thanks.” His excessive manners worried her. He’d never spoken to her before, other than to order his rum and thank her.

When he didn’t speak, Anna felt the sweat prickle along the hairline at the back of her neck. The wind blew a little colder, and the crowd and imagined safety of the market seemed remote. The upright brick structure of the Town House was impossibly far away, and the ships anchored groaning at the wharves could have been at sea.

He waited, searched her face, then looked down. “What very pretty shoes.”

“Thank you. They’re from Turner’s.” She shifted uncomfortably. She didn’t believe he was interested in her shoes, but neither did she imagine he was trying to spare her feelings by not staring at the bruises that ran up the side of her head. These were almost hidden with an artfully draped shawl, but her lip was still visibly puffy. It was too easy to trace the line from that to the black and blue marks. One mark led to the next like a constellation.

One thing always led to another.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Seaver?” she said at last. Not knowing was too much.

“I may be in a way to do something for you.”

Anna couldn’t help it: she sighed. She heard the offer five times a night.

“Nothing like that,” he said, showing that rank of teeth. “It’s your husband.”

“What about him?” Gambling debts, whores, petty theft? Another harebrained investment gone west? Her mind raced over the many ways Thomas could have offended Mr. Seaver.

“I saw him at Clark ’s law office this morning. I had business with Clark…on behalf of my employer…”

Anna barely stifled a shudder. Best to know nothing of Seaver or his employer’s business, which had brought a fortune so quickly that it could only have come from some brutal trade in West Indian contraband. Thick Thomas Hoyt was well beneath the notice of Seaver’s boss, praise God.

“…and your husband was still talking to Clark.”

“Yes?” Anna refused to reveal surprise at Thomas visiting a lawyer. He had no use or regard for the law.

“He was asking how he could sell your establishment.”

“He can’t. It’s mine,” she said before thinking.

Seaver showed no surprise at her vehemence. “Much as I thought, and exactly what Clark told him. Apparently, Hook Miller wants the place.”

“So he said last night. I thanked him, but I’m not selling. He was more than understanding.”

Seaver tilted his head. “Because he thinks the way to acquire your tavern is through your husband.”

The words went through Anna like a knife, and she understood. Her hand rose to her cheek. The beating had come only hours after Miller’s offer and her refusal. Thomas had been blind drunk, and she could barely make out what had driven him this time.

“If I sell it, how will we live? The man’s an idiot.” She was shocked to realize that she’d actually said this, that she was having a conversation, this conversation, with Seaver.

“Perhaps Thomas thinks he can weasel a big enough price from Miller.”

“The place is mine. No one can take it, not even my husband. My father said so. He showed me the papers.” Feme sole merchant were what the lawyers called her, with their fancy Latin. The documents allowed her to conduct business almost as if she was a man. At first, it was only with her father’s consent, but as she prospered-and he sickened-it was accepted that she was responsible, allowed to trade on her own. Very nearly independent, almost as good as a man, in the year of Our Lord 1745. And, though she could never say so aloud, better than most.

“I think Clark will be bound by the document,” Seaver said. “At least until someone more persuasive than Thomas comes along.”

The list of people more persuasive and smarter than her husband was lengthy.

“It’s only a piece of paper.” Seaver shrugged. “A fragile thing.”

Anna nodded, trying not to shift from one foot to another. Eventually, Hook Miller would find a way. As long as she’d known him, he always had.

Anna swallowed. “Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged. “I like to drink at your place.”

She almost believed him. “And?”

She knew what was coming, was nearly willing to pay the price that Seaver would ask. Whatever would save her property and livelihood, the modicum of security and independence she’d struggled to achieve. What were her alternatives? Sew until she was blind, or follow behind some rich bitch and carry her purse, run her errands? Turn a sailor’s whore?

“And?” she repeated.

“And.” He leered. “I want to see what you will do.”

Boston Harbor

She was waiting for me when I came back from the corner store and I stopped, giving her a quick scan. She had on a dark blue dress, black sensible shoes, and a small blue hat balanced on the back of thick brown hair. She held a small black leather purse in her hands, like she knew she was in a dangerous place and was frightened to lose it. On that last part, she was right, for it was evening and she was standing in Scollay Square, with its lights, horns, music, honky-tonks, burlesque houses, and hordes of people with sharp tastes who came here looking for trouble, and more often than not, found it.

I brushed past a group of drunk sailors in their dress blues as I got up to my corner, the sailors no doubt happy that with the war over, they didn’t have to worry about crazed kamikazes smashing into their gun turrets, burning to death out there in the Pacific. They were obviously headed to one of the nearby bars. There were other guys out there as well, though I could always identify the ones who were recently discharged vets: they moved quickly, their eyes flicking around, and whenever there was a loud horn or a backfire from a passing truck, they would freeze in place.

And then, of course, they would unfreeze. There were years of drinking and raising hell to catch up on.

I shifted my paper grocery sack from one hand to the other and approached the woman, touched the brim of my fedora with my free hand. “Are you waiting for me?” I asked.

Her face was pale and frightened, like a young mom seeing blood on her child for the very first time. “Are you Billy Sullivan?”

“Yep.”

“Yes, I’m here to see you.”

I shrugged. “Then follow me, miss.”

I moved past her and opened the wooden door that led to a small foyer, and then upstairs, the wooden steps creaking under our footfalls. At the top, a narrow hallway led off, three doors on each side, each door with a half-frame of frosted glass. Mine said, B. Sullivan, Investigations, and two of the windows down the hallway were blank. The other three announced a watchmaker, a piano teacher, and a press agent.

