It was in Lebanon that Bubba made the connections that would create his illegal arms business in the States. Over the last decade he’d begun to branch out into often more lucrative enterprises such as fake IDs and passports, counterfeit money and name-brand appliance replicas, flawlessly bogus credit cards, permits and professional licenses. Bubba could get you a degree from Harvard in four years’ less time than it took Harvard to confer it, and he himself proudly displayed his own doctoral certificate from Cornell on the wall of his warehouse loft. In physics, no less. Not bad for a guy who’d dropped out of St. Bartholomew’s Parochial in the third grade.

He’d been downsizing his weapons operation for years, but it was that (as well as the disappearance of a few wise guys over the years) for which he was best known. Late last year, he’d been rousted, and the cops found an unregistered Tokarev 9mm taped to his wheel well. There are very few certainties in this life, but in Massachusetts, if you’re found with an unregistered fire-arm on your person, it is certain that you’re going to spend a mandatory year in jail.

Bubba’s attorney had kept him out of jail as long as he could, but the waiting was over now. Tomorrow night, by nine, Bubba had to report to Plymouth Correctional to serve out his sentence.

He didn’t mind particularly; most of his friends were there. The few left on the outside were joining him tonight at Declan’s.

Declan’s in Upham’s Corner sits amid a block of boarded-up storefronts and condemned houses on Stoughton Street directly across from a cemetery. It’s a five-minute walk from my house, but it’s a walk through the epitome of slow but certain urban decay and rot. The streets around Declan’s rise steeply toward Meeting House Hill, but the homes there always seem ready to slide in the other direction, crumble into themselves, and cascade down the hilly streets into the cemetery below, as if death is the only promise with any currency around here anymore.

We found Bubba in the back, shooting pool with Nelson Ferrare and the Twoomey brothers, Danny and Iggy. Not exactly a brain trust, and they seemed to be burning through whatever cells were left by trading shots of grain alcohol.

Nelson was Bubba’s sometime partner and knockabout pal. He was a small guy, dark and wiry, with a face that seemed set in a perpetual angry question mark. He rarely spoke, and when he did, he did so softly, as if afraid the wrong ears would hear, and there was something endearing about his shyness around women. But it wasn’t always easy feeling endearment toward a guy who’d once bitten off another guy’s nose in a barfight. And took it home as a souvenier.