Billy has made a killing post-9/11. He’s welcome in the office of four-term mayor Angelo Cicilline any day of the week. Sissy (as he’s been known since elementary school) thinks Billy’s an upstanding citizen. That assessment is not hurt by Billy’s generous campaign contributions. Billy is the kind of homosexual that anyone would like.

Detective Seann MacPhail likes Billy in particular. He likes him for a sixteen-year-old murder. It’s a cold case. There was a defunct gay bar called the Chain Male, and a Jewish stiff, and a murder weapon gone AWOL. Mac’s got no personal beef, but it eats at him that Billy’s still out on the street.

Mac gets no end of guff from the brass about pursuing the case. It takes some serious cojones to move against Sissy’s friends. And it doesn’t help that the stiff was a scumbag. A lawyer for cons. A guy who worked the unions and greased city hall to get Billy his building permit. Maybe a fag besides.

"Who would you rather have alive?" other cops ask Mac when he won’t let it die. "Billy or the Jew?"

"Speak of the devil," Mac mutters. "I was just thinking about fucking your wife."

Billy and Toni had married in ’75. They divorced a year later, and were still best of friends.

Billy says, "I been looking for you, Mac."

"You forget how good her pussy smells, Billy?"

"How come you don’t like me, Mac?"

"Kind of a question’s that? I love you, Billy. The way I love spiders and rats and cockroaches." He slaps his hand down on the bar and his glass jumps.

"Whaddou I have to do to get you to like me?"

"Kill yourself. Why don’t you try that, Billy? I think I’d like you better dead."

"What’re you drinking?"

Billy signals Tino to bring Mac another beer.

Mac sighs. Nothing a guy said to this scum-sucking fudgepacker got him angry. Billy doesn’t even give a shit that Mac’s fucking his wife. Billy’s without the basic emotions, flat as a picture on a page. Which drives Mac fucking cuckoo. Nothing gets his goat more than a man without passion, without animation. The amorphous and stubborn and passive are anathema to him. The worst of the worst. How many times in his career had Mac wanted to kill not the murderers and the rapists, but the sniveling snitches, the passive cowering sneaks who were hard to pin down, hammering jelly to the wall? They let themselves get kicked like dogs but never change their ways. These are the dangerous people, these are the people who will stab you in the back. World a better place without them.

Billy and Tino talk it up. Billy doesn’t care that people like Tino make a mint laughing at him behind his back. He talks about the Sox, and the new tax hike, and whatever happened to summer, and when there seems to be nothing left to talk about they talk about the Festival of Hours. The Festival is Sissy’s work. Bigger than First Night. Bigger than St. Paddy’s. They have fires in the river, and a parade of boats, and costumes, and music, and cotton candy, and it is all supposed to tempt people off the interstate and into Hebron’s downtown to celebrate the city’s heritage as the place where time began. Sissy went all out. They actually dug a new channel for the Towahannoc River to re-route it through a part of town better suited for the Festival’s crowds.

"Festival doesn’t suck," Tino says. "For business, I mean."

Billy says, "Not from where I’m at. All the folks are up at the festival. No sense in evening opening my doors. And more fools they all are, far as I’m concerned. They should be fuckin’ afraid. They should be coming down and stocking up. You just never know what’s going to go down at Festival. Osama. Housebreaks. People got to be prepared."

Billy’s got a lot of "th" in every "s" that comes out of his mouth. Tino just nods and polishes glass.

"Speaking of," Billy says. He turns to Mac. "I gotta tip for you."

Billy says he’s got suspicions about a sale he’s just made. It seems a kid came in, just eighteen years old. He was looking for a shotgun. Didn’t say what he was up to, but Billy’s got suspicions it’s no good. He says Mac should look into it. Might get a promotion out of it.

"Kid’s name," he says, "is Lot Bates. I got the info in the file."

Mac fixes Billy with a stare. Billy’s not known for having scruples about the business he does. Maybe he’s got an ax to grind. Maybe Billy tried to get down this kid’s pants and got shut out.

"All that suspicion didn’t stop you from making a sale, did it, Billy?"

"Well, I didn’t sell him any ammo."

"You’re a fuckin’ sweetheart."

Mac grunts.

"You only got a couple of days, Mac."

"Gonna turn into a pumpkin?"

"Whatever the kid’s up to, it’s going down at the Festival of Hours," Billy says. "That’s the word I get." Billy slips a note across the bar. It’s folded sixteen times, written in words Billy might have wrote himself. It’s a threat. He says it’s from the boy.

"Two days," Billy repeats.

Mac takes a long pull on his long-neck.

"I got all my life, Billy."

