City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(91)

Terri’s out of it, morphine flowing through her.

Danny looks up at the TV.

Sure enough, there on the late-night news is a smiling Agent Jardine, standing by a stack of heroin, bragging about how the twelve kilos is the largest drug bust in the history of Rhode Island, how it’s going to cripple the New England narcotics trade, about the arrest of John Murphy and the warrants out for several other “major traffickers.”

“I’m sure,” Jardine says, “that we’ll have them in custody very soon. They can run, but they can’t hide.”

Danny don’t know what to do.

He wishes Pat was here, Pat would know.

But he isn’t here, Danny tells himself.

So think.

Think like a leader.

Vecchio was a rat. He came to you with the heroin deal because he needed money to go on the run from Chris Palumbo and the Morettis, so—

No, he didn’t, Danny thinks.

It was a trap all the time. Vecchio set us up.

And you didn’t see it, you dumb donkey. You were so worried there’d be an ambush in the truck, you didn’t see that the truck was the ambush, that the dope was the weapon. The Morettis sent Vecchio to set you up. He was the bait and you swallowed it whole. They couldn’t win the war against you, so they’re letting the feds do it for them.

And now we’re fucked.

The room phone rings. Danny figures it’s probably Bernie with more bad news, but it ain’t.

“Danny?” his mother asks.

“How did you get this number?”

“I’m so sorry about Terri,” Madeleine says. “I’m very fond of her.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to get out of there,” Madeleine says.

“What do you know about it?” Danny asks.

“Let’s just say I follow you from afar,” Madeleine says. “Remotely, as you requested. You asked me to stay out of your life and so far I’ve honored your wishes. But, Danny, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not knowing is not good enough,” Madeleine says. “You have a wife and a child—you don’t have the luxury of indecision. You have to get out. If there isn’t an indictment on you, there will be. Or the Morettis will kill you.”

“Terri’s dying.”

“All the more reason you have to go,” Madeleine says. “Your child is going to be without a mother—”

“Like me?”

She takes the punch and then says, “And if you stand there paralyzed and stay a child yourself, Ian is going to be without a father, too, because you’ll be dead or in prison. Do you love your son, Danny?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then you have to go,” she says. “For his sake.”

“I can’t leave Terri.”

“It’s what she’d want,” Madeleine says.

“How do you know what she’d want?”

Madeleine says, “I’m a mother.”

Danny hangs up.

Then he goes down to the chapel.



Jardine has Ron Laframboise’s balls in a vise.

Not literally, but he might as well have, the way Ronny’s squirming and twisting, his brain cooking as he tries to figure a way out.

He’s sitting on the old sofa in his apartment, where he got busted with two grams of coke and an unregistered handgun, a combo plate for which the bill comes to thirty years, without the tip.

“There’s only one way out, Ronny,” Jardine says. “I want to know where Liam has the rest of the dope.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know where he is,” Jardine says. “You’re one of Liam’s bodyguards, and to guard his body, you have to know where it is. So where is it?”

“At this very moment?” Ronny asks.

“Good, play games,” Jardine says. “I can play games, too. My favorite is Send the Dumb Frog to the Worst Supermax You Can Think of and Make Sure He Gets Put In with the Spics, Where He Becomes a Pincushion.”

Ronny twists and squirms.

“Let me ask it this way,” Jardine says. “If Liam Murphy was looking at dying behind bars, and his out was giving you up, what do you think he’d do?”

Ronny knows the answer.

He tells Jardine about the safe house in Lincoln.



Pam shoves clothes into her bag.

Because Liam keeps telling her to hurry. “They could be here any second.”

“Who?”

“The Morettis or the feds,” Liam says. “It doesn’t matter which. Jesus Christ, hurry up.”

Liam’s been in a state since Bernie called with the news of the raid on the Gloc. He’s coked up anyway, and then when he turned on the TV and saw his father being led into the car, he got all the more jacked up.

He takes the three bricks of heroin from under the bed and shoves them into his suitcase. “Thank fucking God I took these to sell, so we have something. Fucking Danny Ryan and his ‘wait’ bullshit, look what happened. Nobody listens to Liam.”

He grabs her bag and zips it shut. “Enough. Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“You know what, Pam?” Liam asks. “Why don’t we sit down and have a nice long chat about the future? We can just sit here and share our feelings until the door crashes in, how about that?”