Curry knew, too, that Ness got restless when tied down to his office that he thrived on being out in the field. It was said that Eliot Ness took no greater pleasure out of life than when he was kicking down a door and conducting a raid.

So it was no surprise to Curry to find himself driving Ness to the front lines of the volatile Republic Steel strike. What surprised Curry was seeing his chief strap on a shoulder-holstered revolver, back at Ness's City Hall office.

Despite the somewhat deserved reputation Ness had for embracing danger, Curry knew that Ness rarely ever carried a gun. "They won't be so quick to shoot at you," he had explained, "if they know you can't shoot back." And resorting to the use of a gun to resolve a situation meant failure to born-diplomat Ness.

Yet tonight Eliot Ness was carrying a gun into a situation. Odd, Curry thought; particularly considering the strict "no firearms" orders the police detail at Corrigan-McKinney was saddled with.

But Curry said nothing about it to Ness, who had his fedora in his lap and rode leaning against the window, gazing out almost dreamily at the blush of red against the sky that was the signature of the steel mills.

"On summer nights," Ness said, "we used to sit out on the porch and drink beer and watch the sky turn orange."

"Sir?"

Ness smiled gently without looking at Curry. "South Side of Chicago, where I grew up," he explained. "Roseland was my neighborhood… so close to the mills that if you faced east, you'd see an incredible glow on the sky… especially if they were opening the steel furnaces to clean out the coke."

Curry had never heard Ness talk about Chicago, not even the Capone days, let alone anything about growing up.