“You’re awful quiet, Dickie boy,” Patrick grumbles from a pace behind my left shoulder.

He’s old school, and when we’re walking the streets, he wouldn’t be anywhere else. It’s just far enough away from me to blast away any punk who might chance their hand at putting a chunk of lead between my eyeballs, or a blade between my ribs. Just close enough to step up should we have to cover each other, back to back.

Not that I’m expecting trouble… But it’s always best to be prepared.

These are our streets: Byrne streets. They stretch from Roxbury in the West, down to Milton, and then on into the sea. It’s my home, and anyone who tries to snatch it will have to go through me. I know any one of my brothers would say the same. We’d die for this place, and the people in it. Even after the yuppie invasion, Dorchester’s still our home. Even with the four-dollar-a-cup of Fair-trade this, or cold pressed that of coffee, and the dude cycling round on a single-speed gearless bike with a damn messenger bag.

For me, all of this is the closest to God’s green earth you can find in this world. Maybe Ireland … But I’ve never been there, so it isn’t real to me. Dorchester is.

Least, that’s all I have to say.

“Hmm; I guess I am; just thinking, Pat. Never knew you were such a conversationalist,” I joke.

Pat shifts his hands in his pockets, and buckshot loaded shotgun shells rustle and clatter against each other. I shiver. There ain’t nobody I’d rather have by my side in a fight,

“Never known you to be so quiet, s’all,” Pat murmurs. “So it got me thinking.”

I stifle an urge to turn around and shoot Patrick a hard, inquiring look. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about something, and I’ve got a horrible feeling that this something is Casey. I don’t know how he knows, but it doesn’t surprise me. In the city, Patrick O’Hanlon is like the CIA, the FBI, the British Secret Service and MI-goddamn-5 all rolled into one. Even his connections have got connections, and so on, and so on.

“Oh?” I say, noncommittally.

“Heard tell of a scuffle down at the old Morello warehouse – you know, the one whar they be fightin’ their dogs,” he says in a tone dripping with disdain. “Don’t suppose you know a thing or two about that?”

“You know what that lot’s like,” I reply, pounding my mind to come up with a plausible story. It’s pretty clear Patrick doesn’t just suspect I was there: he knows. And as my father’s confidant – his right hand man – he wields a lot of power. Especially now that dad’s so weak.

“I do, I do,” he grunts. “Thing is, Dickie boy, s’not often two tall lads dressed all in black go in and beat seven shades of shit out of a Morello caporegime. It’s frowned on, you know? There be another thing that tickled me fancy.”

“What’s that, Pat?”

“Maybe somethin’, maybe nothin’. You know what them Italians a’like: short; fat; too much o’mamma’s cookin’ fer their own good. You know the type.”

“Maybe the Russians,” I nod. “They are tall. Didn’t we hear that a party of their thugs was in town.”

I wish I could see Patrick’s face right now. I bet his eyes are burning holes in the back of my skull. Hell, come to think about it, I think I can feel the heat pricking, and my hair is singeing under his gaze.

“Maybe, maybe: but I was thinking,” Pat says. He’s dragging out the words, and I know what he’s doing. He’s salting the damn wound. He knows. I know he knows. He knows that I know that he knows – and he’s fucking playing with me. “What if those who beat him were a couple of our boys; two of the soldiers? The last thing we need right now is a turf war with the Morellos.”

“A couple of our boys?” I say. My voice sounds higher-pitched than usual. I scrape my bottom row of teeth across my bottom lip. Pat’s played me like a goddamn cello. I don’t have a choice, I turn to face him. I’m going to have to come clean.

Just as Pat’s face comes into view – lit up with a triumphant grin – a cry splits the air. It’s a squeal of pain, and it wipes the smile off Pat’s face.

I adjust my head in the direction of the sound. “This way; stay on me.”

Pat’s the consummate professional, and I know my way around. We’ll get back into the conversation at some point, but for now, everything has been tabled until our next “business meeting.”

We head through the streets at a light trot, sticking to the edges of buildings, just in case we’re heading into an ambush. We’re moving fast enough that I’m slightly out of breath, but Patrick – easily thirty years my senior – doesn’t seem to be affected in the least.

“What the hell did they use to make you?” I puff.

He grunts. “They don’t make it anymore.”

We find the source of the cry at the corner of Josephine and Geneva Avenue. It’s an elderly woman, and she’s inconsolable, even though an older gentleman, dressed in red trousers and a flat tweed cap (her husband, I assume) is doing his best.

I relaxed. “Just a domestic ya’ think?” I ask, crinkling an eyebrow.

“I’m not so sure.” Patrick jerks his chin. “You thin’ that ‘ither of those two bae the type to put a brick through their own shop winda’?”

A surge of rage floods through me. It’s the same rage that overcame me the other night with Casey – no thought – just blackness behind my eyes; fingers clenching of their own accord.

So it’s not until a couple of seconds later that I realize that my nails are biting into my palms. I ignore the pain. Someone is fucking with my people. My people! That means someone is going to pay for this. It doesn’t matter if it was just some drunk-off-his-ass street punk. That’s just the way things work down here: an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.

