They’d stolen the garbage truck from the BFI yard in Brighton this morning. They left it where it was and walked back to the van. Bubba looked up at the windows fronting the street. Nobody was looking out. But, even if they were, this was the North End, home of the Mafia, and one thing people knew around here from birth was no matter what they saw, they didn’t see it, Officer.

“Nice getup,” I said to Bubba as he climbed into the van.

“Yeah,” Angie said, “you look good dressed up as a garbageman.”

Bubba said, “That’s sanitation engineer to you.”

Bubba paced around the third floor of the warehouse he owned, sucking from a vodka bottle, smiling and occasionally looking over at John and Manny, who were tied tight to metal chairs, still unconscious.

The first floor of Bubba’s warehouse was gutted; the third was empty now that he’d liquidated his stock-in-trade. The second was his apartment, and it would have been more comfortable, I suppose, but he’d covered everything in quilts in anticipation of his yearlong departure, and besides, the place was mined with explosives. That’s right. Mined. Don’t ask.

“The little guy’s coming to,” Iggy Twoomey said. Iggy sat with his brother and Nelson on adjoining piles of old pallets, passing a bottle back and forth. Every now and then, one of them giggled for no apparent reason.

John opened his eyes as Bubba leaped across the floor and landed in front of him, hands on his knees like a sumo wrestler.

For a moment, I thought John would faint.

“Hi,” Bubba said.

“Hi,” John croaked.

Bubba leaned in close. “Here’s the deal, John. Is it John?”

“Yes,” John said.

“Okay. Well, John, my friends, Patrick and Angie, they’re going to ask you some questions. You understand?”

“I do. But I don’t know—”

Bubba put a finger to John’s lips. “Sssh. I’m not finished. If you don’t answer their questions, John, then my other friends? You see them over there?”

Bubba stepped aside and John got a look at the three head cases sitting back on the pallets in the shadows, swilling booze, waiting for him.

“If you don’t answer, Patrick and Angie will leave. And me and my other friends will play this game we like involving you, Manny, and a Phillips-head screwdriver.”

“A rusty one,” one of the Twoomeys giggled.

John began to convulse, and I don’t even think he was aware of it. He looked up at Bubba as if he were looking at the physical reality of a phantom that had haunted his dreams.

Bubba straddled John and brushed his hair back off his forehead. “That’s the deal, John. Okay?”

“Okay,” John said and nodded several times.