City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(86)

They take the bags out of the boat, walk over to a panel truck and throw them in the back. Danny takes five bricks, shoves them into another bag and hands it to Vecchio.

Then he hands him a set of car keys and nods toward a Chevy Nova at the back end of the parking lot. “It’s hot, but the plates are clean. Disappear, Frankie. They’ll be looking for you.”

Vecchio walks to the Nova and gets in.

“We should have dumped him in the bay,” Liam says.

“Get in the car.” Bloodthirsty prick, Danny thinks.

It’s a twenty-minute drive to Mashanuck Point.

They rented a cottage on Exit Street, a few streets over from Danny’s dad’s, a nondescript place no different from dozens like it there on the point. Most of them are empty in the winter—only hermits like Marty Ryan and maybe a few college students who rent them cheap.

Inside, they get to cutting up the take. Danny is going to leave his share, ten keys, here. He’ll split the profits with Jimmy, Ned, and the Altar Boys, although he’ll keep the lion’s share. Liam takes the other twenty-five to keep in Providence and share out with his father.

They push up a ceiling panel and shove ten bags up there, then put the panel back in place.

“I’m telling you,” Danny says, “let it sit. It’s not going to be worth any less in a month or two.”

Sell the dope off slow, Danny thinks, let the money cool out, then use it to take his family, get out of Dogtown, and start over somewhere. In some clean business. His take should be in excess of a million dollars, more than enough to buy a fresh start.

You’re a hypocrite, he tells himself, using dirty dope money to get yourself clean, using other people’s suffering to relieve your own, committing a mortal sin to save your soul.

But if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes, because Ian is not going to grow up in this shit.

He never needs to know his dad was a dope dealer.

But you’ll know, Danny thinks.

Something else bothers him.

The hijacking went too smooth.

It shouldn’t have been that easy.



Chris Palumbo drives all the way out to Hope Valley, where there’s nothing but farmers and goobers, and parks next to a little pond out in the middle of nowhere.

Which is more or less the point.

Phillip Jardine pulls up a few minutes later, and Chris gets into the FBI agent’s car.

“So?” Jardine asks.

“It went smooth,” Chris says. “All according to plan.”

“Ryan has the drugs?”

“Him and Liam Murphy, yeah,” Chris says.

“What about Vecchio, will he testify in court?”

“Frankie understands that he has limited options,” Chris says. “He testifies and goes away into the program, or he just goes away. He can put H in the hands of Liam Murphy, John Murphy, Danny Ryan, the whole crew. You can ride Vecchio all the way to a desk in DC, corner office.”

Chris explained this to Frankie weeks ago, when he first had the idea of setting up the Murphys. Told Frankie how he was in bad odor since the whole Sal thing, how Peter was going to put a hit on him, how there was a way out.

Go to the Murphys, sell them the heroin boost.

And the dumb donkeys walked right into the trap. Even Danny Ryan, the smartest of them, went for it.

Now the Irish are fucked.

Because Jardine used Vecchio’s information to obtain wire warrants on the Glocca Morra. He has them on tape discussing the heroin deal. Couple that with catching them in possession, open-and-shut case.

Thirty to life for all of them.

War over.

“And I got immunity, right?” Chris asks. “Across the board?”

“Just don’t put any more bodies in the ground,” Jardine says.

“So our arrangement is in place,” Chris says. “I mean, don’t forget.”

“Don’t you forget.”

“Hey, you’re my guy.”

They both know how it works.

One hand dirties the other.



It’s freakin’ quiet the next day.

Like one of them bad old Western movies, Danny thinks, where one of the actors says “Too quiet,” and a second later gets pincushioned with arrows.

The talk on the street is . . . well, there isn’t a lot of talk on the street, but what there is says a truckload of tools got boosted and that’s it. Even their contacts in the Providence police and state troopers don’t say anything about heroin.

Danny expected at least some drumbeats from Federal Hill. After all, Peter didn’t have six mil to lay out for the dope, it was probably fronted to him, so now he owes a shitload of money with no way to pay it back.

So Danny thought that Moretti soldiers would be on the streets, shaking everyone down for information, that cops on the Moretti payroll would be rattling cages, but so far, nothing.

Danny figured the police would be at his door, because it was a truck hijacking and Danny’s been known to participate in such activities, and he’s in a war with the Morettis to boot.

No one shows up.

It gives Liam ammunition for his argument to sell off the heroin now. “Why wait? I’ll spread it around. Here, Boston, New York, DC, even Miami.”

“Not now,” Danny says. “Let things blow over.”