I unlocked the door, flicked on the light, and walked in. There was an old oak desk in the center with my chair, a Remington typewriter on a stand, and two solid filing cabinets with locks. In front of the desk were two wooden chairs, and I motioned my guest to the nearest one. A single window that hadn’t been washed since Hoover was president overlooked the square and its flickering neon lights.

“Be right back,” I said, ducking through a curtain off to the side. Beyond the curtain was a small room with a bed, radio, easy chair, table lamp, and icebox. A closed door led to a small bathroom that most days had plenty of hot water. I put a bottle of milk away, tossed the bread on a counter next to the toaster and hot plate, and returned to the office. I took off my coat and hat, and hung both on a coat rack.

The woman sat there, leaning forward a bit, like she didn’t want her back to be spoiled by whatever cooties resided in my office. She looked at me and tried to smile. “I thought all private detectives carried guns.”

I shook my head. “Like the movies? Roscoes, heaters, gats, all that nonsense? Nah, I saw enough guns the last couple of years. I don’t need one, not for what I do.”

At my desk, I uncapped my Parker pen and grabbed a legal pad. “You know my name, don’t you think you should return the favor?”

She nodded quickly. “Of course. The name is Mandy Williams…I’m from Seattle.”

I looked up. “You’re a long way from home.”

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “I know, I know…and it’s all going to sound silly, but I hope you can help me find something.”

“Something or someone?” I asked.

“Something,” she said. “Something that means the world to me.”

“Go on.”

“This is going to sound crazy, Mister Sullivan, so please…bear with me, all right?”

“Sure.”

She took a deep breath. “My fiancé, Roger Thompson, he was in the army and was stationed here, before he was shipped overseas.”

I made a few notes on the pad, kept my eye on her.

“We kept in touch, almost every day, writing letters back and forth, sending each other mementos. Photos, souvenirs, stuff like that…and he told me he kept everything I sent to him in a shoe box in his barracks. And I told him I did the same…kept everything that he sent to me.”

Now she opened her purse, took out a white tissue, which she dabbed at her eyes. “Silly, isn’t it…it’s been nearly a year…I know I’m not making sense, it’s just that Roger didn’t come back. He was killed a few months before the war was over.”

My hand tightened on the pen. “Sorry to hear that.”

“Oh, what can you do, you know? And ever since then, well, I’ve gone on, you know? Have even thought about dating again…and then…”

The tissue went back to work and I waited. So much of my professional life is waiting, waiting for a phone call, waiting for someone to show up, waiting for a bill to be paid.

She coughed and continued: “Then, last month, I got a letter from a buddy of his. Name of Greg Fleming. Said they were bunkmates here. And they shipped out together, first to France and then to the frontlines. And Greg told me that Roger said that before he left, he hid that shoe box in his barracks. He was afraid the box would get lost or spoiled if he brought it overseas with him.”

“I see,” I said, though I was practically lying. “And why do you need me? Why not go to the base and sweet talk the duty officer, and find the barracks your fiancé was staying at?”

“Because…because the place he was training at, it’s been closed since the war was over. And it’s not easy to get to.”

“Where is it?”

Another dab of the tissue. “It’s out on Boston Harbor. On one of the islands. Gallops Island. That’s where Roger was stationed.”

The place was familiar to me. “Yeah, I remember Gallops. It was used as a training facility. For cooks, radiomen, and medics. What did your man train for?”

“Radioman,” she said simply. “Later…later I found out that being a radioman was so very dangerous. You were out in the open, and German snipers liked to shoot at a radioman and the officer standing next to him…that’s, that’s what happened to Roger. There was some very fierce fighting and he was…he was…oh God, they blew his head off…”

And then she bowed and started weeping in her tissue, and I sat there, feeling like my limbs were made of cement, for I didn’t know what the hell to do. Finally I cleared my throat and said, “Sorry, miss…Look, can I get you something to drink?”

The tissue was up against her face and she shook her head. “No, no, I don’t drink.”

I pushed away from my desk. “I was thinking of something a bit less potent. I’ll be right back.”

BY STEWART O’NAN

Brookline

Sometimes Boupha honestly found them. She thought it was a gift. Her father said she wasn’t so special-anybody could. He should know because it was his game; he’d been running it since he’d been driving a cab. After a while you developed an eye, like a hunter.

“American people don’t see anything,” he said. “People like us, we have to.”

He’d taught her well, as he never tired of reminding her. Late August, when the college kids moved in, she watched the park. Winter she cruised the potholed lots behind the apartments on Jersey. In spring the long flats of Beacon beyond Kenmore were littered with the dead-worth just as much, and less trouble, besides the smell. In her trunk she kept garbage bags and rubber gloves, an aerosol can of Oust.

Each season brought a new crop, that was the genius of it. Her father was the one who’d realized the possibilities. Now that he could no longer drive, Boupha used his badge, working twelve-hour shifts to pay his hospital bills. After all his talk about keeping her eyes open, he’d been going fifty on Storrow Drive in the rain when he rear-ended a stopped tow truck. His head bent the steering wheel. The wheel could be fixed but not her father. The doctors had saved his life so he could lie in a special bed and watch TV. “Boupha!” he called when he needed anything. “Boupha!” Their apartment wasn’t large enough to escape his voice. He’d had a sly sense of humor before the accident, a con man’s easy charm. Now her smallest mistake sent him into a rage. She hated leaving him alone because sometimes, for no reason, he screamed. The upstairs neighbors had complained.

On his best days, he obsessed over money and cigarettes. He didn’t care about food or temple anymore. His friend Pranh no longer visited.

“How much you make today?” he asked when she came home, already reaching for his Newports. Every dollar, every pack was an offering to him.

Like driving, so much of the game was being in the right place. That night she wasn’t even looking. She’d dropped a silent fare at Beth Israel and stopped at the Store 24 on Beacon when the shepherd limped out of an alley directly into her path, as if it didn’t see her.

