Were it not for her, Danny would likely be all that remained of the Moore brothers.
Lord, she wouldn’t be so calm if she knew what Danny was doing now, though, and she wouldn’t stand in Rowan’s way if he found out and lost his temper.
But Danny wasn’t the only one shaking hands with the Devil. There were Irishmen all over New York who worked for the gangsters, especially since so little remained of both the Five Points gang and the White Hands. These days the only Irish gang with any power was Big Bill Dwyer’s operation. The only crime that paid anymore was bootlegging like Dwyer and the Italians, or political crime, and as far as Danny was concerned, the ranks of the police and the men working in Tammany Hall were no less gangsters than Dwyer and Battaglia.
Few outside the gangs had any use for the kind of theft Danny and his crew were good at, and desperate as they were for work that would keep them fed, they were beggars who couldn’t be choosers. If Queenie St. Clair over in Harlem or Rothstein himself had offered to pay them like the Pulvirenti family was, Danny couldn’t imagine he or his crew would’ve said no to them either.
And of course there was the small matter of him needing the protection that came with associating with a gang. Rowan could never know about that either. Times were too hard for a man to be picky about where his money or protection came from.
Even if it meant selling his soul to the men who’d put two of his brothers in the ground.
Though Danny was still uneasy about working for gangsters and the implications on his soul, there was one thing he couldn’t deny: rum running was fun. Especially since his crew’s approach included more than just going out to sea, collecting hooch from British and Canadian ships, and getting it back to shore without the Coast Guard catching them. Oh, no. That might have gotten boring.
Two or three nights a week, depending on the weather, they went out to Long Island, where they busied themselves transporting gallons of liquor right under the Coast Guard’s nose in between relieving other rum runners and bootleggers of their cargo. They made it their mission to find every imaginable way to score, and they were having the time of their lives doing it.
One night, as they often did, they’d gone out in a fishing boat. After they’d taken on cargo from one of the ships, they’d drifted around in international waters until daylight before heading back toward the Coast Guard’s jurisdiction. They spent the entire day fishing in between lazily working their way back to Greenport, where they’d stolen the boat in the first place. Around noon, a Coast Guard vessel got curious, but when they approached the fishing boat, they found Bernard and Paddy engaged in a furious argument about whether they should cast a net here or move into deeper waters. When the Coast Guard crew tried to interrupt and ask questions, Bernard had turned to them and exasperatedly asked, “Would you tell this bozo the best fishing is that way?” He’d pointed emphatically to the north. “There’s not a damn thing to catch here!”
“The hell there isn’t!” Paddy had picked up a black sea bass almost as big as his arm and flapped it in Bernard’s face, nearly hitting him. “We’ve already caught—”
“That was hours ago!” Just like that, they’d been arguing again, shouting over the top of each other while the rest of the lads egged them on, and the Coast Guard stared in utter bemusement.
Finally, the Coast Guard crew had given up and, apparently convinced this was just a boat full of irritable fishermen, gone on to hunt down those engaged in illegal activity… unaware of the crates of Canadian whisky stacked neatly belowdecks. The crew had made a killing off that run, plus they’d had a nice cache of fish to eat or sell.
The crew had also quickly come up with signals to communicate between boats and from sea to shore without tipping anyone off. One night, when it hadn’t been safe to come to shore because some cops were sniffing around, Francis had fired a flare gun into the air. The cops had, of course, immediately come over and demanded to know what they were doing. They found Peter glaring at Francis and telling him the next time he fooled around with the damn thing, he’d put out