World Gone By: A Novel by Dennis Lehane

him, her flat face as flat as a pan. “When he is no longer sick.”
    Joe, who’d had the chicken pox as a boy, went up to Tomas’s room and sat with him. “I knew you looked under the weather yesterday.”
    Tomas turned a page of Dumas’s Twenty Years After. “How bad do I look?”
    “You’d have to put the book down, buddy.”
    Tomas lowered the book and looked at his father with a face that appeared to have been ravaged by bees and then left under a strong sun.
    “You look great,” Joe said. “Barely noticeable.”
    Tomas raised the book in front of his face. “Ha-ha.”
    “Okay, you look awful.”
    He lowered the book and cocked an eyebrow at his father.
    “No,” Joe said, “you really do.”
    Tomas grimaced. “These are times I miss not having a mother.”
    Joe came out of his chair and hopped on the bed and lay beside his son. “Oh, sweetie, does it hurt? Can I get you some warm milk?”
    Tomas slapped at his father, and Joe tickled him hard enough that he dropped the book to the floor. Joe came off the bed to pick it up. He went to hand it to his son, found Tomas giving him a strange, hesitant look.
    “What?” Joe said, a smile finding his face.
    “Could you read it to me?”
    “What?”
    “Like you used to all the time. Remember?”
    Joe remembered. The Grimm brothers, Aesop, the Greek and Roman myths, Verne, Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and, of course, Dumas. He looked down at his son and smoothed the cowlick rising from the back of the boy’s head.
    “Sure.”
    He kicked off his shoes, climbed on the bed, and opened the book.
    After Tomas fell asleep, Joe sat in the office he kept in the back of the house on the first floor. It was at night, alone, when he most thought about what the yokel from Raiford had told him in his office on Friday. He knew it was ridiculous— no one would be stupid enough to try to kill him—and yet he pulled the drapes over the French doors, though the thickness of the glass and the height of the wall out back made it unlikely, if not impossible, that anyone could see him from the street.
    But if, say, someone had scaled the wall with a rifle, they could easily make out the shape of his head through the glass.
    “Christ,” he said as he poured himself a scotch from the decanter, “stop it.” He caught his reflection in the bar mirror as he corked the decanter. “Okay? Just stop.”
    He told himself to reopen the drapes, but he didn’t.
    Instead, he sat at his desk, with the plan of doing nothing more than reliving his last encounter with Vanessa, when his phone rang.
    “Fuck.” His feet came off the desk and he lifted the receiver. “Hello.”
    “It’s me.”
    Dion.
    “Hey, you. How’s things?”
    “Pretty fucking bad at the moment, Joseph.”
    “Do explain, Dionysius.”
    “Ah ha.” Dion chuckled. “You would prefer I call you ‘Joe.’”
    “Always, good sir. Always.” Joe put his feet back on the desk. He and Dion had been friends since they were thirteen. They’d each saved the other’s life more than once. They could read each other’s moods and minds better than most married couples. Joe knew that Dion was turning out to be a middling boss at best—the best soldiers often did, and Dion had been an exceptional soldier. He knew that Dion’s fits of rage, always fearsome, had only worsened with age and that most men with any wits were terrified of him. He also knew—though few others did—that Dion’s taste for the cocaine they brought in from Bolivia once a month seemed to contribute to his mood swings and his violence. He knew all these things about his friend, and yet Dion was, in fact, his friend. His oldest friend. The only man who’d known him before the fine suits and the four-dollar haircuts and the refined taste in food and liquor. Dion had known him when he was someone’s son, someone’s little brother, when he was callow and impulsive and unformed. And he’d known Dion when he was much jollier, much fatter, so much