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with examining the filth on the bottom of his sneaker.
    Irish sighed and assaulted his own beer, finishing half the bottle in one tremendous swallow. “And don’t get me started on that bitch upstairs and her friggin’ cats. I’m tellin’ you, boys, you ain’t never
seen
so many damn cats. All kinds. Them big fluffy ones and the hairless ones—look like sewer rats. Some of the damn things don’t have tails, if you can imagine that.”
    Jimmy leaned back against the wall, popped the tendons in his back. “You got any food around here?”
    “You find it, it’s yours,” Irish said, finishing his beer.
    Jimmy looked at Raymond and held up his own bottle. “You good?”
    “I’ll do another.”
    Jimmy flipped his bottle in the air. It spun twice, and he caught it—barely—by the neck as he disappeared into the kitchen.
    Irish slipped around a small end table and opened a tarnished pewter box that rested on top of it. “You wanna hit a few lines?”
    On Mickey’s left, Raymond laughed at something on the television set while wiping saliva from his chapped lips with the sleeve of his coat. “I’m up,” Raymond said, sounding a bit more relaxed.
    Jimmy returned, his fists loaded with frozen burritos. “Chow’s on,” he said. Like a knife-thrower in the circus, he began firing the burritos into the air, laughing when Raymond attempted to grab one and nearly fell out of his chair.
    “Good stuff here,” Irish said, sifting through the little pewter box. He brought what looked like a ring-wrapper from a cigar up to his nose, sniffed it, replaced it inside the box.
    Raymond gathered two of the burritos from the floor and examined the packaging. “Damn things are still cold, Jimmy. You ain’t heatin’ them up?”
    “I look like your mommy?” Jimmy said, and produced a .38 from inside his coat. In one fluid motion, he cocked back the hammer, his fingers somehow seemingly unrelated to the expression on his face. He aimed the gun at Raymond.
    Raymond uttered a weak laugh, the burritos dropping from his hands and sliding down his jacket into his lap. “Jimmy, what the hell—”
    Jimmy Kahn fired two shots in immediate succession. The first one caught Raymond in the chest, jerking the boy back against the chair, his left arm shooting up to his face, his fingers bent into a crooked talon. The second shot caught him in the side of the face, expelling a black gout of blood that splashed against the back of the chair and the alabaster wall beside Raymond’s head. A deluge of blood poured from his mouth as he convulsed against the chair, his eyes peeled back into his head, his blood-speckled lip working soundlessly.
    “Jesus
Christ!”
Irish shouted, his big hands pressed to either side of his face. “Jesus Christ—in my goddamn
house
, Jimmy?”
    One of Raymond’s feet snapped out and struck the leg of the small end table, splintering it down the middle and causing the table to topple over. Irish made a noble attempt at rescuing his pewter box, but he was too slow: the box hit the carpet, its lid ricocheting off toward one corner of the room, spilling its contents in a fan of fine powder across the floor.
    Raymond’s body flailed. Like a sack of wet grain, the kid slid off the front of the chair and hit the floor. A vertical crimson stripe divided the back of the chair into two sections.
    Jimmy reloaded the two spent rounds, his teeth chewing at the inside of his right cheek. Mickey watched Jimmy’s hands move, watched Irish back up against the side of the wall with a look of absolute disgust on his face. The old man couldn’t stop watching as Raymond’s spastic leg continued to grind his snort into the carpet.
    Jimmy took a step closer to Raymond. He held the gun out at arm’s length, slowly rotating his wrist, as if he were having a difficult time deciding which way he liked holding the weapon. He thumbed back the hammer.
    “Have some more,” he said, and fired three more rounds into Raymond