City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)

by Don Winslow

Rhode Island likes things difficult, hard to find. The other unofficial state motto—“If you were supposed to know, you’d know.”

With the move up Peter wants to make, he can’t let his little brother look like a douchebag. He has other reasons, too. Peter is a little bit of a philosopher—he believes that no problem comes without an opportunity. “What do you want to do?”

But Pasco Ferri tells them no. Standing in the little kitchen area, he stirs the chowder that’s been simmering on the stove since early morning. Real Rhode Island chowder, with clear broth, not that milky baby puke they throw at you up in Boston. He turns and looks deliberately at Paulie Moretti. “If you hit John Murphy’s son we’ll be in a war that won’t end until we kill every mick in Rhode Island.”

He bleeds out, right there in front of Danny, right there on Eddy Street in the clichéd broad daylight. Everybody sees everything and nobody sees nothing.

“He embarrassed the family,” Jacky said at his sentencing hearing. “So you killed your own brother,” the judge said. “Half brother,” Jacky said. “What, maybe I should have only half killed him?”

Some poor kids from some shitty British slum have no other choice than enlisting in the army, get their asses sent to Northern Irish ghettos little different from their own neighborhoods, and get killed by a long-range bullet shot by a guy they never see. For what? A change of flags? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Fuckin’ Irish, always looking forward to our next defeat. We can’t get out of our own way. That old saying, “If it was raining soup, the Irish would run outside with forks.”

Providence is a gray city. Gray skies, gray buildings, gray streets. Gray granite as hard as the New England pilgrims who hacked it out of the quarries to build their City on the Hill. Gray as the pessimism that hangs in the air like the fog.

Gray as grief.