“Not me,” Mooney said. “I don’t have any problem.”
“You got a big problem,” Nick told Mooney.
“How come? I got no worries. There’s nothing on my mind at all.”
“That’s your problem,” Nick said.
Kerrigan was gazing past them. He said, “I wonder why he comes to Vernon Street.”
“Hard to figure,” Nick said. “Lotta ways of looking at it. Maybe in his own league he don’t rate very high, so he rides down here where he don’t hafta look up to anybody.”
“Or maybe he just don’t like himself,” Mooney remarked.
“That’s an angle,” Nick agreed. Then he frowned thoughtfully. “What it amounts to, I guess, he’s probably safer down here.”
“Safer?” Kerrigan said.
“What I mean is, he knows he can pull certain stunts on Vernon that he couldn’t get away with uptown.”