Dismissed, Danny thinks.
Out of the back room.
“Come on,” Danny says.
Jimmy sets his beer down. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
They go out on the street.
The car comes at them fast.
Roars up the street and Danny doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t stop to think, or try to see who’s behind the wheel, he just pulls his gun and empties it into the windshield. The car goes out of control and slams into the back of a delivery truck parked along the sidewalk.
Danny and Jimmy get the hell out of there.
Smash Danny’s gun up and leave parts of it in the river, in a dumpster, in a ditch.
Sal looks out the window, watches Tony walk to the car.
He’s a beautiful creature, Sal thinks.
A beautiful fucking creature. Like a noble racehorse, sleek, muscled, and proud of his strength.
Tony opens the door and gets into the front seat. He looks out the window, sees Sal looking, smiles, pleased to be watched, his teeth white as new snow, and turns the key.
The car erupts in flame.
Sal sees Tony open the door and lurch screaming out into the street. He’s on fire, arms in front of him like a blind man. He takes two steps, then twirls, then falls.
The irony is that Tony had always said he wanted to be cremated when his time came, and the joke （although no one repeats it to Sal） is that he sure as shit was. Anyway, they put what’s left of him in an urn and they have a mass and a memorial service and a reception that Sal springs for, but Sal, he’s inconsolable.
Peter, he’s just happy that Pat Murphy accomplished what he couldn’t—bringing Sal back into the Moretti fold.
It doesn’t happen right away.
Sal goes into a deep depression, just closes the door to his den and won’t come out.
Peter Moretti comes over personally with a suitcase of cash—the “tax” from the Manchester job—but Sal won’t even see him. Peter leaves the money with Sal’s wife and takes off.
“Car bombs?!” Danny yells in the back room of the Gloc. “That’s who we are now? Jesus, Pat, what if his wife and kids were in the car?”
“They weren’t,” Pat says, but he knows that he’s taken things to a place they shouldn’t have gone.
Danny’s furious. They had Sal out of the war, maybe even ready to come over to their side, and now it’s a dead solid lock he’ll come back in with the Morettis. Fuckin’ Irish, always looking forward to our next defeat. We can’t get out of our own way.
That old saying, “If it was raining soup, the Irish would run outside with forks.”
Pretty much what happens now.
Danny would think about it in years to come. The “what if” of it. What if Tony had his own car with him. What if Danny could have persuaded Pat to sit down with Sal.
But none of that happened.
God’s way of fucking with you.
The Providence cops pick Danny up.
Put him in the back seat of their unmarked car. Viola slides in beside him and asks, “What do you know about the car bombing?”
“Nothing.”
“Same old Danny Ryan,” O’Neill says from the driver’s seat. “He never knows nothing. I suppose you don’t know nothing about those two guys gunned down in their car the other day, either. The De Salvo brothers?”
I only know they tried to kill me first, Danny thinks. He doesn’t answer.
“Tony Romano burned to death,” Viola says to Danny. He’s angry. “You fucking donkeys did that.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“You burn to death in the chair, too,” Viola says. “Did you know that? I’d like to put you there. I’d flip the fucking switch myself.”
“We done here?”
“For now,” Viola says.
Danny opens the door and gets out.
Pasco calls.
Danny is surprised when the phone rings and he hears the old man’s voice. “Jesus Christ, Danny, what the hell is going on up there?”
“I dunno, Pasco.”
“We can’t be having this shit,” Pasco says. “Cars blowing up? You know what kind of heat this is going to bring down? There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Danny knows.
Someone getting whacked is one thing—the public almost expects it. But car bombs? Where innocent people could get hurt? That’s another story—that’s Northern Irish shit and the public isn’t going to put up with it.
“I don’t want to know who did it,” Pasco says.