Kevin Shea, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student in history at San Francisco State University, was clean-cut and red-cheeked and he was lucky if he looked twenty. He had thick, nearly black hair, a sardonic grin he liked to trot out from time to time, and a recently acquired predilection to drink that he thought he was shepherding along nicely.

He leaned into the wall by the juke box, on his third free pint of Harps. He hadn't known Mike Mullen, hadn't come down here specifically for the send-off, although he guessed that subliminally he must have heard about it – he was at the Cavern most every day anyway.

Neil Young was getting on his nerves. When the opening riff for 'War of Man' started up for the fifteenth straight time, he jammed his hip into the side of the box, sending a jarring screech through the room.

'Watch your arse!'

The place was quiet. The Irish call such a moment 'angel's passing,' but if that was it, no angels stayed around long. At the bar, in the hole of silence, Peter McKay happened to glance at the television, which suddenly seemed to be blaring. He grabbed heavily at Brandon Mullen's shoulder, spilling more beer over his glass, down the sides, over his hand.

'Hey, look at that!' he yelled. 'Up there. That's the nigger that killed Mikey, isn't it?'

All eyes were glued on the newscaster, who stood holding her microphone on the steps of San Francisco 's Hall of Justice, empty food wrappers and other debris swirling around her in the late afternoon wind.

'In local news,' she was saying (Jamie O'Toole had turned the sound up as loud as Neil Young had been), 'Jerohm Reese, who last week was arrested in connection with the daylight carjacking of a man in the Mission District, was ordered released today with no charges being brought against him. According to the district attorney's office, there wasn't enough evidence-'