“What’ll they want?”
“Money,” Danny says.
At the end of the day, the Morettis always want the money.
Liam Murphy stumbles around in the fog feeling gloriously sorry for himself. Everybody’s mad at him, and they shouldn’t be. Okay, he thinks, I had a little too much to drink and I felt her tit. It’s not like I raped her or anything, for Chrissakes.
He plops down in the sand, drains the last of his beer, and throws the empty can into the water.
I’m going to catch it tomorrow, he thinks. I’ll get it from Pat, from my old man, from all the wives. Not to mention Pasco and Mary Ferri. And the Moretti brothers. I’m going to spend the next two days going around apologizing to everybody—including, of course, Pam—and will have to eat a healthy ration of shit. Maybe I should just go down to Florida until this blows over.
Anyway, it’s tomorrow’s problem.
He pushes himself up off the sand to go back to his cottage. Sleep this off, deal with the hangover, and then figure it out. He walks up the beach and is almost to the road when he sees four figures in the fog.
Peter, Paulie, Sal, and Tony.
“Hello, motherfucker,” Paulie says.
He raises the baseball bat.
Liam smiles and says, “I guess the coke deal’s off, huh?”
Paulie swings the bat.
Danny’s been asleep maybe an hour, hour and a half when he hears the screen door bang.
What the hell, he thinks. Danny rolls out of bed and gets his jeans and a shirt on and goes to the door.
Liam lies on the stoop, one hand stretched up toward the door handle. There’s blood all over him.
“Jesus Christ,” Danny says. Then he yells, “Pat! Jimmy! Come here quick!”
They get Liam into the back seat and Jimmy Mac drives like a bat out of hell up Goshen Beach Road and onto Route 1 to South County Hospital. It takes a long ten minutes and they aren’t sure Liam is going to make it. He goes into convulsions, his body jerking and racking while Pat struggles to hold him still.
The doctor isn’t sure Liam is going to live, either. His skull is fractured, there’s swelling on the brain. He has two broken ribs and maybe internal injuries, something about a ruptured spleen.
“What the hell happened to him?” the doc asks. He’s young, a junior guy on staff to pull this shift, and he’s shook up. Nobody tells him anything even though they know goddamn well what happened: Paulie, Peter, Sal, and Tony went looking for Liam, found him on the beach, and beat the wicked piss out of him.
They got carried away. Liam had something coming to him, no question. They should have slapped him around a little, but not this.
The nurses roll Liam into the operating room.
Long goddamn night in that hospital. Pacing around the waiting room, drinking coffee, waiting for word.
“I swear, if he dies . . .” Pat says.
“Don’t think like that,” Danny says. They go through the usual bullshit—he’s a fighter, he’s young, he’s strong.
Terri gets there with her parents. John Murphy has seen a lot in his life, but he hasn’t seen a son die. “What the hell happened?” he asks Pat, like it’s his fault, like he should have been looking after his brother and didn’t.
Pat tells him.
“You shouldn’t let him drink,” Pat’s mother says to him. “You know that.”
The waiting room is crowded—the Murphys, Danny and Terri, Jimmy and Angie, Pat and Sheila, Cassie. It’s Sheila does most of the talking with the doctors, comes back with the reports that there’s nothing to report. Except that it’s touch-and-go.
Down at the coffee machine, Cassie says to Danny, “Don’t go all Irish on this. If you go after the Morettis, there’ll be a war, and then someone will get killed.”
Danny don’t say anything.
First things first. They have to see what happens—but if Liam dies, there’s going to be no restraining Pat.
He’ll drop the gloves.
Pasco Ferri knows that, too.
Peter Moretti is smart enough to go over first thing in the morning and tell him what happened, because the old man doesn’t like surprises and Peter doesn’t want him to get the story from the Murphys first.
Pasco ain’t happy.
Takes in the story, thinks about it for a long minute, then looks over his coffee cup and says, “Now you come for permission? No—you come for permission before you do something. If you had, I wouldn’t have given it.”
Paulie starts to say, “What Liam Murphy did—”