The Given Day (Coughlin 1)

Danny's corner man was Steve Coyle. Steve was also his patrol partner at the Oh-One Station House in the North End. They walked a beat from one end of Hanover Street to the other, from Constitution Wharf to the Crawford House Hotel, and as long as they'd been doing it, Danny had boxed and Steve had been his corner and his cut man.

Danny, a survivor of the 1916 bombing of the Salutation Street Station House, had been held in high regard since his rookie year on the job. He was broad-shouldered, dark-haired and dark-eyed; more than once, women had been noted openly regarding him, and not just immigrant women or those who smoked in public. Steve, on the other hand, was squat and rotund like a church bell, with a great pink bulb of a face and a bow to his walk. Early in the year he'd joined a barbershop quartet in order to attract the fancy of the fairer sex, a decision that had served him in good stead this past spring, though prospects appeared to be dwindling as autumn neared.

Steve, it was said, talked so much he gave aspirin powder a headache. He'd lost his parents at a young age and joined the department without any connections or juice. After nine years on the job, he was still a flatfoot. Danny, on the other hand, was BPD royalty, the son of Captain Thomas Coughlin of Precinct 12 in South Boston and the godson of Special Squads Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. Danny had been on the job less than five years, but every cop in the city knew he wasn't long for uniform.

"Fuckin' taking this guy so long?" Steve scanned the back of the hall, hard to ignore in his attire of choice. He claimed he'd read somewhere that Scots were the most feared of all corner men in the fi ght game. And so, on fight nights, Steve came to the ring in a kilt. An authentic, red tartan kilt, red and black argyle socks, charcoal tweed jacket and matching five-button waistcoat, silver wedding tie, authentic gillie brogues on his feet, and a loose- crowned Balmoral on his head. The real surprise wasn't how at home he looked in the getup, it was that he wasn't even Scottish.

The audience, red-faced and drunk, had grown increasingly agitated the last hour or so, more and more actual fights breaking out between the scheduled ones. Danny leaned against the ropes and yawned. Mechanics Hall stank of sweat and booze. Smoke, thick and wet, curled around his arms. By all rights he should have been back in his dressing room, but he didn't really have a dressing room, just a bench in the maintenance hallway, where they'd sent Woods from the Oh-Nine looking for him five minutes ago, told him it was time to head to the ring.

So he stood there in an empty ring waiting for Johnny Green, the buzz of the crowd growing louder, buzzier. Eight rows back, one guy hit another guy with a folding chair. The hitter was so drunk he fell on top of his victim. A cop waded in, clearing a path with his domed helmet in one hand and his pocket billy in the other.

"Why don't you see what's taking Green?" Danny asked Steve.

"Why don't you climb under my kilt and pucker up?" Steve chin-gestured at the crowd. "Them's some restless sots. Like as not to tear my kilt or scuff my brogues."

"Heavens," Danny said. "And you without your shine box." He bounced his back off the ropes a few times. Stretched his neck, swiveled his hands on the wrists. "Here comes the fruit."

Steve said, "What?" and then stepped back when a brown head of lettuce arced over the ropes and splattered in the center of the ring.

"My mistake," Danny said. "Vegetable."

"No matter." Steve pointed. "The pretender appears. Just in time."

Danny looked down the center aisle and saw Johnny Green framed by a slanted white rectangle of doorway. The crowd sensed him and turned. He came down the aisle with his trainer, a guy Danny recognized as a desk sergeant at the One-Five, but whose name escaped him. About fifteen rows back, one of Eddie McKenna's Special Squads guys, a goon named Hamilton, grabbed a guy off his feet by his nostrils and dragged him up the aisle, the Special Squads cowboys apparently figuring all pretense could be chucked now that the fi nal fi ght was about to begin.

Carl Mills, the BPD press spokesman, was calling to Steve from the other side of the ropes. Steve went to one knee to talk to him. Danny watched Johnny Green come, not liking something that floated in the guy's eyes, something unhooked. Johnny Green saw the crowd, he saw the ring, he saw Danny--but he didn't. Instead, he looked at everything and looked past everything at the same time. It was a look Danny had seen before, mostly on the faces of three-bottles-to-the-wind drunks or rape victims.

Steve came up behind him and put a hand on his elbow. "Mills just told me this is his third fight in twenty-four hours."

"What? Whose?"

"Whose? Fucking Green's. He had one last night over at the Crown in Somerville, fought another this morning down at the rail yards in Brighton, and now here he is."

"How many rounds?"

"Mills heard he went thirteen last night for sure. And lost by KO." "Then what's he doing here?"

"Rent," Steve said. "Two kids, a pregger wife."

"Fucking rent?"

The crowd was on its feet--the walls shuddering, the rafters shimmying. If the roof suddenly shot straight up into the sky, Danny doubted he'd feel surprise. Johnny Green entered the ring without a robe. He stood in his corner and banged his gloves together, his eyes staring up at something in his skull.

"He doesn't even know where he is," Danny said.

"Yeah, he does," Steve said, "and he's coming to the center." "Steve, for Christ's sake."

"Don't 'Christ's sake' me. Get in there."

In the center of the ring, the referee, Detective Bilky Neal, a former boxer himself, placed a hand on each of their shoulders. "I want a clean fight. Barring that, I want it to look clean. Any questions?"

Danny said, "This guy can't see."

Green's eyes were on his shoes. "See enough to knock your head off." "I take my gloves off, could you count my fingers?"

Green raised his head and spit on Danny's chest.

Danny stepped back. "What the fuck?" He wiped the spittle off on his glove, wiped his glove on his shorts.

Shouts from the crowd. Beer bottles shattered against the base of the ring.

Green met his eyes, Green's sliding like something on a ship. "You want to quit, you quit. In public, though, so I still get the purse. Just grab the megaphone and quit."

"I'm not quitting."

"Then fi ght."

Bilky Neal gave them a smile that was nervous and furious at the same time. "They's getting restless out there, gents."