City on Fire: A Novel

Book 1: Danny Ryan Trilogy

by Don Winslow

Genres: Police Procedurals; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

From the #1 internationally bestselling author of the Cartel Trilogy (The Power of the Dog, The Cartel, and The Border), The Force, and Broken comes the first novel in an epic new triad.

“One of America’s greatest storytellers.” – Stephen King

Two criminal empires together control all of New England.

Until a beautiful modern-day Helen of Troy comes between the Irish and the Italians, launching a war that will see them kill each other, destroy an alliance, and set a city on fire.

Danny Ryan yearns for a more “legit” life and a place in the sun. But as the bloody conflict stacks body on body and brother turns against brother, Danny has to rise above himself. To save the friends he loves like family and the family he has sworn to protect, he becomes a leader, a ruthless strategist, and a master of a treacherous game in which the winners live and the losers die.

From the gritty streets of Providence to the glittering screens of Hollywood to the golden casinos of Las Vegas, Danny Ryan will forge a dynasty.

Exploring the classic themes of loyalty, betrayal, and honor, City on Fire is a contemporary Iliad, a saga that spans generations—a towering achievement of storytelling genius from Don Winslow, “America’s greatest living crime writer” (Jon Land, Providence Journal).

Release date: April 26, 2022

Publisher: William Morrow

Print pages: 376

Reader says this book is...: high stakes (1) likable hero (1) suspenseful (1)

Sample

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.

Danny, he used to go out to Block Island all the time, not on the ferry, but back before he was married when he was working the fishing boats. Sometimes, if Dick Sousa was in a good mood, they’d pull into New Harbor and grab a beer before making the run home.

Those were good days, going after the swordfish with Dick, and Danny misses them. Misses the little cottage he rented behind Aunt Betty’s Clam Shack, even though it was drafty and colder than shit in the winter. Misses walking down to the bar at the Harbor Inn to have a drink with the fishermen and listen to their stories, learn their wisdom. Misses the physical work that made him feel strong and clean. He was nineteen and strong and clean and now he ain’t none of those things; a layer of fat has grown around his middle and he ain’t sure he could throw a harpoon or haul in a net.

You look at Danny now, in his late twenties, his broad shoulders make him appear a little shorter than his six feet, and his thick brown hair, tinged with red, gives him a low forehead that makes him look a little less smart than he really is.

Danny sits on the sand and looks at the water with a yearning. The most he does now is go in and have a swim or bodysurf if there are any waves, which is unusual in August unless there’s a hurricane brewing.

Danny misses the ocean when he’s not here.

It gets in your blood, like you got salt water running through you. The fishermen Danny knows love the sea and hate it, say it’s like a cruel woman who hurts you over and over again but you keep going back to her anyway.

Sometimes he thinks maybe he should go back to fishing, but there’s no money in it. Not anymore, with all the government regulations and the Japanese and Russian factory ships sitting thirteen miles off the coast and taking up all the cod and the tuna and the flounder and the government don’t do shit about them, just keeps its thumb on the local guy.

Because it can.

So now Danny just comes down from Providence in August with the rest of the gang.

Mornings they get up late, eat breakfast in their cottages, then cross the road and spend the day gathered on the beach in front of Pasco’s place, one of about a dozen clapboard houses set on concrete pylons near the breakwater on the east end of Goshen Beach.

They set up beach chairs, or just lie on towels, and the women sip wine coolers and read magazines and chat while the men drink beer or throw in a fishing line. There’s always a nice little crowd there, Pasco and his wife and kids and grandkids, and the whole Moretti crew—Peter and Paul Moretti, Sal Antonucci, Tony Romano, Chris Palumbo and wives and kids.

Always a lot of people dropping by, coming in and out, having a good time.

Rainy days they sit in the cottages and do jigsaw puzzles, play cards, take naps, shoot the shit, listen to the Sox broadcasters jaw their way through the rain delay. Or maybe drive into the main town two miles inland and see a movie or get an ice cream or pick up some groceries.

Nights, they barbecue on the strips of lawn between the cottages, usually pooling their resources, grill hamburgs and hot dogs. Or maybe during the day one of the guys walks over to the docks to see what’s fresh and that night they grill tuna or bluefish or boil some lobsters.

Other nights they walk down to Dave’s Dock, sit at a table out on the big deck that overlooks Gilead, across the narrow bay. Dave’s doesn’t have a liquor license, so they bring their own bottles of wine and beer, and Danny loves sitting out there watching the fishing boats, the lobstermen, or the Block Island Ferry come in as he eats chowder and fish-and-chips and greasy clam cakes. It’s pretty and peaceful out there as the sun softens and the water glows in the dusk.

