“The two of you make me sick.” He went over to the table, slammed the cork back into the whiskey bottle, and left the room with it under his arm.

His mouth still tasted of soap and his ass still smarted from the calm, emotionless whipping his father had given it after he’d returned from his study half an hour later, when Joe climbed out his bedroom window with some clothes in a pillowcase and walked off into the South Boston night. It was warm, and he could smell the ocean at the end of the street, and the streetlamps glowed yellow. He’d never been out on the streets this late by himself. It was so quiet he could hear his footsteps and he imagined their echoes as a living thing, slipping away from the family home, the last thing anyone remembered hearing before they became part of a legend.

What do you mean, he’s gone?” Danny said. “Since when?”

“Last night,” his father said. “He took off…I don’t know what time.”

His father had been waiting on his stoop when Danny returned home, and the first thing Danny noticed was that he’d lost weight, and the second was that his hair was gray.

“You don’t report into your precinct anymore, boy?”

“I don’t really have a precinct these days, Dad. Curtis shitcanned me to every cold-piss strike detail he could find. I spent my day in Malden.”

“Cobblers?”

Danny nodded.

His father gave that a rueful smile. “Is there one man who isn’t on strike these days?”

“You have no reason to think he was snatched or something,” Danny said.

“No, no.”

“So there was a reason he ran.”

His father shrugged. “In his head, I’m sure.”

Danny placed a foot on the stoop and unbuttoned his coat. He’d been frying in it all day. “Let me guess, you didn’t spare the rod.”

His father looked up at him, squinting into the setting sun. “I didn’t spare it with you and you turned out none the worse for wear.”

Danny waited.

His father threw up his hand. “I admit I was a little more impassioned than usual.”

“What’d the kid do?”

“He said fuck.”

“In front of Ma?”

His father shook his head. “In front of me.”

Danny shook his head. “It’s a word, Dad.”

“It’s the word, Aiden. The word of the streets, of the common poor. A man builds his home to be a sanctuary, and you damn well don’t drag the streets into a sanctuary.”

Danny sighed. “What did you do?”

Now it was his father’s turn to shake his head. “Your brother’s out on these streets somewhere. I’ve put men on it, good men, men who work runaways and truants, but it’s harder in the summer, so many boys on the streets, so many working jobs at all hours, you can’t tell one from the other.”

“Why come to me?”

“You damn well know why,” his father said. “The boy worships you. I suspect he may have come here.”