“JOHNNY LONG. That you?”

The voice came from behind Johnny as he was entering the Astoria Boulevard subway station. He was surprised to hear his name spoken at three in the morning in Astoria, where he didn’t think he knew anyone.

For a moment he worried it was a cop. Just in case, he started reaching into the pocket of his jacket where he had a Kel-Tec .380.

But then he looked over his shoulder and actually had to blink, doing a double take.

“Carlos?” he asked.

He hadn’t seen Carlos Sanchez, his old friend from St. John’s, in how long? Eight, nine years? Nine years, but Carlos looked like he’d aged twenty. He was only four or five years older than Johnny, but he looked fifty with all of that gray in his hair, and his face looked old and drawn, too. Johnny had heard through Rayo, another guy from St. John’s, that Carlos had been away for dealing.

Carlos came over and gave Johnny a big hug. He reeked of booze and pot smoke, and Johnny couldn’t wait for the hug to end.

“It’s been a long time, bro,” Carlos said, finally letting go. “Been a long, long time. The hell you doin’ ’round here?”

“I should be asking you that question,” Johnny said. “I thought you were away.”

“Naw, man, that’s ancient history,” Carlos said. “Got out six months ago, and I’m livin’ here now, bro. Well, not here, here, I mean Queens, Bayside. I’m just here in Astoria on some business, know what I’m sayin’?”

Johnny wasn’t surprised Carlos was dealing again; the guy had been dealing since he was thirteen. Johnny had never touched drugs, not even pot, which was the main reason why he’d only been away one time. When you weren’t whacked out on drugs and could think clearly, it was easy to stay one step ahead of the cops.

“Where you living now?” Carlos asked.

“Still in Brooklyn,” Johnny said. “Got a little place out in Red Hook.” “Yeah, how you gettin’ by?”

“I’m doing okay.”

“Yeah, you still a pretty boy. I bet you gettin’ all the ladies, right?” “I can’t complain.”

“Can’t complain? Yeah, I remember the times, we’d point to any girl in the schoolyard or wherever, pay you twenty bucks or whatever and bet you couldn’t go pick her up, and you’d take our money every time.”

“Not every time,” Johnny said.

“Not every time,” Carlos said. “Check this guy out. You still got that sense of humor goin’ on. You still make me laugh.”

Johnny heard a subway pulling into the station above them. “Well, that’s my ride,” he said. “It was really great seeing you again, man.”

“Come on, hang out,” Carlos said. “Where you rushin’ to at three in the morning?”

“Long day,” Johnny said. “Gotta crash.”

“Come on, man. You ain’t seen your ol’ bro in how many years and you can’t sit down and have a drink?”

Johnny really wanted to get home and away from Astoria. It was unlikely that Theresa would call the cops, but after he hustled a woman he didn’t like to stay in her neighborhood.

“I don’t drink,” Johnny said.

“Johnny Clean, that’s right,” Carlos said. “Remember everybody used to call you that shit? Never drank, never did nothin’. That’s how you stayed a pretty boy, right?”

The train was pulling into the station, the brakes screeching.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Johnny said. “Why don’t you give me your cell? We’ll hang out some time.”

“Nah, come on, sit down with me right now,” Carlos said. “We can get some coffee and cake. I got something I gotta talk to you about anyway, somethin’ where you can make some serious cash, know what I mean?”

Johnny wasn’t interested in hearing Carlos’s idea, but he knew he couldn’t just blow him off. You didn’t do that to a guy from St. John’s. Growing up, those guys had been Johnny’s whole family. He’d spent every Christmas with them, every Thanksgiving.

“Okay, let’s go,” Johnny said, “but I can’t stay out long.”

They went to the corner, to the Neptune Diner, and sat in a booth by a window with a view of the Grand Central Parkway, still a lot of traffic this time of night. Johnny was starving—a night of hustling and sex had built up quite an appetite—and he ordered a bacon cheeseburger with everything on it. After a couple of bites, he realized it wouldn’t fill him up, so he ordered another one.

Carlos caught Johnny up on guys from the old neighborhood. Everybody, it seemed, had gotten into some kind of trouble. Pedro was doing fifteen for manslaughter. Delano was at Attica for dealing. DeShawn had been stabbed to death in a fight outside a bar in Philly. Eddie had OD’d on smack.

“Sounds like me and you are the big winners, huh?” Johnny said, smiling. “Yeah, I’m doing okay,” Carlos said. “Not in jail anyway, and I got my HIV under control.”