Even with the shadows she could tell it was an older male, rheumy-eyed and white around the snout. Its haunches were matted black and it was hobbling so badly that she thought it had been hit. One of her father’s cardinal rules was that a hurt animal wasn’t worth the trouble. She’d once found a cat on Park Drive with its back legs smashed, writhing and spitting. It had no collar, so it was worthless, but Boupha couldn’t leave it in the street. As she tried to slide it to the curb on a pizza box, it snarled and clawed her arm, opening three beading lines she now wore as scars. “I tell you,” her father had said, “but you’re too smart, you don’t want to listen.”

Normally strays shied away, distrustful of people, but the shepherd just waddled along ahead of her. Its back was slick with blood; it shone under the streetlights. She was almost beside her car. Thinking of the cat lashing out, she stopped.

The dog stopped and looked back as if they were going for a walk and she needed to catch up. Its tag glinted.

She had treats in the glove compartment, a leash with a muzzle. She could quote her father back to him: older dogs were worth more. The owners had more invested in them.

But the blood. The blood was a problem.

The dog turned to watch her open the passenger door, cocking his head.

“Hey. I’ve got something for you. Here you go.”

She tossed him a treat. He waddled over and nosed it, keeping his eyes on her the whole time. Finally he took the biscuit, crunching it with his head lowered.

“Good boy, yes.”

The second one she dropped halfway between them. This time he didn’t hesitate.

“That’s a good dog,” she said, and squatted down to show she was no threat. With the leash behind her back, she set a treat on the sidewalk right in front of her.

As he came closer, he hunched lower and lower until he lay down and rolled on his side, panting, his tongue flopping out of his mouth.

“It’s all right, you’re okay,” she said, and hooked the leash to the ring on his collar.

She pushed the treat toward him and he rolled and took it and got to his feet, chomping. She waited till he was finished to pet him. His tag said his name was Edgar and he belonged to the Friedmans. The phone number was a Brookline exchange, a point in her favor.

He was still panting, so she took the bowl from the trunk and gave him some water. As he lapped, she inspected his haunch, pouring the rest of the bottle over it. She rinsed most of the blood off but there wasn’t enough light to see where it was coming from.

“I know it hurts, Edgar,” she said, drying him with an old towel, but he didn’t seem to mind. He stood still for her as if he was getting a bath. Maybe he was senile, or maybe he was just good-natured.

He looked good enough. She laid a trash bag and another towel across the backseat for him and drove straight home. It took only five minutes this time of night, but in the lot, when she opened the back door, his rear was matted again and the towel was bloody.

Later she realized this was where she should have cut him loose, but she’d already made her decision, and the possibility never crossed her mind. She thought she’d saved him. He had the tag, the tag had the number. That was the game. The only thing she was worried about was her father.

She couldn’t lie to him. The dog didn’t want to go in the cage, and there was blood on her shirt, blood on her arms. She gave him his cigarettes first.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “What do I tell you, and you do this.”

“I’m going to call them,” she said, but when she did, there was no answer.

Edgar was bleeding in the cage, and she had to make dinner.

“Get it out of here,” her father said. “What are you waiting for?”

She called the Friedmans again while he was eating. She thought it was wrong. She should at least be getting a machine.

She coaxed Edgar out of the cage and lifted him into the bathtub the way she did her father, using the flexible hose to wash his haunch. As she scrubbed him, something sharp cut her palm.

She looked at the hole in her rubber glove as if it couldn’t have happened, but the blood was already welling up.

“Shit.”

“What is it?” her father called.

“Nothing.”

She held Edgar still and gingerly parted his fur. Poking from a lipped gash in his gray skin was the broken blade of a steak knife.

She needed the pliers to ease it out. He didn’t growl as she cleaned and dressed the wound. She used extra butterflies and checked on him every few minutes to make sure he wasn’t digging at it. He didn’t like the cage, so she’d put down a blanket in a corner and given him a few toys. He lay with a stuffed Tigger between his crossed paws, licking the head as if it were a pup.

“I don’t know why anyone would do that to you,” she said, stroking him. “You’re a good boy.”

“Call them again,” her father said.

She had the number right, they just weren’t home. She had their address. Tomorrow she’d swing by and see if they’d put up posters. She wondered how long it had been.

In the middle of the night she woke to her father calling for her and the dog barking. Edgar must have nosed the door open, because he was in the middle of her father’s room, his front legs braced, his fangs bared. It was like the two of them were arguing.

“Go!” Boupha shouted, clapping, and Edgar slunk away.

“Keep him away from me!” her father screamed, wild-eyed. “He tried to bite me!”

“I’ll close your door. That way you’ll be safe.”

“Don’t leave me alone!”

“I’m right here, Pa,” she said, patting his arm. “I’m not going anywhere.”

In the morning he was calmer, but he wanted the dog gone. Now, today.

Edgar’s bleeding had stopped, the blood crusted darkly around the butterflies. The way the game worked, the longer you held on to them, the greater your reward, but her father made that impossible. She called the Friedmans, and when no one answered, she clipped Edgar to his leash and took him to Brookline.

The address on his tag belonged to a leafy side street. It was the kind of neighborhood she could never afford, with neat lawns and hedges and gardens. As she slowed, searching for the number, Edgar sat up in the backseat as if he knew where they were going.

The Friedmans’ was a white frame house with baskets of geraniums hanging from the porch. Behind her, Edgar huffed and scratched at the window.

“Let me stop the car first.”

When she opened the door, he shot across the yard and up the steps, trailing his leash, a burst of energy that made her think he was feeling better. He waited, facing the doorknob, as if she had the key.

