"Sit down," Danny said, glaring up at Al and pointing to the empty chair. His words were a quiet, firm command. Danny picked up the candle in the center of the table and lit it with his lighter. Using the candle, he lit a smoke. "You cursed at that poor girl for a drink, sit the fuck down and drink it. You're buying this round, too, and you better fucking come up with a righteous tip."

Grumbling, Al tossed his credit card on the table. "Like I give a fuck." He dropped back into his chair, nearly going over backward into the landscaping. "It ain't fair. It ain't right."

"What ain't?" Danny asked. "You can afford it."

Al shot his arm over the table, pushing his inverted palm at me. "Him. He ain't."

"What'd I do?" I asked.

John brought out our drinks. Not a good sign. The waitress, a skinny slip of a girl, glared at us from the doorway, chewing on her thumbnail. John set the three drinks down one by one. He looked at me. "Kevin, right? Been a while."

I stood to shake his hand. "Right. This here is my brother, Danny, and our friend Al." John nodded at the others but he didn't shake any more hands. "Look," I said, "I'm sorry about the bad manners."

"Don't apologize to that cunt for me," Al said from low in his chair, deep in the shadows. He wiggled his fingers at his credit card. "Put it there."

"I'm out here as a courtesy to you guys," John said, looking back and forth between Danny and me, pointedly excluding Al from the conversation. "Next time this trained ape talks to Maureen like that, she's gonna stab him in the eye with a four-inch switch-blade. There's nothing I can do to prevent it. And believe me, when that happens? I'm gonna be way too busy to call nine-one-one." He picked up Al's empty glass. "This round is on me but I'm afraid it's gonna be the last one for you fellas tonight."

Danny leaned forward, folding his hands on the tabletop, his face warm with obvious admiration.

"We're grateful for the hospitality." He turned to Al. "You won't have any more trouble from us, I promise. We'll make things right with Maureen."

"Appreciate it," John said. "Nice to meet you, Danny. Don't be a stranger, Kev. Shame about the Mets. We'll get 'em next year."

On his way back into the bar, John said something into Maureen's ear that pleased her. She shot us a self-satisfied grin and walked into the bar.

"Tell me when I became your bitch," Al said, staring into the space that Maureen had just vacated.

"When you started acting like one," Danny said. "What's your fucking problem?"

"I'm losing work and money," Al said. "I been, like, practically laid off. Bavasi said the word came from Santoro himself. They're in love with Mr. Smarty-Pants over here." He threw his hands in the air. "I got bills to pay, man. Debts. What if there is no next job? What if it goes to the professor over here?"

"This is a one-time thing for me," I said. "After this project, I'm out."

"Al, you're overreacting," Danny said. "I know for a fact you got another job. Shit, you're lucky you're still sucking air after that fuck-up with the bodies. And that was after that shit in Atlantic City. Which was after you got whipped by Waters."

"La-dee-fucking-da on the new job," Al whined. He spit on the deck. "I'm fucking babysitting again. Sitting on some creep from the school named Whitestone. He's almost as boring as the professor here."

"I got you that fucking job," Danny said. "And I had to work it hard." Turning away from me, Danny leaned closer to Al. "Whitestone's important work. We can probably turn this whole thing on just him. Kevin and I are working him from the inside."

"It's fucking charity baby work, is what it is," Al said.

"I'm telling you it's important," Danny said. "Whitestone knows Kevin and he's met me. You're the only one that can tail him and not get made. Tell me you've got something on him and that's why you called. We could really use some help."

Al straightened in his chair and hopped it closer to the table. Danny's bringing him back into the mix reinvigorated him. That Danny had gone to bat for him surprised and impressed him.

"He's married," Al said. "The broad's got a face like a hyena but she's got money. Couple of young kids in the house. Two boys. Also the broad's. Never takes 'em anywhere." Al stared into his hands as if they held an open notebook. "Kids go back and forth to school, that's it. Nice house by the water in Great Kills, over by the beach. Decent but nothing too fancy. He drives an old Saab convertible."

It made me queasy, the ease with which Danny manipulated Al's interest and mood. I wondered if someone else would see the same dynamic, someone like Kelsey, maybe, in the way Danny talked to me. I didn't want to know. Besides, I wasn't as dumb or as drunk as Al.

