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    With that face, if Tony had chosen to be a con man, he’d have done all right. But Tony, ultimately, wasn’t smart enough to run a con, and maybe he was just too nice. Tony liked people. They seemed to confuse him the way just about everything did, but he genuinely liked them, too. Unfortunately, he also liked safes. Liked them a lot. Maybe just a hair more than people. He had an ear that could hear a feather settle on the surface of the moon and fingers so nimble he could solve a Rubik’s Cube one-handed without glancing at it. In his twenty-eight years on the planet, Tony had cracked so many safes that anytime an all-night burn job left a gutted shell in place of a bank vault, cops drove over to Tony’s Southie apartment even before they stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts, and judges cut search-and-seizure warrants in the time it takes most of us to write a check.
    Tony’s real problem, though, at least in the legal sense, wasn’t the safes, and it wasn’t the stupidity (though it didn’t help); it was the drink. All but two of Tony’s jail terms had come from DUIs, and his latest was no different—driving north in the southbound lane of Northern Avenue at three in the morning, resisting arrest (he’d kept driving), malicious destruction of property (he’d crashed), and fleeing the scene of an accident (he’d climbed a telephone pole because he had a theory the cops might not notice him twenty feet above the wrecked car on a dark night).
    When I entered the fishing cabin, Tony looked up from the living room floor with a face that said, What took you so long? He sighed and used the remote to flick off Rugrats , then stood unsteadily and slapped his thighs to get the blood flowing through them again.
    “Hey, Patrick. Mo send you?”
    I nodded.
    Tony looked around for his shoes, found them under a throw pillow on the floor. “Beer?”
    I looked around the cabin. In the day and a half he’d been here, Tony had managed to fill every windowsill with empty Heineken bottles. The green glass captured the sun glinting off the lake and then refracted it into the room in tiny beams so that the entire cabin glowed the emerald of a tavern on St. Patrick’s Day.
    “No, thanks, Tony. I’m trying to cut back on beer for breakfast.”
    “Religious thing?”
    “Something like that.”
    He crossed one leg over the other and pulled the ankle up to his waist, hopped around on the other foot as he tried to get a shoe on. “You gonna cuff me?”
    “You going to bolt?”
    He got the shoe on somehow, then stumbled as he dropped the foot to the floor. “Nah, man. You know that.”
    I nodded. “So no cuffs, then.”
    He gave me a grateful smile, then raised the other foot off the floor and started hopping around again as he tried to put on the second shoe. Tony got the shoe over his foot, then stumbled back into the couch and fell on his ass, short of breath from all that hopping. Tony’s shoes didn’t have laces, just Velcro flaps. Word was that—oh, never mind. You can guess. Tony strapped the Velcro flaps together and stood.
    I let him gather up a change of clothes, his Game Boy, and some comic books for the ride. At the door, he stopped and looked hopefully at the fridge.
    “Mind if I grab a roadie?”
    I couldn’t see what harm a beer on the ride could do to a guy heading off to jail. “Sure.”
    Tony opened the fridge and pulled out an entire twelve-pack.
    “You know,” he said as we left the cabin, “in case we hit traffic or something.”
     
    We did hit some traffic, as it turned out—small squalls of it outside Lewiston, then Portland, the beach communities of Kennebunkport and Ogunquit. The soft summer morning was turning into a white sear of a day, the trees and roads and other cars glinting pale, hard, and angry under a high sun.
    Tony sat in the back of the black ’91 Cherokee I’d picked up when the engine of my Crown