“She’s still smokin,” Will said. Nolan glared at him. “I mean, she looks very nice,” Will amended primly.
“Fuck you,” Nolan said.
“Back at you.” Will hesitated. “She’s working for some kind of legal clinic downtown. Helping immigrants or something.”
“I don’t care.” It was a lie. A lie that sustained him when her face drifted to him in the dark of night, when he woke up with it burned into his mind, a remnant of his dreams.
Will continued as if Nolan hadn’t spoken. “She’s still working for Seamus too. I think she’s doing it for the money. To help Owen.”
“I said I don’t care,” Nolan said through his teeth.
Will raised his glass. “And you’re a fecking liar.”
Nolan had wept when he’d heard about Bridget’s little brother’s ALS diagnosis, a diagnosis that meant Owen would likely have a short and painful life. Nolan had had to check the instinct to go to Bridget, had had to remind himself that she didn’t want him in her life.
“Are you going to change the subject or am I going to leave you with the tab and get the hell out of here?” Nolan was aware that his voice had turned hard, the humorous edge he’d been working to sustain gone.
“Fine,” Will said. “Jesus you’re a stubborn fool.”
Nolan wanted to disagree: Bridget had ended it with him. His refusal to think about her, to talk about her, wasn’t stubbornness — it was reality. But arguing the point would only continue the conversation, and that was the last thing he wanted.
“Speaking of Seamus, how’s business?” Nolan asked.
“Business is business,” Will said. “ A lot of fighting, a lot of resistance to Seamus.”
“Still?”
Will nodded.
“Does it matter?” Nolan asked.
“The other groups make a lot of noise — Hennessy, Flanagan, even Durnin — but they’d never dare touch Seamus,” Will said.
Seamus O’Brien was legendary on the street, a deceptively jovial old-school immigrant with the dangerous undercurrent of someone who’d grown up on the mean streets of 1980s Dublin. He hadn’t gotten the memo about it being the twenty-first century, an oversight that caused him to hate the Italians with a passion, even back when Raneiro Donati’s Syndicate had run Boston under Carlo Rossi’s leadership.
No one had been happier than Seamus when Donati was arrested, then assassinated, taking him out of the mix for good. The Syndicate’s operations had been thrown into chaos, a situation Seamus took full advantage of by organizing his own troops into a hierarchy of leadership not only for Southie’s criminal underground, but for all of Boston and its surrounding areas.
Running the neighborhood was a matter of principle for Seamus — Southie was Irish, had always been Irish. The money that came with running it probably didn’t hurt either, even though as far as Nolan knew, Seamus lived in the same row house he’d owned since the 1990s, back when the neighborhood was almost exclusively working-class Irish.
Nolan turned his beer in his hand. “You sure you’re good?”
He worried about Will. It didn’t matter that they’d both known Seamus since they were kids: Nolan knew that when push came to shove, Seamus was more dangerous than a rabid dog — he was a seemingly friendly one who would rip out your throat for half a hamburger.
“Me?” Will scoffed. “I’m good. You know me, I keep my nose clean, do my job, stay out of the fighting, bank my money.”
Nolan nodded. “You give any more thought to school?”
“Nah.” Will drained his beer. “Not for me. Too much reading.”
“You read more than anyone I know, myself included now that I work eighty hours a week.”
“I read what I want to read, not what someone else tells me to read. And I don’t have to write a fecking paper on it either.” Will clapped him on the back. “Don’t worry. I’m covered. I’m more worried about you.”
“Me?” Nolan laughed. “I couldn’t be better.”
“So you say.”
“I’m billing over a million a year. I live in a two million dollar apartment. I drive a hundred thousand dollar car,” Nolan said.