I master myself with difficulty, finally speaking through gritted teeth. “Let’s go check it out.”

There’s a small gathering of people in a loose semicircle ringing the vandalized general store. It’s old and quaint: the kind with stained-glass windows that’s probably been there fifty years. The kind of glass you can’t just replace with a click of your fingers these days.

“You’re Seamus’s boy?” the woman asks the second we approach. It’s a question that’s anything but. She launches into her story without waiting for me to reply. Her tears are already forgotten, drying on cheeks that are red with indignation. She strikes me as one of those people who has drama following wherever she goes.

“You’ve heard, then?”

I nod, because it seems the right thing to do. “We came as soon as we did.” When you run the streets, and take care of your people, life for a Byrne is easier when those same people think you know everything, and that you can be everywhere at once. It keeps them on their toes.

“Tell me what’s gone on then, will you, Mrs –?”

“O’Toole. Mary O’Toole. I thought you’d know that,” she remarks acidly. Your father would.”

“And your husband –?” I ask, ignoring her swipe at me, but she cuts me off mid-flow. I can tell who wears the pants in their relationship, and it’s not Mister O’Toole, that’s for sure.

“What are you going to do about it,” she asks. “It’s a disgrace, a disgrace I tell you. What’s the world coming to when ordinary men and women like us, hard-working families, can’t walk the streets without fear of attack? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to stop? Else what good are ye?”

“Begging your forgiveness, Mary –.”

She shoots me a hard glare. “My pardon, Mrs. O’Toole,” I add. “But you still haven’t told me what the hell’s happened here. Mister O’Hanlon here and I want to help, but –”

“Language, boy,” she says in a tone that would put my late grandmother to shame. “Isn’t it obvious?” She chides, pointing at her gaping shop window and all the while shaking her head. “Ye think that appeared by itself, do ye?”

I close my eyes. I can feel the temper beginning to rise inside me, and I bite it back. Still, I feel the blood pumping in my chest, at my wrists and on my neck. Patrick puts a hand on my shoulder, and without saying a word transmits a message. “Stay calm.”

I nod – a tiny, imperceptible movement of my head and the hand disappears. I know what I am – my father’s representative on the streets. It won’t do to succumb to a teenage temper tantrum.

“O’ course not Mar–, Mrs. O’Toole. Did ye see who did it?”

She shakes her head, and her husband interjects for the first time. I have to lean in to hear him. He’s frail, half the size of his wife in both body and temperament.

“I did,” he wheezes. “I was opening up when it happened. I saw some kid with his hood pulled low and something in his hand, but I didn’t pay him a blind bit of difference.”

“Did you see his face?”

The old man shakes his head. “No sir. He was tan, that’s all I saw, so it is. A second later the glass was smashing and he was running about the shop causing a hell of a storm. Maybe two of them, I couldn’t tell ye. I hid behind the counter and let them do their thing. It seemed to last forever…”

“Can we take a look around?”

Mary looks like she wants to continue with her rant, but her husband touches her on the shoulder and pulls her back. I guess he’s fought this battle more times than I care to imagine. I give him a nod of thanks.

“It’d be my pleasure,” he says.

“You smell that?” Patrick asks, stepping through the smashed window just ahead of me. I followed him in and take a deep breath – and regret it instantly.

“Is that –?”

He nods. “Piss. This is personal. You mark my words.”

“Thanks, Detective,” I remark. The truth is, I know he’s right – and the way my gut’s beginning to curdle, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

A can of tomato soup goes spinning off the end of my boot and I stop bothering to pick my way around them. It’s a losing battle, anyway. The store looks like a hurricane has hit it: shelving that used to form neat aisles have toppled on one another; chilling units have been smashed to pieces …

“Awful lot of anger here,” Patrick muses. I turn a corner and he’s standing right in front of me, resting his hands on either side of his body of the shotgun stored in his coat. “What do you reckon they did, the O’Toole’s? They must’ve ticked someone off good ‘n proper like.”

He holds my gaze, and once again I get the impression that he knows a whole lot more than he’s telling me: a lot more about where I was the other night; that there’s something I’m hiding.

Patrick’s gaze barrels in on me, and I wish I was anywhere else in the world. There are a lot of men who can make me quail – not these days – but Pat’s one of them.

My pocket buzzes. I can’t break my eyes away from Patrick’s.

“You gonna get that, Dickie boy?” He grins.

That breaks the spell, and I can move again. Patrick keeps watching as I fish the cell phone out of my pocket. It’s Kieran: saved by the bell!

“What is it, brother?” I ask in a jaunty tone, pressing the old Nokia against my ear. It’s half-forced, half genuine relief that I don’t have to face Patrick’s probing questions, if only for a couple of seconds more. He’s calling me on the burner, so it can’t be great news, but it can’t possibly be worse than this …

He sounds deflated: terrible; like he’s been hit by a car. “Are ye somewhere quiet,” he asks.

“Sure am. I’ve got Patrick by me side, but that’s it.”

“I’ve got bad news: awful news. They took dad into the hospital –”