“Oh, shit,” Johnny said. “Sorry to hear that, man.”

“Eh, it’s okay,” Carlos asked. “The fuck you gonna do, right? And with the medicines they got, I’m gonna live longer than you.”

Carlos was sobering up, and Johnny started to have a good time bullshitting with him about the old days at St. John’s. Johnny had forgotten how much he’d needed Carlos back then. The courts had sent Johnny to St. John’s when he was nine years old after his mother was killed. They’d told Johnny she went in a car accident, which hadn’t made sense to him because she didn’t own a car, and then he found out a few years later that his mother wasn’t really a secretary, she was a hooker, and she’d been stabbed to death by one of her clients. Johnny felt like an outcast at St. John’s because all the other kids were a lot tougher than him and had known each other all their lives. He got picked on a lot—it seemed like every day somebody wanted to kick his ass—and Carlos had been the only one who always had his back.

So when Carlos looked at Johnny seriously and said, “So the thing I got goin’ on . . .” Johnny knew he couldn’t say no right away even though he also knew this wasn’t going to lead to anything good. He had to at least listen to his old buddy, see what he had to say, give him a little respect.

Surprisingly, Carlos’s plan didn’t seem so bad—rob some fancy house in Forest Hills while the family was away in Florida. Carlos’s ex-girlfriend, the maid, had the keys and knew the code to the alarm system.

“Shit’s gonna be so easy,” Carlos said. “The house is gonna be empty and we gonna go in and out. Gabriela, my girl, she said the lady in the house got a diamond ring. It’s so expensive she doesn’t wear it, but she keeps it right out in her bedroom. My girl’s gonna tell us where everything’s at so we can go in, out, and then we got fifty thousand dollars, twenty-five each.”

“What about your girl?”

“That’s the funny shit.” Carlos was laughing.“She was on my ass the other day, sayin’ she wanted the money split three ways, going it gotta be equal and shit or she won’t give me the keys. So I was telling her, yeah, don’t worry, baby, it’ll be three ways, anything to shut her fat ass up, right? But when we get the money, that’s it, we gone. She never gonna see our asses again.”

Carlos was still laughing, wiping tears out of the corners of his eyes with his index finger.

Johnny had to admit the plan sounded good, but that’s what worried him. In his experience, when something sounded too good it usually meant it was bad.

“How do you know the family’ll be in Florida?” he asked.

“Because my girl works there,” Carlos said. “She knows everything.”

“And when we don’t give her a cut, how do you know she won’t rat us out?” “Why’d she rat us out and get her own ass sent to jail? The cops, they’re gonna know she got us the key and the code. Naw, trust me, the bitch is gonna

keep her mouth shut.”

Johnny had some more questions, but he couldn’t find any obvious holes in the plan, and he didn’t see how he could say no. Twenty-five G’s was some serious cash—beat the hell out of the kind of pocket change he’d been making lately, a few hundred bucks here and there on the good days. The summer was coming, and he could use a break. It would be nice to take a couple of months off, go to the beach down the shore, work on his tan. How hot would he look with a tan? How many women would want to screw him then? He’d pass that thousand mark in four years, no problem.

“So,” Carlos said, “you in or out?”

Johnny looked across the table at his old buddy and smiled.

The night of the robbery, Johnny and Carlos, wearing backpacks, met where Carlos had parked his car, outside a pizza place on Austin Street in Forest Hills. Johnny had come by subway, but Carlos had taken his car, a beat-up Impala. Not the best getaway ride, but if things went right they wouldn’t be in any rush. They’d just casually get in the car and drive away.

“Ready to do it?” Carlos asked.

“Hold up,” Johnny said, looking around. He didn’t like this at all. Yeah, it was better meeting here than in front of the house they were gonna rob, but it still felt too out in the open. It was 1:30 a.m., and almost all the stores were closed, but there were still cars passing by, and right across the street and down the block a little, there was a homeless-looking guy hanging out.

“What’s wrong?” Carlos asked.

“Maybe we should’ve met at the house,” Johnny said. “You told me to park here.”

“The car’s okay. I’m talking about us. It’s not good if somebody sees us together.”

“So what if somebody sees us?” Carlos said. “We’re just two people. What did we do?”

“I mean if somebody remembers,” Johnny said. “After.”

“After what? The people’re in Florida. It’s gonna be like a week before they find out the joint got robbed.”

