Back in middle school he had joined the wrestling team only because the coach had told him he could be good at it. Eventually, he came to realize that this was the coach’s standard way of recruiting players. Everyone, regardless of any innate talents, got the same pitch. But Ted had stuck it out. He lost often the first two years, but in high school he began to win. In his junior year, he lost one match—to a wiry Hispanic kid from the South Bronx who knocked him out of contention for statewide competition. The following November, he pinned the same kid in eight seconds. He had learned something about himself: he did not like to lose.

And despite the disappointments he had faced in his career and his marriage, he still didn’t like it.

This was a fight he had not sought. The moment when Richie Rubiano dumped the file on the table at Gallagher’s was clear in his memory. But somehow, the case had found him, and the stakes had never before in his life been any higher. Like it or not, it was his to lose.

At the bottom of the stairs, he turned down the alley and walked out to Roosevelt Avenue. The sidewalks were busy, which gave him a comfortable feeling. There was anonymity in crowds. He felt the tension in his shoulders. He must have been carrying it for days.

Across the street the chain-link fence around the proposed construction site was a grinning, arrogant barrier forcing pedestrians to skirt the obstruction by stepping out into the roadway midblock. It was easy to see why Kenzie hated it.

He strode across, looking for signs of progress within the stockade. No one was there. All the windows of the buildings inside the fence that faced the street had been covered with sheets of plywood, and the graffiti taggers had been busy marking them. shorty lives ran along the windowless top floor of one building, making Ted stop for a moment to contemplate how anyone could have reached that point armed with a half-dozen different cans of spray paint. It was an homage to Shorty 140, one of Queens’ most prolific street artists, who had been arrested eventually, but not before hitting every overpass on the LIE, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of other sites throughout the borough.

“That boy made himself famous. For some of these young guns, a little street cred is all they’re ever going to get.”

The Preacher was standing over Ted’s left shoulder. He could have sworn the man hadn’t been there a second earlier.

“He’s no boy, Preacher. He’s as old as I am. And,” Ted said, nodding at the building, “he’s still famous.”

“Foolishness. Vandals.”

“Maybe. Or a protest? Sad, futile, powerless, but noble.”

“And your dilemma? When we spoke the other day, you had a decision to make.”