Some nights they just walk home after dinner, gather in each other’s cottages for more cards and conversations; other times maybe they drive over to Mashanuck Point, where there’s a bar, the Spindrift. Sit and have a few drinks and listen to some local bar band, maybe dance a little, maybe not. But usually the whole gang ends up there and it’s always a lot of laughs until closing time.

If they feel more ambitious, they pile into cars and drive over to Gilead—fifty yards by water but fourteen miles by road—where there are some larger bars that almost pass for clubs and where the Morettis don’t expect and never receive a drink bill. Then they go home to their cottages and Danny and Terri either pass out or mess around and then pass out, and wake up late and do it all over again.

“I need some more losh,” Terri says now, handing him the tube.

Danny sits up, squeezes a glob of the suntan lotion onto his hands, and starts to work it onto her freckled shoulders. Terri burns easy with that Irish skin. Black hair, violet eyes, and skin like a porcelain teacup.

The Ryans are darker-skinned, and Danny’s old man, Marty, says that’s because they got Spanish blood in them. “From when that armada sank back there. Some of them Spanish sailors made it to shore and did the deed.”

They’re all black Irish, anyway, northerners like most of the micks who landed in Providence. Hard men from the stony soil and constant defeat of Donegal. Except, Danny thinks, the Murphys are doing pretty good for themselves now. Then he feels guilty thinking that, because Pat Murphy’s been his best friend since they were in diapers, not to mention now they’re brothers-in-law.

Sheila Murphy lifts her arms, yawns and says, “I’m going to go back, take a shower, do my nails, girly stuff.” She gets up from her blanket and brushes the sand off her legs. Angie gets up, too. Like Pat is the leader of the men, Sheila is the boss of the wives. They take their cues from her.

She looks down at Pat and asks, “You coming?”

Danny looks at Pat and they both smile—the couples are all going back to have sex and no one’s even being subtle about it. The cottages are going to be busy places this afternoon.

Danny’s sad that summer is coming to an end. He always is. The end of summer means the end of the long slow days, the lingering sunsets, the rented beach cottages, the beers, the fun, the laughs, the clambakes.

It’s back to Providence, back to the docks, back to work.

Home to their little apartment on the top floor of a gabled three-decker in the city, one of the thousands of old tenement buildings that went up all over New England in the height of the mill and factory days, when they were needed to provide cheap housing for the Italian, Jewish, and Irish workers. The mills and factories are mostly gone, but the three-story houses survive and still have a little of the lower-class reputation about them.

Danny and Terri have a small living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom with a small porch out the back and windows on every side, which is nice. It ain’t much—Danny hopes to buy them a real house someday—but it’s enough for now and it ain’t so bad. Mrs. Costigan on the floor below is a quiet old lady and the owner, Mr. Riley, lives on the ground floor, so he keeps everything pretty shipshape.

Still and all, Danny thinks about getting out of there, maybe out of Providence altogether.

“Maybe we should move someplace where it’s summer all the time,” he said to Terri just the night before.

“Like where?” she asked.

“California, maybe.”

She laughed at him. “California? We got no family in California.”

“I got a second cousin or something in San Diego.”

“That’s not really family,” Terri says.

Yeah, maybe that’s the point, Danny thinks now. Maybe it would be good to go somewhere they don’t have all those obligations—the birthday parties, the first communions, the mandatory Sunday dinners. But he knows it won’t happen—Terri is too attached to her large family, and his old man needs him.

Nobody ever leaves Dogtown.

Or if they do, they come back.

Danny did.

Now he wants to go back to the cottage.

He wants to get laid and then he wants a nap.

Danny could use a little sleep, feel fresh for Pasco Ferri’s clambake.

Two

Terri’s in no mood for preliminaries.

She walks into the little bedroom, closes the drapes and pulls the bedspread down. Then she peels off her bathing suit and lets it drop on the floor. Usually she showers when she gets back from the beach so she don’t get sand and salt in the bed. Usually makes Danny do the same—but now she don’t care. She digs her thumbs into the waistband of his swimming trunks, smiles and says, “Yeah, you’re worked up from that bitch on the beach.”

“You too.”

“Maybe I’m bi,” she teases. “Oh, feel you when I said that.”

“Feel you.”

“I want you in me.”

Terri comes quickly—she usually does. She used to be embarrassed by it, thought it made her a whore, but later, when she talked to Sheila and Angie, they told her how lucky she was. Now she jacks her hips, works hard to make him come, and says, “Don’t think about her.”

“I’m not. I won’t.”

“Tell me when you’re going to.”

It’s a ritual—every time since they first did it she wants to know when he’s about to come, and now when he feels it building he tells her and she asks, as she always does, “Is it good? Is it good?”

“So good.”

She holds him tight until his thrusting stops, then leaves her hands on his back, and Danny feels when her body gets sleepy and heavy, and he rolls off. He sleeps for just a few minutes and then wakes up and lies beside her.

He loves her like life.

And not, like some people think, because she’s John Murphy’s daughter.