Johnny didn’t care, he still felt uncomfortable. The homeless guy seemed to be looking right at them. Johnny still had a bad feeling about the whole thing. He’d been on a roll lately—picking pockets, picking up women, hustling a little pool. It wasn’t big money, but it was steady, and it was safe. Why was he getting in on a robbery with a drug addict?

He was ready to back out. He was going to say to Carlos, Sorry, man, I don’t like it, and go back to Brooklyn, but he knew he’d be letting Carlos, his brother, down, and was there really a reason to? Maybe he was just overthinking it, making it more complicated than it really was. Maybe it was like Carlos said, an easy twenty-five K. He’d go along with it, see how it went. If it didn’t feel right at the house, he could bail then.

They went past Austin Street under the Long Island Rail Road tracks and through the big gates into Forest Hills Gardens. Johnny had only been to this neighborhood once or twice, driving by, and he’d forgotten how fancy all the houses were. They were like mini mansions, with front lawns and backyards and driveways, and they had to go for, what, three, four million dollars, maybe even more nowadays. It reminded him of the houses in Rockaway in Brooklyn. One summer, when Johnny was eleven or twelve years old, he stole a bicycle, and every day he biked all the way to the beach. He’d pass all the fancy houses out there, watch all the families—the dads playing catch with their kids in the street, or the kids playing on their front yards and shooting hoops in their backyards. He’d wonder what it would feel like to be one of those kids, just for one day, to have everything instead of nothing.

As they walked, they didn’t talk at all. This had been Johnny’s rule—no talking. They went about three blocks, made a left, and there was the house. Jesus, it was one of the nicest ones on the block—three stories, brick, front lawn. When Johnny was a kid he would’ve killed to live in a place like this. He hoped the people appreciated what they had, that it wasn’t just all normal to them and they didn’t give a shit.

Johnny and Carlos looked around to make sure the coast was clear, then nodded to each other and walked up the driveway to the backyard. One thing struck Johnny as wrong, and he’d kick himself about it later: A shiny black Mercedes was in the driveway. There was a garage in the back, so if the people were away, out of town, wouldn’t they put the car in the garage? Or why not drive it to the airport and leave it there? Johnny was going to say something to Carlos, even suggest they go back to their car, but then he thought maybe there was nothing so strange about it at all. Lot of rich people have two or even three cars. Maybe the other cars were in the garage and the people had left the Merc in the driveway. Maybe they’d taken a limo to the airport. There were a lot of reasons why the Merc could be there.

At the end of the driveway, it was dark, just like Carlos had said it would be. They opened their backpacks and put on their ski masks and gloves and took out their flashlights. Then they went around to the back door. Carlos turned on his flashlight and opened the door with the keys. So far so good, but now they had to disarm the alarm. Carlos went right to the keypad and punched in the numbers, but the red light was still blinking. Fuck, in maybe a minute or less the alarm would start blaring, and they’d have to run as fast as they could back to the car and get the hell out of Forest Hills.

“Come on,” Johnny stage-whispered. He was holding the door open, ready to take off.

“Wait,” Carlos said, and he started punching the numbers in again.

Jesus, Johnny knew he should’ve made Carlos write the code down, but he swore he had it memorized. Carlos typed in several numbers, then hesitated, as if thinking, using all his concentration, then punched in the last two.

The red light turned green.

Carlos smiled widely, and Johnny wondered, Had the guy been fucking with me all along? It was the type of prank Carlos would’ve pulled at St. John’s, trying to scare the shit out of somebody and getting a big kick out of it.

But they were in the house, that was the important thing. Now they had to get what they needed and get the hell out.

Shining their flashlights ahead of them, they went through the kitchen—it was huge, with brand new-looking stainless steel appliances—and into some kind of big pantry. Then they went into the living room—man, these people were loaded; they had a plasma TV on the wall, looked like a sixty-incher—and entered the dining room, where Carlos started coughing. He bent over for a few seconds, like he was trying to prevent a full-blown coughing fit. Then he straightened up and said in a loud whisper that was almost like his normal speaking voice, “Gotta stop smoking, man.”

“Shhhh,” Johnny said, shining his flashlight at his own face to show Carlos how serious he was.

Carlos smiled, and Johnny wondered if the cough was just for show, too, to get a reaction.

Carlos’s attitude was starting to piss Johnny off. He’d been cool on the way to the house, but now that they were inside he was acting like this was all a big game or something.