She took the leash in hand and rang the bell, then stepped back, standing straight, her chin held high. Americans liked you to look them in the eye so they knew you were telling the truth. In this case Boupha was, but out of habit she prepared the details of her story, like an actor about to take the stage. As proof, she would show the Friedmans the Band-Aid on her palm. She wouldn’t ask for a reward, would turn it down at first. Only when they insisted would she accept it, thanking them in turn for their generosity, and everyone would be happy.

After standing there a minute, Boupha pressed the doorbell again and heard it chime inside-bing-bong.

“They’re probably all out looking for you,” she said, scratching Edgar’s head.

She was about to knock when a voice called, “Can I help you?”

It came from the porch next door, from an older lady with puffy white hair and red lipstick. She wore a flowered apron over a powder-blue sweat suit. In one gloved hand, drawn like a weapon, she held a spade.

“I’m looking for the Friedmans,” Boupha said.

“I’m sorry, the Friedmans aren’t here. They’re both gone.”

“I think I found their dog.”

“Is that Edgar?” the woman said, craning as if she couldn’t see him. “I thought the police took him.”

Just the mention of them made Boupha want to excuse herself.

“Wait right there.” The woman tottered down the stairs and across the yard. “Oh God, it is Edgar.”

Boupha went right into her story. When she described finding the blade, the woman covered her mouth with both hands.

“Oh dear, you don’t know, do you? You didn’t hear what happened to them?”

“No.”

“I thought everyone knew. It was all over the TV. There were reporters tromping all over my yard. I refused to talk to them. I told them they could go dig up their dirt somewhere else. It was a tragedy, that’s all. God forgives everything, I have to believe that. The people I feel sorry for are the children.”

“What happened?”

She really didn’t want to talk about it. The woman would just give Boupha the basics-she could get them from the paper anyway.

Last Wednesday, in the middle of the night, Mr. Friedman, who was having serious health problems, took a kitchen knife and stabbed Mrs. Friedman-who was having even more serious health problems-many times. Then Mr. Friedman stabbed himself, once, in the neck (the woman gestured with the spade). He survived, she died, which the woman guessed was better than the other way around, but it was still horrible. They were both such nice people. Mrs. Friedman had been president of the Hadassah.

“I’m sorry,” Boupha said.

“It’s no mystery. He couldn’t take care of her anymore, that was all. He was afraid.”

“You said there are children.” She petted Edgar as if to show how good he was.

“They’re long gone. They wanted to get as far away as possible from this mess, and I don’t blame them. I don’t have the slightest idea how to get ahold of them. You might try the police. It’s a shame. He always had such a sweet disposition for a shepherd. I’d take him in a second if I wasn’t allergic.”

“Is there anyone around here who could?”

The woman shrugged and shook her head as if there was nothing anyone could do.

Boupha knew what her father would do. He’d leave the dog sitting on the porch and drive away. Boupha thought she could have done that too, if the woman wasn’t standing there. Maybe later she could come back and tie him to a tree in the backyard-but how long would he be there, and who would find him? She might as well drive over to Brighton and drop him off at animal control.

She thanked the woman and-finally resorting to treats again-convinced Edgar to get back in the cab. In the rearview mirror, he watched his old home go, and she wondered if, that night, he’d tried to protect Mrs. Friedman, or whether it had already been too late and he was just lucky to escape. The way he acted on the porch, she wasn’t sure he understood what had happened. Had he expected them to be there waiting for him?

He was old, and hurt, and maybe he couldn’t imagine that great of a change.

When she let him out in their parking lot, she noticed bloody pawprints on the seat. He’d probably opened the cut running across the yard.

“I tell you!” her father shouted. “You get rid of him! Boupha!”

She closed the bathroom door to tend to Edgar, but the butterflies were fine. In the other room, her father raged.

“Stop!” she finally shouted. “I can hear you. Everyone can hear you. I’ll get rid of him when he’s better. Right now he’s sick.”

“That’s why you need to get rid of him! You’re not a doctor!”

She wasn’t, and she really needed to be. That night, as she was falling asleep, Edgar got up from his corner, padded to a spot in front of her closet, and squatted. The puddling noise woke her.

“No!” she yelled. “Bad!”

Fearing diarrhea, she turned on the light and saw he was unleashing a bloody stream. He looked over at her guiltily as it gushed out of him onto the carpet.

She jumped up in just her T-shirt and dragged him into the kitchen so he would go on the linoleum, because he wasn’t done, but that only made a bigger mess.

“What’s happening?” her father shouted.

“He’s sick.”

“I tell you that already.”

Someone upstairs stomped on the floor.

“Shut up!” Boupha yelled at the ceiling.

Bomp, bomp, bomp!

“Boupha! Listen to me! Get rid of it!”

In the whole city, the only animal hospital that was open was in Brookline. She laid down towels, knowing they wouldn’t do any good. He couldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop it. Her father was right, she wasn’t a doctor, and when she parked by the sliding doors and carried the dog inside, her sopping T-shirt sticking to her skin, there was nothing the doctor could do either.

She paid them to take care of him, a week’s worth of tips.

“What I tell you?” her father said. “You don’t listen. Stupid.”

The next morning she cleaned the carpet, going over the spot with Resolve and a scrub brush. She threw out the toys and blankets and folded the cage away. She took the car to the self-wash, using the rubber gloves and Oust one last time.

She worked. She drove. She bought her father cigarettes and listened to him cough. In the night he summoned her. “Boupha!” he called. “Boupha!” And sometimes, as she made her way through the darkened kitchen, she imagined the knives piled in the silverware drawer, and wondered how strong or how weak you would have to be to use them. Not very, she thought.

