City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(31)
“No,” Terri says. “I’m late.”
Must have been that night on the beach, she tells him, after Pasco Ferri’s clambake.
Part Two
City on Fire
Providence, Rhode Island
October 1986
Thus on the beachhead the Achaeans armed . . . avid again for war,
And Trojans faced them on the rise of plain.
Homer
The Iliad
Book XX
Fifteen
The phone wakes him early in the morning.
Danny rolls over and answers it.
“Hello?”
“Thank God.” It’s Pat. “Danny, get the hell out of there.”
“What are you talking about?”
The Morettis hit and hit hard.
Three guys dead.
“Who?” Danny asks, his brain still a little cloudy.
“I’ll run it down when you get here,” Pat says. “Just get the fuck out.”
“Jimmy?”
“He’s my next call.”
“I’ll call him.” Danny sits up, punches in Jimmy Mac’s number.
“What is it?” Terri asks, waking, irritable.
“It’s not good,” Danny says. Feels like he can’t breathe, like there’s this heart-attack band around his chest as he listens to Jimmy’s phone ring. Pick up the fucking phone, pick up the fucking phone, Jimmy . . .
“Danny? The fuck.”
Danny tells him the news.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Come heavy.” Danny hangs up and punches in his father’s number. Marty answers it on the first ring, says, “I’m still breathing, that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Pat call you?”
“John.”
“Ned with you?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call you when I know more.”
Danny pulls on his jeans, a T-shirt, then straps on a shoulder holster with the .38 and puts a denim work shirt on over it. He goes downstairs, Terri’s already in the kitchen. She’s got the coffee going and has bacon in the pan for his eggs. Danny likes it crispy, almost burned. Doing the little things, keeping the routine, Danny knows it’s her way of dealing with it.
“Just tell me,” she says, not looking up from the stove. “Is it Liam?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Dad?” Her voice quavers.
“Pat would have said.”
“Then who—”
“I don’t know, Terri. I just know it’s bad.”
Wants to tell her that he’s safe for the time being, that he has the choice of just opting out of this thing. But he hasn’t decided what he’s going to do yet, and don’t know how to tell her anyway. “Go to your parents’, take care of your mom.”
The bacon starts to smoke. Terri takes it off and lays it on a folded paper towel on a plate, then cracks two eggs in the pan and fries them in the hot grease. Then she takes two slices of Wonder bread out of the bag and pops them into the toaster.
“What are we going to do?” she asks.
“About what?”
“We’re gonna have a baby, Danny.”
She has tears in her eyes. Unusual for Terri; she don’t cry about a lot. Danny wraps his arms around her and she lays her head on his shoulder and cries.
“It’s going to be all right, Terri,” he says. “It’s going to be all right.”
“How, Danny?” she asks, straightening up and looking him in the eyes. “How’s it going to be all right?”
“Let’s just go,” Danny says. “You, me, and the baby.”
“Where?”
“California.”
“California again,” Terri says. “What is it with you and that place?”
“It’s supposed to be nice.”
“You don’t just pick up and move,” Terri says. “It takes money to relocate. You don’t have a job there . . . and we need your health insurance.”
She breaks away from him, goes back to the stove, flips the eggs and uses the spatula to break the yolks. Danny likes his eggs over hard with the yolk spread out.
“I’ll get a job,” he says. “With benefits.”
“How?”
“Terri, quit nagging me, all right?!”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“Well, don’t yell at me!”
“Make your own fucking eggs. Jerk.”
She walks out.
Danny turns the heat off on the stove. Decides he doesn’t have time for bacon and eggs, so he pours himself a cup of coffee, milk and sugar, and takes it with him.
“Go to your parents’!” he yells.
He heads out the door.
Walks down to the Gloc.
Head on a swivel just in case the Morettis think they didn’t get their answer quick enough.
Two unmarked police cars are parked out by the Gloc as Danny walks up. Good thing to know, he thinks, we still have a few cops left. The Morettis aren’t going to hit the Gloc in daylight, not after last night, but it doesn’t hurt to be cautious. He nods at the cops and goes in.