“You want me to flip on my wife’s father and her brother,” Danny says.
“Ask Terri,” Jardine says. “Ask her if she’d swap her old man and her big brother for her husband and her baby.”
“Fuck you.”
“Scared to know what she’d say?”
As a matter of fact, I am, Danny thinks.
Sensing that, Jardine pushes. “Hey, if John Murphy could give us, for instance, Pasco Ferri, we might be able to cut him a deal.”
Yeah, Danny thinks, a lot of people would like Pasco out of the way.
Peter Moretti being one of them.
“What about my father?” Danny asks.
“Whatever he did is ancient history,” Jardine says. “No offense, but nobody cares.”
More to himself than to Jardine, Danny says, “He’d never talk to me again if I was a rat. He’d never look at me.”
“Then I’d ask you the same question,” Jardine says. “Who do you owe more, your wife and kid or your old man? What your mother tells me, Marty doesn’t care much about you at all.”
Danny doesn’t answer. What can he say? The man is right.
Like any fed, Jardine knows when to push and when to lie back. The book says he should push now, steamroll Ryan into a quick decision, keep the ball moving, swoop up his pregnant wife and close the deal.
But his gut tells him different.
Tells him to lay off a little, give Ryan a little space.
“Look, think it over,” Jardine says. “But don’t take too long. You don’t have the time. And I’m not going to make the same offer to your widow. Where do you want me to drop you?”
Danny has him drop him on Point Street.
It’s a long walk home, but he needs the time to think.
Everything Jardine said was true.
The Italians are going to kill Pat, he thinks, they’re going to kill Liam and Old Man Murphy, they’re going to kill Jimmy and they’re going to kill me.
It’s not an “if,” it’s a “when.”
Unless I do something to change it.
Yeah, like what?
I can’t go over to the Morettis; even if I wanted to they’d never trust me again and I can’t blame them.
I can just take Terri and go, but she’s not going to be away from her family when the baby comes. And even if she’d go, the feds will find me.
Or you can take Jardine’s hand.
Become a goddamn rat.
An informer, the curse of the Irish.
A man who turns on his friends.
It doesn’t get any lower than a rat.
Yeah, it does, he thinks—a man who doesn’t take care of his wife and child.
Pat Murphy sits in the Gloc, drinking alone.
Liam never showed up, fuck him.
His boys wanted to stay but he chased them off. Mean drunk. He finishes his last shot, locks up the bar and walks out onto the street. Pat doesn’t even see the car when, full of Jameson’s and regrets, he shuffles out onto Eddy Street.
Sal must have been waiting.
He doesn’t use a bomb or a gun, he uses the foot feed. Floors the stolen Caddy and aims it straight at Pat, who looks up at the last second, pulls the .38 from his jacket pocket but doesn’t get a chance to shoot before Sal runs over him.
Then Sal puts it in reverse, then drive, reverse again, again and again, running back and forth over Pat. Then he takes off with Pat’s body jammed under the oil pan and drags him for blocks before he realizes it.
Clicking out of his red rage, Sal thinks a little about self-preservation, gets out, tosses what’s left of Pat Murphy into the trunk and drives away.
Leaving smears of Pat on Eddy Street.
It takes the heart out of Danny.
People are screaming for revenge and looking for Danny and his crew to deliver it. But Danny says no. Not yet, anyway, he just doesn’t have the heart. You’d think that the brutal murder of his best friend would fire him up, but at some point you just say fuck it, enough is too much.
Your heart breaks, it’s broken.
Liam, of course, he’s all over the revenge thing, walking around the Gloc saying how’s he going to get payback for his brother. He won’t shut up about it until Danny says, “You can’t kill Sal.”
“Why not?” Liam demands.
Because you can’t, Danny thinks. Because Sal is too good for you and, anyway, you’re more mouth than balls. But he says, “Because if Sal is dead, he can’t tell us where Pat’s body is, can he?”
Sal dumped it somewhere but, of course, he ain’t saying because that’s tantamount to a homicide confession. Pat’s mother is a mess anyway, as is to be expected, but she’s especially distraught that she can’t bury her son, give him a decent funeral. Until then, there can be no what-do-you-call-it, closure.