And he don’t believe for a second that Peter Moretti is going to trust Vecchio with six million dollars in merchandise. The Morettis may not want to go near the heroin, Danny gets that, but they’ll have eyes on it. And guns, too.
So it would be stupid to jack the shipment at the docks. No point. The heroin is stored in bags under false bottoms in crates of cheap tools from some Eastern European country. They’ll be offloaded into a trailer. The Morettis are expecting Frankie and his crew to pick up the tractor-trailer truck and make the short drive to a truck repair place in Fox Point. To offload the shit.
Moretti people will be there waiting.
There’s a vacant lot off Gano Street just after the exit road from Route 195, maybe fifty yards from the Seekonk River. That’s their moment. Jimmy will force the truck off the road into the lot and then they got maybe a minute to jack it.
What could go wrong?
A lot.
The Morettis could have a car or two following the truck, full of armed guys. Or this could be a fucking ambush and an army will be waiting at the vacant lot. Or Vecchio’s guys, who aren’t in on it, put up a fight.
Danny asked him about that earlier in the week.
“They won’t,” Frankie said.
“And what if they do?”
“Their bad luck, I guess,” Frankie said, miming pulling a trigger.
Which don’t exactly reassure Danny, that Frankie’s cold enough to get his own crew killed.
No, he don’t trust Frankie at all.
Frankie’s only bringing two guys—one to drive the truck, the other to sit inside the trailer with the dope. He claims they don’t know what’s sitting under the tools. The driver will have a .38 in a shoulder holster, the guy inside will have a twelve-gauge shotgun.
Maybe, Danny thinks. Or maybe there’ll be six guys in there with automatic weapons and they let loose the second we open the door.
So Danny brought plenty of firepower. He’s got himself a MAC-10 and Jimmy has a twelve-gauge of his own. Ned, he’s sticking with his .38 revolver, because that’s what he uses and that’s what he uses.
“Okay,” Danny says. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Danny sits in the passenger seat of the work car pulled off Gano Street just north of the vacant lot.
An ’84 Dodge Charger, freshly stolen. Jimmy has a police scanner under the dash. He’s at the wheel and Ned’s in the back seat.
“Is this going to work?” Danny asks.
“Who’s driving?” Jimmy asks.
“You are.”
“Then it’s going to work.”
It’s just another hijacking, Danny tells himself. You’ve done it a dozen times, nothing different, no sweat, business as usual.
No it isn’t, he thinks. This isn’t some truckload of eight-track cassettes or ski jackets, this is six mil in heroin. People kill for that kind of money, people die for it. This could get bloody in a hurry.
They drove past the vacant lot a couple of times, didn’t see anybody, no sign of an ambush.
That don’t mean it’s not there, Danny thinks.
The plan is that Danny is just going to take the truck and drive away with it, but that ain’t gonna work if the Morettis are following the freakin’ thing. So Danny has another plan, but he didn’t share that with Frankie.
The problem with the alternate plan is that it relies on Liam. Liam has to be there—on time. If Liam is drunk or coked out or just too scared to do his job—all very real possibilities—they’re fucked.
Danny turns around and sees Sean’s car pulled off twenty yards behind. Say what you want about the Altar Boys—and there’s a lot to say—they know how to work. He has no doubts that they’ll perform their assigned task.
He sits back in the seat. Now all he can do is wait.
One o’clock, one fifteen, one thirty.
Where the hell is Vecchio with the truck? Danny wonders.
A thought hits him—maybe the Morettis used this pickup as a trap to hit Frankie? Maybe there was no freakin’ heroin in the first place, and Frankie V is wrapped in chains at the bottom of the Providence River.
That’s one possibility.
Maybe the feds are onto the shipment and busted it. The scanner hasn’t picked up any unusual activity, but it wouldn’t if it was just a federal op and they kept the Providence PD out of it, which would be a good idea.
Or maybe Vecchio just took the truck and hauled with it. That doesn’t make sense, though. If he was going to do that, why would he bring us in in the first place?