"The kids," I said. "They do anything after school? Play sports or anything?"

Al shook his head. "Don't look like it to me. Couple miserable spoiled bastards from the looks of them."

"Nieces?" I asked. "Nephews?"

"Doubt it," Al said. "I know what you're talking about. I seen him out there at Willowbrook. He doesn't talk to anyone, just wanders around. I don't know whose kids he's interested in out there, but they're not his."

I turned to Danny. His face had gone cold, become a stone mask, his eyes disappearing deep into his face. He wasn't breathing. Al noticed it, too.

"Oh, shit," Al said, half-covering his mouth with his hand, his eyes popping wide. "You don't think . . . oh, fucking gross."

"I knew that guy was wrong," Danny said. "Minute I laid eyes on him."

"No, no, no," I said, leaning closer to Danny. I needed him to focus on me. "It's nothing sick like that. Listen, I got this figured out. It's Kelsey he's out there for. He knows she doesn't want him there so he watches from a couple fields away."

"She does look good in them shorts," Al said.

Danny didn't move, but his eyes slid in my direction. A touch of color returned to his face. He exhaled.

"I told you, she plays soccer out at Willowbrook a couple times a week," I said. "Whitestone always seems to be out there the same nights." I hated pleading Whitestone's case, but I had to do it for Danny's sake, to haul him back from where his imagination had taken him. "I was out there with her tonight. She told me all about it. I talked to him myself."

"It's true," Al said. "I saw the three of them out there this evening." He reached for his drink.

Danny got it first and poured it out in the bushes beside the table.

"You gotta keep your shit together," Danny said. "This is serious fucking business. We need to know what this guy is really about, as soon as possible. Kev and I got a lot riding on this job."

"Like I give a fuck," Al said. "Maybe I would, though, if I had real cheese coming to me like it was supposed to."

"Do your job. Think of the future," Danny said. "We'll get paid big when that property flips and those dorms go through. Stay on Whitestone. In fact, do me a favor. I gotta get Kevin home. Tell Bavasi we're into Whitestone's computer. We'll know a lot more real soon. Do it tonight. In person, no phones."

"I'm your fucking errand boy, now? You want me to drive over to Brooklyn drunk like this?"

Danny wiped his hands down his face, exasperated by Al's return to petulance. "Fuck you, Al.

You've driven out to Atlantic City in worse shape than this. I thought you wanted more work, to make some points with Bavasi. You're so unhappy, fucking quit. Go get a real job. Maybe you're right, maybe we don't need you after all."

Al laughed. "Quit? There's no fucking quitting Santoro's crew." He stood slowly, digging around in his pants pocket. "And A.C. was your idea." He tossed a hundred-dollar bill on the table and picked up his credit card. He chuckled to himself, raising his chin at me. "Quit. Yeah, right. Come to think of it, you need to give Mr. One and Done here a reality check, Dan. With the way he talks about getting out."

He walked away. After Al had disappeared into the bar, I turned to Danny.

"You promised me I could get out after this," I said. "I got things waiting for me on the outside."

"Relax," Danny said. "Don't listen to him. Who you gonna trust? Me or him?"

"He's not gonna fuck this up on us, is he?"

Danny bunched his lips and shook his head, staring through the doorway and into the bar. "No fucking way. I won't allow it."

I took a big swallow of Guinness. "Why do we need Al tailing Whitestone if we're in his computer?"

"We don't," Danny said. "Santoro wants Al kept busy and close to me."

"Why?"

Danny didn't answer. He lit another cigarette off the candle. Watching smoke rush from Danny's nose, I remembered John the bartender telling me that lighting cigarettes with candles brought bad luck. Every time you did it, he said, somewhere out at sea a sailor died.

BORROWING DANNY'S CELL, I called Kelsey as we left the bar. She'd been about to give up on me and go to bed, she told me. Then she told me to come over. She'd be awake and would leave the doors to her building and to her apartment unlocked. She didn't ask where I'd been. I couldn't wait to get to her.

Though we were only blocks from my apartment, Danny cheerily agreed to drive me halfway back across the island. He drove fast, humming to himself as we sped down Victory Boulevard, passing slower cars to the left and right. His recklessness seemed to be for his own entertainment, not haste. If Danny had any worries about Whitestone or Al, they didn't show. He didn't seem concerned about the rest of his night. I didn't ask about his plans.

