“It’s the most innocuous salvo we can fire,” Mark Denton said. “If they reject it, then we can point to it later to show their refusal to grant us any concessions at all.”

“Point for who?” Adrian Melkins asked.

“The press,” Mark Denton said. “Sooner or later, this fight will be fought in the papers. I want them on our side.”

After the meeting, as the men milled by the coffee urns or passed their flasks, Danny found himself thinking of his father and then of Nathan Bishop’s.

“Nice beard,” Mark Denton said. “You grow cats in that thing?”

“Undercover work,” Danny said. He pictured Bishop’s father crawling through a collapsed mine. Pictured his son still trying to drink it away. “What do you need?”

“Huh?”

“From me,” Danny said.

Mark took a step back, appraised him. “I’ve been trying to figure out since the first time you showed up here whether you’re a plant or not.”

“Who’d plant me?”

Denton laughed. “That’s rich. Eddie McKenna’s godson, Tommy Coughlin’s son. Who’d plant you? Hilarious.”

“If I was a plant, why’d you ask for my help?”

“To see how fast you jumped at the offer. I’ll admit, you not jumping right away gave me pause. Now here you are, though, asking me how you can help out.”

“That’s right.”

“I guess it’s my turn to say I’ll think about it,” Denton said.

Eddie McKenna sometimes conducted business meetings on his roof. He lived in a Queen Anne atop Telegraph Hill in South Boston. His view—of Thomas Park, Dorchester Heights, the downtown skyline, the Fort Point Channel, and Boston Harbor—was, much like his persona, expansive. The roof was tarred and flat as sheet metal; Eddie kept a small table and two chairs out there, along with a metal shed where he stored his tools and those his wife, Mary Pat, used in the tiny garden behind their house. He was fond of saying that he had the view and he had the roof and he had the love of a good woman so he couldn’t begrudge the good Lord for forsaking him a yard.

It was, like most of the things Eddie McKenna said, as full of the truth as it was full of shit. Yes, Thomas Coughlin, had once told Danny, Eddie’s cellar was barely able to hold its fill of coal, and yes, his yard could support a tomato plant, a basil plant, and possibly a small rosebush but certainly none of the tools needed to tend them. This was of little import, however, because tools weren’t all Eddie McKenna kept in the shed.

“What else?” Danny had asked.

Thomas wagged a finger. “I’m not that drunk, boy.”

Tonight, he stood with his godfather by the shed with a glass of Irish and one of the fine cigars Eddie received monthly from a friend on the Tampa PD. The air smelled damp and smoky the way it did in heavy fog, but the skies were clear. Danny had given Eddie his report on meeting Nathan Bishop, on Bishop’s comment about what should be done to the rich, and Eddie had barely acknowledged he’d heard.