City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(6)

And that happened more and more.

Summers, though.

Summers were wonderful.

Summers, Danny was on the swordfish boat, light and fast, on blue seas under blue skies chasing the game fish, and Danny’s post was right on the bow because he was a good harpooner. And Dick, he could find swordfish like he was one of them. A freakin’ legend out of that port. Sometimes they’d take clients out to sport-fish—rich guys who could afford to charter a boat and a crew, and they’d go after the swords and the tuna with poles and lines, and then it was mostly Danny’s job to cut bait and make sure the clients had cold beers, and they had some pretty famous people on that boat but Danny will never forget the time that Ted Williams—Ted freakin’ Williams—came on and was a good guy and tipped Danny a hundred when they were done.

Other times they went out to catch the swords to sell at the fish markets and then it was all business, Danny standing on the bow with his harpoon and when they hit a bunch of swords Danny would throw the spear, which was attached to a heavy buoy that would wear the sword down, and sometimes they’d have five or six swords tied up before they went back to fight the tired fish onto the boat and those were goddamn wonderful days because they’d come in by dusk and celebrate and drink and party and then Danny would fall face-first into bed, happily exhausted, and get up to do it again the next day.

Good times.

It was one of those summers, one of those Augusts, when the Dogtown crew was down at the beach and Danny joined them for drinks and hot dogs and burgers and saw that Terri was something more than Pat’s little sister.

Her hair was black like a winter sea and her eyes weren’t blue, Danny swore they were violet, and her little body had slimmed in some places but filled out in others. Back then she didn’t have money for perfume and her mother wouldn’t have let her buy it anyway, so she’d dab vanilla extract behind her ears and now Danny jokes he can still get hard from a sugar cookie.

He remembers the first time they’d felt each other, clasped each other behind some sand dunes. Hot, wet kisses, her tongue a busy surprise flicking in and out of his mouth. He was so happy when she let him undo two buttons on her white blouse, slip his hand inside, cop a feel.

A few weeks later, one of those hot, humid August nights, parked in his car at the beach, he unsnapped her jeans and she surprised him again by lifting her hips to let his hand inside and he felt her underneath her plain white cotton panties and her tongue quickened on his and she held him tighter and said, “Do that, yes, do that.” Another night he was rubbing her and she stiffened and whimpered and he realized that she had come. He was so hard it hurt and then he felt her small hand unzip his jeans and she dug around inside, unsure and inept, but then she grabbed him and stroked him and he came inside his shorts and had to pull his shirt over his jeans to hide the dark spot before they went back to join the gang sitting around outside the cottage.

Danny was in love.

But Terri, she didn’t want to be no fisherman’s girlfriend, no fisherman’s wife.

“I can’t live all the way down here,” she said.

“It’s a half hour,” Danny said.

“Forty-five minutes,” Terri said. She was so attached to her family, her friends, her hairdresser, her church, her block, her neighborhood. Terri was a Dogtown girl and always would be, and Goshen was okay for a few weeks in the summer but she could never live there, espe cially with Danny gone for nights at a time and her worried whether he was coming back. And it was true, Danny knew, that boyfriends and husbands died out there, slipped off the deck into the icy water, got their brains beat out when a net boom swung wildly in the wind. Or drank themselves to death when the fishing was bad.

And there was no money in it.

Not for a deckhand, anyway.

If you owned a boat, maybe you strung a couple of good seasons together, but even most of the boat owners were hurting now with the fish playing out.

Terri grew up comfortable in the Murphy house and didn’t see herself being a poor “fishwife,” as she called it.

“Daddy can get you a union card,” she said, “and a job at the port.”

The Port of Providence, that is, not Gilead.

The docks, swinging a hook.

Good money, good union job, and then who knew? A move up with the Murphys. Maybe a desk job as a union official, something like that. And a taste of Murphy’s other businesses. What he would have had anyway, if his father hadn’t drunk it away, his old man getting so sloshed so often that he became a liability and the guys worked him out of the top job and then out altogether. For old times’ sake kicked him enough to live on and that was about it.

There was a day, when Danny was just a little kid, that the name Marty Ryan struck fear. Now it just provoked pity.

Danny didn’t want it anyway, didn’t want nothing to do with the rackets, the loan-sharking, the gambling, the hijacks, the union. Problem was, he did want Terri—she was funny and smart and listened to him without taking any of his bullshit, but she wouldn’t give it up without them being at least engaged, and his take from the boats wasn’t enough for a diamond, never mind a marriage.

So Danny took the card and went back to Dogtown.

First person he told about wanting to propose to Terri was Pat.

“You going to give her a ring?” Pat asked.

“When I get enough money for something decent.”