“Hell no!”

The men were moving around Danny, shifting from foot to foot.

“Would you like to walk out the back door right now and hand it over to a horde of subversives and ask them to please remember to shut the lights out at bedtime?”

“Hell no!” Shoulders jostled off one another and Danny could smell sweat and hangover breath and a strange burnt-hair odor, an acrid scent of fury and fear.

“Or,” McKenna shouted, “would you, instead, like to take this country back?”

The men were so used to saying “Hell no!” that several did so again.

McKenna cocked an eyebrow at them. “I said—Would you like to take this fucking country back?”

“Hell, yes!”

Dozens of the men attended BSC meetings alongside Danny, men who just the other night had been bemoaning the shoddy treatment they received at the hands of their department, men who’d expressed kinship for all the workers of the world in their struggle against Big Money. But all that, for the moment, was swept away by the tonic of unity and a shared purpose.

“We are going down to the Dudley Opera House,” McKenna shouted, “right now and we are going to order these subversives, these Communists and anarchists and bomb throwers, to stand the fuck down!”

The cheer that rose up was unintelligible, a collective roar of the blood.

“We are going to say, in the strictest terms, ‘Not on my watch!’” McKenna leaned over the rail, his neck extended, his jaw thrust forward. “Can you say it with me, gents?”

“Not on my watch!” the men shouted.

“Let me hear it again.”

“Not on my watch!”

“Are you with me?”

“Yes!”

“Are you frightened?”

“Hell no!”

“Are you Boston police?”

“Hell yes!”

“The finest, most respected police force in these forty-eight states?”

“Hell yes!”

McKenna stared at them, his head sweeping slowly from one side of the crowd to the other, and Danny saw no humor in his face, no ironic glint. Just certitude. McKenna let the silence build, the men shuffling from side to side, hands wiping sweat on the sides of pants and the handles of nightsticks.

“Then,” McKenna hissed, “let’s go earn our pay.”

The men turned in several directions at once. They shoved one another gleefully. They barked in one another’s faces, and then someone figured out where the exit was and they turned into the rear corridor and moved in a sea through the door. They poured out the back of the station house and up the alley, some already rapping their billy clubs off the walls and the tops of metal trash cans.

Mark Denton found Danny in the crowd and said, “Just wondering…”

“What’s that?”

“We keeping the peace,” Mark said, “or ending it?”

Danny looked at him. “Fair question.”

When they rounded the corner into Dudley Square, Louis Fraina stood on the top steps of the Opera House, speaking through a bullhorn to a crowd of a couple hundred.

“…they tell us we have the right to—”