John Murphy is an Irish king, like the O’Neills in the old country. Holds court in the back room of the Glocca Morra pub like it’s Tara. He’s been the boss of Dogtown since Danny’s dad, Marty, fell into the bottom of the bottle and the Murphy family took over from the Ryans.

Yeah, Danny thinks, I could have been Pat or Liam, except I’m not.

Instead of being a prince, Danny is some kind of minor duke or something. He always gets picked in the shape-ups without having to pay off the dock bosses, and Pat sees that other kind of work comes his way from time to time.

Longshoremen borrow from the Murphys to pay off the bosses and can’t catch up, or they put the paycheck on a basketball game that goes the wrong way. Then Danny, who’s “a strapping lad,” in the words of John Murphy, pays them a visit. He tries to do it at the bar or on the street so as not to embarrass them in front of their families, upset their wives, scare their kids, but there are times when he has to go to their homes, and Danny hates that.

Usually a word to the wise is enough, and they work out some kind of payment plan, but some of them are just plain deadbeats and boozehounds who drink up the payments and the rent, and then Danny has to rough them up a little. He isn’t a leg-breaker, though. That stuff rarely happens anyway—a man with a broken stick can’t work and a man who can’t work can’t make any kind of payment at all, not on the vig, never mind the principal. So Danny might hurt them, but he doesn’t hurt them bad.

So he picks up some extra coin that way, and then there’s the cargo he helps walk off the dock, and the trucks that he and Pat and Jimmy Mac sometimes take on the dark road from Boston to Providence.

They work with the Morettis on those jobs, getting the word and the nod from the brothers and then taking the trucks down, the tax-free cigarettes going into the Moretti vending machines, the booze going to Moretti-protected clubs or the Gloc or other bars in Dogtown. Suits like they took last night get sold out the trunks of cars in Dogtown, and the Morettis get their cut. Everybody wins except the insurance companies, and fuck them, they charge you up the ass anyway and then raise your rates if you have an accident.

So Danny makes a living, but nothing like the Murphys, who get points from the dock bosses, the no-show wharf jobs, the loan-shark ops, the gambling, and the kickbacks that come from the Tenth Ward, which includes Dogtown. Danny gets some crumbs from all that, but he don’t sit at the big table in the back room with the Murphys.

It’s embarrassing.

Even Peter Moretti said something to him about it.

They were walking down the beach together the other day when Peter said, “No offense, Danny, but, as your friend, I can’t help but wonder.”

“Wonder what, Peter?”

“With you marrying the daughter and all,” Peter said, “we all figured you’d get a little boost up, you know what I mean.”

Danny felt the heat rise to his cheeks. Thinking about the Moretti crew sitting around the vending machine office on Federal Hill, playing cards, sipping espressos, shooting the shit. Danny didn’t like it his name came up, especially not about this.

He didn’t know what to say to Peter. Truth was, he’d figured he’d get a boost, too, but it hadn’t happened. He expected his father-in-law to have taken him into the back room of the Gloc for a “chat,” put his arm around him and given him a piece of the street action, a card game, a seat at the table—something.

“I don’t like to push,” Danny finally said.

Peter nodded and looked past Danny out at the horizon, where Block Island seemed to float like a low cloud. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Pat like a brother, but . . . I don’t know, sometimes I think the Murphys . . . Well, you know, because it used to be the Ryans, didn’t it? Maybe they’re afraid to move you up, you might have thoughts of restoring the old dynasty. And if you and Terri have a boy . . . a Murphy anda Ryan? I mean, come on.”

“I just want to make a living.”

“Don’t we all?” Peter laughed, and he let it drop.

Danny knew that Peter was making onions. He liked Peter, considered him a friend, but Peter was going to be Peter. And Danny had to admit there was some truth to what Peter said. He’d thought it, too—that Old Man Murphy was shutting him out because he was afraid of the Ryan name.

Danny don’t mind it so much with Pat, a good guy and a hard worker who runs the docks well and doesn’t lord it over anyone. Pat’s a natural leader, and Danny, well, if he’s being honest with himself, is a natural follower. He don’t want to lead the family, take his father’s place. He loves Pat and would follow him to hell with a squirt gun.

Kids from Dogtown, they’ve been together forever—him and Pat and Jimmy. St. Brendan’s Elementary, then St. Brendan’s High School. They played hockey together, got slaughtered by the French-Canadian kids from Mount St. Charles. They played basketball together, got slaughtered by the Black kids at Southie. Didn’t matter they got slaughtered—they played tough and didn’t back down from nobody. They ate most suppers together, sometimes at Jimmy’s, mostly at Pat’s.