Like a warm blanket, a great tiredness settled on me. I didn't fight it. More and more Kelsey was the calming solace that awaited me, a place I could disappear into safe and untouchable after these long, bizarre nights with Danny.

Moving from world to world, from school to my folks to Danny to Kelsey, came easier every day. I thought little about what Danny and I did while I was with Kelsey, thought about it less while I went through the motions in the classroom. And yet the different pieces of my life, despite my best efforts to keep them distinct and discreet, had started integrating, like the convergence of historical forces that preceded an event worthy of its own chapter in a history book.

Danny had come back into the family. Kelsey and Danny had met. I thought about the dresser drawer and Danny's disappointment over Kelsey having never seen my apartment. Like my brother had said outside the Cargo, my life was different. And despite the convoluted route I'd taken toward love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, my life was steadily improving. What harm, really, had come to any of us? What had I been so afraid of?

For such a long time I had felt and lived so separately from others. Now I wondered if perhaps I had overestimated the distance. Maybe the things I wanted hung from branches that were more within reach than I had ever thought.

"What we did before in the office," I said, Danny again rolling us through a red light, "is really what you do for a living?"

"Most gigs are more complicated," Danny said. "Broader, more intense surveillance. And it's usually dirtier work, more like what you saw at my place. But yeah, that's about it. I spend a lot more time observing than I do acting." He shrugged. "It's a job. It's got its highs and lows, its good and bad points."

With each passing mile I felt I better understood Danny's chosen career. It depressed me but made sense in a sick, sad kind of way.

Despite his still-virile hatred of them, in what I knew was a slow, subconscious metamorphosis, Danny had become a free-roaming version of the Bloodroot doctors in his dreams. He peered through his own private windows into the lives of others, waiting to see what his subjects would do and trying to judge what it could be worth to him. He rejected any responsibility for what he saw by casting himself as a fly on the wall, a silent, multi-eyed thing that only reflected events that he had neither unleashed nor had the power to restrain.

What he watched was stomach-turning ugly in the everyday world, but compared to the depravity, destruction, and death he'd witnessed and even played a part in on the streets, the images on his computer screens probably deserved nothing beyond a bored yawn. Superman and his wife were going to wreck their lives no matter what. Stopping people from shitting all over each other was flat-out impossible. History proved it. Why not gain from what people were going to do anyway? Danny was hardly the first person in history to turn a profit on misery.

As we turned onto Kelsey's street, I waited for a pang of conscience over becoming my brother's accomplice. The ache didn't come. The doctors at Bloodroot had no such pangs, nor did the institutions chasing the final days of people like my mother and Kelsey's mother. Corporations ran those places, not charities. My mother didn't get her medical care or her drugs for free. The sicker she got, the more hands went into my parents' pockets. Danny always had to pony up the cash for his fix, no matter how pathetic his condition. Whitestone certainly didn't care about using tragedy to feed his ego as well as his bank account. Wars cost a fortune and minted rich men by the hundreds.

Human history teemed with kings and queens, with presidents and popes who had watered their coffers with the blood of poor, desperate men. Jesus Christ himself used misery-the outcast, the sick, and the lame-as teaching tools. At least He'd been willing to look misery in the eye and take it up in His hands. At least He'd tried to create something good out of it. What was noble about denying the misery that permeated life? I wasn't about to confuse Danny or Santoro with Jesus, but at least, like Him, they didn't pretend. They didn't gaze down from their balcony like one of history's kings and act as though the sad, loud, terrible lives playing out below them happened in a separate world.

Danny parked the car outside Kelsey's building. "You all right? You don't look so good. Don't worry about Al. I can handle him."

"It's not him," I said.

Danny looked up at the one apartment window with a light still shining. "It'll all be over soon.

Don't worry. You should be done. From here, I can handle everything myself. You can get your life back to normal." He smiled. "The battlefield is nearly ours."

I thought about his fine clothes in a heap on his cold floor. I wondered if there was ever a light left on for him. "What're you gonna do?" I asked.

