“He agrees or it’s a no-go,” Danny says.
It gets chilly and they go back inside. Terri’s sitting on the living room couch, looking pale as hell, but she smiles when they come in and says, “I finally found a weight-loss program that actually works. I should go on TV.”
“You’re pretty enough,” her mother says.
Because nobody knows what to say. They stay for a little while longer, Danny has a piece of pumpkin pie, and then they go home, where Danny puts both his wife and his baby to bed.
Next day, Danny sits down with his crew—Jimmy Mac, Ned Egan, and the Altar Boys.
Ned, who never says much of anything, says, “No. I’m not letting you go in there. I promised your father.”
Danny has second thoughts himself.
I have an infant son and a wife with cancer, he thinks. If anything happens to me, what happens to them? But he says, “Ned, if I can make a reasonable deal, I’m going to make that deal.”
“Fuck deals,” Kevin says. “I say we go after them, we go after them hard, and we finish this thing.”
“The man didn’t ask for your opinion,” Ned says. “You don’t get a vote.”
“The issue isn’t whether I go or not,” Danny says. “I’ve already made that call. The issue is how to make it safe.”
Ned lays out his requirements—it can’t be a restaurant or a bar; the Italians are too hooked in to most of them. It has to be outdoors, a place with two ways in and out, good visibility from all sides, somewhere Ned and the others can be close, with a separate getaway car. They come up with several locations, but none of them meet Ned’s standards—not enough visibility, no good shooting angles, too “Italian.”
Finally Danny suggests Gilead Lighthouse. “That little park above the lighthouse. Has a big parking lot, a way in and a separate way out. We don’t have to worry about the ocean side—you can cover the other angles.”
Ned looks to Jimmy Mac. “You and me will drive down there, check it out.”
Danny says, “We’ve been there a thousand times.”
“Then a thousand and one won’t hurt,” Ned says.
He gets up.
Jimmy gets up with him.
Danny goes home to check on his wife and son.
Two o’clock the next morning, Danny sits in the front passenger seat of Jimmy’s car, pulled off the side of the road that leads to the lighthouse, waiting for Liam to drive past.
Liam gave Frankie the forty-five minutes’ notice to meet him along the seawall, where he’d pick him up and bring him to the meet. Ned’s already in his car in the parking lot. Kevin Coombs lies in the weeds with a rifle and a night scope.
Sean is in another car. He’ll give Liam a minute or so, then stay behind him to see if anyone follows.
Liam’s BMW comes by.
Danny sees Vecchio in the passenger seat.
Ned sees the yuppie car pull in.
He waits, watches, then gets out of his car, walks over and gets into the back of Liam’s car.
“I’m going to pat you down,” he says to Frankie.
“I’m not carrying,” Frankie says.
“I gotta be sure.”
“Do what you need to do,” Frankie says. Then, because he’s Frankie V, he has to add, “But you pat my dick more than once, you owe me dinner.”
He’s clean.
Jimmy waits five minutes and then drives into the parking lot. He gets out and Liam takes his place. Ned walks Frankie to the back seat of Jimmy’s car and gets in beside him, points his gun into Frankie’s crotch. “You as much as blink funny, I blow your balls off.”
“Relax, Ned,” Liam says.
Ned don’t relax.
Frankie V was always a smooth, cocky fuck, Danny thinks, but he don’t look like it now. He looks scared. “You mind if I smoke?”
Ned nixes it. “No. It could be a signal.”
“Can you wait?” Danny asks Frankie.
“Guess I’m going to have to,” Frankie says. “I was sorry to hear about your wife’s illness.”
Danny don’t answer.
Liam says to Vecchio, “Tell him what you told me.”
Danny looks at Vecchio like Okay, I’m listening. What he wants to hear is that Frankie is here to set up a peace negotiation.
That’s not what he hears.
“Heroin,” Vecchio says.
“What about it?”
The Morettis have a big shipment coming in, is what about it. Forty kilos of heroin from the Golden Triangle, market value $150,000 per—so a cool six million. And that’s before you step on it and put it out on the street, where the value could double or even triple. Biggest score ever, enough to get every junkie in New England high. The shit is coming in on a cargo ship, right into the Port of Providence, and Vecchio’s crew is in charge of pickup and distribution.