Southie

Father Tom Mulcahy can’t seem to get warm. He’s wearing his bulky cardigan sweater over his flannel pajamas over his V-neck T-shirt. He’s got fleece-lined cordovan slippers on over his woolen socks and an afghan folded over his lap. The radiator is clanging and hissing in the corner, and he’s still shivering. He tugs his watch cap over his ears, wipes his runny nose with a tissue. He stares at the bed against the wall and longs for the sleep of the dead. The window rattles. The weather people expect eighteen to twenty inches from the storm. He sips his Irish whiskey, swallows the other half of the Ativan, opens Meister Eckhart, and reads how all of our suffering comes from love and affection. He slips the venomous letter into the book to mark his page. The red numerals on the alarm clock seem to float in their black box. He sees his galoshes tucked under the radiator, the shaft of the right one bent to the floor. He’s so tired he wonders if the droopy galosh might be a sign from God. Then he smiles and takes another sip of whiskey.

He lifts a corner of the curtain, peeks out on the driveway below, and sees fresh footprints leading to the elementary school. Probably Mr. O’Toole, the parish custodian, up early to clear the walk, an exercise in futility, it seems to Father Tom. The snow swirls, and the huge flakes look like black moths in the spotlight over the rectory porch. How new the world seems like this, all the clutter and debris mantled in white. He looks at the school and remembers the childhood exhilaration of snow days. Up early, radio on, listening to ’BZ, waiting for Carl De Suze to read the cancellation notices: “No school in Arlington, Belmont, and Beverly. No school, all schools, Boston…” In the years before his brother died, Tom would wake Gerard with the wicked good news, and the pair of them would pester their mom for cocoa and then snuggle under blankets on the couch and watch TV while she trudged off to work at Filene’s. They’d eat lunch watching Big Brother Bob Emery, and they’d toast President Eisenhower with their glasses of milk while Big Brother’s phonograph played “Hail to the Chief.” Maybe if Gerard had lived, if they’d taken him to the hospital before it was too late, maybe then their dad would not have lost heart and found the highway.

Cambridge

This was her, he figured. The poet. That was the first thing Marcella Ahn had said on the phone, that she was a poet. She was, in fact, the über-image of a poet, straight black hair hanging to her lower back, midnight-blue velvet pants, lace-up black boots, flouncy white Victorian blouse cinched by a thick leather belt. She was pretty in a severe way, too much makeup, lots of foundation and powder, deep claret lipstick, early thirties, maybe. Not his type. She stumbled through Café Pamplona’s small door and, spotting Toua, clomped to his table.

“Am I late? Sorry. I’m not quite awake. It’s a little early in the day for me.” It was 1:30 in the afternoon.

She ordered a double espresso and gathered her hair, the ruffled cuffs of her blouse dropping away, followed by the jangling cascade of two dozen silver bracelets on each wrist. With exquisitely lacquered fingers, silver rings on nearly every digit, she raked her hair over her shoulder and laid it over her left breast.

“Don’t you have an office? It feels a little exposed in here for this type of conversation.”

Actually, this was precisely why Toua Xiong liked the café. The Pamplona was a tiny basement place off Harvard Square, made to feel even smaller with its low ceiling, and you could hear every tick of conversation from across the room. Perfect for initial meetings with clients. It forced them to lean toward him, huddle, whisper. It didn’t lend itself to histrionics or hysterics. It inhibited weeping. Toua didn’t like weeping.

Besides, he no longer had an office. After Ana, his girlfriend, had kicked him out of their apartment, he’d been sleeping in his office, but he’d gotten behind on the rent and had been kicked out of there too. These days he was sacking out on his former AA sponsor’s couch.

“You used to be a cop, Mr. Xiong?” she asked, pronouncing it Zee-ong.

“Yeah,” he said, “until two years ago.”

“You still have friends on the force?”

“A few.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“Complicated,” Toua said. “Shee-ong. It’s Too-a Shee-ong.”

“Chinese?”

“Hmong.”

“I’m Korean myself.”

“What is it I can do for you, Ms. Ahn?”

She straightened up in her chair. “I have a tenant,” she said in a clear, unrestrained voice, not at all inhibited. “She’s renting one of my houses in Cambridgeport, and she’s on a campaign to destroy me.”

Toua nodded, accustomed to hyperbole from clients. “What’s she doing?”

“She’s trying to drive me insane. I asked her to move out. I gave her thirty days’ notice. But she’s refused.”

“You have a lease?”

“She’s a tenant at will.”

“Shouldn’t be too difficult to evict her, then.”

“You know how hard it is to evict someone in Cambridge? Talk about progressive laws.”

“It sounds like you need a lawyer, not a PI.”

“You don’t understand. Recently, she started sending me anonymous gifts. Like candy and flowers, then things like stuffed animals and scarves and hairbrushes and, you know, barrettes-almost like she has a crush on me. Then it got even creepier. She sent me lingerie.”

“How do you know it was her? Maybe you have a secret admirer.”

“Please. I have a lot of admirers, but she’s not one of them. I know it was her.”

“Well, the problem is, none of that’s against the law, or even considered threatening.”

“Exactly! You see how conniving she is? She’s diabolical!”

“Uh-huh.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Why do you think she’s doing these things?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been nothing but charitable toward her.”

“Although there was that minor thing of asking her to move out.”

“Look, something really strange has been happening. I got a high-meter-read warning from the Water Department. The bill last month was $2,500. You know what that amounts to? She’s been using almost ten thousand gallons of water a day.” She dug into her purse and produced the statement.

“This is grounds for eviction,” Toua said, looking at it. “Excessive water use.”

“That’s what I thought. But it’s not that simple. It could be contested as a faulty meter or leak or something, even though I’ve had all that checked out. She categorically denies anything’s amiss. You see what I mean? She’s trying to play with my mind. What I need is evidence. I need proof of what she’s doing in there.”

