The Drop

by Dennis Lehane

a successful man could hide his past, but an unsuccessful man spent the rest of his life trying not to drown in his.

Rardy was late. Again. Bob, who’d never been late in his life, suspected there was something hostile at the core of people who always were.

Cruelty is older than the Bible. Savagery beat its chest in the first human summer and has kept beating it every day since. The worst in men is commonplace. The best is a far rarer thing.