“You don’t have to.”

“No,” North said, sighing and shoving the phone away. “It’s fine.”

“I’ll call Jadon. Really, I will.”

“They’re not going to help us nose into their case. Barr practically told us to shut this down.”

“I’ll offer him sexual favors.”

North had one of those frostfire North smiles. “We want him to help us, Shaw. Not send him running off the grid.”

“I really don’t want you to do this. You always come back—”

North arched a fuzzy blond brow.

“Upset.” That was a pathetically small word for it. North always came back from these visits flattened. He always came back drunk. For a week or two after, the black eyes and bloody noses and split knuckles would be worse, a lot worse, and Shaw could only guess at how hard North had to push himself in boxing to drive the demons back into their corner.

Scooping the Ding Dong wrapper and safety pin into his hand, Shaw came around the desk and wrapped North in a hug. He worked the pin shut as he patted North’s back. “North Donald McKinney, don’t do something stupid.”

“That is definitely not my middle name,” North said, with a laugh as he pulled free of the embrace. “And I’ll be fine. I’m just going to ask my dad for another favor.”

Chapter 11

North followed Gravois to Arsenal, and Arsenal out to the dry cement wash that people stupidly called River Des Peres. He followed the river—well, its shell—south. Lindenwood Park was one of the outermost neighborhoods in the city, and it was one of the quiet neighborhoods that had survived the urban blight intact. In fact, it was thriving, one of the few working-class enclaves with low crime and clean parks and neighbors who still helped each other.

A knot was drawing tighter between North’s shoulders as he turned, and turned, and turned, until he parked on Winona and walked to the blondie-brick house where he had grown up. He didn’t bother with the front door; nobody ever used the front door, as far as North knew, except the parish priest when he’d come once. Instead, he followed the cement pavers past the chain fence, and the rusted Beware of Dog sign clapped and rattled the links when he shut the gate behind him.

Two steps up to the back door, and North jiggled the handle—no door had been locked on this house since Mary McKinney had died when North was thirteen years old—and stepped inside. He smacked face-first into a wall of cigar smoke, navigated Jasper and Jones, who yowled and darted past him, their tails flicking as they disappeared into the overgrown yard, and kicked over an ancient desk fan that wheezed and chugged and tried to push the smoke through one of the sun-porch’s windows.

“Who’s back there?”

There was always a moment of shock now when North saw his father. David McKinney, in North’s mind, was still a silver-haired fireplug of a man with a rough voice and a rough temper. Forty years on job sites, exposed to the elements, forty years of cigars, forty years of weeknight drinks at Murphy’s had all taken bites out of him. He was so much thinner now, his back and shoulders curved, his hand knobby where he clutched the oxygen tank. The cannula hung over jaundiced cheeks. He had lost most of his hair during the chemo a few years ago, and much of it hadn’t come back.