“Got another meeting tonight,” Steve said. “Big doings.”

“BSC meeting?” Danny shook his head. “‘Big doings.’ You’re serious?”

Steve twirled his pocket billy on its leather strap. “You ever think if you showed up to union meetings, maybe you’d be bumped to Detective Division by now, we’d all have our raise, and Johnny Green’d still have his wife and kids?”

Danny peered up at a sky with glare but no visible sun. “It’s a social club.”

“It’s a union,” Steve said.

“Then why’s it called the Boston Social Club?” Danny yawned up at the white leather sky.

“A fine point. The point of the matter, in fact. We’re trying to change that.”

“Change it all you want and it’s still just a union in name. We’re cops, Steve—we’ve got no rights. The BSC? Just a boys’ club, a fucking tree house.”

“We’re setting up a meeting with Gompers, Dan. The AF of L.”

Danny stopped. If he told his father or Eddie McKenna about this, he’d get a gold shield and be bumped up out of patrol the day after tomorrow.

“The AF of L is a national union. You crazy? They’ll never let cops join.”

“Who? The mayor? The governor? O’Meara?”

“O’Meara,” Danny said. “He’s the only one that matters.”

Police Commissioner Stephen O’Meara’s bedrock belief was that a policeman’s post was the highest of all civic posts and therefore demanded both the outward and inward reflection of honor. When he’d taken over the BPD, each precinct had been a fiefdom, the private reserve of whichever ward boss or city councilman got his snout into the trough faster and deeper than his competition. The men looked like shit, dressed like shit, and didn’t give shit.

O’Meara purged a lot of that. Not all of it, Lord knows, but he’d fired some deadwood and worked to indict the most egregious of the ward bosses and councilmen. He’d set the rotted system back on its heels and then pushed, in hopes it would fall over. Didn’t happen, but it teetered on occasion. Enough so he could send a good number of the police back out into their communities to get to know the people they served. And that’s what you did in O’Meara’s BPD if you were a smart patrolman (with limited contacts)—you served the people. Not the ward bosses or the midget czars with the gold bars. You looked like a cop and you carried yourself like a cop and you stepped aside for no man and you never bent the basic principle: you were the law.

But even O’Meara, apparently, couldn’t bend City Hall to his will in the latest fight for a raise. They hadn’t had one in six years, and that raise, pushed through by O’Meara himself, had come after eight years of stalemate. So Danny and all the other men on the force were paid the fair wage of 1905. And in his last meeting with the BSC, the mayor had said that was the best they could look forward to for a while.