Pat’s mom, Catherine, would call them to the table like they were one person, “Patdannyjimmyyyyyyy!” Down the street, across the little backyards. Patdannyjimmyyyyyyy! Suppaaaaaah! When there was no food at home because Marty was too drunk to get it together, Danny would sit at the big Murphy table and have pot roast and boiled potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, always fish-and-chips on Friday, even after the Pope said it was okay to eat meat.

With no real family of his own—Danny was that anomaly, an Irish only child—he loved the sprawling Murphy household. There was Pat and Liam, Cassie, and, of course, Terri, and they took Danny in like he was family.

He wasn’t exactly an orphan, Danny, but a near thing, what with his mother running off when he was just a baby and his father pretty much ignoring him because all he could see in him was her.

As Martin Ryan fell deeper into the bitterness and the bottle, he was hardly a fit father for the boy, who more and more took refuge on the streets with Pat and Jimmy and at the Murphy house, where there was laughter and smiles and rarely any yelling except when the sisters fought for the bathroom.

Danny was a lonely boy, Catherine Murphy always thought, a lonely, sad boy, and who could blame him? So if he was at the house a bit more than was normal, she was happy to give him a smile and a mother’s hug, some cookies and a peanut butter sandwich, and as he grew up and his interest in Terri became obvious—well, Danny Ryan was a nice boy from the neighborhood and Terri could do worse.

John Murphy wasn’t so sure. “He’s got that blood.”

“What blood?” his wife asked, although she knew.

“That Ryan blood,” Murphy answered. “It’s cursed.”

“Stop being foolish,” Catherine said. “When Marty was well . . .”

She didn’t finish the thought, because when Marty was well, he, not John, had run Dogtown, and her husband didn’t like the thought that he owed his rise to Martin Ryan’s fall.

So John wasn’t all that unhappy when Danny graduated high school and moved down to South County to be a fisherman, of all the goddamn things. But if that’s what the kid wanted to do, that’s what he wanted to do, even though he didn’t understand that jobs on the boats were hard to get and he only got his place on the swordfish boat because its owner thought the Celtics were a lock at home against the Lakers and they weren’t. So if the owner wanted to keep his boat, young Danny Ryan was going to be on board.

No reason for Danny to know that, though. Why ruin it for the kid?

Pat, he didn’t understand Danny’s move, either.

“What are you doing this for?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Danny said. “I want to try something different. Work outdoors.”

“The docks aren’t outdoors?”

Yeah, they are, Danny thought, but they weren’t the ocean and he meant what he said—he wanted something different from Dogtown. He knew the life he was looking at: Get his union card, work on the docks, pick up some spare change as muscle for the Murphys. Friday nights at the P-Bruins hockey games, Saturday nights at the Gloc, Sunday dinner at John’s table. He wanted something more—different, anyway—wanted to make his own way in the world. Do clean, hard work, have his own money, his own place, not owe nobody nothing. Sure, he’d miss Pat and Jimmy, but Gilead was what, half an hour, forty-minute drive and they’d be coming down in August anyway.

So he got himself a job on the swordfish boat.

Total fucking doofus at first, no clue what he was doing, and Dick, he must have yelled himself hoarse trying to teach Danny what to do, what not to do, called Danny every name in the book, and for a good year Danny thought his first name was “Dammit.”

But he learned.

Became a decent hand and overcame the prejudice most of the old guys had that no one who didn’t come from at least three generations of fishermen could work a boat. And he freakin’ loved it. Got his drafty little cottage, learned to cook—well anyway, bacon and eggs, clam chowder, chili—earned his salary, drank with the men.

Summers he worked on the swordfish charter, winters he caught on with the boats that went out for the groundfish—the cod, the haddock, the flounder—whatever they could net, whatever the Russians or the Japs didn’t get and the government would still let them have.

Summers were fun, winters a bitch.

The sky gray, the ocean black, and the only word that could describe Gilead in the winter was “bleak.” The wind would come through his cottage like it had an invitation, and nights he’d wear a heavy hooded sweatshirt to bed. When the boats could get out in the winter, the ocean would make every effort to kill you, and when you couldn’t get out the sheer tedium would take its shot. Nothing to do but drink, watch your belly grow and your wallet shrink. Look out your window at the fog, like you was living inside an aspirin bottle. Maybe watch some TV, go back to bed, or put on your toque, jam your hands inside your peacoat, and walk down to the docks to look at your boat sitting there as miserable as you were. Go to the bar, sit around and bitch with the other guys, Sundays you had the Patriots anyway, you weren’t unhappy enough already.

But those days they could go out, Jesus Christ it was cold, colder than a witch’s tit, even with so many layers of clothes on you looked like the freakin’ Michelin Man. Thermal long johns and long-sleeve shirt, thick wool socks, a wool sweater, a sweatshirt and a down jacket, thick gloves and he was still cold. Out at the dock by four in the morning, chopping ice off the moorings and the gears while Dick or Chip Whaley or Ben Browning or whoever he was working for tried to get the engine to turn over. ...