Ten thousand gallons a day. Toua couldn’t imagine. The woman had to be running open every faucet, shower, and spigot in the house 24/7, punching on the dish and clothes washers over and over, flushing the toilets ad nauseum. Or maybe experimenting with some indoor hydroponic farming, growing ganja.

“I guess I could do a little surveillance,” he said, giving the water bill back to Marcella Ahn.

“Round the clock?”

Toua laughed. “I have other cases. I have a life,” he said, though neither was true.

“I own another house on the same lot, a studio. The tenant just left. You could move in there for the duration.”

“You realize what this might cost?” he asked, trying to decide how much he could squeeze out of Marcella Ahn.

“That’s not an issue for me,” she said. “I want to know everything. I want to know every little thing she’s been doing or is planning to do, what she’s saying about the situation and me to other people, what’s going on in her life, a full profile. The more I know, the more I can protect myself. Your ad said something about computer forensics?” Business had gotten so bad, Toua had been reduced to stuffing promotional fliers into mailboxes, targeting the wealthy demographic along Brattle Street, where people could afford to act on their suspicions, infidelity being the most common. “Can you hack into her e-mail?”

“I won’t do anything illegal,” he told her.

“You won’t, or can’t?”

“Anything I get trespassing would be inadmissible in court.”

“Would it be trespassing if I gave you a key?”

“That’s a gray area.”

“As are so many things in this world, Mr. Shee-ong. I don’t care what it takes. Do whatever you have to do. I want this woman out of my life.”

Roxbury

Hey. You better snap the fuck out if it,” Nina told him, popping her fingers in a circle around his head. “She’s not your friend. She’s the en-na-mee,” Nina half sang. Didn’t think she had to emphasize the obvious to a thirty-two-year-old ex-Marine on his way to a doctorate from M.I.T. But the more she heard, the more she wondered about the terms of discharge and criteria for admission.

Isaac faced an assault charge that was aggravated, Nina discovered, by stupidity: violation of a restraining order.

“You don’t know to cross the street if you see her?”

“She was boarding the same bus.”

“What’s your point?” That’s all they had at Dudley Station, transfer point to anywhere in Boston -buses. “Take another one.”

And his stab at “resolving things”-on the crowded #1 to Cambridge -happened after the arraignment.

At the arraignment, his best friend showed up with both sets of grandparents, a trio of uncles, and a chorus of cousins.

“I didn’t know she had that many relatives in America,” the ex-corporal droned, still shocked and awed.

Nina tilted her close-cropped curls and smiled, picturing it. “You think she flew some in from Johannesburg?”

“And she was wearing her collar.” Isaac said it in a slow monotone matching the zombie gaze that was pissing Nina off. “I’ve known that girl three years and I ain’t never seen her wear her collar.”

The divinity school grad had a tongue-twisting South African name. Isaac called her Sindi for short. Nina Sojo liked Collar, and couldn’t help smiling a little when she thought of her. Collar wanted blood.

They were sitting at Nina’s dining table. A used Queen Anne repro someone had painted high-gloss white. The chairs too. Isaac drew his finger down the side of an ice-filled glass of lemonade. He examined the trail.

“Do you want me to help you find a lawyer or not?”

He winced, but kept looking at the glass.

Nina pulled back, slow and haughty. Frowning deepened the groove between her brows. It was the only line in her bare moon face. She never wore makeup offstage.

The Boston Yellow Pages was sitting there on the table. She’d been looking up lawyers. Now she stared through him, picked up the directory, and gave him her half-bare back. The crisp white top was sleeveless and gathered in a tie under her holstered breasts. The naked skin from there to her hips was the color of dark honey. The jeans gripped just below her waist. Everything looked tight. But unhike those tits, lay Nina flat, and the twins danced the slide. Shock at her body’s betrayal lent Nina Isaac’s zombie stare. She’d had to smack herself one morning while looking in the mirror. It is what it is, she finally told herself. The change had happened between cities and lovers. Vancouver and Boston. The economist and the chemical engineer. The engineer hadn’t minded: Isaac made clear the pussy was good. “Hot and wet. Just the way I like it.” But post-forty pussy stayed in the house. You didn’t date it. You could take it to Starbucks, but not to see Monster’s Ball. “You kidding?” Isaac had shook his head at the accusation. “Oh. Okay. I tell you what: let’s flip the script and do the movie. Cause it’s not like you really hittin’ that other thang too good. Know what I’m sayin’?” She had counted on the lockdown to make him want it. When he did: “Uh-uh. You don’t know how to treat me.” That was February. It was June now. Pussy was still on strike.

She pushed the phone book onto a loaded shelf, then rummaged the refrigerator to make a doggie bag for Isaac’s cousin Devon.

Two sets of tall bookcases standing back-to-back divided the kitchen area from the rest of the bright, loftlike unit. She’d moved in two days after 9/11. The space was a quality reno off Moreland in one of Roxbury’s historic districts. Unpacked boxes draped with white sheets were still ghostly roommates after nine months. The stacked cartons formed an undulating cityscape and dividing line. On one side: her Yamaha Clavinova and shelved music collection. On the other: a computer workstation near the dining table that doubled as a desk, two halogen torch lamps, and Isaac on her futon. Staring at the ceiling lights and fake-wood trusses. Or just in that direction.

Isaac asked her something she pretended not to hear.

About now, she was feeling the Newark brother who’d put those bookshelves together. Always helpful, fun over a beer, and a professional cook who had dinner waiting when she came home. And the dick was good. Just too much insecurity attached. He never finished high school. Dropped out to raise two younger brothers who did. She thought all that admirable and said so. But Chef was always comparing himself to someone like Isaac. Dr. M.I.T., the chef called him.

