“You goddamn got that right,” the crying cop said. “You can make goddamn fucking book on that.”

Danny looked away from Stoddard’s body. Ambulances rolled up Dudley Street. Across the square, a cop rose from the pavement on wobbly feet and wiped at the blood in his eyes and then tipped over again. Danny saw a cop empty a metal trash can on a prone Lett, then drop the can on the body for good measure. It was the cream-colored suit that got Danny moving. He walked toward them as the cop delivered a kick so hard it lifted his other foot off the ground.

Nathan Bishop’s face looked like a crushed plum. His teeth littered the ground near his chin. One ear was torn halfway off. The fingers of both hands pointed in all the wrong directions.

Danny put his hand on the shoulder of the cop. It was Henry Temple, a Special Squads goon.

“I think you got him,” Danny said.

Temple looked at Danny for a bit like he was searching for an apt response. Then he shrugged and walked off.

A pair of paramedics were passing and Danny said, “We got one here.”

One of the paramedics grimaced. “He ain’t wearing a badge? He’ll be lucky we get to him by sundown.” They walked off.

Nathan Bishop opened his left eye. It was startlingly white in the ruin of his face.

Danny opened his mouth. He wanted to say something. He wanted to say, I’m sorry. He wanted to say, Forgive me. Instead, he said nothing.

Nathan’s lips were sectioned into strips, but behind them spread a bitter smile.

“My name’s Nathan Bishop,” he slurred. “What’s yours, eh?”

He closed his eye again, and Danny lowered his head.

Luther had an hour for lunch, and he hustled back across the Dover Street Bridge and over to the Giddreauxs’ house on St. Botolph, which, these days, was the operating headquarters of the Boston NAACP. Mrs. Giddreaux worked there with a dozen other women pretty much every day, and it was in the very basement of the house on St. Botolph where the Crisis was printed and then mailed out to the rest of the country. Luther came home to an empty house, as he knew he would—on fine days, the girls all took their lunch in Union Park a few blocks away, and this was the finest day, thus far, of an often unforgiving spring. He let himself into Mrs. Giddreaux’s office. He sat behind her desk. He opened her drawer. He lifted the ledger out and placed it on the desk and that’s where it was sitting half an hour later when Mrs. Giddreaux came back through the door.

She hung up her coat and her scarf. “Luther, honey, what’re you doing in here?”

Luther tapped the ledger with his finger. “I don’t give this list to a policeman, he’s gonna have my wife arrested, have our baby taken from her soon as it’s born.”

Mrs. Giddreaux’s smile froze and then vanished. “Excuse me?”