They continued to the foyer, to the staircase. The plan was Carlos would go up and get the jewelry and whatever cash there was, and Johnny would be the lookout. Johnny knew he was putting a lot of trust in Carlos. Carlos could come down and say he couldn’t find the jewelry, and meanwhile pocket all of it, but Johnny didn’t want to believe Carlos would ever do that to him. They were brothers for life, and they’d never rip each other off. They had a bond that nothing could break.

Or did they?

Carlos started upstairs. The stairs were creaking, more than Johnny liked, and then they heard the noise. Johnny knew Carlos had heard it, too, because he suddenly stood still and cut off his flashlight. Johnny did the same and immediately stuck his hand in his pocket and gripped his piece.

Johnny tried to convince himself that it was just the wind, the house settling, but he knew exactly what he’d heard: footsteps. Somebody was up there.

Carlos wasn’t packing. Johnny had wanted him to, but Carlos had said, “Why do I need a piece when there’s gonna be nobody in the house to shoot?”

Johnny was aiming his gun toward the top of the staircase. His eyes hadn’t adjusted yet, and he could barely see. If he saw someone, anything, and had a clear shot, he was going to take it.

The only light in the room was coming from the streetlights outside and maybe some dim light from a night-light or something upstairs. Now Johnny could see the front door, the windows, and the outline of the staircase. He couldn’t see anything upstairs yet, but he was just starting to see Carlos, standing there, about halfway up the stairs.

Then Carlos started heading up again.

Johnny wanted to scream, What the fuck’re you doing? The guy wasn’t carrying, and somebody was up there. He had to know somebody was up there.

Then Johnny heard movement, maybe the floor creaking. Shit.

Carlos said, “Please don’t shoot me,” and then the shots came. Two first, then a bunch all at once. Jesus, the shooter was opening up on Carlos, the fuck was going on? Johnny saw Carlos fall back a little, trying to steady himself by grabbing the railing, but then he lost his balance and fell to the bottom of the stairwell.

The whole thing had happened so fast, maybe like three seconds total, that Johnny didn’t have any time to think about what to do. He was about to fire at the staircase—he saw somebody there now, looked like a guy in a T-shirt and boxers—but did he really want to get into a shootout?

He took a couple of steps toward the door then heard, “Get the hell outta here or I’ll shoot!”

It sounded like some rich, middle-aged white guy trying to be tough. Johnny would’ve bet any amount the guy was full of shit; he’d probably spent his whole round and was standing there shitting bricks with nothing but a handful of metal. If Johnny had taken a few seconds to think it over, he would’ve blown the guy away, but his instincts told him to get the hell out before this thing went from bad to worse.

Instead of going all the way back through the house to the back door and then having to go through the backyard, all the way around to the driveway, he went toward the front door. His eyes had adjusted more, and there was enough light there from the streetlights outside to see what he was doing as he unbolted two locks and unchained the door. He wasn’t afraid the guy would shoot him in the back because he knew, he just knew, the guy had been bullshitting.

A few seconds later Johnny was sprinting down the block, and then he turned onto the main street and ran toward the Forest Hills gates. He heard sirens and immediately slowed, taking off his ski mask and gloves and walking at a normal pace as a police car sped by in the opposite direction.

Johnny felt like shit for ditching Carlos. Yeah, it looked like those bullets got him, probably got shot in the head the way he fell back, but what if he was wrong and Carlos had just gotten hit in the arm or something? Maybe if Johnny hadn’t taken off, if he’d opened up on the middle-aged guy instead, he could’ve pulled Carlos out. Instead Johnny had saved his own ass instead of trying to help his brother, a guy who’d helped him so many times before.

Johnny went down to the subway. The platform was pretty much empty— just a homeless guy, sleeping sprawled out on a bench. It wasn’t the same homeless guy he’d seen earlier on the street, though. Johnny was going to take the first train that came, but at this time of night, past two in the morning, he had no idea how long that would take. He listened for a rumbling in the tunnels, but there was nothing. He had to get the hell out of Forest Hills. The cops were definitely at the house now; how long would it be before they checked the subway station? Johnny figured he had five, ten minutes, if that.

He wasn’t going to take any chances. He jogged to the end of the platform, then jumped onto the tracks and headed into the tunnel. He hadn’t been in a subway tunnel in years, but as kids he and his friends used to walk the tracks all the time. One New Year’s Eve, he and Carlos and a couple of other guys from St. John’s had walked along the 6 train tracks from Grand Central to Union Square. When trains came they’d stood in the space between the tracks and the wall.

