Live by Night (5 page)

She thought about it a bit, that birthmark rippling every time she stretched up the bed to tap ash off her cigarette. “I'm supposed to see him for that new hotel opening. The one on Providence Street?”

“The Statler?”

She nodded. “Supposed to have radios in every room. Marble from Italy.”

“And?”

“And if I go to that, he'll be with his wife. He just wants me there 'cuz, I dunno, 'cuz it excites him to see me when his wife's on his arm. And after that, I know for a fact he's going to Detroit for a few days to talk to new suppliers.”

“So?”

“So, it'll buy us all the time we need. By the time he comes looking for me again, we'll have a three- or four-day head start.”

Joe thought it through. “Not bad.”

“I know,” she said with another smile. “You think you can clean yourself up, get over to the Statler Saturday? Say, about seven?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we're gone,” she said and looked over her shoulder at him. “But no more talk about Albert being a bad guy. My brother's got a job 'cuz of him. Last winter, he bought my mother a coat.”

“Well, then.”

“I don't want to fight.”

Joe didn't want to fight either. Every time they did, he lost, found himself apologizing for things he hadn't even done, hadn't even thought of doing, found himself apologizing for not doing them, for not thinking of doing them. It hurt his fucking head.

He kissed her shoulder. “So we won't fight.”

She gave him a flutter of eyelashes. “Hooray.”

L
eaving the First National job in Pittsfield, Dion and Paolo had just jumped in the car when Joe backed into the lamppost because he'd been thinking about the birthmark. The wet sand color of it and the way it moved between her shoulder blades when she looked back at him and told him she might love him, how it did the same thing when she said Albert White wasn't such a bad guy. A fucking peach actually was ol' Albert. Friend of the common man, buy your mother a winter coat as long as you used your body to keep
him
warm. The birthmark was the shape of a butterfly but jagged and sharp around the edges, Joe thinking that might sum up Emma too, and then telling himself forget it, they were leaving town tonight, all their problems solved. She loved him. Wasn't that the point? Everything else was heading for the rearview mirror. Whatever Emma Gould had, he wanted it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. He wanted it for the rest of his life—the freckles along her collarbone and the bridge of her nose, the hum that left her throat after she'd finished laughing, the way she turned “four” into a two-syllable word.

Dion and Paolo ran out of the bank.

They climbed in the back.

“Drive,”
Dion said.

A tall, bald guy with a gray shirt and black suspenders came out of the bank, armed with a club. A club wasn't a gun, but it could still cause trouble if the guy got close enough.

Joe rammed the gearshift into first with the heel of his hand and hit the gas, but the car went backward instead of forward. Fifteen feet backward. The eyes of the guy with the club popped in surprise.

Dion shouted, “Whoa! Whoa!”

Joe stomped the brake and the clutch. He rammed the shift out of reverse and into first, but they still hit the lamppost. The impact wasn't bad, just embarrassing. The yokel with the suspenders would tell his wife and friends for the rest of his life how he'd scared three gun thugs so bad they'd reversed a getaway car to get away from
him
.

When the car lurched forward, the tires kicked dust and small rocks off the dirt road and into the face of the man with the club. By now, another guy stood in front of the bank. He wore a white shirt and brown pants. He extended his arm. Joe saw the guy in the rearview mirror, his arm jumping. For a moment, Joe couldn't comprehend why, and then he understood. He said, “Get down,” and Dion and Paolo dropped in the backseat. The guy's arm jerked up again, then jerked a third or fourth time, and the side-view mirror shattered and the glass fell to the dirt street.

Joe turned onto East Street and found the alley they'd scouted last week, banged a left into it, and stood on the gas pedal. For several blocks he drove parallel to the railroad tracks that ran behind the mills. By now they could assume the police were involved, not enough so that they were setting up roadblocks or anything, but enough that they could follow tire tracks off the dirt road by the bank, know the general direction in which they'd headed.

They'd stolen three cars that morning, all in Chicopee, about sixty miles south. They'd picked up the Auburn they were in now, as well as a black Cole with bald tires and a '24 Essex Coach with a raspy engine.

Joe crossed the railroad tracks and drove another mile along Silver Lake to a foundry that had burned down some years before, the black shell of it listing to the right in a field of weeds and cattails. Both cars were waiting for them when Joe pulled into the back of the building, where the wall was long gone, and they parked beside the Cole and got out of the Auburn.

