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“What do you mean?”

“I thought in Carlucci’s office that I was about to lose you.”

“That I’d quit? So quickly?”

“Yeah.”

“You know me better than that.”

“‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ as Ben Franklin said when—”

“When quote he was our distinguished ambassador to England before the Revolution unquote,” Finley finished. “At least that’s what our fearless leader Francis Fuller keeps telling us.”

Finley snorted again, and then in a serious tone went on: “Philly is the fifth-largest city in the United States, second on the East Coast, for which we’re sometimes called New York City’s sixth borough. We have one and a half million residents, yet more than twenty-five percent of them live in poverty. Our unemployment rate averages eleven percent—and in places like Kensington it spikes to fifty percent. That’s got to change. Center City and a handful of neighborhoods are more or less going great. But cities rise and fall as a whole, and for Philly to truly thrive, the whole has to be healthy. As long as I’m on the job, I’ll give all I’ve got and more for that to happen.”

Stein nodded.

“My apology for misreading that.”

“None necessary. I do believe what I said.”

“Which part?”

“That I love this city, Ed. Correction: love the possibility of this city. Right now, I absolutely loathe the ugliness. But I have hope, for now at least, that we might fix that.”

He pointed at his writing on the legal pad.

“Dial.”

Stein grunted as he picked up the telephone receiver and began punching in the number.

“This damn well better work,” he said.

[ FOUR ]

East Somerset and Jasper Streets, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 2:15 P.M.

“We really shouldn’t do this, man,” Dan Moss said, staring out the car window as they drove through the area known as Kensington. “You know how many people get shot around here? I saw it on the news.”

The pudgy seventeen-year-old Moss had shaggy dark hair and a round face with an angry red pimple on the bridge of his nose that looked as if it could burst at any moment. He turned in the front passenger seat of the five-year-old silver Volkswagen Jetta and looked at the driver.

Billy Chester, a wiry eighteen-year-old, had a bony face with birdlike eyes and a narrow nose, and kept his short strawberry blond hair spiked. He had met Dan Moss in a computer code writing class when they were high school freshmen.

Both now were wearing faded blue jeans and sneakers. Billy had on a gray fleece winter jacket while Dan wore his Upper Marion Area High School sweatshirt, a navy blue hoodie with gold stenciled lettering on the chest: PROPERTY OF UMA VIKINGS ATHLETIC DEPT.

“Aw, c’mon and chill out,” Billy said, his tone frustrated. “The girls said they wanted some weed. You going to tell them we couldn’t score any?”

Dan couldn’t believe how calm Billy was acting. The Kensington neighborhood looked like a war zone. They were a long way from the clean streets and tidy lawns of their homes in the suburb of King of Prussia. Too far from Dan’s comfort zone. He thought the fifteen miles might as well have been fifteen thousand.

They had driven down expressways, the Schuylkill to Vine Street to the Delaware, along the way passing the impressive glass-skinned skyscrapers and other expensive real estate that made up Center City. Ten minutes later, just north of Center City, Billy had exited the Delaware Expressway at Westmoreland, then taken that to Frankford Avenue and made a left. Then, at Somerset, he’d hung a right and announced in a confident voice that it was only a few more blocks.

“Man, we just keep getting into worse and worse streets,” Dan said.

The overcast sky, a dark blanket of thick clouds, added to the gloom.

He yanked the navy blue hood over his head while sliding lower in his s