City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(17)

Danny cuffs him on the side of the head. “Shut up.”

Liam breaks away and runs down the beach away from them. Danny starts to chase him, but Jimmy Mac is there now, grabs hold of Danny and says, “Let him go.”

Jimmy looks as Irish as corned beef. Curly red hair, pale skin with freckles, a face as open as a book. He’s stocky leaning toward chubby, and Danny knows sometimes his softness makes people think he’s weak.

It’s a big mistake.

Jimmy’s a gearhead, maybe the best wheelman in New England. What he can’t do with a car can’t be done. He’ll get you in and he’ll get you out. But he’s more than that—you get into a beef, you want Jimmy with you. He’ll go with his hands, with a knife, or with a gun, that’s what it takes. Angie bosses him around like he’s a cocker spaniel, but that’s because he loves her and he lets her.

Jimmy Mac has balls.

So Danny doesn’t fight him, he watches Liam disappear into the fog.

Pat walks up to Paulie and Pam. “I’m sorry. I apologize for my brother.”

“He’s an asshole,” Paulie says.

“I can’t disagree.”

“What he did is not acceptable,” Peter says.

“He’s drunk.”

“No excuse.”

“No, it’s not,” Pat says. “I’ll talk with him. We’ll deal with it.”

“Can we get her in out of the cold?” Terri asks. “The poor girl is shaking.”

“He didn’t do anything more to you, did he?” Paulie asks her.

“No, he just touched my breast.”

They take Pam back to their cottage because they don’t want to wake up Pasco and Mary with this. Terri gets her settled down, even laughing a little bit, and then Paulie takes her back to his place.

“Your fucking brother,” Danny says when they’ve all left. “I swear.”

Terri, she looks sad. “I can’t help feeling bad for him.”

“What for?”

“It’s his way of getting attention,” Terri says. “It’s not easy being Pat’s younger brother. Pat the hockey star, Pat the basketball star, Pat the star student . . . the star son. His whole life, Liam’s been in Pat’s shadow. Now Dad relies more and more on Pat in the business . . . that will be Pat’s. Liam just wants something that’s his, you know.”

But Pam isn’t his, Danny thinks. That’s the problem. “There’s going to be hell to pay for this.”

“What’ll they want?”

“Money,” Danny says.

At the end of the day, the Morettis always want the money.



Liam Murphy stumbles around in the fog feeling gloriously sorry for himself. Everybody’s mad at him, and they shouldn’t be. Okay, he thinks, I had a little too much to drink and I felt her tit. It’s not like I raped her or anything, for Chrissakes.

He plops down in the sand, drains the last of his beer, and throws the empty can into the water.

I’m going to catch it tomorrow, he thinks. I’ll get it from Pat, from my old man, from all the wives. Not to mention Pasco and Mary Ferri. And the Moretti brothers. I’m going to spend the next two days going around apologizing to everybody—including, of course, Pam—and will have to eat a healthy ration of shit. Maybe I should just go down to Florida until this blows over.

Anyway, it’s tomorrow’s problem.

He pushes himself up off the sand to go back to his cottage. Sleep this off, deal with the hangover, and then figure it out. He walks up the beach and is almost to the road when he sees four figures in the fog.

Peter, Paulie, Sal, and Tony.

“Hello, motherfucker,” Paulie says.

He raises the baseball bat.

Liam smiles and says, “I guess the coke deal’s off, huh?”

Paulie swings the bat.



Danny’s been asleep maybe an hour, hour and a half when he hears the screen door bang.

What the hell, he thinks. Danny rolls out of bed and gets his jeans and a shirt on and goes to the door.

Liam lies on the stoop, one hand stretched up toward the door handle. There’s blood all over him.

“Jesus Christ,” Danny says. Then he yells, “Pat! Jimmy! Come here quick!”



They get Liam into the back seat and Jimmy Mac drives like a bat out of hell up Goshen Beach Road and onto Route 1 to South County Hospital. It takes a long ten minutes and they aren’t sure Liam is going to make it. He goes into convulsions, his body jerking and racking while Pat struggles to hold him still.

The doctor isn’t sure Liam is going to live, either. His skull is fractured, there’s swelling on the brain. He has two broken ribs and maybe internal injuries, something about a ruptured spleen.

“What the hell happened to him?” the doc asks. He’s young, a junior guy on staff to pull this shift, and he’s shook up. Nobody tells him anything even though they know goddamn well what happened: Paulie, Peter, Sal, and Tony went looking for Liam, found him on the beach, and beat the wicked piss out of him.

They got carried away. Liam had something coming to him, no question. They should have slapped him around a little, but not this.

The nurses roll Liam into the operating room.

Long goddamn night in that hospital. Pacing around the waiting room, drinking coffee, waiting for word.