“Yes, sir.”

Once Gleason’s footsteps had left the alley, Thomas took Eddie’s right hand in his. He looked at the scars on the knuckles, the missing flesh on the tip of the middle finger, courtesy of a knife fight in an alley back in ’03. He raised his friend’s hand to his lips and kissed it. He held on tightly and placed his cheek to it.

“We grabbed it, Eddie. Didn’t we?” He closed his eyes and bit into his lower lip for a moment.

He opened his eyes. He put his free hand to Eddie’s face and used his thumb to close the lids.

“Ah, we did, boy. We surely did.”

CHAPTER thirty-six

Five minutes before the roll call of every shift, George Strivakis, the duty sergeant at the Oh-One station house on Hanover Street, rang a gong that hung just outside the station house door to let the men know it was time to report. When he opened the door late in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 9, he ignored a small hitch in his step as his eyes took note of the crowd gathered on the street. Only after he had rung the gong, giving it several hard hits from his metal rod, did he raise his head fully and take in the breadth of the mob.

There had to be at least five hundred people in front of him. The back edges of the throng continued to swell as men, women, and street urchins streamed in from the side streets. The roofs on the other side of Hanover filled, mostly kids up there, a few older ones who had the coal-pebble eyes of gang members. What immediately struck Sergeant George Strivakis was the quiet. Except for the scuffling of feet, the stray jangling of keys or coins, no one said a word. The energy, though, lived in their eyes. To a man, woman, and child they all bore the same pinned-back charge, the look of street dogs at sundown on the night of a full moon.

George Strivakis withdrew his gaze from the back of the crowd and settled on the men up front. Jesus. Coppers all. In civilian dress. He rang the gong again and then broke the silence with a hoarse shout: “Officers, report!”

It was Danny Coughlin who stepped forward. He walked up the steps and snapped a salute. Strivakis returned the salute. He’d always liked Danny, had long known he lacked the political touch to rise to a captaincy but had secretly hoped he’d become chief inspector one day like Crowley. Something shriveled in him as he considered this young man of such evident promise about to engage in mutiny.

“Don’t do it, son,” he whispered.

Danny’s eyes fixed on a spot just beyond Strivakis’s right shoulder.

“Sergeant,” he said, “the Boston police are on strike.”

With that, the silence shattered in a roar of cheers and hats thrown high in the air.

The strikers entered the station and filed downstairs to the property room. Captain Hoffman had added four extra men to the desk, and the strikers took their turns and handed in their department-issued property.