City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(35)

If the shot’s going to come, it’s going to come now.

Then he sees Jimmy in the work car coming up the street.

The passenger window rolls down, Mick sticks the rifle out the window and lets a full clip go into the silver Audi.

Danny ducks into Madigan’s doorway as muzzle flashes come out from the Audi. The bullets hit Mick full in the mouth, cleave off his tongue and shatter his jawbone. The Irishman slumps onto the door handle. It opens, and he topples into the street.

Jimmy guns the car and flies down the street.



Giordo, a patch of blood on his shoulder, gets out of the car, looks to see where “Liam” went, and then spots Danny in the doorway.

Danny will never know what happened, but something takes over in him and he pulls the pistol from his pocket, pulls the trigger over and over again, screaming in rage and fear as he charges across the street at Giordo.

Every shot misses.

Giordo backs away, though, as he fires.

Danny feels a punch hit his hip. The blow spins him around and he can’t stay on his feet or hang on to the pistol as the world seems to pull him down to his knees. He props himself up on one hand and sees Giordo aiming the rifle at him.

Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee And I do detest all my sins

Jimmy roars backward down the street, putting the car between Danny and Giordo. Leaning down, he opens the passenger door, grabs Danny’s wrist, and pulls him into the car.

Giordo’s bullets smack the car like hail.

With Danny still hanging half out of the car, Jimmy hits the gas and flips the toggle switch.

The cloud of smoke shields them from Giordo’s aim.

Danny blacks out.



He wakes up in a hospital bed.

Crisp, clean sheets and distant pain.

A woman sits in a chair beside the bed. Beautiful woman with long red hair. At first Danny thinks she’s a nurse, but she doesn’t have a nurse’s uniform on. She’s expensively dressed and her perfume is enchanting.

He gets scared for a second because he thinks maybe he’s dead and this is heaven. He flashes on the shooting, the searing pain as the bullet struck his hip bone.

Maybe I died out there, he thinks, maybe I’m dead.

“Who are you?” he asks groggily.

“You don’t recognize me?”

Now he looks at this woman and remembers a photograph in his father’s dresser drawer.

It’s her.

His mother.

Madeleine.

“Get out,” Danny says.

I didn’t need you then, I don’t need you now.

“Danny,” she says. Beautiful green eyes wet with tears. “My baby.”

“Out,” he repeats. Like talking through cotton, a cool silver mist. Just let me go back to sleep. When I wake up, you’ll be gone, like you were always gone.

“You’re going to be all right, baby,” Madeleine says. “I got you the best doctors.”

“Go to hell.”

“I don’t blame you, Danny,” she says. “When you’re older, maybe you’ll understand.”

When you hurt, I hurt.





Eighteen


It started young.

Madeleine McKay’s own mother opined that the girl was born “already fourteen years old,” because she seemed sexually aware, even as a toddler. And what a beautiful little girl she was, with a perfectly symmetrical face, high cheekbones that seemed carved from Calacatta marble, sparkling emerald eyes, vibrant red hair.

Young Darlene (she wasn’t Madeleine yet) was aware of her beauty, precociously sensual, seductive in a way that made adult women passively hostile and grown men actively uncomfortable. She knew it, she used it with a glorious absence of shame. She discovered her body early, its potential for pleasure; she played with it as a marvelously joyful toy, a gift from God.

In truth, few other gifts had been given to her.

Darlene’s family was poor, even by the modest standards of Barstow, California. Her father, Alvin, never met a job he couldn’t lose, but at the same time insisted that “no wife of mine is going to work.” Outside the home, anyway—Alvin had ample spare time to knock Dorothy up and fill the revolving-door rental homes and trailers with five kids, Darlene being the oldest.

She had no childhood—she was too busy being a mother to two brothers and two sisters, because after baby number three, Dorothy checked out. Call it postpartum, call it plain depression, call it fatigue, the steady erosion of poverty, the unrelenting assault of landlords seeking past-due rent, but she pretty much gave up. Spent most of her nights on the sofa, washing down cheap pills with cheaper booze, her days in bed with the covers pulled over her head.

Alvin, that paragon of Puritan work ethic, once described her to Darlene as “useless as tits on a bull.”

So it was Darlene, from about age eight, who got the kids up for school, made their lunches, washed their clothes, who showed up (ludicrously but earnestly) at parent-teacher conferences, gave them baths, dried their tears.

Darlene shed few of her own, comforted herself instead with the consolation of her body. Her best companion was her image in the mirror, her imagination of what she would become.

She wanted to be Marilyn Monroe.

She carefully cut photos from Dorothy’s magazines and kept a scrapbook under her bed. She tried to fix her hair like Marilyn’s, followed her changes of style, her manner of dress. There was no money, of course, for new clothes, but Darlene had a flair, a knack for making the frumpiest frock look fresh with just a ribbon, a used belt, an unconventional slice of the scissors.