“If you’d just let me,” Bubba said, “he would have blown up about now.”

Bubba had wanted to strap some C-4 to the engine block and wire the charge to the Audi’s alarm transmitter. C-4. Take out half of Watertown, blow the Mount Auburn Club to somewhere over Rhode Island. Bubba couldn’t see why this wasn’t a good idea.

“You don’t kill a guy for trashing a woman’s car.”

“Yeah?” Bubba said. “Where’s that written?”

I have to admit he had me there.

“Plus,” Bubba said, “you know, he gets the chance he’ll rape her.”

I nodded.

“I hate rape-os,” Bubba said.

“Me, too.”

“It’d be cool if he never did it again.”

I turned in my seat. “We’re not killing him.”

Bubba shrugged.

Cody Falk closed his trunk and stood by it a moment, his strong chin tilted up as he looked at the tennis courts fronting the parking lot. He looked like he was posing for something, a portrait maybe, and with his rich, dark hair and chiseled features, his carefully sculpted torso and soft, expensive clothes, he could have easily passed for a model. He seemed aware that he was being watched, but not by us; he seemed the kind of guy who always thought he was being watched, with either admiration or envy. It was Cody Falk’s world, we were just living in it.

Cody pulled out of the parking lot and took a right, and we followed him through Watertown and around the edge of Cambridge. He took a left on Concord Street and headed into Belmont, one of the tonier of our tony suburbs.

“How come you park in a driveway and drive on a parkway?” Bubba yawned into his fist, looked out the window.

“I have no idea.”

“You said that the last time I asked you.”

“And?”

“And I just wish someone would give me a good answer. It pisses me off.”

We left the main road and followed Cody Falk into a smoke-brown neighborhood of tall oaks and chocolate Tudors, the fallen sun having left a haze of deep bronze in its wake that gave the late winter streets an autumn glow, an air of rarefied ease, inherited wealth, stained-glass private libraries full of dark teak and delicate tapestries.

“Glad we took the Porsche,” Bubba said.

“You don’t think the Crown Vic would have fit in?”

My Porsche is a ’63 Roadster. I bought the shell and little else ten years ago and spent the next five purchasing parts and restoring it. I don’t love it, per se, but I have to admit that when I’m behind the wheel, I do feel like the coolest guy in Boston. Maybe the world. Angie used to say that’s because I still have a lot of growing up to do. Angie was probably right, but then, until very recently, she drove a station wagon.