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flooding out into the busy Bronx street. A large mountain of dust billowed out of the basement like a derailed tornado and stretched its brown tentacles across the face of the tenements dotting the blighted avenue. A half dozen parked cars were lifted off the ground and tossed onto their sides, windows shattering and tires exploding from the heat. Three men and a child were knocked to the ground, and an elderly woman was slammed against a light pole, cutting her head and face. In the distance, car alarms and police sirens went off almost in unison, black-and-whites rushing to respond to the blast, called in by a dozen locals.
    Inside the apartment, there was nothing but ruin. The bodies of Grandpa Olmeda and Maria lay mangled and destroyed—two innocent souls blinked out of existence at one end of the Bronx.
    At the other end, three miles to the north, a young girl sat in a classroom listening with full attention to her English teacher dissecting Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She did not yet know it, but at that moment the life she had known had ended and a journey had begun. A journey that would lead her to the hard hands that planted the bomb that erased her mother and her grandfather from her world—and created in her a hurt and an ache that she could do nothing to ease.
    From that day forward, Stephanie Torres would never again be able to refer to herself as innocent.

5

    The young man jogged down the empty sidewalk. He was looking to better his eight-minute mile and glanced occasionally at the stopwatch clutched in his right hand. It was a cool morning, light barely breaking across Washington Heights, the riot gates on the bodegas and the candy stores he passed lifted and morning newspapers taken in, the smell of fresh coffee filling the foggy air. Julio Aguilera was two months past his twenty-third birthday and had lived in the Heights for all of those years, venturing outside his neighborhood only once, for a weekend trip to Miami with his parents when he was six. He was a high school dropout and had held a series of one-way jobs before latching on to eyeball work for a Colombian crew new to the area, paying get-by cash for any street information he passed their way. The money he was given was more than enough to cover the expenses on the one-bedroom third-floor walk-up whose kitchen window faced out onto a thin alleyway where a dozen years earlier the body of his brother, Miguel, a low-end drug dealer, was found in his own blood. It was Julio who had identified the body for the police on the scene, gazing down at the gaping wounds that had torn open his brother’s back and the top of his skull. Miguel had thrown the money he earned into a heroin habit he could ill afford, which marked him as an easy prey for a street-corner takeout. It was on that humid night, watching Miguel’s body get bagged and tagged in an alley, that Julio vowed that any cash he took in from the lucrative Heights drug trade would be tossed deep into a bank account—not slipped into a bent needle with little give.
    Which led him to his current position as a street stool, spying for the new set of cocaine cowboys in town, Father Angel’s hard-dealing fresh-off-the-runway crew. They rolled into the city little more than six months ago, looking to break into the crowded upper tiers of the white-line traders, flashing wads of green and packing heavy artillery in case the money wasn’t enough to catch someone’s interest. Julio signed on from the get-go and fed the higher-ups enough street news to keep the cash rolling in, but not enough to chart his name on anyone’s radar panel. The hours were light and sea-breeze easy, giving Julio more than enough time to devote to the one true passion in his life: running.
    Julio never missed a day’s run, regardless of weather or time of year. He kept to a steady routine, hitting the streets in the slow-tick minutes just before dawn to scale the hills of the Heights, logging a steady