Mac stands on a span over the river. He looks down at the place where the Towahannoc funnels into the new riverbed they built for it. The river is a stew, broken by tree limbs and shopping carts mired on the banks or caught in the current. Cold air skims a mist off the water. He hardly knows the river any more. What kind of arrogance does it take to move a river from its God-given course? Sissy must think he’s going to live forever, never have to pay the price.

Mac wonders if what was drowned under the river’s new course still carries on under the river’s surface. A shadow world. That says to anyone who would looks: Here is the way life was supposed to have been.

Mac can’t swim, but he imagines he can breathe water. What was it that Toni used to say? Ideal man breathes through his ears and has a twelve-inch tongue? Mac wonders if she’s is up for fucking tonight. He glances over toward the looming shadow of the old headquarters of Hebron Time Co., where Toni’s got a state-subsidized apartment that Sissy fixed for her to keep. Fixed by Billy Vigor no doubt. It gets Mac’s goat that Toni lets that faggot provide for her. It gets his goat that he can’t give her up.

A car approaches and slows. Mac’s hands shift to his badge and weapon. This is not fear, he tells himself. He almost wants someone to try to fuck with him tonight.

The car overshoots him. It’s a 97 Buick Regal. Instinctually, Mac notes the plate number and matches it against the time on his watch.

There’s the crunch of gears, a flash of white light from the car’s rear. It backs up. A jowly face looks out the driver’s window. Father Twomey. Returning from some night errand. He’s likely lonely. These must be bad hours to be a priest.

"Get in," the priest says.

Mac does not immediately accept the invitation. His eyes are down the road. A convoy of State Police cars appears, one after another, whooshing out of the dark and silence at 60 miles an hour, a low throb or whisper as they pass without siren or flashing lights, so that they appear unnaturally quiet, people who can keep a secret.

"Get in," the priest repeats.

He does not ask what Mac’s doing out here late. He explains that he’s been called out to Lower Hebron to perform the sacrament of the sick. He jokes, "I think it’s the third time this month that Mrs. Walsh has been dying."

Mac thinks: I like a priest who’s got a sense of humor.

He thinks: Why is the priest not more careful with decorum when he is around me? Why am I exempted from priest-like political correctness? Was this honesty on the priest’s part? Was that what honesty was, the absence of decorum? The ruder, the blunter, the less circumspect, the more honest he was with me?

The longer Mac thinks about it, the more the lack of decorum seems like a lack of respect.

You think too much, he tells himself.

Mac asks, "You got a kid in your parish named Lot Bates?"

"Sure," the priest says.

"Not Jewish?"

"Father was Jewish. Quiet kid. Tough what he went through. I’ve always felt a pull to minister to that family. Isn’t that strange?"

"We’ve all got a calling, Father. What’d the kid go through?"

"Huh?"

"You said the kid went through something."

"Oh. Yeah. Didn’t you know?" He mentions the murder sixteen years ago.

Mac stiffens, and the priest is keen to his surprise.

"Didn’t you know that, Mac?"

There’s a clenched fist in Mac’s belly. His dick’s hard for this news. He’s angry at the priest for making this connection before he had.

"I know," the priest allows. "Sore spot. You guys never solved that one?"

"That’s not the half of it," Mac says.

The priest looks discomfited. "What do you mean?"

"Turn here."

The priest falls into silence. They come to a traffic light. The pavement is unaccountably wet, though Mac does not remember its having rained.

The lights of Billy Vigor's compound cast the clock factory in a shroud of darkness. The lights on the tower wink red.

"I heard it from someone up in Sissy’s office," the priest offers. His tone is almost apologetic, as if he feels he has to explain that he has come to the information legitimately.

The priest observes, "Things on your mind, Mac."

Old school, Mac thinks approvingly. He’s not trying to pry. He knows that each of us has our burdens. He is not part of this broader culture of vomiting up all your secrets on reality TV, eyes on you all the time, cameras in your shower, and doctors looking up your ass with klieg lights, and some how it comes out you don’t know anyone any more, even though you know you been up their pooper with a microscope.

"If ever you need to talk ..." the priest starts to say.

"Don’t ruin a good thing, padre."

"Nothing wrong with that," he says. "Doesn’t make you a bad guy to want to put it all aside, to admit it’s got you shaken a bit."

Mac’s thoughts are cold. The burning pique at being bested by the priest has left him. Inside his head it is all cold ashes. Dusty. Lunar. He wants the priest to shut his yap.

"You know Billy Vigor?"

"Everyone knows you got it in for him."

Mac is surprised. He had not known that everybody knew he had it in for Billy.

