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were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. Sean Callahan met them when he was in the ninth grade.
    The McNultys were raised by two violent, bigoted drunks, and their mother was just as bad as their father when it came to smacking them around. The smacking stopped when the boys entered their teens and were big enough to fight back. And you never fought one McNulty brother; you always fought them both simultaneously. Their parents got the picture one fine night when the boys sent their dad to the emergency room with a broken nose and dislocated shoulder.
    Their mother, who was morbidly obese, died of a heart attack when they were seventeen and their father died of lung cancer compounded by liver problems a couple years later. Sean vividly remembered the McNultys weeping at their mother’s funeral. It had been like watching hyenas cry.
    Sean’s parents were nothing like Ray and Roy’s. They were decent people who doted on their only child. Sean’s dad worked for the MBTA as a maintenance man and his mom was a substitute teacher. The problem with them was that they were weak people and Sean learned to manipulate them at an early age. They never approved of Sean being friends with the McNulty brothers, and could never understand why he was their friend. What Sean’s parents didn’t realize was that the McNultys made life interesting for a bored, discontented kid who didn’t have anything better to do.
    Sean wasn’t a good enough athlete to make the first team and he had too much pride to ride the bench. He had no desire to hang around with the losers on the school marching band, the debate team, or the chess club. Nor was he—in those days—cool enough to hang with the A-list kids, most of whom were either athletes or had money coming out their ears.
    So the McNultys filled the vacuum. They introduced young Sean to pool and pinball machines and bowling alleys thick with smoke. They initiated him in the urban sport of shoplifting. (Sean would be the diversion while the McNultys would go through a Kmart like a plague of two locusts.) The McNultys knew older guys who would sell them weed and booze. They also knew girls who would give it away for a six-pack of beer; these same girls would later understand that they were significantly undervaluing a moneymaking asset.
    The amazing thing was that Sean was never arrested for the things he did with the McNulty brothers. He graduated from high school, and went off to college. Ray and Roy were not so fortunate. Ray spent most of his senior year in jail for stealing a car. Roy dropped out of school, as he didn’t like to do anything without his brother.
    Sean met the McNultys at their bar in Revere the day John Mahoney flew back to Washington.
    At the ages of forty-seven and forty-eight respectively, Roy was maybe ten pounds heavier than Ray, and Ray’s hair was disappearing faster than Roy’s, but those differences were barely noticeable. They were both five foot eight, stocky, thick necked, and had the muscles one gets doing forty-pound curls while watching pro wrestling on TV. They had short, broad snouts; small, close-set eyes; lips as thin as knife blades. Their hair was cut within a quarter inch of their knobby skulls and they shaved dark, heavy beards a couple times a week. The easiest way to tell them apart was Ray’s right ear: a piece was missing from the lobe, the piece swallowed by a drunk in a bar fight.
    The brothers were proud of their bar in Revere; in fact, owning a bar was the pinnacle of their ambition. They did wish that their bar was in Charlestown where they’d been raised, and people they knew could say, “Hey, let’s go to Ray and Roy’s place for a beer.” But thanks to developers like their friend, Sean Callahan, they couldn’t afford a bar in Charlestown.
    Sean, however, did “loan” them the down payment to buy their bar for a favor they once did for him, knowing they’d