Dion lifted Joe by his overcoat lapels and pushed him against the Auburn's hood. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It was a mistake,” Joe said.

“
Last week
it was a mistake,” Dion said. “This week it's a fucking pattern.”

Joe couldn't argue. But he still said, “Take your hands off me.”

Dion let go of Joe's lapels. He breathed heavily through his nostrils and pointed a stiff finger at Joe. “You're fucking up.”

Joe took the hats and the kerchiefs and the guns and put them in a bag with the money. He put the bag in the back of the Essex Coach. “I know it.”

Dion held out his fat hands. “We've been partners since we were little fucking kids, but this is bad.”

“Yeah.” Joe agreed because he didn't see the point in lying about the obvious.

The police cars—four of them—came through a wall of brown weeds on the edge of the field behind the foundry. The weeds were the color of a riverbed and stood six or seven feet tall. The cruisers flattened them and revealed a small tent community behind them. A woman in a gray shawl and her baby leaned over a recently doused campfire, trying to scoop whatever heat was left into their coats.

Joe jumped into the Essex and drove out of the foundry. The Bartolo brothers drove past him in their Cole, the back end sliding away from them as they hit a patch of dry red dirt. The dirt spewed onto Joe's windshield and covered it. He leaned out the window and wiped at the dirt with his left arm while he drove with his right. The Essex bounced high off the uneven ground and something took a bite out of Joe's ear. When he pulled his head back in, he could see a lot better, but blood poured from his ear, sluicing under his collar and down his chest.

A series of pings and thunks hit the back window, the sound of someone skipping coins off a tin roof, and then the window blew out and a bullet sparked off the dashboard. A cruiser appeared on Joe's left and then another on his right. The one to his right had a cop in the backseat who rested the barrel of a Thompson on the window frame and opened fire. Joe stepped on the brakes so hard the steel coils of his seat pressed against his back ribs. The passenger windows exploded. Then the front window. The dashboard spit pieces of itself all over Joe and the front seat.

The cruiser to his right tried to brake as it turned in toward him. It rose on its nose and left the ground like something lifted by a gust. Joe had time to see it land on its side before the other cruiser rammed the back of his Essex and a boulder appeared out of the weeds just before the tree line.

The front of the Essex collapsed and the rest of it snapped to the right, Joe snapping with it. He never felt himself leave the car until he hit the tree. He lay there for a long time, covered in glass pebbles and pine needles, sticky with his own blood. He thought of Emma and he thought of his father. The woods smelled like burning hair, and he checked his arm hair and head just in case, but he was fine. He sat in the pine needles and waited for the Pittsfield police to arrest him. Smoke drifted through the trees. It was black and oily and not too thick. It moved around the tree trunks like it was looking for someone. After a while, he realized the police might not be coming.

When he stood and looked past the mangled Essex, he couldn't see the second cruiser anywhere. He could see the first, the one that had fired the tommy gun at him; it lay on its side in the field, a good twenty yards from where he'd last seen it bounce.

His hands had been chewed up by glass or fragments flying around inside the car. His legs were fine. His ear continued to bleed. When he found the rear window along the driver's side of the Essex intact, he looked at his reflection and saw why—no more left earlobe. It had been removed as if by a flick of the barber's blade. Past his reflection, Joe saw the leather satchel that held the money and the guns. The door wouldn't open right away, and he had to put both feet on the driver's door, which was unrecognizable as a door. He pulled hard though, pulled until he felt nauseated and light-headed. Just when he was thinking he should probably go find a rock, the door opened with a loud groan.

He took the bag and walked away from the field and deeper into the woods. He came upon a small, dry tree that was aflame, its two largest branches curving toward the fireball in its center, like a man trying to pat out his own burning head. A pair of oily black tire tracks flattened the brush in front of him, and some burning leaves listed in the air. He found a second burning tree and a small bush, and the black tire tracks grew blacker and more oily. After about fifty yards, he arrived at a pond. Steam curled along its edges and wisped off the surface, and at first Joe couldn't tell what he was seeing. The police cruiser that had rammed him had entered the water on fire, and now it sat in the middle of the pond, the water up to its windowsills, the rest of it charred, a few greasy blue flames still dancing on the roof. The windows had blown out. The holes the Thompson gun had made in the rear panel looked like the butts of flattened beer cans. The driver hung halfway out his door. The only part of him that wasn't black was his eyes, all the whiter for the charring of the rest of him.

