Praise

Other Books by Dennis Lehane

Copyright

About the Publisher

When I was a kid, my father took me up on the roof of a freshly burned building.

He’d been giving me a tour of the firehouse when the call came in, and I got to ride beside him in the front seat of the fire engine, thrill to the feel of it turning corners as its back half buckled and the sirens rang and the smoke poured blue and black and thick ahead of us.

An hour after they’d doused the flames, once my hair had been ruffled by his fellow firemen a dozen times, and I’d been fed my limit of street vendor hot dogs as I sat on the curb and watched them work, my father came and took my hand and led me up the fire escape.

Oily wisps of smoke curled into our hair and caressed the brick as we climbed, and through broken windows I could see charred, gutted floors. Gaps in the ceilings rained dirty water.

I was terrified of that building, and my father had to pick me up when he stepped out on the roof.

“Patrick,” he whispered as we walked across the tar paper, “it’s okay. Don’t you see?”

I looked out and saw the city rising steel blue and yellow beyond the stretch of neighborhood. I could smell the heat and damage below me.

“Don’t you see?” my father repeated. “It’s safe here. We stopped the fire in the low floors. It can’t reach us up here. If you stop it at its base, it can’t rise.”

He smoothed my hair and kissed my cheek.

And I trembled.

Prologue

Christmas Eve
6:15 p.m.

Three days ago, on the first official night of winter, a guy I grew up with, Eddie Brewer, was one of four people shot in a convenience store. Robbery was not a motive. The shooter, James Fahey, had recently broken up with his girlfriend, Laura Stiles, who was a cashier on the four-to-twelve shift. At eleven fifteen, as Eddie Brewer filled a styrofoam cup with ice and Sprite, James Fahey walked through the door and shot Laura Stiles once in the face and twice in the heart.

Then he shot Eddie Brewer once in the head and walked down the frozen food aisle and found an elderly Vietnamese couple huddling in the dairy section. Two bullets each for them, and James Fahey decided his work was complete.

He walked out to his car, sat behind the wheel, and taped the restraining order Laura Stiles and her family had successfully filed against him to the rearview mirror. Then he tied one of Laura’s bras around his head, took a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and fired a bullet into his mouth.

James Fahey and Laura Stiles were pronounced dead at the scene. The elderly Vietnamese man died en route to Carney Hospital, his wife a few hours later. Eddie Brewer, however, lies in a coma, and while doctors say his prognosis isn’t good, they also admit his continued existence is all but miraculous.