The audience, red-faced and drunk, had grown increasingly agitated the last hour or so, more and more actual fights breaking out between the scheduled ones. Danny leaned against the ropes and yawned. Mechanics Hall stank of sweat and booze. Smoke, thick and wet, curled around his arms. By all rights he should have been back in his dressing room, but he didn’t really have a dressing room, just a bench in the maintenance hallway, where they’d sent Woods from the Oh-Nine looking for him five minutes ago, told him it was time to head to the ring.

So he stood there in an empty ring waiting for Johnny Green, the buzz of the crowd growing louder, buzzier. Eight rows back, one guy hit another guy with a folding chair. The hitter was so drunk he fell on top of his victim. A cop waded in, clearing a path with his domed helmet in one hand and his pocket billy in the other.

“Why don’t you see what’s taking Green?” Danny asked Steve.

“Why don’t you climb under my kilt and pucker up?” Steve chin-gestured at the crowd. “Them’s some restless sots. Like as not to tear my kilt or scuff my brogues.”

“Heavens,” Danny said. “And you without your shine box.” He bounced his back off the ropes a few times. Stretched his neck, swiveled his hands on the wrists. “Here comes the fruit.”

Steve said, “What?” and then stepped back when a brown head of lettuce arced over the ropes and splattered in the center of the ring.

“My mistake,” Danny said. “Vegetable.”

“No matter.” Steve pointed. “The pretender appears. Just in time.”

Danny looked down the center aisle and saw Johnny Green framed by a slanted white rectangle of doorway. The crowd sensed him and turned. He came down the aisle with his trainer, a guy Danny recognized as a desk sergeant at the One-Five, but whose name escaped him. About fifteen rows back, one of Eddie McKenna’s Special Squads guys, a goon named Hamilton, grabbed a guy off his feet by his nostrils and dragged him up the aisle, the Special Squads cowboys apparently figuring all pretense could be chucked now that the final fight was about to begin.

Carl Mills, the BPD press spokesman, was calling to Steve from the other side of the ropes. Steve went to one knee to talk to him. Danny watched Johnny Green come, not liking something that floated in the guy’s eyes, something unhooked. Johnny Green saw the crowd, he saw the ring, he saw Danny—but he didn’t. Instead, he looked at everything and looked past everything at the same time. It was a look Danny had seen before, mostly on the faces of three-bottles-to-the-wind drunks or rape victims.

Steve came up behind him and put a hand on his elbow. “Mills just told me this is his third fight in twenty-four hours.”

“What? Whose?”

“Whose? Fucking Green’s. He had one last night over at the Crown in Somerville, fought another this morning down at the rail yards in Brighton, and now here he is.”