“So you found another woman. Or maybe had one already waiting, maybe someone as insanely loyal as my mother. Maybe you even started a new family. Do you coach your new kid in Little League, Dad?”

There was a pause as father and son stared at each other and the missing years tumbled between them like clothes in a Laundromat dryer.

“He’s a got a swing, he does,” Liam Byrne said finally. “Almost as pretty as yours.”

“You’re still with her and the boy?”

“It didn’t work out, it never does. I’m fated to pick women too good for me. Like your mother.”

“How do you live? Are you still a lawyer?”

“Couldn’t finagle myself a license. So it’s real estate instead. I dabble and get by.”

“With the money you stole from Sorrentino?”

Liam Byrne nodded as if Kyle’s possession of the name were not a surprise. “What did that foul little monster tell you?”

“He beat the hell out of me looking for what you stole. He wants the file, too. He thinks he can make his money back with it. He says you owe it to him.”

“That thief. We were in the middle of a partnership dispute when I left, that’s all it was. What I took was my share only.”

“You better tell him that before he comes after me again.” “I’ll deal with him, don’t worry.”

“How, Dad? How are you going to deal with anything? You’re dead, remember? And tell me, if life is so damn good in California, why did you bother to come back? And why now?”

“Because of Laszlo. I saw word of his murder on the Internet, and I knew I had to be at that funeral.”

“You came to pay your respects?”

“No, you’re not getting it. When I heard about his murder, I figured he had found a copy of the file and tried to weasel some money for himself. He was always a crook. He couldn’t help himself. What’s the opening line of every Hungarian recipe? ‘First, steal a chicken.’ And I remembered the cabinet I left in your house, which meant you, too, were at risk. So I came back, boyo. I came back to save you. You must believe me.”

“How can I?”

“And I want to tell you, watching you hit that baseball from afar . . .”

“So it was you.”

“Of course it was. I always loved watching you play ball. And now, spending this time with you, even if on the run, boyo, it fills my heart. You and me, together again, Byrne and son. We make a hell of a team, yes we do. The way we got out of that burning house, it was magical.”

“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?”

“So are we settled on the issue?”

“No,” said Kyle.

“But someday, maybe? Someday you’ll forgive the old man for doing only what he had to do?”

“I don’t know.”

Liam Byrne looked at his son with bright eyes, as if a jury had just come back in his favor.

“Well, that’s all I can ask for,” he said in a cheery voice. “It’s all I deserve. I made mistakes, I know it. I’ve loved and lost and played the fool. But I did it all on my terms, and that made all the difference. Son, listen. I learned something in this life that has kept me on the right side of things. You need to be true to yourself, boyo. Be true to yourself and you’ll be true to me, too. That’s all I can ask.”

He patted Kyle’s knee before standing and resuming his dressing. “Come now, boyo, we have work to do.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s time to trap a senator. We’re going to stomp on that rogue like a cockroach in the kitchen.”

“Why are we going to do anything? Let’s just go to the cops with the file and our story. There’s a detective I met that I think I trust.”

“We can’t, boyo, don’t you see? It wouldn’t any longer be about him, it would be about you and about me. Your car is still at the house. They’ll blame you for the fire. And then they’d pick me up, too. There was insurance involved in my leaving, with death benefits to your mother and my wife. We’d both end up in jail, and our senator would weasel his way out of trouble. You have to promise me. No one can know I’m back. I must at all times remain dead. That’s rule one. Promise me.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“Well, figure it out,” he said angrily. “And fast. You might never forgive your poor father, and he might not deserve forgiving, but you surely wouldn’t send him to jail, would you?”

Kyle looked at his father, felt some deeply held sense of misplaced loyalty well inside. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Good boy. Now, with the file in our hands, we can go on offense. The stakes were high fourteen years ago, but they’ve been raised radically. It’s not just a seat in Congress anymore, the assassin has his sights on the White House. He’ll do anything to make sure every trace of his boyhood crime is destroyed. And that, finally, will be his undoing.”

CHAPTER 34

FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life, Bobby Spangler’s world seemed perfectly balanced, as if he were dancing on the edge of a cleaver.

There had always been a disparity between his hopes and his realities, between his vision of himself and the way she viewed him. But the fire had cleansed him, burning off not just his eyebrows, or the lank hair he combed over his skull, but also his most puerile fantasies. Through the healing power of fire, he could, for the first time, see himself and his place in the world clear. The sulfurous landscape of his inner life now matched perfectly the burned and smoking wasteland he had trudged through all his days.

And somehow, magically, this balance made him incredibly happy.

Gone were the burdens of his expectations, of the high place he saw for himself among the men who made things happen in the world. Gone was the daily humiliation as he scraped and bowed for her blessings. Gone was the incessant striving. They all belonged to Robert, and Robert had been roasted to death in the fire as surely as those poor dead bastards in the basement of the Byrne house. For the first time since he was an innocent young child in his father’s meager home, he felt free of the shackles of possibility. He was no longer in the process of becoming, he simply was.

Bobby Spangler. Hunter. Fire starter. Murderer. A dangerous man and quite a nimble dancer, maintaining his balance on the cleaver’s edge.

“What have you done?” she said over the phone. He was sitting in his apartment, on the easy chair, naked except for the phone covering his ear, singed and still stinking of smoke, feeling waves of burning heat flush his ravaged skin as her bitter voice surged through him. The Super 8 projector was whirling away behind him as a blackand-white female figure flickered on the makeshift screen set up behind the television. The figure was dressed only in glossy high heels, dark stockings, long white gloves. Her pale limbs writhed, her torso twisted and breasts heaved, her mouth opened with feigned passion.