City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(78)
“You’re telling us the truth, Alex.”
“I swear.” He starts to cry. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Take it easy,” Chris says. “We didn’t even like the guy. Where is Liam supposed to give you the rest of the money?”
“At the bar,” Alex says. “But he didn’t show up.”
“Figures,” Frankie says.
“Next time get the money up front,” Chris says. “Always get the money up front.”
“I got one more question,” Frankie says. “I just gotta know. Sal—pitcher or catcher?”
“Huh?”
“Did you fuck him or did he fuck you?” Chris asks.
“He fucked me.”
“Well, that’s something anyway,” Frankie says.
“You done?” Chris asks him.
“Yeah.”
“Here’s the deal,” Chris says to Alex. “I’d like to let you go, but you set up a made guy, and there are rules about these things.”
“Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll suck both your cocks.”
“As appealing as that sounds,” Chris says, “we have a boss to answer to, so—”
“On the other hand,” Frankie says.
“What other hand?”
“If we put the guy on a bus, and he promised never to come back,” Frankie says, “we could just say we did him. Who would know?”
“Save us digging a grave,” Chris says. “What do you think, Alex? Would you be willing to do that? Get on a bus, disappear?”
“I’d . . . I’d need to change my pants.”
“Really?” Frankie says. “You’d be the only guy at the Greyhound station didn’t smell like piss. But, yeah, I guess we could swing by your place.”
Chris says, “But you have to ride in the trunk again. No offense, but I don’t want you smelling up the interior.”
“Okay.”
They lift him up and put him in the trunk.
Before shutting it, Chris says, “We might stop at the McDonald’s drive-through, so don’t make any noise.”
“You want anything?” Frankie asks. “A Quarter Pounder?”
Alex shakes his head.
They shut the trunk. Then Chris puts the car in neutral, pushes it into the water, and they watch it sink.
Twenty minutes later, another car comes by and picks them up.
“You still want to stop at McDonald’s?” Frankie asks.
“I could eat,” Chris says.
Liam is ripped when he gets home.
Totally jacked up on coke.
“I did it,” he tells Pam.
“What?” She’s tired, doesn’t feel like listening to a coke-fueled monologue.
“What everyone said I wouldn’t,” Liam says. “What everyone said I couldn’t. That’s what.”
“You want to be a little more specific, Liam?”
He sits on the couch beside her. Leans over and whispers, “I killed Sal Antonucci. Me. I did. Worthless, spineless, useless Liam.”
He tells her the whole story.
Pam listens to it, and then says, “So you bribed a gay man to seduce him, then shot him from across the street. Yeah, you’re a big man, Liam.”
He raises his fist to her.
“Do it, you limp dick,” Pam says. “I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
She gets up and goes in to take a shower.
Frankie has a sit-down with Peter.
“Do you know what history is?” Peter asks.
“History?”
“Yeah.”
“I dunno,” Frankie says, “it’s things that happened.”
“No,” Peter says, “it’s what people say happened. So let me tell you the history on Sal. He wasn’t queer, he was a loving father and husband, the moolies killed him in revenge for Marvin Jones.”
“Liam killed him.”
“See, that’s you not understanding history,” Peter says.
“I don’t get why, though.”
You dumb fuck, Chris thinks. If Liam killed Sal, then Peter would be expected to respond, and the war goes on. And we don’t want the war to go on, not like this, anyway. If it was some moolie, then you can spend months looking for him and no one cares. Or you whack one of them and call it a day.
“You don’t need to know why, Frankie,” says Chris.
“But I already told a bunch of people that Sal was a fag.”
“And now you’re going to tell them that he wasn’t,” Peter says. “And they’re either going to believe you or pretend to believe you, because it’s history. Capisce?”
“Capisce.”
Frankie gets up and leaves.
“You trust him?” Chris asks.
“No.”
“Sooner or later we’re going to have to do something about him,” Chris says.
Thirty-One
The word “diagnosed” never meant much to Danny.
People got diagnosed with all sorts of things—sinus infections, pneumonia, mental illness. But now he learns that the word has a very specific meaning—you have cancer.