Danny stood before Sergeant Mal Ellenburg, whose distinguished career hadn’t been able to surmount his German ancestry during the war years. Down here since ’16, he’d become a house cat, the kind of cop who often forgot where he’d left his revolver.

Danny placed his own revolver on the counter between them, and Mal noted it on his clipboard before dropping it in a bin below. Danny followed the revolver with his department manual, hat number plate, call box and locker keys, and pocket billy. Mal noted it all and swept it away into various bins. He looked up at Danny and waited.

Danny looked back at him.

Mal held out his hand.

Danny stared into his face.

Mal closed his hand and opened it again.

“You gotta ask for it, Mal.”

“Jesus, Dan.”

Danny gritted his teeth to keep his mouth from trembling.

Mal looked away for a moment. When he looked back, he propped his elbow on the counter and flipped his palm open in front of Danny’s chest.

“Please turn over your shield, Officer Coughlin.”

Danny pulled back his jacket and exposed the badge pinned to his shirt. He unhooked the shield from its pin and slid the pin out of his shirt. He placed the pin back behind the hook and placed the shield in Mal Ellenburg’s palm.

“I’m coming back for that,” Danny said.

The strikers assembled in the foyer. They could hear the crowd outside and by the volume Danny assumed it had doubled. Something rammed into the door twice and then the door was flung open and ten men pushed their way inside and slammed the door shut behind them. They were young mostly, a few older men who looked like they had the war in their eyes, and they’d been pelted with fruit and eggs.

Replacements. Volunteers. Scabs.

Danny placed the back of his hand on Kevin McRae’s chest to let him know the men should be allowed to pass unmolested and unremarked, and the strikers made a path as the replacements walked between them and up the stairs into the station.

Outside, the sound of the mob rattled and shook like a storm wind.

Inside, the snap of gun slides being racked in the first-floor weapons room. Handing out the riot guns, readying for a tussle.

Danny took a long, slow breath and opened the door.

The noise blew up from all sides and blew down from the rooftops. The crowd hadn’t doubled; it had tripled. Easily fifteen hundred people out here, and it was hard to tell from the faces who was for them and who was against because those faces had turned into grotesque masks of either glee or fury, and the shouts of “We love ya, boys!” were intermingled with “Fuck you, coppers!” and wails of “Why? Why?” and “Who will protect us?” The applause would have been deafening if it weren’t for the jeers and the projectiles of fruit and eggs, most of which splattered against the wall. A horn beeped insistently, and Danny could make out a truck just beyond the fringe of the crowd. The men in back were replacements by the look of them, because the look of them was scared. As he descended into it, Danny scanned the crowd as best he could, saw some crudely fashioned signs of both support and condemnation. The faces were Italian and Irish and young and old. Bolsheviks and anarchists mingled with several smug faces of the Black Hand. Not far from them, Danny recognized a few members of the Gusties, the largest street gang in Boston. If this was Southie, the Gusties’ home turf, it wouldn’t have been surprising, but the fact that they’d crossed the city and spread their ranks made Danny wonder if he could honestly answer the shouts of “Who will protect us?” with anything but “I don’t know.”