Or maybe—
“Danny.”
Jimmy nudges him, points to the headlights coming their way.
High headlights.
A truck.
“Is that it?” Danny asks. He pulls a black stocking down over his face.
“Better be,” Jimmy says, doing the same. He guns the engine and pulls out. “Hold on.”
No shit, hold on, Danny thinks, because Jimmy floors it, steers into the oncoming lane and points the Charger straight at the truck.
The truck’s horn blasts over the roaring engine.
Game of chicken, and Jimmy ain’t backing down. He’s laughing like a motherfucker, going pure kamikaze here, and Danny about pisses himself as the truck gets bigger and bigger and then all Danny can see is truck and he throws his arms up over his face and—
The truck veers off, into the vacant lot.
Jimmy pulls in front of it, to block it.
Danny, Jimmy, and Ned jump out and run up to the cab, guns out, black plastic garbage bags shoved into their belts.
From the corner of his eye, he sees Sean pull in, swerve the car sideways so it’s parallel to the road, and Kevin stick the barrel of his AR-15 out the window. Which is a good thing because there wasn’t a follow car, there were two of them, and Kevin opens up as they start to pull into the lot.
Red muzzle flashes cut through the night.
Shots come back from the cars.
Danny imagines the shot that comes out of the dark and blows a hole in him. You get shot once, you don’t forget it. Even if your head does, your body doesn’t—it can still feel the shock, the pain, the lifeblood pouring out. The body remembers. And now Danny’s nerves and muscles are bowstring tight. He can’t help it.
But the guys in the follow cars weren’t ready for the automatic rifle fire and they pull out.
They won’t go far, Danny thinks. They’ll get out of range and keep an eye on the truck, try again when we pull out. They know they got us hemmed in here.
And the cops will be here any second.
So move.
He points the MAC-10 at the driver. “Get out! Come down!”
Frankie V is in the passenger seat. Ned walks around and points the shotgun up at him.
The driver hesitates.
“You wanna die for a bunch of tools?!” Danny yells.
He hears Frankie. “Do what he says!”
The driver climbs down. Frankie gets out the other side.
Ned pushes Frankie toward the back of the truck.
“Shout to your guy inside,” Danny says to him. “Tell him to lay his gun down or we blow your freakin’ brains out.”
“You hear him, Teddy?” Frankie yells. “Do what he says! It’s not fucking worth it!”
With Jimmy covering him, Danny opens the truck door.
Teddy stands there with his hands up, the shotgun at his feet. Danny grabs the gun and throws it to the ground, then gestures for Teddy to get out. When he does, Ned covers them while Danny and Jimmy jump into the truck.
Frankie looks surprised—this wasn’t the plan.
Danny knows he has to hurry.
He and Jimmy jack the crates open, throw the tools out and start grabbing the plastic-wrapped bricks of heroin, Danny counting them out loud as he does and shoving them into the garbage bags.
“Two minutes in!” Jimmy yells.
Danny has given them three minutes, max, to do this thing. What they don’t get in three they don’t get, and that’s just part of the discipline of this kind of work. Better to get away light than get caught heavy.
You can’t spend any of it dead or in jail.
But they get all of it.
“Forty!” Danny yells.
“Two thirty-five!” Jimmy answers.
They jump down from the truck.
Danny hears the sirens coming. Providence PD responding to a “shots fired” call. They probably think it’s a gang drive-by, so they’re not in a big hurry. Danny drops the MAC-10 on the ground because he needs both hands to carry the garbage bags.
He doesn’t get back in the car, though, but walks across the vacant lot, away from the street.
Sean speeds out.
Ned pokes Vecchio in the back with the revolver. “You’re coming with us.”
“What?” Vecchio says. “That wasn’t part of the—”
Which is a stupid fucking thing to say.
“It is now,” Ned says. “Move.”
They walk across the lot, climb over a low guardrail, across a narrow stretch of grass onto some rocks that edge the river. The off-ramp of westbound 195 looms over them, providing some cover.
Danny looks back and sees flashers as two black-and-whites pull into the lot.