City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)
Don Winslow
Part One
Pasco Ferri’s Clambake
Goshen Beach, Rhode Island
August 1986
Take your meal, now; we prepare for combat.
Homer
The Iliad
Book II
One
Danny Ryan watches the woman come out of the water like a vision emerging from his dreams of the sea.
Except she’s real and she’s going to be trouble.
Women that beautiful usually are.
Danny knows that; what he doesn’t know is just how much trouble she’s really going to be. If he knew that, knew everything that was going to happen, he might have walked into the water and held her head under until she stopped moving.
But he doesn’t know that.
So, the bright sun striking his face, Danny sits on the sand out in front of Pasco’s beach house and checks her out from behind the cover of his sunglasses. Blond hair, deep blue eyes, and a body that the black bikini does more to accentuate than conceal. Her stomach is taut and flat, her legs muscled and sleek. You don’t see her fifteen years from now with wide hips and a big ass from the potatoes and the Sunday gravy.
The woman comes out of the water, her skin glistening with sunshine and salt.
Terri Ryan digs an elbow into her husband’s ribs.
“What?” Danny asks, all mock-innocent.
“I see you checking her out,” Terri says.
They’re all checking her out—him, Pat and Jimmy, and the wives, too—Sheila, Angie, and Terri.
“Can’t say I blame you,” Terri says. “That rack.”
“Nice talk,” Danny says.
“Yeah, with what you’re thinking?” Terri asks.
“I ain’t thinking nothing.”
“I got your nothing for you right here,” Terri says, moving her right hand up and down. She sits up on her towel to get a better view of the woman. “If I had boobs like that, I’d wear a bikini, too.”
Terri’s wearing a one-piece black number. Danny thinks she looks good in it.
“I like your boobs,” Danny says.
“Good answer.”
Danny watches the beautiful woman as she picks up a towel and dries herself off. She must put in a lot of time at the gym, he thinks. Takes care of herself. He bets she works in sales. Something pricey—luxury cars, or maybe real estate, or investments. What guy is going to say no to her, try to bargain her down, look cheap in front of her? Isn’t going to happen.
Danny watches her walk away.
Like a dream you wake up from and you don’t want to wake up, it’s such a good dream.
Not that he got much sleep last night, and now he’s tired. They hit a truckload of Armani suits, him and Pat and Jimmy MacNeese, way the hell up in western Mass. Piece of cake, an inside job Peter Moretti set them up with. The driver was clued in, everyone did the dance so no one got hurt, but still it was a long drive and they got back to the shore just as the sun was coming up.
“That’s okay,” Terri says, lying back on her towel. “You let her get you all hot and bothered for me.”
Terri knows her husband loves her, and anyway, Danny Ryan is faithful like a dog. He don’t have it in him to cheat. She don’t mind he looks at other women as long as he brings it home to her. A lot of married guys, they need some strange every once in a while, but Danny don’t.
Even if he did, he’d feel too guilty.
They’ve even joked about it. “You’d confess to the priest,” Terri said, “you’d confess to me, you’d probably take an ad out in the paper to confess.”
She’s right, Danny thinks as he reaches over and strokes Terri’s thigh with the back of his index finger, signaling that she’s right about something else, that he is hot and bothered, that it’s time to go back to the cottage. Terri brushes his hand away, but not too hard. She’s horny, too, feeling the sun, the warm sand on her skin, and the sexual energy brought by the new woman.
It’s in the air, they both feel it.
Something else, too.
Restlessness? Danny wonders. Discontent?
Like this sexy woman comes out of the sea and suddenly they’re not quite satisfied with their lives.
I’m not, Danny thinks.
Every August they come down from Dogtown to Goshen Beach because that’s what their fathers did and they don’t know to do anything else. Danny and Terri, Jimmy and Angie Mac, Pat and Sheila Murphy, Liam Murphy with his girl of the moment. They rent the little cottages across the road from the beach, so close to each other you can hear your neighbor sneeze, or lean out the window to borrow something for the kitchen. But that’s what makes it fun, the closeness.
None of them would know what to do with solitude. They grew up in the same Providence neighborhood their parents did, went to school there, are still there, see each other almost every day and go down to Goshen on vacation together.
“Dogtown by the Sea,” they call it.
Danny always thinks the ocean should be to the east, but knows that the beach actually faces south and runs in a gentle arc west about a mile to Mashanuck Point, where some larger houses perch precariously on a low bluff above the rocks. To the south, fourteen miles out in the open ocean, sits Block Island, visible on most clear days. During the summer season, ferries run all day and into the night from the docks at Gilead, the fishing village just across the channel.