Joe walked into the pond until he was standing on the passenger side of the cruiser, the water just below his waist. There was no one else inside the car. He stuck his head in through the passenger window even though it meant getting that much closer to the body. The heat radiated off the driver's roasted flesh in waves. He leaned back out of the car, certain he'd seen two cops in that cruiser as they'd raced across the field. He got another whiff of cooked flesh and lowered his head.

The other cop lay in the pond at his feet. He looked up from the sandy floor, the left side of his body as blackened as his partner's, the flesh on the right curdled but still white. He was about Joe's age, maybe a year older. His right arm pointed up. He'd probably used it to pull himself out of the burning car and fell into the water on his back, and it had stayed that way when he died.

But it still looked like he was pointing at Joe, the message clear:

You did this.

You. No one else. No one living anyway.

You're the first termite.

Chapter Four

A Hole at the Center of Things

B
ack in the city, he dumped the car he'd stolen in Lenox and replaced it with a Dodge 126 he found parked along Pleasant Street in Dorchester. He drove it to K Street in South Boston and sat down the street from the house he'd grown up in while he considered his options. There weren't many. By the time night fell, he'd probably be out of them.

It was in all the late editions:

THREE PITTSFIELD POLICEMEN CUT DOWN

(
The Boston Globe
)

3 MASS. POLICE OFFICERS BRUTALLY SLAIN

(
The Evening Standard
)

COP SLAUGHTER IN WESTERN MASS.

(
The American
)

The two men Joe had come across in the pond were identified as Donald Belinski and Virgil Orten. Both had left wives behind. Orten had left two children. After studying their photos for a bit, Joe decided that Orten had been the one driving the car and Belinski had been the one who pointed up at him from the water.

He knew the real reason they were dead was because one of their brother lawmen had been stupid enough to fire a fucking tommy gun from a car bouncing across uneven ground. He knew that. He also knew that he was Hickey's termite and Donald and Virgil never would have been in that field if he and the Bartolo brothers hadn't come to their small city to rob one of their small banks.

The third dead cop, Jacob Zobe, was a state trooper who'd pulled over a car along the edge of the October Mountain State Forest. He'd been shot once in the stomach, which bent him over, and once through the top of his skull, which finished him off. The killer or killers ran over his ankle as they sped away, snapping the bone in half.

The shooting sounded like Dion. It was how he fought—punched a guy in the stomach to fold him in half and then worked the head until he went down for good. Dion, to the best of Joe's knowledge, had never killed a man before, but he'd come close a few times, and he hated cops.

Investigators had yet to identify any suspects, at least publicly. Two of the suspects were described as “heavyset” and “of foreign descent and odor,” while the third—possibly a foreigner as well—had been shot in the face. Joe looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Technically, he supposed, it was true; the earlobe was attached to the face. Or, in his case, it had been.

Even though no one had their names yet, a sketch artist with the Pittsfield Police Department had rendered their likenesses. So while most papers ran pictures of the three dead cops below the fold, above it they printed sketches of Dion, Paolo, and Joe. Dion and Paolo looked more jowly than normal and Joe would have to ask Emma if his face looked that thin and wolfish in the flesh, but otherwise, the resemblance was remarkable.

A four-state dragnet was in effect. The Bureau of Investigation had been consulted and was said to be joining the pursuit.

By now his father would have seen the papers. His father, Thomas Coughlin, deputy superintendent of the Boston Police Department.

His son, party to a cop killing.

Since Joe's mother had passed two years ago, his father worked himself to numb exhaustion six days a week. With a dragnet in effect for his own son, he'd have a cot brought into his office, probably not come home until they closed the case.

The family home was a four-story row house. It was an impressive structure, a redbrick bowfront where all the center rooms looked out at the street and boasted curved window seats. It was a house of mahogany staircases, pocket doors, and parquet floors, six bedrooms, two bathrooms, both with indoor plumbing, a dining room fit for the great hall of an English castle.

When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house, not a magnificent home.