What came after was always the best part of sex with Isaac. Wet clinches in a hot shower. Long, Marine-hard body. Infinitesimal dick. Isaac was a cuddler. The curves of their bodies met in wet suction and held. Tight. In her mouth, his tongue was well-schooled. Between her thighs, his fingers were too. When she was light-headed in the steam, Isaac Sayif’s tenderness could feel like love.

His hand touched her shoulder.

“Did you say you knew a judge?” he repeated.

Nina had been away from Boston for decades. But she’d known a lot of law students when she was going to Berklee. Some built major practices in the city. Some occasionally stayed in touch. Unfortunately, none were criminal attorneys.

“Maybe he could recommend someone.” Isaac put his other hand on her shoulder and leaned into her back.

“Maybe she could,” Nina responded. “But what are you going to do for money?”

He said nothing and let go of her shoulders.

“Hand me that foil, please.” Nina gestured toward the refrigerator top with a paring knife. She wrapped a couple of homemade shortcakes in foil, then put a quart of strawberries she’d bought at the farmer’s market that morning in a plastic bag. Two loin lamb chops left from the night’s dinner went in too. Isaac had told her he liked lamb and she’d bought six on sale months ago. She offered him the bag. “For Devon.”

Isaac ignored it and searched her face.

Nina didn’t want to see a brother, who’d risen by straps attached to the thinnest air, get screwed. Realizing he was dazed, due in court seventy-two hours from now, and relying on the system’s counsel to keep his record clean and career on track, had put her in Rescue Mama mode. But she’d just heard two hours of stupid and took off the cape.

She put her good food back in the refrigerator.

The kitchen space was cramped. Standing-room only. Nina was a few inches shy of Isaac’s five-ten. She crossed her arms and her elbow brushed his shirt front. “This woman’s after your neck. Why?” Fill in the blanks, she told him. “How you better than Triple-A? You don’t even own a car?”

“She knew I had Devon ’s ride.”

“That’s not his car.”

“It’s his car whenever he wants it,” Isaac told her. Every syllable dripped smug, making Nina pause.

Sindi had called him around 3 in the morning back in March.

“She was stranded out in Newton,” Isaac said.

“That time of night? How come?”

He said she’d been coming back from Wellesley.

“The college?”

He nodded. “The transmission gave out.”

“And Marine to the rescue?”

“I get there and she picks a fight.”

“About?”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, that’s what I say.”

“I’m telling you. It was about nuth-in,” he insisted. “She’s all up in my face and I push her away. She starts swinging at me. I grab her wrists and push her back. The shit is crazy so I leave her there.”

“That’s it?”

“She tells the cops I assaulted her.”

“You put your hands on her. That’s all it takes.”

He froze for a few seconds, then mumbled, “Am I that kind of man?”

Nina tried to read him. “This chick apparently sets you up and you’re seriously pondering the nature of your soul?”

“She likes that,” Isaac said, the drugged gaze fading.

“Likes what?”

“Being slapped around.”

Nina let that hang a moment.

“She wanted me to smack her around in bed.”

“Did you?”

“That is so against my spirit,” he said, slowly.

Nina considered his words, his tone. Then: “What about the polygamy thing? Girlfriend down with that?” When they first met, Isaac had told Nina that he planned to move to South Africa to teach and live with multiple wives. Nina had laughed it off and said, “You must want some serious voodoo on your ass.”

He shrugged now.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Kind of,” he said.

“As long as she’s Wife Number One and you beat the crap out her daily? Nig-grow, please.” She started putting together another container of strawberries for later. She felt her sweet tooth calling.

Isaac moved toward the front door to put on his shoes.

Nina walked and talked. Fruit in one hand, paring knife in the other. “Is anything I know about you true?”

He bent to tie his shoelace. Nina hovered.

“What are you talking about?” He was holding up the wall with his shoulder and looked exhausted from the effort.

“Maybe you’re that brother from another planet,” cause she didn’t know any brothers from the ’hood who talked to the police without a lawyer.

They had called him, he repeated. They’d asked if he wanted to clear things up. “I felt it could easily be resolved. This woman is my best friend. We’re used to talking a dozen times a day.”

“You broke up and still talked a dozen times a day?”

“Yeah.”

“But she was cool with you not fucking her anymore, and you believed that?”

Nina started remembering threads of their early conversations last fall. Calling himself a free agent. Admitting, only when Nina pressed, that he did see one sister more than anyone else…

…and that Isaac had been in her car when an old boyfriend called to apologize for ancient misdeeds. It was one of those twelve-step-make-amends things. Isaac had said he thought that was nice. She’d agreed. “Especially since I stabbed him.”

“She’s my best friend,” Isaac repeated.

Nina batted the air and a bit of forgotten strawberry flew. She needed to wash the smashed fruit off her hand. “Say goodnight, Gracie,” she muttered, walking back to the kitchen.

“What?”

“Way before your time.”

“Thanks for dinner,” he called out from the doorway.

She ignored the lame farewell and wiped the fruit off the floor. The downstairs door slammed shut.

The night was cool and windy. Nina raised the slats of a shutter and watched Isaac disappear in the dark. It was a ten-minute walk to Dudley Station, past some very sketchy territory. Nina had escaped Boston in the ’80s, the years when crack was king and a Roxbury zip code meant perpetual violence. Before the plague, she’d traveled Interstate 90 from Albany to attend Berklee, and had lived at a series of Roxbury addresses with no problem. She loved the familiar swagger and grace amidst despair. Some of those blocks had crashed and resurrected. Some meant constant crossfire still. Her new address was safe in the daytime, but a game try at night without klieg-light battalions. Nina wouldn’t hazard a night stroll. But a Marine might make it.

