Yet who the hell had more of a reason to whine than Kyle Byrne? Everyone blames his parents for purposely screwing up his life, but Kyle now had absolute proof. His father had deserted him not out of fear for his own safety or for the safety of his only son, as he had claimed, but out of greed and lust. The truth of it filled Kyle with anger and resentment, with a sour consolation at being proved right all along, and with a feral sadness that tore through him like choked sobs. Betrayal to the left of him, betrayal to the right, and here he was stuck in the middle, stuck in this nightmare, stuck in this life.

For a time he pretended not to know where he was headed, imagined he was just accelerating into the setting sun, feeling the wind in his face and the pumping of the pistons through his bones. Speed was what he was after, raw speed, as if he could outrun the emotions that were overwhelming him. But he wasn’t running away from the source of his pain, he was running to it, inexorably. He was like the noble salmon jumping up the falls as it returned to its childhood home. Except he wasn’t a fish. And he wasn’t going to spawn. And he didn’t go well with a beurre blanc and a risotto, though being poached that very night was a real possibility.

It wasn’t long before he was back in the old neighborhood, back on the old street, sitting on the bike and surveying the charred ruins of house and car. And at the sight of it, the sadness nearly overwhelmed him, until he transmuted it into raw bitterness. Aimed at his father.

Liam Byrne was responsible for this, for everything about this. The fire, yes, of course, because of his ruthless pursuit of the O’Malley file for his own damn profit. But even before the fire. The loss of the house, because of the way he had left Kyle and his mother practically destitute. And the loss of his mother, as if the sadness of Liam’s fake death had metastasized into the cancer that failed to respond to any treatment and overwhelmed her body. And the ruinous choices in Kyle’s own life that had led him to where he was at this moment, without anything to claim as his own but the suit on his back and the target on his forehead.

He was wondering how to play the next few hours, but the sight of the burned wreckage made everything clear. He was going to do whatever he needed to betray his father the way his father had betrayed him. Ashes to ashes, baby.

He looked up and saw a police car slip onto the street, and suddenly he remembered all the trouble he was in. With his toe he tapped the gearshift into first as he popped the clutch, lurching off down the street, speeding away, a left, a right, losing the cops when he made another left. He didn’t think it mattered where he was headed, but it did. Because he was traversing a course that had become familiar in the past year. Up City Line, down Lansdale Avenue, up State Road, along the low stone fence to the cemetery. The same cemetery where his father’s fake funeral had happened fourteen years before and where his mother’s real burial had taken place just about a year ago.

He parked the bike on the narrow road that wound its way through the burial ground and walked over to her grave. He read her name, the dates, the words on the stone: loving mother and sister. Not wife, though. You couldn’t say wife. He had betrayed her there, too.

Kyle leaned over to brush some leaves away from the grass atop her plot. He rubbed his hand across the carving of her name. He dropped to one knee.

“The old bastard’s come back,” he said to the stone.

He knelt there for a moment, as if waiting for a response. He lifted his chin and saw a woman in the distance who appeared to be walking toward him, and his heart clutched with an insane hope. But why the hell shouldn’t she come back from the grave just as his father had? It only fit everything else that had happened to him the past few days. And he’d trade a hundred of him for one of her. But it wasn’t her, it was just some older woman who stopped and turned and bowed before a patch of grass far away. And like a stone falling in a dark, cold pond, his heart fell.

No, his mother wasn’t coming back, and yet he could hear her voice, soft but insistent, the way she spoke to him whenever his father made those rare visits to the house. Go to him, she would say as they sat on the porch and saw his car pull up. Go to your father.

He closed his eyes, and he remembered a shard from his boyhood, when he’d asked his mother about the father who had always been a mystery to him. They were sitting on the porch, and his mother was in the rocking chair, smoking, staring off with those impassive eyes of hers. “He’s a complicated man,” she had said to Kyle. “He’s difficult to understand.”

“And do you understand him?” Kyle said.

“No. But I love him, and you should, too.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s your father, Kyle. That’s just the way it is. And without him I wouldn’t have you.”

“Does he love us?” Kyle asked.

“In his way.”

“And what way is that, Mom?”

“The only way he can. And, Kyle, that’s all you’ll ever get from

anyone.”

Kyle didn’t understand then what she had meant, didn’t understand it still, but he remembered how he felt when his father’s car would pull up to the front of the house and his mother would tell him, “Go to him. Go to your father,” and off he’d run, down the steps to the car. And when the stranger stepped out, Kyle would hug his legs and the old man would pat him on the head and Kyle would smell the braided scents of old cigarette smoke, of Brylcreem and Aqua Velva, and the fear and the love both would overwhelm him.

But things were different now. Kyle was no longer a child with all a child’s pathetic needs, and his mother was dead, and all kinds of truths about his father had been branded into his soul. The way his father had used privileged information to extort money from a congressional candidate. The way his father had returned from the dead only to extort more money from the same candidate, and to rope his son into the scheme. The way his father had lied to and betrayed him all the years of his life. It would be different now, absolutely. He wouldn’t run to him and hug his legs, absolutely. All he felt now was anger, a seething anger that strained for release.

“So, boyo,” said the old man in the doorway of that New Jersey motel after Kyle had made his way back. The old man’s eyes were lit with greed, his smile yellow, his hands reached out with expectation. “How did it go? Are we in business?”

Kyle stared at his father for a long moment and felt the tectonic plates shift within him, before he lunged. And grabbed his father close. And buried his face in his father’s grizzled neck.

“I love you, Dad,” he said as his tears rubbed off on his father’s skin.

Fourteen years after Liam Byrne’s funeral, Kyle was finally crying for his father. And Kyle wasn’t lying. He did, truly, love his father. Despite all he knew, despite the anger that remained inside, despite the past and despite himself, he loved his father. Unqualifiedly. As had Kyle’s mother before him. Kyle didn’t trust his father, or admire him, or particularly like him. But a part of Kyle lived forever beyond the realm of reason, and that part had taken control. “I love you,” he said again.

“I know you do, boyo,” said Liam Byrne, patting his son’s head as he had all those years before, drawing out thick tears. “I know you do. Now, come inside. You have much to tell, and we have much to plan.”

CHAPTER 52

BOBBY DRAGGED THE BLACK SATCHEL through the rhododen