“Yeah.”

He didn’t need the address; he’d grown up in Southie. Never left there, in fact. When he was growing up, the Body Shop had been a landmark. The sign that hung from the grimy, low-slung stucco building read “Murphy’s Car Body and Engine Repair,” but it was known to everyone in the neighborhood simply as the Body Shop. It was located on an oversized lot fringed with knee-high weeds, set back from the street, in an area that drew little traffic. That hardly mattered, though-no one ever took their cars there anyway. A mechanic was on the premises during the daytime to keep appearances up, but anyone looking to have a car repaired was invariably told that all of the appointments were booked. The only auto-body work performed there took place at night, and few of the cars that found their way into the garage emerged again in one piece.

Notwithstanding the lack of legitimate automotive services offered, the place usually buzzed during the day. Murphy, a leader in what remained of the loosely affiliated Irish-American gangs, kept his office in the back, running his crews and brokering a tenuous peace among those in the neighborhood who operated on the wrong side of the law.

The place was humming with activity as Stone guided the car into the driveway, though not with its normal daily business. The driveway was crammed with BPD squad cars and crime scene units. Yellow tape was strewn loosely around the entire complex, and a patrolman had to lift one of the banners strung across the entryway to allow the detectives’ car in.

“You think this is the start of another war?” Stone asked as he eased the Lincoln around to the back of the lot.

“Don’t know,” Sanchez replied. “Been a long time since the last one, and things have been outta whack since Whitey took off. If it is another war, it’s gonna get ugly.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. He remembered the times when he was a boy and he’d heard whispers about the wars that went on between the rival gangs back in the sixties and seventies. They had seemed at the time like mythic, almost heroic battles. Later he came to understand that they were more like scraps between vicious animals.