"You and McNab are staying in my office tonight?"

Her mouth moved perilously close to a pout. "If he's staying, I'm staying. Besides, the food's superior."

"Try not to kill each other."

"I'm showing admirable restraint in that particular area, sir."

"Right. Is Summerset behaving himself?"

"He went to some art class, then out for coffee and brandy with his lady friend. I had him shadowed. It was all very dignified according to the report. He got back about twenty minutes ago."

"See that he stays in."

"I've got it covered. Any progress there?"

"That's debatable. We have a list of potentials, which was shorted by half during interviews. I'm going to take a closer look at six," she said, rubbing her tired eyes. "One's in New York, and one's supposed to be in Boston. I'll run them when I get in tomorrow. We should be back by noon."

"We'll keep the home fires burning, Lieutenant."

"Find that damn van, Peabody." She disengaged the 'link and ordered herself not to wonder, or worry, about where Roarke could be.

He knew better than to go home. It was foolish and fruitless and irresistible. The shanties had changed little since he'd been a boy trying to crawl his way out of them. The buildings were cheaply constructed, with roofs sagging, windows broken. It was rare to see a flower bloom here, but a few hopeful souls had scratched out a stamp-sized garden at the doorstep of the six-flat building where he'd lived once.

But the flowers, however bright, couldn't overcome the odor of piss and vomit. And they couldn't lighten the air that lay thick with despair.

He didn't know why he went in, but he found himself standing inside the dim lobby with its sticky floors and peeling paint. And there were the stairs his father had once kicked him down because he hadn't made his quota lifting wallets.

Oh, but I had, Roarke thought now. What was a kick and tumble compared to the pounds he'd secreted away? The old man had been too drunk, and often too stupid, to have suspected his whipping boy of holding back any of the take.

Roarke had always held back. A pound here, a pound there could make a tidy sum for a determined boy willing to take his licks.

"He'd have given me his fist in my face in any case," he murmured and gazed up those battered stairs.

He could hear someone cursing, someone else weeping. You would always hear cursing and weeping in such places. The odor of boiled cabbage was strong and turned his stomach so he sought the thick air outside again.

He saw a teenage boy in tight black pants and a mop of fair hair watching him coolly from the curb. Across the street a couple of girls chalking the cracked sidewalk for hopscotch stopped to watch. He walked passed them, aware there were other eyes following him, peering out of windows and doorways.

A stranger in good shoes was both curiosity and insult.

The boy called out something vile in Gaelic. Roarke turned, met the boy's sneering eyes. "I'm going back in the alley," he said, using the same tongue, found it came more easily to his lips than he'd expected, "if you've a mind to try your luck on me. I'm in the mood to hurt someone. Might as well be you as another."

"Men have died in that alley. Might as well be you as another."

"Come on then." And Roarke smiled. "Some say I killed my father there when I was half your age, sticking a knife in his throat the way you'd slaughter a pig."

The boy shifted his weight, and his eyes changed. The sneering defiance turned to respect. "You'd be Roarke then."

"I would. Steer clear of me today and live to see your children."

"I'll get out," the boy shouted after him. "I'll get out the way you did, and one day I'll walk in fine shoes. Damned if I'll come back."

"That's what I thought," Roarke sighed and stepped into the stinking alley between the narrow buildings.

The recycler was broken. Had been broken as long as he could remember. Trash and garbage were strewn, as always, over the pitted asphalt. The wind whipped his coat, his hair, as he stood, staring down at the ground, at the place where his father had been found, dead.

He hadn't put the knife in him. Oh, he'd dreamed of killing the man; every time he'd taken a beating by those vicious hands he'd thought of pounding back. But he'd only been twelve or so when his father had met the knife, and he'd yet to kill a man.

He'd crawled out of this place, out of this pit. He'd survived, even triumphed. And now, perhaps for the first time, he realized he'd changed.

He'd never again be like the mirror image of himself who had challenged him from the curb. He was a man grown into what he had chosen to be. He enjoyed the life he'd built for itself now, not simply for its opposition to what had been.

He had love in his heart, the hot-blooded love for a woman that could never have rooted if the ground had remained stony.

After all these years he discovered that coming back hadn't stirred the ghosts, but had put them to rest.

"Fuck you, bloody bastard," he murmured, but with outrageous relief. "You couldn't do me after all."

He turned away from what had been, set his direction on what was, and what would come. He walked, content now, through the rain that began to fall as soft as tears.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Eve had never been to a wake before, and it surprised her that, given Roarke's usual style of doing things, he'd chosen to hold it in the Penny Pig.

The pub was closed to outside traffic, but crowded just the same. It seemed Jennie had left behind a lot of friends, if no family.

An Irish wake, Eve was to discover, meant pretty much what an Irish pub meant. Music, conversation, and drinking great quantities of liquor and beer.

It made her think of a viewing she'd attended only the month before, one that had led to more death and violence. There the dead had been laid out in a clear side-viewing casket, and the room had been heavy with red draperies and flowers. The mood had been sorrow, the voices hushed.

Here, the dead were remembered in a different manner.

"A fine girl was Jennie." A man at the bar raised his glass, and his voice over the noise of the crowd. "Never watered the whiskey or stinted when pouring it. And her smile was as warm as what she served you."

"To Jennie then," it was agreed, and the toast was drunk.

Stories were told, often winding their way from some virtue of the dearly departed and into a joke on one of those present. Roarke was a favored target.

"There's a night I remember," Brian began, "years back it was, when our Jennie was just a lass – and a fine figure of one was she – that she was serving the beer and the porter. That was when Maloney owned the place – God rest his thieving soul – and I was tending bar for a pittance."

He paused, took a drink, then puffed into life one of the cigars Roarke had provided. "I had an eye for Jennie – and what right-minded young lad wouldn't – but she had none for me. 'Twas Roarke she was after. On that evening, we had a fair crowd in, and all the young bucks were hoping to get a wink from young Jennie. I gave her all me best love-starved looks."

He demonstrated with a hand over his heart and the heaviest of sighs so his audience hooted with laughter and cheered him on.

"But to me she paid no mind at all, for her attention was all for Roarke. And there himself sat, perhaps at the table where he's sitting where he is tonight. Though he wasn't dressed so fine as he is tonight, and I'd wager a punt to a penny that he didn't smell so fresh either. Though Jennie sashayed by him a dozen times or more, and leaned over, oh, leaned over close in a way that made my heart pound wishing I were exposed to such a fine and lovely view, and she would ask so sweetly could she fetch him another pint."