Kenny burst into laughter. “You look like you about pissed yourself, you dumb Mexican,” he called down.
Juan glared up at them. He was a skinny kid, and he seemed even scrawnier than usual from this height. He muttered something and went inside the clubhouse, soon joining them on the ledge.
As darkness crawled across the alleyway the boys finished another bottle. A light affixed to the bar clicked on.
“Shit,” Juan said. “What time is it? I gotta be home by eight.”
“Eight? Is Sesame Street on or something?” Kenny said.
“You know my dad,” Juan said.
Sean looked at his watch and then stood and brushed off his jeans. The booze had kicked in, and he clutched the railing to steady himself. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The three stumbled their way out of the clubhouse. As Sean turned to jam the clubhouse door shut, a voice sliced into the night air. “You!”
Sean whirled around. At the mouth of the alley, a silhouette. The figure stalked toward them and came under the bar’s yellow light: the old man from the liquor store.
The storekeeper charged at Kenny, grabbing him by the shirt and ramming him into the clubhouse wall.
“Get the fuck off me, old man!”
The storekeeper’s face was flushed and he shouted, a slur of Japanese, spittle hitting Kenny’s face. Sean grabbed the storekeeper’s arm, but the man—strong for his age and size and smelling of whiskey himself—pushed Sean away. As the old man fended off Sean, Kenny managed to break free. He barreled into the man. The storekeeper stumbled backward but got hold of Kenny’s shirt, and the two fell hard to the pavement.
Sean looked around for help, but there was only Juan who just stood there, frozen.
Kenny tried to get up, but the storekeeper pulled him to the ground, eventually pinning Kenny down, straddling him. The old man raised a fist, but hesitated, as if just realizing he was about to punch a teenage kid in the face. Before the storekeeper could decide, Kenny kneed the man in the groin. The storekeeper doubled over. Kenny shoved him away, leapt to his feet, and kicked the man in the side. Rolling away, the storekeeper drew a sharp breath and moaned.
Sean ran over and hoisted the storekeeper up by the arm. He called for Juan to help and, after a long moment, Juan took hold of the old man’s other arm. The storekeeper was on his feet now. He struggled, trying to rip his arms free. That’s when Kenny ran up to him. Sean thought Kenny was going to spit in the storekeeper’s face.
But then he heard it. An indescribable groan.
The storekeeper’s body stiffened, and there was a gasp. Before Sean could react, Kenny made several quick jabs and pulled his hand away. The storekeeper’s body went limp and slumped to the ground. Kenny’s right hand—clutching a blade—was red with blood.
Sean and Juan stood there, stunned. Kenny closed the knife, jammed it into his pocket, and yelled at them to run. They raced across the alley, down a narrow path, to the back of the bar. Scrambling up some trash bins, they climbed over the base’s ten-foot perimeter wall. Sean went last, his shirt catching on the barbed wire as he dropped to the ground.
Juan sat in the grass, his back against the cinder blocks. “He’s dead.” Tears streamed down his face. “He’s dead.”
“Shut up. We don’t know that,” Sean said. But he did.
Juan hugged his skinny arms around his knees and began rocking back and forth. “He’s dead…”
Kenny took out the knife, unfolded it, and wiped the blade on the grass. “If he’s dead,” Kenny said, “he had it coming.”
*
For the rest of Sean’s brief time in Japan, he never spoke to Kenny or Juan again. He left them and that ugly night behind. The world was a bigger place back then—no Internet, no Facebook, no Twitter. And for thirty years, Sean had no idea what had become of them, no reason to believe that their secret would come to light.
Until he was about to be nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
CHAPTER 1
Washington, D.C., Suburbs
Present Day
There should have been a sign. A feeling. Some sense of impending doom. But Sean Serrat’s day started like any other.
“Daddy, guess what?”
Sean always felt a tiny rush of emotion when his children called him Daddy, a word that was fading to extinction in his home.
“Daddy,” Jack repeated. Sean glanced at his son, who was perched on a stool at the granite kitchen counter shoveling Cheerios into his mouth. Sunshine cut through the window and a shadow fell across the seven-year-old’s round face. Jack’s teenage brother, Ryan, sat next to him crunching a bagel.
“What is it, buddy?” Sean stood near the stove, bowl in one hand, spoon in the other, trying not to drip on his tie.
“I told my friend, Dean, about our family Money Jar.”