City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(98)

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Excerpt from City of Dreams


READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

CITY OF DREAMS,

THE NEXT VOLUME IN DON WINSLOW’S

EXPLOSIVE NEW TRILOGY





Prologue

Daybreak


Anza Borrego Desert, California 1992



At last the day was breaking, the morning star on the rise . . .

Virgil

The Aeneid



Danny should have killed them all.

He knows that now.

Should have known it then—you rip forty million in cash from people in an armed robbery, you shouldn’t leave them alive to come after you.

You should take their money and their lives.

But that ain’t Danny Ryan.

It’s always been his problem—he still believes in God. Heaven and hell and all that happy crap. He’s pushed the button on a few guys, but it was always a him-or-them situation.

The robbery wasn’t. Danny had them all zip-tied, flat on the floor or the ground, helpless, and his guys wanted to put bullets in the backs of their heads.

Execution-style, like they say.

“They’d do it to us,” Kevin Coombs said to him.

Yeah, they would, Danny thought.

Popeye Abbarca was notorious for killing not only the people who rip him off, but their entire families, too. Popeye’s head guy had even told Danny that. Looked up from the floor, smiled, and said, “You and all your families. Muerte. And not fast, either.”

We came for the money, not a massacre, Danny thought. Tens of millions of dollars in cash to start new lives, not keep reliving the old ones.

The killing had to stop.

So he took their money and left them their lives.

Now he knows it was a mistake.

He’s on his knees with a gun to his head. The others are tied, bound wrist and ankle, stretched on poles, looking down at him with pleading, terrified eyes.

The desert air is cold at dawn and Danny shivers as he kneels in the sand with the sun coming up and the moon a fading memory. A dream. Maybe that’s all life is, Danny thinks, a dream.

Or a nightmare.

Because even in dreams, Danny thinks, you pay for your sins.

An acrid smell pierces the crisp, fresh air.

Gasoline.

Then Danny hears, “You watch while we burn them alive. Then you.”

So this is how I die, he thinks.

The dream fades.

The long night is over.

The day is breaking.





Part One

In Some Neglected Land


. . . exiles now, searching earth for a home in some neglected land . . .

Virgil

The Aeneid





One


They leave a little after dawn.

A cold northeast wind—is there any other kind? Danny thinks—blows off the ocean like it’s giving them the bum’s rush. He and his family—or what’s left of it—his crew in cars behind him, spread out so they don’t look like the refugee convoy they are.

Danny’s old man, Marty, is singing—

Farewell to Princes’ landing stage, River Mersey fare thee well I am bound for California . . .



Danny Ryan’s not sure where they’re going, just that they have to get the hell out of Rhode Island.

It’s not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me . . .



It’s not Liverpool they’re leaving, it’s freakin’ Providence. They have to put a lot of miles between them and the Moretti crime family, the city cops, the state troopers, the feds . . . just about everybody.

What happens when you lose a war.

Danny’s not grieving, either.

Even though his wife, Terri, died just hours ago now—the cancer took her like a slow-moving but relentless storm—Danny doesn’t have the time for heartbreak, not with a two-year-old child asleep in the back seat.

but, my darling when I think of thee . . .



There’ll be a mass, Danny thinks, there’ll be a funeral and a wake, but I won’t be there for any of it. If the cops or the feds didn’t get me, the Morettis would, and then Ian would be an orphan.

The boy sleeps through his grandfather’s caterwauling. I dunno, Danny thinks, maybe the old Irish song is a lullaby.

Danny’s in no hurry for him to wake up.

How am I going to tell him that he isn’t going to see his Mommy anymore, that “she’s with God”?

If you believe that stuff.

Danny’s not sure he does anymore.

If there is a God, he thinks, he’s a cruel, vengeful prick who made my wife and my little boy pay for the things I did. I thought Jesus died for my sins, that’s what the nuns said anyway.

Maybe my sins just maxed out Christ’s credit card.

You’ve robbed, Danny thinks, you’ve beaten people. You’ve killed three men. Left the last one dead on a frozen beach just an hour or so ago. He tried to kill you first, though. Yeah, tell yourself that. The guy is still dead. You still killed him. You have a lot to answer for.

You’re a drug dealer, you were going to put ten kilos of heroin out on the street.

Danny wishes he’d never touched the shit.