Once that damn little voice started speaking, Bobby had never been very good at keeping the brush between the lines. Lack of impulse control—that’s what the teachers and the priests and the social workers who were eventually brought in had called it, when Bobby was growing up in East Boston; sometimes he just did things. Probably the reason, by the age of fifty-one, his arrest record was as long and varied as his debt ledger.

Bobby grinned, as he drew his box cutter down the length of the canvas that was now splayed out on the floor in front of him. The feel of the blade against the painting was strange and unique. The chips and dust from the paint sprayed up against his gloved fingers, filling him with a sense of gravitas. He knew that paint was old—even older than the building around him, which itself looked like some sort of Venetian palace that had been airlifted out of nineteenth-century Italy and dropped into a leafy suburb of Boston. But it wasn’t just the age of the canvas, already halfway out of the gilded frame and beginning to curl up at the edges, like a bit of a newspaper held too close to a flame—Bobby knew that the decision he had made wasn’t just spontaneous, it was, quite possibly, historic.

He kept his knee steady against the bottom of the frame as he worked, ignoring the beads of sweat dripping down the back of his neck and staining the stiff collar of his borrowed police uniform. He could hear Richie’s grunts as the bigger man worked on his own painting a few feet away on the floor—a much smaller frame, maybe two feet wide and tall, the canvas depicting some sort of seventeenth-century parlor scene involving a guy with a stringed instrument, two women, and a piano. It hadn’t taken much to convince his partner to join in on the fun, once they’d gotten the big one off the wall. Richie had always been more of a follower than most of the hoods Bobby had grown up with on the streets of Revere, which was why Bobby had tapped him for the job in the first place. No matter how simple a gig looked on paper, there was always the possibility of unexpected complications—and the last thing you needed when things went off script was a partner who liked to think for himself.