Dirk spent the rest of his childhood perfecting and augmenting the skills his father had taught him. Thinking back on it, as he often did during the long bus ride from the Home to school that passed the gates of the military base where his father had served, he was glad for his fighting heritage: That alone kept him whole when Mady went bad after Mitch died. Alcohol and pills cut the grief of enduring without Mitch, and Dirk spent a lot of time on the street running purchase errands for Mady and her clients. A six-year-old copping pills on streetcorners lured perverts from every rathole in the city, and Dirk became proficient at warding off threats and inflicting injuries.

By the time Mady got busted and jailed, Dirk had become a street viper, spindly from malnutrition and venomous with rage. His face clenched in a defiant scowl, even in sleep, his furiously scrawny body fit with muscles taut as razors, he terrorized the other kids, even the senior boys and the social workers. Small as he was, no one could stand up to him when he was enraged. Fury jagged in him like lightning and moved him faster than most people could think.

Six older boys, blighted by child abuse and toughened from years of vengeance, ganged up on Dirk in the lavatory during his first week at the Home. Three were hospitalized. Shoved into a urinal, bigger than he was at that time, Dirk spun about on the wet, scooped ceramic and gouged the air from the lungs of his nearest assailant. His flash-stab forced fingers under the boy’s sternum and touched his heart with a pain like the silver tip of an acetylene flame. The kid curled up no better than a torched insect, and that happened so swiftly that the other five boys didn’t appreciate the dark skill they had just witnessed. The scowling wastrel whirled, whip-punching testicles, elbowing a kidney, kicking a knee to splinters, biting a half moon of flesh from an arm, and slicing the cornea of an eye with a precise finger flick. No one in the Home ever threatened him again.