No moonlight, the nearest gas lamp a floor below.

Eddie listened some more. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the night, he was certain the rectangular shape was no illusion, no trick of the darkness. It was there all right, and he damn well knew what it was.

A toolbox.

The toolbox, the one he’d given Luther Laurence, the one filled with pistols he’d spirited out of the evidence rooms of various station houses over the last decade.

Eddie placed the bottle of Power’s on the gravel and removed his .38 from its holster. He thumbed back the hammer.

“You up here?” He held the gun by his ear and scanned the darkness. “You up here, son?”

Another minute of silence. Another minute in which he didn’t move.

And still nothing but the sounds of the neighborhood below and the quiet of the roof in front of him. He lowered his service revolver. He tapped it off his outer thigh as he crossed the roof and reached the toolbox. Here the light was much better; it bounced upward from the lamps in the park and those along Old Harbor Street and it bounced from the factories off the dark channel water and up toward Telegraph Hill. There was little question that it was the toolbox he’d given Luther—same chips in the paint, same scuff marks over the handle. He stared down at it and took another drink and noticed the number of people strolling through the park. A rarity at this time of night, but it was a Friday and maybe the first Friday in a month that hadn’t been marred by heavy rain.

It was the memory of rain that got him to look over the parapet at his gutters and notice that one had come loose from its fasteners and jutted out from the brick, canting to the right and tipping downward. He was already opening the toolbox before he remembered that it held only pistols, and it occurred to him what a harebrained instinct it had been to open it before calling the Bomb Squad. It opened without incident, however, and Eddie McKenna holstered his service revolver and stared in at the last thing he expected to find in this particular toolbox.

Tools.

Several screwdrivers, a hammer, three socket wrenches and two pair of pliers, a small saw.

The hand that touched his back was almost soft. He barely felt it. A big man not used to being touched, he would have expected it to have taken more force to remove him from his feet. But he’d been bent over, his feet set too closely together, one hand resting on his knee, the other holding a glass of whiskey. A cool gust found his chest as he entered the space between his home and the Andersons’, and he heard the flap of his own clothes in the night air. He opened his mouth, thinking he should scream, and the kitchen window flew up past his eyes like an elevator car. A wind filled his ears on a windless night. His whiskey glass hit the cobblestone first, followed by his head. It was an unpleasant sound, and it was followed by another as his spine cracked.