It’s all up to Liam now, Danny thinks.
Which ain’t a comforting thought.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Vecchio asks.
“Shut up.”
“This wasn’t—”
“I said shut up.” Danny looks downriver. Come on, Liam, where are you? Then he sees the boat, an old Cobia 22-footer with a Yamaha outboard.
Liam standing at the helm.
It pulls under the off-ramp.
“Let’s go,” Danny says.
“I’m not getting on no boat,” Frankie says.
Ned points the gun at his head.
Vecchio gets on the boat.
Danny and Jimmy toss the bags on and then hop in. Danny reaches back and pulls Ned aboard. Then he looks at Liam. “I’ll take the wheel.”
Liam steps aside.
Danny takes the helm, pulls out, turns the boat around and heads downriver, into Narragansett Bay, then out into the ocean.
Jimmy’s cutting the bags open. He dips a finger in and tastes the powder. “It’s H.”
“It fucking better be,” Liam says. He cranks his neck back at Danny and shouts over the engine. “Should we just do Frankie now?!”
“Leave him alone!”
“If they catch him, he’ll rat us out!”
“A deal is a deal,” Danny says.
It takes longer than he wanted, hacking against the wind and the chop, but he finally pulls the boat through the eastern gap of the breakwater into the Harbor of Refuge, then slows it way down and glides through the channel into a slip at Potter’s Wharf, a small marina across the channel from Gilead.
They take the bags out of the boat, walk over to a panel truck and throw them in the back. Danny takes five bricks, shoves them into another bag and hands it to Vecchio.
Then he hands him a set of car keys and nods toward a Chevy Nova at the back end of the parking lot. “It’s hot, but the plates are clean. Disappear, Frankie. They’ll be looking for you.”
Vecchio walks to the Nova and gets in.
“We should have dumped him in the bay,” Liam says.
“Get in the car.” Bloodthirsty prick, Danny thinks.
It’s a twenty-minute drive to Mashanuck Point.
They rented a cottage on Exit Street, a few streets over from Danny’s dad’s, a nondescript place no different from dozens like it there on the point. Most of them are empty in the winter—only hermits like Marty Ryan and maybe a few college students who rent them cheap.
Inside, they get to cutting up the take. Danny is going to leave his share, ten keys, here. He’ll split the profits with Jimmy, Ned, and the Altar Boys, although he’ll keep the lion’s share. Liam takes the other twenty-five to keep in Providence and share out with his father.
They push up a ceiling panel and shove ten bags up there, then put the panel back in place.
“I’m telling you,” Danny says, “let it sit. It’s not going to be worth any less in a month or two.”
Sell the dope off slow, Danny thinks, let the money cool out, then use it to take his family, get out of Dogtown, and start over somewhere. In some clean business. His take should be in excess of a million dollars, more than enough to buy a fresh start.
You’re a hypocrite, he tells himself, using dirty dope money to get yourself clean, using other people’s suffering to relieve your own, committing a mortal sin to save your soul.
But if that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes, because Ian is not going to grow up in this shit.
He never needs to know his dad was a dope dealer.
But you’ll know, Danny thinks.
Something else bothers him.
The hijacking went too smooth.
It shouldn’t have been that easy.
Chris Palumbo drives all the way out to Hope Valley, where there’s nothing but farmers and goobers, and parks next to a little pond out in the middle of nowhere.
Which is more or less the point.
Phillip Jardine pulls up a few minutes later, and Chris gets into the FBI agent’s car.
“So?” Jardine asks.
“It went smooth,” Chris says. “All according to plan.”
“Ryan has the drugs?”
“Him and Liam Murphy, yeah,” Chris says.
“What about Vecchio, will he testify in court?”
“Frankie understands that he has limited options,” Chris says. “He testifies and goes away into the program, or he just goes away. He can put H in the hands of Liam Murphy, John Murphy, Danny Ryan, the whole crew. You can ride Vecchio all the way to a desk in DC, corner office.”
Chris explained this to Frankie weeks ago, when he first had the idea of setting up the Murphys. Told Frankie how he was in bad odor since the whole Sal thing, how Peter was going to put a hit on him, how there was a way out.