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Godspeed, Tim.

May you now rest in peace with your beautiful bride . . .

Jesus! That was one thing we didn’t consider, and should have.

Tomas was whacked with his wife and kids. Why wouldn’t we think they’d do the same here?

Answer: We weren’t believing it would happen.

But it did.

And we did make a plan to provide for Emily if Tim were killed. Which now is moot.

He wiped his eyes, then clicked on the file.

O’Hara’s bushy red eyebrows went up as he read O’Brien’s work again—it came as no surprise that the piece was a fairly clean first draft, and had three pages of source material, including contact names and numbers—and slowly nodded.

When he’d finished, part of his conversation with Matt Payne at the University City bar earlier flashed back . . .

“After this, Mick, you’re going to run O’Brien’s next piece?”

“Well, the bastards can’t kill O’Brien again when it does.”

“That’s a bullshit answer and you know it. They can kill you. Jesus! I’m having an undercover sent to sit on you.”

“You don’t need to, Matty. Don’t.”

“And one for your mother, too. An unmarked unit parked on her street twenty-four/seven.”

“Oh, God! I completely forgot about her!”

“Okay, then. It’s not up for debate. You’ve got to be worried, Mick.”

“Worried? Hell yeah. I am worried. But if we give in, Matty, the bastards win. And they get away with . . . with what they did to the O’Briens.”

—

O’Hara picked up off the desk the mug of coffee that he’d spiked with a heavy pour of Irish whisky, and took a gulp.

Then, hands back to the keyboard, his fingers flew as he began editing the piece, preparing it for publication.

[ THREE ]

Office of the Mayor, City Hall

1 Penn Square, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 6:15 P.M.

“Clearly, Mr. Mayor, we knew something had to be up when Cross did not get in touch with me after Badde promised that he would,” Edward Stein said. “However, I damn sure did not expect that Cross would double-down on his attacks on the police. And now he’s sowing these seeds of revolt that the lawlessness is intentional? That we want the killings to continue as some sort of self-perpetuating control?”

Mayor Jerry Carlucci’s eyes went from Stein to James Finley, who was anxiously pacing in front of the television.

“Something is going to have to give,” Finley said. “We need to contain this before something blows up.”

“Before it blows up?” Mayor Carlucci said. “What do you call this lawlessness, this mayhem?”

He pointed at the flat-screen television on the wall of his office. It showed live video from police department cameras at the scene of what an hour earlier, before the gunfire, had been a more or less peaceful rally.