Chapter Eight
The neighborhood was a shambles.
I had to look that word up, I'd never heard it outside the context of the expression. A shambles, it turns out, is an archaic slaughterhouse, a medieval open-air meat market. I tried to imagine what that would look like. The disarray. The refuse. The smell.
Yeah, the neighborhood was a shambles.
The fire department had erected temporary barriers around the pile of rubble that was once 600 Cabot Row. Broken bricks, charred beams, grime-covered shards of window glass, puddles of soggy gypsum board marred with streaks of charcoal. For three blocks around, all you could smell was smoke and dust and sewage.
The adjacent buildings had suffered a lot of property damage. Some of it from the fire. Some water damage from the fire department trying