"Same thing I always do when work is over. Go home, eat something, have a glass of wine, see if I can't sleep through the night." Danny grinned. Ghosts played behind his eyes. His nightly companions, reliable as my corner boys. "I like my chances tonight. We gotta take our perks where we can. The dirt we do isn't all there is to life. You gotta pluck what grows from it."

"Deep." I reached for the door handle. "Call me tomorrow."

"Will do," Danny said. "Go see your girl." He bounced his eyebrows up and down his forehead.

"And, bro? Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

KELSEY SAT CROSS-LEGGED on her couch wearing sweats with holes in the knees and a blue silk camisole edged with black lace. She tossed her magazine on the coffee table and got up to hug me. I set down my bag by the door. She led me over to the couch but I didn't sit. Instead, I walked into the kitchen and got the bottle of Bacardi I'd stashed in her cabinet. She didn't follow. I dumped some ice in a glass, splashed orange juice over it. I brought the bottle into the living room. If helping myself to her kitchen was out of line, Kelsey didn't let on. I thought maybe I should ask for that dresser drawer.

"It went that well," she said, watching me pour as the juice went from bright orange to a pale fog.

"It went fine. Better than fine, actually," I said. "Draining, though." I hadn't brought her a glass.

I started to stand.

"I'm good," Kelsey said, patting my knee. I sat back down. "Nothing sucks the life out of you like family, does it?"

"Not if you're my mother," I said. I pulled off my jacket, tossed it on the arm of the couch. "You should've seen her. When we left she looked reborn."

"So it was worth it, then?" Kelsey said. She went to work on the buttons of my shirt.

"Oh, yeah. Without a doubt."

I kicked off my shoes and peeled off my shirt but the disrobing stopped there. Even with Kelsey's participation, there'd been nothing sexual to it. I enjoyed the feeling. She raised her hand to my face. I closed my eyes and let the weight of my head lie in her palm.

"I don't want to pry," she said, "but there's something about your brother that seems to wear you out. And not in the way the job does, or staying out late." I could feel her face move close to mine. "Or the way I do. It's deeper than that."

"He's hard to keep up with," I said. "Always was. Too much of a night owl. I'm out of practice."

I opened my eyes. She hadn't bought the lie. I wanted to turn away but her hand held me in place. It was too late anyway. She'd already seen what I would've been trying to hide, the fact that she was right.

"It makes me worried," Kelsey said. "Not that your brother's a bad person or anything like that, but that maybe he takes a lot from you and doesn't give it back."

"I have you for that," I said. I lifted my head, kissed her, and leaned back into a corner of the couch. "Don't worry, I'm just going through an intense couple of days with this family shit. It'll pass. Nothing lasts forever."

"Seems like a sad thing to count on," Kelsey said.

Funny thing for a woman quite possibly on her way out of town to say, I thought. But I kept that to myself.

Kelsey's impending departure had afforded me the nerve to get involved with her in the first place. Would I stick around if she did? Of course I would. By now it wasn't a question of desire.

I'd do back flips if she canceled her plans to go away. No, I wanted her to stay and she knew I did. Now, it was only a question of nerve. Had I enough of it to go after something so dangerous as love on my own, without Danny leading the way? When it came to Kelsey, I was on my own.

She took my drink, sipped it and winced. "Let me splash some more OJ in there for us." She raised my chin with her fingertip. "When was the last time you ate something? I got some olives, some cheese and crackers. Sit tight."

Sinking deeper into the soft couch, listening to Kelsey move around the kitchen, I nearly dozed off. But then something Whitestone had said at the soccer game leaped into my mind and I popped awake. It had hardly registered at the time. Teasing me, he'd said that Kelsey was leaving Staten Island in a matter of weeks.

Why had he said that?

Technically, he was correct. If you wanted, you could count the months between October and the next summer, when her teaching year was done and she would head off to Chicago, as weeks.

Hell, you could use days, hours, or minutes if you felt like doing all that math. Maybe he had simply used weeks for dramatic effect. And had he really been talking about Staten Island, or had he just meant the college?

My brain painted a gloating smirk on Whitestone's face as he spoke those words over and over behind my eyes. I wanted to believe I just misremembered the moment, even as the memory and the questions it inspired rubbed like sandpaper against my skull. Was Kelsey hiding something?