Live by Night (22 page)

O
n the road, Dion said, “Hey, I don't like hitting 'em either but sometimes it's all a dame respects.”

“I didn't hit her because she had it coming,” Joe said.

“No, you hit her to help her get her hands on a bunch of BARs and Thompsons to send back to all her little friends on Sin Island.” Dion shrugged. “It's a shitty business, so we do shitty things. She asked you to get the guns. You came up with a way to get them.”

“Ain't got 'em yet,” Joe said.

T
hey pulled to the side of the road one last time for Joe to change into his uniform. Dion rapped his hand on the wall between the cab and the back of the truck and said, “Everybody be as quiet as cats when the dogs are around.
¿Comprende?
”

From the back of the truck came a chorus of
“Sí,”
and then the only thing they could hear were the ever-present insects in the trees.

“You ready?” Joe said.

Dion slapped the side of the door. “Why I get up every morning, chum.”

T
he National Guard Armory was way up in unincorporated Tampa, at the northern edge of Hillsborough County, a harsh landscape of citrus groves and cypress swamps and broom sage fields gone dry and brittle in the sun, waiting for the chance to burn and turn the whole county black with the smoke.

Two guards manned the gate, one armed with a Colt .45, the other with a Browning automatic rifle, the very items they'd come to steal. The guard with the sidearm was tall and lanky with dark spiky hair and the sunken cheeks of a very old man or a very young man with bad teeth. The boy with the BAR was barely out of diapers; he had burnt orange hair and dull eyes. Black pimples covered his face like pepper.

He was no problem, but the lanky one worried Joe. Something about him was too coiled and too keen. He took his time when he looked at you and he didn't care what you thought about it.

“You the ones got blowed up?” His teeth, as Joe had guessed, were gray and slanted, several tipping back into his mouth like old headstones in a flooded graveyard.

Dion nodded. “Put a hole in our hull.”

The lanky boy looked past Joe at Dion. “Shit, tubby, how much you pay to pass your last FITREP?”

The short one left the shack with his BAR cradled lazily in his arm, the barrel slanting across his hip. He started down the side of the truck, his mouth half open like he was hoping it would rain.

The one by the door said, “I asked you a question, tubby.”

Dion smiled pleasantly. “Fifty bucks.”

“That what you paid?”

“Yep,” Dion said.

“Got yourself a bargain. And who was that you paid, exactly?”

“What's that?”

“Name and rank of the man you paid,” the boy said.

“Chief Petty Officer Brogan,” Dion said. “Why, you thinking of joining?”

The guy blinked and gave them both a cold smile but said nothing, just stood there while the smile evaporated. “Don't accept bribes myself.”

“All right,” Joe said, his nerves getting the better of him.

“All right?”

Joe nodded and resisted the urge to smile like a fool, show the guy how nice he was.

“I know it's all right. I know.”

Joe waited.

“I know it's all right,” the guy repeated. “Gave you the impression I needed your counsel on the matter?”

Joe said nothing.

“I did not,” the boy said.

Something thumped in the back of the truck and the boy looked back there for his partner and when he looked at Joe again Joe placed his Savage .32 against the boy's nose.

The kid's eyes crossed to stare at the gun barrel and his breathing came heavy and long through his mouth. Dion came out of the truck and around to the boy and relieved him of his sidearm.

“Man with teeth like yours,” Dion said, “should not be remarking on the flaws of others. Man with teeth like yours should just keep his mouth shut.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy whispered.

“What's your name?”

“Perkin, sir.”

“Well, Perkinsir,” Dion said, “me and my partner will at some point discuss whether we let you live today. If we decide in your favor, you'll know 'cause you ain't dead. If we don't, it'll be to teach you you should have been nicer to people. Now put your fucking hands behind your back.”