Mac misses having Toni’s body in his bed. He misses her brown skin. Wet pussy. He misses her fiercely. Last thing Toni said to him was, "You’re a real bastard, Mac. And your dick’s small." She said, "Your time’s gonna come, too, Mac. Just you wait."

Mac checks the kid out. Confirms the priest’s intelligence: Lot Bates is indeed the second son of the Jew. He was two years old when his Daddy killed, and he has moved back to Hebron just in the last two months, staying with an aunt from the Catholic side of the family.

Mac questions principles, teachers, coaches and neighbors. They say the same thing as the priest: quiet kid. They don’t know him much.

Typical lazy-ass civilians, all of them, pulling salaries, but doing slipshod work. Mac puts in seventy-minute hours to get done what needs doing, while these bums clutch their crotches and coffee cups and wait to pull down pensions that will be as fat as Mac’s.

Mac catches up to the kid on the street. Bates is dressed in jailhouse sneaks with Velcro ties, a pair of pocket-free jeans, and a white long-sleeved T-shirt. His head is shaved to the bone and he’s got a patch growing beneath his lower lip. If Mac had been his father, he would have made the kid shave and give him money to buy himself some decent clothes. From the way the kid carries himself, Mac guesses his handshake is weak, clammy, untaught. His face is gaunt, his body pocked with shadow, dimples, and knobs. His dark eyes are slow. No one would ever mistake this kid for Beaver Cleaver. But that’s fine with Mac. Pure is for Corn Flakes boxes. Mac lives in the real world.

The kid’s hesitation is no more than a quarter-second, but Mac closes in for the kill.

"What is it?"

Bates shakes his head.

"What?"

The kid denies everything, denies the very hesitation that set Mac off, until Mac, too, questions whether he detected anything it all. Bates reminds me of me, Mac thinks. Chip off the old block. There is something terrible and uncompromising reflected in the boy’s eyes. He felt like he was in the presence of an ally.

"You got a gun?" Mac asks.

After a second, the kid says, "Yeah."

"You got a clue how to use it?"

Just before dusk, the kid comes out. On foot. A trench coat flapping at his ankles. Plenty of room for just about anything you might like to hide beneath.

Mac follows at a block’s distance until the crowds force him closer. So close, it feels like Bates is in Mac. He has become an extra floating rib, a vestigial bone, subsumed in Mac’s flesh, part of him.

Flesh of my flesh. A kid like me.

Tourists and gapers surround them. Booths have been set up to hawk everything under the sun. The city has removed the garbage bins from the street, so that no one has a place to hide a bomb. In every window, there are clocks taped to the glass, paper hands turned to every which hour. Father Time costumes have been dusted off from New Year's and recycled.

Across the way, a little child with a brass voice dances on the curb. Her hair is drawn up in a marble tie. The girl looks carefully both ways for traffic and crosses the street. She comes up and measures Mac's face, so full of confidence he can’t say "Boo".

"Hi!" she blurts. Then she skips away, thrilled with her own daring, three times on the left foot, one on the right, briefly tottering with both blue sandals on the curb.

Bates darts from the magic show and muscles his way through the crowd to the river’s edge. The crowds are four-people thick along the railing. Beneath the rail, at a ten-foot drop, runs the new river that Sissy made. In its current, at fifteen-foot intervals, pyres have been built in big black metal kettle drums mounted in the channel. Upriver, a black boat peopled with dignitaries dressed in black goes from pyre to pyre with long-handled torches. Sissy is aboard, and Twomey, and Billy Vigor, too.

In the wake of the boats, the Hebron High Swim team leaps into the Towahannoc from the 14th Street bridge. They are laughing and drunk, and when they drag themselves to shore, their boxers cling to their little boy asses which are lit bright by the fires.

When he turns back, he finds Bates had made a hole in the crowd, and has disappeared down a short gangway to a floating dock on the river’s edge. Mac runs to the rail. He flashes the badge, pushes aside a mother and child. He is worried he has lost the boy, failed the test.

Below the rail at which Mac stands is a dock floating in the river. The dock rides low in the water on account of the crowd on it. Sissy’s boat is approaching the dock.

Bates elbows through the crowd on the dock as if he plans to welcome Sissy and Twomey and Billy Vigor home. Someone catches the bow line. Billy Vigor is on the port side near the dock. Sissy stands behind him, a full head taller but half as wide. Toni V, who Mac sees for the first time, is also in the boat. She taps Billy on the shoulder and whispers in his ear, and Father Twomey touches her shoulder and leans close as if he, too, would like to hear.

The boat glides close and is arrested by the bow line pulled taut. Billy straddles a foot-wide stretch of open water and one foot on the dock.