Chapter 1
Brandon shuffled through the doors of the bar. Back when he’d first moved to Boston, it had been a sleazy pool hall. Of course, that had been back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole neighborhood had been pretty sleazy, he remembered almost fondly, with ratty stores and ratty restaurants and actual rats the size of raccoons. There had been a closed-down nightclub—vacant for years by the time he arrived—whose reputation had been so foul that the name itself became a byword for sexually transmitted infections.
Then had come gentrification. Dumpy apartment buildings had been gutted, the brownstone facades given a facelift while the interiors merged into one of the swankiest hotels in Boston. Restaurants that had been the cheapest eats in town disappeared, their places taken