Pescatore gangsters came out of the back of the truck first—four of them in summer suits and florid ties. They pushed the orange-haired boy ahead of them, Sal Urso pointing the kid's own rifle at his back, the boy blubbering that he didn't want to die today, not today. The Cubans, about thirty of them, came out after them, most of them dressed in the white drawstring pants and white shirts with the bell-hemlines that reminded Joe of pajamas. They all carried rifles or pistols. One carried a machete and another carried two large knives at the ready. Esteban led them. He wore a dark green tunic and matching trousers, the field outfit of choice, Joe assumed, for banana republic revolutionaries. He nodded at Joe as he and his men entered the grounds and then spread out around the back of the building.

“How many men inside?” Joe asked Perkin.

“Fourteen.”

“How come so few?”

“Middle of the week. You come here on a weekend?” A little bit of mean returned to his eyes. “You'd have met some men.”

“I'm sure I would have.” Joe climbed out of the truck. “Right now though, Perkin, I'll have to settle for you.”

T
he only guy to put up a fight when he saw thirty armed Cubans flood the halls of the armory was a giant. Six and a half feet tall, Joe guessed. Maybe taller. A huge head and a long jaw and shoulders like crossbeams. He rushed three Cubans who were under orders not to shoot. They shot anyway. Didn't hit the giant. Missed him clean from twenty feet away. Hit another Cuban instead. A guy who'd been rushing up behind the giant.

Joe and Dion were right behind the Cuban when he got shot. He spun and toppled in front of them like a bowling pin and Joe shouted, “Stop shooting!”

Dion screamed,
“¡Dejar de disparar! ¡Dejar de disparar!”

They stopped, but Joe couldn't be sure if they were just reloading their creaky bolt-action rifles or not. He grabbed the rifle from the one who'd been shot, grabbed it by the barrel and cocked his arm as the giant rose from the defensive crouch he'd adopted when they started shooting at him. Joe swung the rifle into the side of his head, and the giant bounced off the wall and came for him, arms flailing. Joe changed his grip and drove the butt of the rifle through the flurry of the guy's arms and into his nose. He heard it break, heard his cheekbone break with it as the butt slid off his face. Joe dropped the rifle when the big man hit the ground. He pulled handcuffs from his pocket and Dion got one of the guy's wrists and Joe got the other and they cuffed them behind his back as he took a lot of huffing breaths, his blood pooling on the floor.

“You gonna live?” Joe asked him.

“Gonna kill you.”

“Sounds like you're gonna live.” Joe turned to the three trigger-happy Cubans. “Get another guy and take this one to the cells.”

He looked at the one they'd shot. He was curled on the floor, mouth open and gasping. He didn't sound good and he didn't look good—marble white, way too much blood flowing from his midsection. Joe knelt by him, but in the moment it took to do so, the boy died. His eyes were open and tilted up and to the right, as if he were trying to remember his wife's birthday or where he'd left his wallet. He lay on his side, one arm pinned awkwardly beneath him, the other splayed up and behind his head. His shirt had bunched up at his ribs and left his abdomen exposed.

The three men who'd killed him blessed themselves as they dragged the giant past him and Joe.

When Joe closed the boy's eyelids, he looked quite young. He might have been twenty, or he could have been as young as sixteen. Joe rolled him onto his back and crossed his arms over his chest. Below his hands, just below the steeple where his lowest ribs met, dark blood climbed from a hole in him the size of a dime.

Dion and his men lined the National Guardsmen up against the wall and Dion told them to strip to their skivvies.

The dead boy had a wedding ring on his finger. Looked to be made of tin. Probably had a picture of her on him somewhere, but Joe wasn't going to look for it.

He was also missing one of his shoes. It must have come off when he was shot, but damned if Joe could see it near the corpse. As they marched the Guardsmen past him in their underwear, he searched the corridor for the shoe.

No luck. It might have been under the boy. Joe thought of rolling the body again to check—it seemed important to find it—but he was due back at the gate and he needed to change into another uniform.

He felt watched by bored or indifferent gods as he pulled the boy's shirt back over his abdomen and left him lying there, one shoe on, one shoe off, in his own blood.

T
he guns arrived five minutes later when the truck pulled up to the gate. The driver was a seaman no older than the boy Joe had just watched die, but riding shotgun was a petty officer in his midthirties with a permanently windburned face. He had a '17 Colt .45 riding his hip, the butt weathered from use. One look in his pale eyes and Joe knew that if those three Cubans had charged him in that corridor, they'd be the ones lying on the ground with sheets over them.