Johnny walked along the tracks as fast as he could, occasionally jogging and even running. There was enough light to see anyway, but to make his path even more visible he shined his flashlight ahead of him, scaring away rats here and there.

It only took him about ten minutes or so to reach the Sixty-seventh Avenue station. He was going to continue through the tunnel to the next station, but he heard a train coming from behind him and climbed onto the platform. It was an R—heading toward Manhattan and Brooklyn. Johnny got on and sat in a seat in the corner, finally able to catch his breath.

Less than an hour later, he arrived at his tiny studio apartment in a walk-up tenement on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook, all the way out near the river. He still felt bad about ditching Carlos, but he kept telling himself that he’d done the right thing. Even if Carlos had been alive he would’ve been seriously injured, bleeding like hell, and it would’ve been impossible to get him out of the house. But no matter how hard Johnny tried to rationalize and reassure himself, he couldn’t help feeling like a big wimp.

He took a long shower, thinking about all the ifs. If it hadn’t started to rain that night in the city, if he hadn’t gone into the Molly Wee Pub, if he hadn’t picked up that girl Theresa, if he hadn’t gone to the diner with Carlos, if he’d just said “No thanks” at any point. He felt like a total idiot, but now his biggest concern was not messing up his life even more. He knew that with his prettyboy looks he couldn’t survive jail again—especially a long stretch. He’d kill himself before he had to be a sissy for all those guys again.

Johnny didn’t think the cops would find a connection between him and Carlos. Before running into each other in Astoria that night, they hadn’t seen each other in years, and Johnny had been careful to not talk to Carlos on his cell or any other way that could be traced. Assuming Carlos had been smart enough not to shoot his mouth off about the robbery—and Johnny didn’t think he had—the only one Johnny had to worry about was Carlos’s girlfriend, Gabriela. What had Carlos said her last name was? He’d mentioned it the other night, when they got together in the city, on that bench in Battery Park, and went over the robbery plans for the final time. Was it Madena? Madano? Madeno? With the hot water beating down on his head, Johnny racked his brain, trying to remember the name, and then he thought, Moreno. Yeah, that was definitely it. There were probably dozens of ways the cops could connect Gabriela to Carlos. Carlos had sworn to Johnny that Gabriela didn’t know anything about Johnny, that she didn’t even know his name, but what if Carlos had been bullshitting just to get Johnny to go along with the robbery? Was Johnny supposed to take Carlos’s word for it now, when he’d been wrong about the house being empty tonight, when Johnny’s ass, literally, was on the line? And if Gabriela did know about Johnny, what was to stop her from ratting him out to the cops, making some kind of deal with them?

Johnny got out of the shower and, with a towel around his waist, called 411 and got the address of Gabriela Moreno in Jackson Heights. That was easy. He put on his usual outfit, the Johnny Long uniform—dark jeans, skintight black tee, worn black leather jacket—tucked his piece under his jeans, safety on— didn’t want to blow his dick off; what would he do without it?—and was out the door.

The sun was starting to rise when Johnny stood on the subway platform, waiting for an F train. To get to Jackson Heights in Queens, he had to change trains twice in the city. It would’ve been faster to steal a car or take a livery cab, but as always Johnny played the percentages. Getting busted for grand theft auto or having a cabdriver finger him in the courtroom would have been the stupidest ways to go down. He figured he had a little time to play with anyway. The cops would have to ID Carlos, figure out exactly who he was, then make the connection to Gabriela. Johnny had told Carlos to be careful, not to talk to Gabriela on his cell, et cetera, so hopefully the guy had listened.

Johnny got out at Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights. He had Gabriela’s address, but he had no idea how to get there. He had GPS on his phone, but he knew the cops could trace that shit. So he asked a guy outside the station for directions. The guy—he was old with very thick glasses, so Johnny thought he would have a hard time ID-ing him later—told Johnny where to go. It was farther than he’d thought, sounded like it would be a ten-minute walk at least. After walking for about twenty minutes Johnny knew something was wrong. He asked a teenager, a black kid on his way to school, for directions, and the kid kind of laughed and told Johnny he’d walked way out of the way. Johnny had to jog back about ten blocks and ask somebody else for directions before he finally found Gabriela’s apartment building.

