backboard. Off campus, the contrast between the two brothers wasn’t any less pronounced. Matt was irreverent, wild, and reckless—in other words, a babe-magnet. Danny was far more introverted and preferred the company of the computer he’d found in a junk shop and rebuilt in his bedroom. Still, despite it all, they had a bond that was unshakable, a deep understanding of each other that survived the nastiest taunts and the most callous temptations that high school could throw at them.
Their friendship had also survived Matt’s repeated collisions with the law.
As with a lot of cases like his, things had started small. Matt had built his first car at the age of thirteen, hooking up an old washing-machine engine to a soap-box derby car that became something of a fixture around his neighborhood. The local cops were amazed and even the hardheaded sticklers among them couldn’t quite bring themselves to take away his pride and joy—a relationship that would change dramatically over the years. For as he grew older, the disparity between his love of cars, on the one hand, and the bleak part-time work prospects available to him in the Worcester area and his parents’ wafer-thin bank account, on the other, became more frustrating. Headstrong and impatient, Matt sought to redress that imbalance his own way.
Those early escapades were classic Matt. He didn’t go after any old ride. He would trawl the more affluent neighborhoods of Boston for specific cars on his hit list. He also never crashed or trashed the cars he stole, nor did he ever try to sell them. He would merely abandon them in some parking lot once he’d had the chance to sample them. He managed to test-drive quite a few before he got caught. The judge he came up against on that first conviction wasn’t amused or impressed by his antics.
That inaugural stint behind bars proved to have far-reaching consequences. Upon his release from jail, it didn’t take long for Matt to realize how his life had changed. Work prospects dried up. Friends shied away from him. People looked at him in a different way. He had changed too. Trouble seemed to come looking for him, as if sensing it had a willing customer. His hardworking, God-fearing parents were overwhelmed and paralyzed by his wild streak. They didn’t have the good sense or the strength of character to offer him the guidance he needed. His underpaid and corrupt parole officer was even less of a candle in the dark. And despite Danny’s repeated, frustrated arguments about where this was headed, Matt ended up dropping out of high school before graduation, and from there, his life just spiraled out of control. He spent the next few years rotating in and out of jail for theft, criminal damage to property, and battery, among others, his future withering away while Danny’s blossomed, first at MIT, then at a highly paid job in a tech company based nearby.
As he motored across the Neponset River, Matt ruefully remembered how he hadn’t seen much of Danny before his death. Matt had only been released from jail a few months before Danny had been offered the job with Reece, and he hadn’t seen much of him after that. Matt had been busy setting up his business—with the help of a life-altering loan from his kid brother, he thought with a twinge of shame. In a sense, he owed him his life.
It was Danny who’d sat him down and talked some sense into him—finally. Made him realize he couldn’t keep doing this. And got him to straighten up.
The way out Danny had suggested was simple. Turn what did the damage in the first place into something positive. Use it to carve out a new life. And Matt listened. He found a small car shop in Quincy that was closing down, and took over the lease. The plan he and Danny came up with was for him to find and fix up classic cars. Matt had a soft spot for American muscle cars from the sixties and seventies, like the Mustang he was now driving, a highly collectible model, a car he and Danny had fantasized about owning ever since they’d watched Steve McQueen catapult one across the streets of San Francisco—a movie they’d only seen about three dozen times. He knew it would be hard to part with it once he was done restoring it, but with a bit of luck, he’d be able to sell it for seventy grand, maybe more,