Chapter 23: Gwen's Father

In the dark, someone fired once, and the sound hit the beams.

I was on the floor between the pews with Marcy's arm over my head, and I did not remember getting there.

Women screamed. Wood cracked.

Then a hundred phones lit at once.

The same phones that had voted turned the chapel white, a hundred small flashlights swinging across the faces.

Marcello stood in the aisle with his arm around the heavy man's neck and a pistol pressed to his ear.

The shot had gone into the ceiling. Plaster drifted down onto his shoulders.

Two Kinsella men were kneeling on the heavy man's arms.

They were not Marcello's. They wore the dark coats of the old man's own crew.

They looked at their boss, and they did not get up.

Gwen's father stood alone beneath the screen, with the white bar still glowing over his head.

He looked, for the first time, like what he was.

An old man in a gray suit.

"A poll is not a verdict," he said.

His voice cracked on the last word.

The old captain with the white mustache got to his feet in the third row.

He was seventy at least, and he held his hat in both hands.

"There is a custom among our fathers," he said, in his rough, low voice. "You cited it yourself."

"A household that shelters a man who burns another household's boy loses its seat. And its ground."

"The custom says the households vote."

"They have voted," said the man beside him.

Then the heads of the other families stood, one after another, in the light of the phones.

A hundred and ten people looked at Gwen's father, and none of them sat down.

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