“Gimpy?” he said. “That’s what we’re calling ol’ Curtis these days. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?” He stretched back in the chair.

“Tragic,” I said.

“It’s too bad,” he said. “Don’t take it too lightly, though. Curtis’s friends might come looking for you and they are particularly heinous motherfuckers.”

“How big are the Raven Saints?”

“Not big by L.A. standards,” he said, “but this ain’t L.A. I’d say they got seventy-five hardcore and another sixty or so peripheral.”

“So what you’re saying is I got a hundred thirty-five black guys to be wary of.”

He put his glass down on the desk. “Don’t turn this into a ‘black thing,’ Kenzie.”

“My friends call me Patrick.”

“I’m not your friend when I hear shit like that come out of your mouth.”

I was angry and damned tired, and I wanted someone to blame. My emotions were running hard along open nerve endings that stopped just short of breaking my skin, and I was feeling stubborn. I said, “Tell me about a white gang that runs around with Uzis and I’ll be afraid of white people too, Richie. But until then ”

Richie banged his fist down on the desk. “The fuck you call the Mafia? Huh?” He stood up and the veins in his neck were thick, poking out as hard as I figured mine were. “The Westies in New York,” he said, “those nice boys, Irish like yourself, who specialized in murder and torture and cowboy bullshit. What color were they? You going to sit there and tell me the brothers invented murder too? You going to try and pass that shit off on me, Kenzie?”

Our voices were loud in the tiny room, hoarse, slipping under the cheap walls and reverberating. I tried to talk calmly, but my voice didn’t come out that way; it sounded harsh and slightly alien. I said, “Richie, one kid gets hit by a car because a bunch of retard Hitler Youth chase him into the road in Howard Beach ”

“Don’t you even bring up Howard Beach.”

“ and it gets treated like a national tragedy. Which it is. But,” I said, “a white kid in Fenway gets stabbed eighteen times by black kids, and no one says a goddamn thing. ‘Racial’ never comes into it. It’s off the front page the next day, and it’s filed as homicide. No racial incident. You tell me, Richie, what the fuck is that?”