The IDs they handed over identified them as Seaman Apprentice Orwitt Pluff and Petty Officer Walter Craddick. Joe handed the IDs back with the signed orders Craddick had given him.

Craddick gave that a cock of his head, left Joe's hand hanging in the space between them. “That's for your CO's files.”

“Right.” Joe withdrew his hand. He gave them an apologetic smile, not putting much into it. “A little too much fun last night in Ybor. You know how that is.”

“No, I don't.” Craddick shook his head. “I don't drink. It's against the law.” He looked out the windshield. “We backing up to that ramp?”

“Yes,” Joe said. “You want, you can off-load it and we'll take it all inside.”

Craddick took note of the chevrons on Joe's shoulder. “Our orders are to deliver and secure the weapons, Corporal. We'll be walking them all the way into the hold.”

“Outstanding,” Joe said. “Just back it up to the ramp.” He raised the gate, catching Dion's eyes as he did so. Dion said something to Lefty Downer, the smartest of the four guys he'd brought along, and then walked off toward the armory.

Joe, Lefty, and the other three Pescatore men, all four dressed as corporals, followed the truck to the loading ramp. Lefty had been chosen because he was smart and didn't lose his cool. The other three—Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone—had been picked because they spoke English without an accent. For the most part, they looked like weekend soldiers, although Joe noted as they crossed the lot that Parone's hair was too long, even for a Guardsman.

He hadn't slept properly, if at all, in two days and he could feel it now in every step he took, every thought he tried to formulate.

As the truck backed up to the ramp, he saw Craddick watching him, and he wondered if the older man was just naturally suspicious or if Joe had given him a reason to be. And then Joe realized something that nauseated him.

He'd abandoned his post.

He'd left the gate unmanned. No soldier would do that, not even a hungover National Guardsman.

He glanced back, expecting to see it empty, expecting a shot in the back from Craddick's .45 and the peal of alarms, but instead he saw Esteban Suarez standing erect in the guard shack, wearing a corporal's uniform, looking to all but the most curious eyes every inch the soldier.

Esteban, Joe thought, I barely know you but I could kiss your head.

Joe glanced back at the truck, saw that Craddick wasn't looking at him any longer. He was turned on the seat, saying something to the seaman apprentice as the boy applied the brake and then shut off the engine.

Craddick hopped from the cab and shouted orders to the back of the truck, and by the time Joe got there, the sailors were out on the ramp and the tailgate was down.

Craddick handed Joe a clipboard. “Initial the first and third pages, sign the second. Clearly states that we are leaving these weapons in your charge for no less than three and no more than thirty-six hours.”

Joe signed “Albert White, SSG, USANG,” initialed where appropriate, and handed it back.

Craddick looked at Lefty, Cormarto, Fasani, and Parone, then back at Joe. “Five men? That's all you got?”

“We were told you were bringing the muscle.” Joe gestured at the dozen sailors on the ramp.

“Just like the army,” Craddick said, “putting its feet up when the work gets tough.”

Joe blinked in the sun. “That why you guys were late—you were working hard?”

“ 'Scuse me?”

Joe squared off, not just because his blood was up, but because not to do so would look suspicious. “You were supposed to be here half an hour ago.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Craddick said, “and we were delayed.”

“By?”

“Fail to see how any of this is your business, Corporal.” Craddick stepped up close. “But, in truth, we were delayed by a woman.”

Joe looked back at Lefty and his men and laughed. “Women can be hard work.”

Lefty chuckled and the others followed suit.

“All right, all right.” Craddick held up a hand and smiled to show he was in on the joke. “Well, this one, boys, was a beauty. Ain't that right, Seaman Pluff?”

“Aye, sir. She was a looker. Bet she's a real biscuit too.”

“Little dark for my tastes,” Craddick said. “But she come out the middle of the road, been all roughed up by her spic boyfriend, lucky he didn't cut her, fond as they are of their knives.”