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waitressing job to another. And when John was thirteen she got hit by the shittiest piece of luck yet, a fist-sized tumor in her abdomen. The doctors cut it out and put her on chemotherapy, but she died a year later and John got sent to a foster home. He didn’t stay there long, though. Within a few months he was working full time for the Disciples.
    His corner was Front Street and Somerset. He started dealing there at the age of fourteen and didn’t leave until he was twenty-three. For the drug business, that was a spectacularly long run. Most kids got killed or sent to prison long before they reached the five-year mark. But John was good at the job. He had a knack for sensing things ahead of time: when the cops were going to crack down on Kensington, when the soldiers from the Latin Kings were coming to visit his corner. Or maybe he was just lucky. He seemed to have just as much good luck as his mother had bad.
    His best piece of luck was meeting Father Murphy. The priest ran a baseball league for the neighborhood kids, and sometimes John would watch the games in the vacant lot behind St. Anne’s Church. Murphy knew John was in the Disciples, but the old man would talk baseball with him anyway. The guy was tremendously knowledgeable about the game—and the Phillies in particular—and over time they started talking about other things as well. By this point, John was one of the Disciples’ captains, in charge of running several corners, and that was a dangerous position. He was in a winner-take-all situation, competing with the three other captains in Kensington. One of them, a ruthless prick named Salazar, wanted to take over John’s corners and was already threatening to kill him. Father Murphy knew all this, and one day he offered John some valuable advice. “Get out of town, son,” he said. “Go join the army.”
    John dismissed the idea at first, but he took it more seriously after Salazar’s boys fired a warning shot at him. The army was desperate for soldiers at the time—the war in Iraq was in full swing—and the recruiters were delighted to sign him up. Once John started basic training, though, he quickly learned that he hated army life. The rules drove him crazy, and his drill sergeant was a sadist. After enduring the full ten weeks of basic, John got into a fistfight with his sergeant, who busted him out of the service. But when he returned to Philly and told Father Murphy what had happened, the old priest just laughed. Then, after he stopped chuckling, he offered John another chance. St. Anne’s Church had just won a grant to start the Anti-Gang Project to convince the neighborhood kids to stay away from the drug crews. Father Murphy told John he’d be perfect for the job. He could get paid for steering kids away from the bad choices he’d made.
    John was skeptical about this idea too, but it worked. Although the new job was part time and didn’t pay as well as the drug business—he had to take landscaping and construction jobs to make ends meet—it didn’t chew up his insides either, or make him jump every time he heard a noise behind him. After a few months he started to adjust to the regular world, the normal innocent life of paychecks and taxes. He bought a cheap suit and started a bank account. For the next seven years he was a happy, law-abiding citizen. He went to community college and met a great woman named Carol DeSantis. They got married and had a daughter.
    Then his luck changed and everything went to hell.
    Now John turned left on Somerset Street. He drove a few blocks and approached a two-story row house with peeling red paint. Since Carol left him three years ago, he’d lived alone in an apartment on the building’s second floor. It was a small, dingy place, not so different from the apartment where he’d grown up. Despite all the bad memories, this neighborhood was still his home. He’d have a hard