I pushed John Byrne to his knees by the glass and wiped the glass with my sleeve. It didn’t help much; it was like looking out from a sauna through ten sheets of plastic wrap. Beacon Street lay before me like an impressionist painting, foggy forms I took for people moving past in the liquid haze, the white streetlights and yellow gas lamps making everything worse somehow, as if I were staring at a picture that had been overexposed. Across the street, the trees in the Public Garden rose in clumps, indistinguishable from one another. I couldn’t be sure if I was seeing things or not, but it seemed that several smaller blue lights flashed repeatedly through the trees. There was no way to know what was out there. But I couldn’t stay here any longer. I could hear voices growing louder in the ballroom, and any minute someone would risk opening the door onto the staircase.

Beacon Street, in the early evening just after rush hour, had to be semicrowded. Even if armed clones of Manny waited out front, it wasn’t like they’d shoot me in front of witnesses. Then again, I didn’t know that for sure. Maybe they were Shiite Muslims, and shooting me was the quickest route to Allah.

“The hell with it,” I said and pulled John to his feet. “Let’s go.”

“Shit,” he said.

I took a few deep breaths through my mouth. “Open the door, John.”

His hand hovered over the doorknob. Then he dropped it and wiped it on his pant leg.

“Take the other hand off your head, John. Just don’t try anything stupid.”

He did, then looked at the doorknob again.

Upstairs, something heavy fell to the floor.

“Any time you’re ready, John.”

“Yeah.”

“Tonight, for instance,” I said.

“Yeah.” He wiped his hand on his pants again.

I sighed and reached around him and yanked open the door myself, dug my gun into his lower back as we came out on the staircase.

And came face-to-face with a cop.

He’d been running past the building when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He stopped, pivoted, and looked up at us.

His right hand went to his hip, just over his gun, and he peered up at John Byrne’s bloody face.

Up the block at the corner of Arlington, several patrol cars had pulled up in front of the corporate offices of Grief Release, their blue and white lights streaking through the trees in the Garden, bouncing off the red brick buildings just past the Cheers bar.