He spit on the traitor cop a couple more times and then he and his comrades returned to the touring car and drove away.

Luther had gotten good at sneaking in and out of Nora’s rooming house. He’d learned that you made the most noise trying to be quiet, so he did his due diligence when it came to listening from behind her door to the hallway on the other side, but once he was sure there was no one out there, he turned her doorknob quick and smooth and stepped into the hall. He swung the door closed behind him, and even before it clicked against the jamb, he’d already opened the door into the alley. By then, he was in the clear—a black man exiting a building in Scollay Square wasn’t the problem; a black man exiting a white woman’s room in any building whatsoever, that’s what got you killed.

That May Day night, he left the bag of fruit in her room after sitting with her about half an hour, watching her eyelids droop repeatedly until they stayed down. It worried him; now that they’d cut her hours, she was tired more, not less, and he knew that had to be about diet. She wasn’t getting enough of something and he wasn’t no doctor so he didn’t know what that something was. But she was tired all the time. Tired and grayer, her teeth starting to loosen. That’s what made Luther take fruit from the Coughlins this time. Seemed he remembered fruit was good for teeth and complexions. How or why he knew that, he couldn’t say, but it felt right.

He left her sleeping and went up the alley, and when he came to the end of it, he saw Danny lumbering across Green Street toward him. But not Danny, really. A version of him. A Danny who’d been fired from a cannon into a block of ice. A Danny with blood all over himself as he walked. Or tried to. Reeled was more like it.

Luther met him in the middle of the street as Danny fell to one knee.

“Hey, hey,” Luther said softly. “It’s me. Luther.”

Danny looked up at him, his face like something someone had tested hammers on. One eye was black. That was the good one. The other was so swollen shut it looked to have been sutured. His lips were twice their normal size, Luther wanting to make a joke about it but feeling it was definitely the wrong time.

“So.” Danny raised a hand, as if to signal the start of a game. “Still mad at me?”

Well, that was something no one had managed to take away apparently—the man’s ease with himself. Busted all to hell and kneeling in the middle of a shit hole street in shit hole Scollay Square, the man was chatting all casual-like, as if this sort of thing happened to him once a week.

“Not at this exact moment,” Luther said. “In general, though? Yeah.”