It was past seven thirty—about five hours since the robbery. The cops, if they’d moved fast, could’ve already gotten to her. A good sign: Johnny looked around and didn’t see any police cars, marked or unmarked. Unmarked, that always cracked Johnny up. The cops always thought they were so undercover in their unmarked cars; meanwhile the unmarked cars were always black Impalas or Chargers that screamed “cop.” If they wanted to be unmarked, why didn’t they drive beat-up Chevys with Puerto Rican flags all over them? Sometimes Johnny thought cops had to be the biggest bunch of idiots in the world.

Johnny pressed the apartment buzzer with g. moreno next to it—didn’t anybody ever tell her not to put her name on it?—and when she answered he said, “Police,” and she let him right up.

On the stairwell he stopped and attached the sound suppressor to the end of the barrel, then put the gun back in his inside jacket pocket and continued up to her apartment. He rang the bell, and she answered, looking scared, like she thought she was about to get busted. Well, she was about to get busted, just not the way she thought.

Johnny was surprised, though; she was actually a really good-looking woman. Yeah, overweight, but she had a pretty South American look and big light brown eyes. How had Carlos gotten a woman this hot?

“You Gabriela?” Johnny asked.

She nodded, and he shot her in the face. She fell back a little, then crumpled onto the floor, the blood puddle spreading around her mouth. He checked to make sure none of her blood was on him, and then he stood back and put a couple into her chest to make sure she was gone for good.

He took a quick look around, spotted her pocketbook. He took twenty-three dollars, then tossed the pocketbook onto the floor and got the hell out of there.

Heading back toward the city on the 7 train—it was crowded with commuters—Johnny stood at the end of the car, facing his reflection in the door, replaying the shootings. He thought it had all gone pretty well. He didn’t think he’d been seen entering or leaving, and he’d been careful not to leave any evidence behind. He knew that because of Gabriela’s job the cops would try to make a connection between her shooting and the shooting and robbery in Forest Hills, but he didn’t see any way the police could get to him. There was no way that Gabriela and Carlos would’ve talked about the robbery with anybody else, and hopefully the purse on the floor would be enough to throw the stupid cops off.

It felt so good to finally be able to relax. Johnny had been on edge pretty much nonstop since meeting Carlos in Forest Hills, and he was looking forward to getting back to Brooklyn, maybe stopping at a diner for a big breakfast, and then getting into bed and sleeping for as long as possible.

But then, when he was switching for the F train at Thirty-fourth Street, he got all tensed up again, thinking, What if Carlos is still alive? Maybe Carlos was in a hospital, hooked up to machines, and the police were questioning him right now. Johnny didn’t think Carlos would talk to the cops—St. John’s brothers didn’t rat each other out—but then again you never know what a guy will do when the cops start hanging twenty-five to life over his ass.

In Brooklyn, Johnny realized he had lost his appetite and decided to skip the diner and head straight home. He turned on the TV to the local news station, and there it was, the top story, the robbery and shooting in Forest Hills. The reporter said Carlos Sanchez had been shot and killed by the owner of the house. “Thank fucking God,” Johnny said, and he leaned back on his sofa and relaxed again.

He was totally in the clear. There was no way the cops would ever catch on to him. All he had to do was lie low for a while and everything would be okay.

On the TV, they were showing the guy, Dr. Adam Bloom. Johnny thought, Doctor? What kind of doctor is he? Johnny hated the way the guy was acting all smug and proud of himself, talking about how he did the right thing shooting Carlos, saying, “I’d do it all over again” and “I think anybody in my position would’ve done what I did.” Man, Johnny wished he’d just shot the guy last night, blown him away.

The report ended, and Johnny shut off the TV and got into bed. He tried to fall asleep, but he kept thinking about the time when he was fifteen years old and these gangbangers were kicking the shit out of him in a schoolyard and everybody was standing around letting it happen, except Carlos. He came right over, pulled a blade, put it up to the biggest guy’s face, and said, “Mess with my boy, you mess with this.” It wasn’t the only time Carlos had saved Johnny’s ass from a beating—Johnny might not’ve survived being a teenager if it wasn’t for Carlos. So now it just didn’t seem right that Carlos was going into a box in the ground, probably in Potter’s Field, where the city buried people who had no families, and that cocky bastard, Dr. Bloom, got to go on living with his happy family in his big, fancy house.

Yeah, Johnny knew he had to do what Carlos would’ve done for him. He had to give that uppity son of a bitch some payback.