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approach down the East River consistently seemed to miss disaster by only a few seconds. A wave of depression hit him. He was tired, off kilter, punchy. The Special K crash was coming and it wasn’t just that. It had been a hard week, hard month, hard year. He had three hundred thousand quid negative equity on those Laganside apartments, the Northern Irish property crash typically coming after twelve years of solid growth and just when he had quit The Life and turned the trajectory of his existence in a new direction at the University of Ulster.
    To mention that it was raining and he had no coat would have been redundant. Course it was. Drizzly greasy stuff that got you so much wetter than a hard rain because people felt it was okay to stand out in it.
    He tilted his head back, let the drops spatter on his cheeks, closed hiseyes, listened: trucks on the Cross Bronx, planes at the Marine Terminal and a banshee wind blowing through the car park as if across the mouth of an Absolut bottle.
    A raindrop caught him in the left eyelid. He opened his eyes. That sky again. Malevolent, not exactly evil, but certainly not good – the sky of a petty thief, or a drunken, sentimental spousal abuser. He considered poking the man in front between his broad shoulders. What was his problem? He checked for a hearing aid and, seeing none, Killian’s fight-or-flight response began to kick in. Adrenalin flooded his endocrine system. His pulmonary artery expanded and his funereal white cheeks became red. He clenched and unclenched his fists, his hands remembering a hundred ways of disabling a man even though that wasn’t exactly his métier.
    “Hey mate, is this the line for the Boston shuttle or what?” he asked in bass-profundo, old timey West Belfast.
    On this iteration the man turned. He was reading the New Yorker and without looking up and after a pause which seemed to communicate some deep but inexplicable contempt, he said: “What do you want?”
    Killian felt pleased and then irritated by this reaction – really what was so terrific about getting into a fight with a stranger in a damp airport car park? These days they processed you for a thing like that. Central booking, the Island, many hassles. The guy was big and broad, but Killian was bigger if considerably less broad.
    “What do you want, asshole?” the man barked.
    A 1990 freshly minted Killian, trying to impress Darkey White, might have kicked him in the left kneecap, pulled him down by the hair, taken the man’s briefcase and smashed it on his head. But this was not 1990.
    “Look at me,” Killian said in a voice like the rasp of steel on flint.
    The man looked. “Yeah?”
    In forty years on planet Earth – twenty-three of them in The Life – Killian’s eyes had seen a lot of unpleasantness and he knew that they could convey a frighteningly deep well of seriousness. A person with anyexpertise in human relations could read them immediately: This is not a man to be fucked with .
    As it was, Killian’s interlocutor took a second or two before he got it.
    “Is the queue for Logan?” Killian asked.
    Belated recognition, fear, panic.
    “Oh…yeah, I’m sorry, yes, this is the shuttle,” the man muttered, lips trembling, eyes downcast – a posture Killian had seen a tedious number of times before. It failed to gratify him. It bored him. This whole world bored him which was part of the reason he was at the University of Ulster.
    “Thank you,” Killian said and released him from the look.
    “You’re welcome,” the man replied and brought the New Yorker up to his face like a shield. Killian looked behind him where a dozen more people had joined the line, which hadn’t moved an inch.
    “How long is this going to be?” he wondered aloud.
    The guy in front flinched but sensed Killian was being rhetorical.
    How long?
    Fifty minutes in the queue.
    Forty in the plane.
    A grim forty. Middle seat/wedged/talkers/baby/five fucking dollars for a Coke.
    Logan looked like an