“In the meantime,” Roscommon said, “what he has got is a whole bunch of people that’re beating on his head and griping all the time about various things that they do not approve of. Some of them’re complaining about the oil companies and how they’re nailing everybody to the mast, and some of them’re complaining about being broads and that means they can’t get their bosses to leave them alone and can’t get free abortions after their bosses get through with them. He’s got guys that want him to sue the Red Sox because the seats in the bleachers’re too expensive, and he’s got guys that don’t approve of dogs taking a shit on Beacon Hill. He’s got women that spend the whole day at the State House so they can scream at him that we shouldn’t have nuclear power, and he’s got people there that bring kids and yell about how they should get forty grand a year on welfare and he should go sue somebody so they can. I am telling you, if his porch light is out, and I think it is, I also know the reason why. I’ll be damned if I can figure out how the hell he stands it.

“Now,” Roscommon said, “one of the things he does on some day when he’s got six shingles off the roof and all these people yelling at him, one of the things he does is hire this fucking Mooney kid. He hadda be nuts to do that. You know what Terry Mooney thinks? Terry Mooney thinks us cops’re too soft on crime. Terry Mooney thinks that until Terry Mooney came along and became a goddamned prosecutor, people got away with murder all over the place. And Terry Mooney is going to put a stop to it, and also make the AG think that if he did one thing right in the whole time he was in office, it was hiring Terry Mooney.