City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)

by Don Winslow

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.

Back then she didn’t have money for perfume and her mother wouldn’t have let her buy it anyway, so she’d dab vanilla extract behind her ears and now Danny jokes he can still get hard from a sugar cookie.

Lesson: Don’t hold on to something’s going to pull you into a trap. If you’re going to let go, let go early. Better yet, don’t take the bait at all.

Danny’s jacked up, off the board for the foreseeable future, but so is Steve Giordo, who departed with the sentiment that he ain’t gonna walk into another ambush because the Moretti brothers can’t tell one mick from another. He has a point, Peter thinks. Worse is that New York and Hartford are less likely to lend out any of their people anymore because they don’t want to waste an asset on some outfit that gets suckered by a cheap leg-breaker like Danny Ryan.

Solly has a few strands of white hair that remind Peter he needs to stop at Rite Aid for dental floss.

at the end of the day you don’t make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies.

That old saying, “If it was raining soup, the Irish would run outside with forks.”

He and Ned had honored the occasion by cracking open two Swanson Hungry-Man turkey dinners to go with their Bushmills and then settled down in front of some bowl game they didn’t give a shit about.

You heard about Irish Alzheimer’s? They forget everything but the grudges.”

The nuns used to say that the devil comes disguised as an angel. That the worst things you’ll do, you’ll do for the best reasons. The most hateful things you’ll do, you’ll do for the ones you love most.

“Your soul is never a rental,” Bernie says. “It’s always a sale.”

He knows that he’s walking toward the edge of a cliff, but somehow he can’t stop his feet from moving—left, right, left, right—toward the abyss. It’s like something else is pushing him, something outside himself, beyond his control.