North Quincy

At the close of his twenty-third birthday, Michael Mosely sat behind the wheel of a 1968 Chevy Bel Air, looked around the empty bank parking lot, lifted a pint of vodka, and took a good slug. He screwed the top on and put it under the passenger seat. He sat up straight, shook his head like a dog drying off, pulled the shift lever on the column toward him, dropped it into drive, and eased the nose of the car out onto Broadway. Amped and fuzzy at the same time, he cranked the window down to let in the clammy night. The windshield wipers squeaked into action, smearing greasy mist into greasy streaks. He looked to the left, and cut the wheel hard right, making the power steering squeal and moan. He toed the gas. The right rear tire dropped off the curbstone, thumping into the gutter with a hollow, rubbery sound.

He inched along beside the high curb, rolled by the bank, and braked to a quiet stop in front of the steak house. Using his left hand, he pinched the fleshy web on his right hand. The pain yanked him back to his body and sharpened his mind.

A swirl of darkness exploded through the glass front doors of the steak house, and three men wearing Red Sox caps atop blurry faces rushed at the car. Two of the men held handguns, while the man in the middle clutched a satchel like it was Ann Margaret.

TJ, carrying the bag, yanked the front passenger door open and jumped in. Paul pulled the back door open and dove in headfirst, followed by Larry, large and loud. He slammed the door closed and yelled.

“Go!”

The air in the car boiled with kinetic energy, but the scenery outside didn’t change.

“Nope,” Michael said. “Not until you say please.”

The large man tried to articulate some sort of threat, but only produced a lowing noise.

The thin guy sitting shotgun looked sad but sounded giddy. “Oh no. That’s not funny, man.”

“Time, little brother,” the guy directly behind Michael said. He put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Gotta go. Not too fast. Slick road.” Michael looked at his brother Paul in the rearview mirror, then stomped on the gas, pinning them all to their seats. The five-year-old green sedan, as anonymous as a telephone pole, zipped down Broadway toward Sullivan Square.

“Okay, ladies,” Paul said, “get down so we can take off the stockings.”

In shotgun, TJ pulled off the stocking mask as he slid out of his seat and into the foot well like liquid mercury.

“TJ,” Michael said, “be a good fella and hand me my jug while you’re down there.”

“No, you can wait, Mikey,” Paul answered from the floor in the back.

“Just need to loosen the straps a little,” Michael said.

“Fuck! Stop fuckin’ talkin’!” Larry was the size of a newborn killer whale, and now wedged in between the seats, he sounded near hysteria. “You’re s’posed to be alone if anyone fuckin’ sees you, you stupid fuckin’ fuck. Just drive the fuckin’ car, you fuck. Fuck the fuckin’ booze.”

“Aunt Betty’d slap your face,” Michael said, “if she knew how her little Larry swore-”

“Shut up about my mother!” Larry barked.

“Easy, boys. Mikey, anyone behind us?”

Michael checked the rearview. “Just the dark.”

At the Sullivan Square traffic circle Michael spun the car around the far edge, with the tires slipping, and then whipped up the crumbling street that ran along the short section of elevated road. A quarter-mile up, the car turned right at Middlesex Avenue and then broke off a fast right into the employee parking lot at the First National Stores grocery warehouse, where there must have been three hundred cars parked in the open dirt lot.

Michael slipped the Chevy Bel Air down to the row of cars against the chain-link fence and stopped at a dark ’65 Ford Falcon. The three passengers got out. Paul keyed open the trunk of the Falcon, and they tossed in their guns, hats, stockings, and the money bag. TJ pulled off his sweatshirt, dropped it in the Falcon’s trunk, and pulled out two license plates and a screwdriver. He moved to the front of the Chevy Bel Air, ducked out of sight, and popped up again before Michael had time to find his Zippo, chunk it open, and fire up his Winston. TJ paused at Michael’s window on his way to the back of the Chevy with the second license plate.

“That’s it for me,” TJ said. He was wearing an Esso gas station T-shirt with the name Thomas over the pocket. “You suck to work with. I’m not going back to jail.” Thomas Jefferson Moran walked to the back of the Chevy.

Paul knocked on the passenger window, and Michael leaned over and rolled it down.

“What’s TJ saying?” Paul asked. He leaned in the passenger side as he pulled off his warm-up pants. Underneath a bulky turtleneck sweater he wore a white shirt and a red silk tie.

“Nothing, post-game jitters. You’re all dolled up.”

“Late date.” Paul turned back and closed the trunk of the Falcon. He threw the trunk key over the fence, out into the growth of bulrushes in the marsh.

Larry got into the front passenger seat of the Chevy. He had worn a Patriots jersey during the robbery, now he had on a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

“Rock on, man!” Michael said. He held his hand up for a high five.

Larry sneered. “One of these days, Michael.”

Paul and TJ got back in the Chevy and Michael dropped each of the three at their own cars, which they had driven to the lot earlier that night.

Michael parked the Chevy, fished the vodka out, and took a drink. He got a rag from his back pocket, soaked it with vodka, and wiped down all the surfaces in the car that anyone might have touched. Then he tossed the Chevy key over the fence. He drank the last of the vodka, dropped back, and tried to spiral the bottle over, hoping to reach the oily creek, but it fell short and smashed into something solid, silencing the marsh.

He walked up two rows to his car, a black GTO. He put his key in the door, and felt the top end of his throat stretch itself wide. He turned his head and threw up beside the car. Wiping his mouth with the rag, he muttered, “Fuckin’ egg salad.”

He placed his feet carefully around the puddle, opened the door, and dropped backwards onto the driver’s seat, pulling his feet in.

When he was done shaking, he woke the Goat and drove it to North Quincy.