Everyone knows who did it, Danny thinks.
“You know how Sal is going to react to this?” Pasco asks. “He’s going to go crazy, and we can’t have that. We have to keep this thing contained.”
Yeah, how’s that gonna happen? Danny wonders.
Pasco tells him.
“What I want you to do,” Pasco says, “is I want you to go to Sal and tell him that you and the Murphys had nothing to do with it.”
“He ain’t gonna believe that.”
“Lie through your ass,” Pasco says. “Make him believe you.”
“He’s more likely to shoot me.”
“Are you afraid, Danny?” Pasco asks.
Goddamn right I am, Danny thinks. You know Sal. When he gets in a killing frame of mind, whoever is in front of him gets killed. I don’t want that to be me.
“You’re the only one on your side of this thing that can make the approach,” Pasco says. “Sal respects you.”
“He hates me.”
“But he respects you,” Pasco says. “I’m expecting Marty Ryan’s son to do this.”
So that’s that—what Pasco Ferri expects, Pasco Ferri gets. So Danny drives down to Narragansett, parks down the block and across the street from Sal’s house and waits. Word is that Sal’s been holed up grieving, but he has to emerge sooner or later.
The fog comes in first.
When a heavy mist blows in off the ocean here it can arrive in a hurry. One second, it’s a clear dusk; the next, it’s a silver blanket thrown over everything. The temperature drops as suddenly, so it’s cold and thick when Danny sees Sal come out of the house, carrying something under his arm.
Danny gives him some space, then gets out of the car and follows him three blocks down to the ocean.
A seawall runs above Narragansett Beach for most of its length. A sidewalk runs along the wall, popular in the summer but deserted now in the cold and fog, except for Sal.
He’s walking in the opposite direction from the Towers, the remnants of a casino that stood here in the 1880s, when the town was a thriving resort for the rich people coming up from New York.
The two towers, each with a shingled conical peak, stand on either side of Ocean Road; an arched walkway with a central cupola spans the road. On a clear night the Towers are iconic, but now Danny can barely see them through the fog.
He follows Sal, who seems oblivious.
Danny doubts it. Sal knows he has a target on his back, knows he dodged a close call with the car bomb. One hand is around the package, the other is in his jacket pocket, and Danny has to assume it’s clutching a gun.
Sal keeps walking in the direction of Monahan’s, a clam shack, closed for the season, that sits on the base of what used to be the Narragansett Pier.
Danny feels the pistol he has in his jacket pocket, closes the distance, and calls out. “Sal!”
Sal stops, turns around and peers through the fog. “Ryan?”
Danny raises his hands. “I come in peace, Sal!”
“Fuck you, peace!”
“I just want to talk!”
“Get away from me,” Sal says, “before I put one in your head.”
“It wasn’t us, Sal,” Danny says. “I swear to God we had nothing to—”
“Lying motherfucker!” Sal says. He takes the gun out of his pocket and points it at Danny.
Danny runs.
If this were a movie, he’d say something clever or pull his own gun and shoot it out, but it’s real life—more critically, it’s real death, and Danny takes off as fast as his hip will let him.
With a gun pointed at him, threatening to go off with ill intent, his legs feel like telephone poles, they’re that stiff and heavy, then he hears the blast and feels the rush of air whoosh past him as the bullet misses his head.
He doesn’t think the next one will miss—the killer in Sal will settle him down and he’ll take the next shot into Danny’s back—so Danny vaults the seawall, drops the five feet or so onto the rocks and almost topples on the seaweed-slick stones. But the sea gods are with him and have given him a low tide. He crouches down and presses himself against the wall.
Maybe it’s Danny’s imagination, or maybe he can really hear Sal’s footsteps stalking him. Danny feels like his pounding heart is going to give him away, but his head knows that the waves hitting rock farther out are making more noise.
Still, if Sal sees him, he’s a dead man, trapped between the ocean and the wall.
Like any Rhode Islander, Danny has spent many hours cursing the fog. Been lost in its soup out at sea fishing, terrified that the boat will run against the rocks. He’s blessed the lighthouses at Point Judith and Beavertail for cutting through the fog and leading them home. He’s been on the highway at night, or worse, on one of the small roads nearer the beach, when he had to open the window and look down to see the yellow line in order to stay on the road.