Twenty-nine cents an hour for a seventy-three-hour week. No overtime. And that was for day patrolmen like Danny and Steve Coyle, the plum assignment. The poor night guys were paid a flat two bits an hour and worked eighty-three hours a week. Danny would have thought it outrageous if it hadn’t been steeped in a truth he’d accepted since he could first walk: the system fucked the workingman. The only realistic decision a man had to make was if he was going to buck the system and starve, or play it with so much pluck and guts that none of its inequities applied to him.

“O’Meara,” Steve said, “sure. I love the old man, too, I do. Love him, Dan. But he’s not giving us what we were promised.”

Danny said, “Maybe they really don’t have the money.”

“That’s what they said last year. Said wait till the war’s over and we’ll reward your loyalty.” Steve held his hands out. “I’m looking, and I don’t see no reward.”

“The war isn’t over.”

Steve Coyle made a face. “For all intents and purposes.”

“So, fine, reopen negotiations.”

“We did. And they turned us down again last week. And cost of living has been climbing since June. We’re fucking starving, Dan. You’d know it if you had kids.”

“You don’t have kids.”

“My brother’s widow, God rest him, she’s got two. I might as well be married. Wench thinks I’m Gilchrist’s on store-credit day.”

Danny knew Steve had been putting it to the Widow Coyle since a month or two after his brother’s body had entered the grave. Rory Coyle’s femoral artery had been sliced by a cattle shear at the Brighton stockyards, and he’d bled out on the floor amid some stunned workers and oblivious cows. When the stockyard refused to pay even a minimal death benefit to his family, the workers had used Rory Coyle’s death as a rallying cry to unionize, but their strike had only lasted three days before the Brighton PD, the Pinkertons, and some out-of-town bat swingers had pushed back and turned Rory Joseph Coyle right quick into Rory Fucking Who.

Across the street, a man with an anarchist’s requisite watch cap and handlebar mustache set up his wood crate under a street pole and consulted the notebook under his arm. He climbed up on the crate. For a moment Danny felt an odd sympathy for the man. He wondered if he had children, a wife.

“The AF of L is national,” he said again. “The department will never—fucking ever—allow it.”

Steve placed a hand on his arm, his eyes losing their usual blithe light. “Come to a meeting, Dan. Fay Hall. Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“What’s the point?” Danny said as the guy across the street started shouting in Italian.

“Just come,” Steve said.

After their shift, Danny had dinner alone and then a few too many drinks in Costello’s, a waterfront saloon favored by police. With every drink, Johnny Green grew smaller, Johnny Green and his three fights in one day, his foaming mouth, his desk job and eviction notice. When Danny left, he took his flask and walked through the North End. Tomorrow would be his first day off in twenty, and as usually happened for some perverse reason, his exhaustion left him wide awake and antsy. The streets were quiet again, the night deepening around them. At the corner of Hanover and Salutation streets, he leaned against a streetlamp pole and looked at the shuttered station house. The lowest windows, those that touched the sidewalk, bore scorch marks, but otherwise you’d be hard-pressed to guess anything violent had ever happened inside.