J
oe let himself into his father's house. From the phone in the kitchen, he called the Gould household and got no answer. The satchel he'd carried into the house with him contained sixty-two thousand dollars. Even split three ways, it was enough to last any reasonably frugal man ten years, maybe fifteen. Joe wasn't a frugal man, so he figured it'd last him four regular years. But on the run, it would last him eighteen months. No more. By then, he'd figure something out. It was what he was good at, thinking on the fly.

Unquestionably,
a voice that sounded suspiciously like his oldest brother's said.
It's worked out so well so far
.

He called Uncle Bobo's blind pig but got the same result as the Gould house. Then he remembered that Emma was attending the opening soiree at the Hotel Statler tonight at six. Joe pulled his watch from his vest: ten minutes to four.

Two hours to kill in a city that was, by now, looking to kill him.

That was far too much time out in the open. In that time they'd learn his name, his address, and come up with a list of his known associates and favorite haunts. They'd lock down all the train and bus stations, even the rural ones, and put up every last roadblock.

But that could cut both ways. The roadblocks would prohibit entry into the city under the logic that he was still outside it. No one would ever assume he was here, planning to slip right back out again. And they wouldn't assume that because only the world's dumbest criminal would risk returning to the only city he'd ever called home after committing the biggest crime the region had seen in five or six years.

Which made him the dumbest criminal in the world.

Or the smartest. Because pretty much the only place they
weren't
searching right now was the place right under their noses.

Or so he told himself.

What he could still do—what he should have done in Pittsfield—was vanish. Not in two hours. Now. Not wait around for a woman who might choose not to join him under the present circumstances. Just leave with the shirt on his back and a bag of money in his hand. The roads were all being watched, yes. Same for trains and buses. And even if he could get out to the farmlands south and west of the city and steal a horse, it wouldn't do him any good because he didn't know how to ride one.

That left the sea.

He'd need a boat, but not a pleasure craft and not an obvious rumrunner like a sea skiff or a garvey. He'd need a worker's boat, one with rusted cleats and frayed tackle, a deck piled high with dented lobster traps. Something moored in Hull or Green Harbor or Gloucester. If he boarded by seven, it would probably be three or four in the morning before the fisherman noticed it missing.

So now he was stealing from workingmen.

Except the boat would be registered. Would have to be, or he'd move on to another. He'd get the address off the registration, mail the owner enough money to buy two boats or just get the fuck out of the lobster business altogether.

It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else. But he also stole because it was fun and he was good at it and it led to other things he was good at like bootlegging and rum-running, which is why he knew his way around boats in the first place. Last June, he'd run a boat from a no-name fishing village in Ontario across Lake Huron to Bay City, Michigan, another from Jacksonville to Baltimore in October, and just last winter ferried cases of newly distilled rum out of Sarasota and across the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, where he'd blown his entire profit one weekend in the French Quarter on sins that, even now, he could only remember in fragments.

So he could pilot most boats, which meant he could steal most boats. He could walk out this door and be on the South Shore in thirty minutes. The North Shore would take a little longer, but this time of year there'd probably be more boats up there to choose from. If he set out from Gloucester or Rockport, he could reach Nova Scotia in three to four days. And then he'd send for Emma after a couple of months.

Which seemed a bit long.

But she'd wait for him. She loved him. She'd never said it, true, but he could feel her wanting to. She loved him. He loved her.

She'd wait.

Maybe he'd just swing by the hotel. Pop his head in real quick, see if he could spot her. If they both vanished, they'd be impossible to trace. But if he disappeared and then sent for her, by that point, the cops or the BI could have figured out who she was and what she meant to him and she'd show up in Halifax with a posse on her tail. He'd open the door to greet her, they'd both go down in bullet rain.

She wouldn't wait.

He either went with her now or without her forever.

He looked at himself in the glass of his mother's china cabinet and remembered why he'd come here in the first place—no matter where he decided to go, he wouldn't get far dressed like this. The left shoulder of his coat was black with blood, his shoes and trouser cuffs were caked in mud, his shirt torn from the woods and speckled with blood.

In the kitchen, he opened the bread box and pulled out a bottle of A. Finke's Widow Rum. Or, as most called it, Finke's. He removed his shoes and carried them and the rum with him up the service stairs to his father's bedroom. In the bathroom, he washed as much of the dried blood from his ear as he could, careful not to disturb the heart of the scab. When he was certain it wasn't going to bleed, he took a few steps back and appraised it in relation to the other ear and the rest of his face. As deformities went, it wasn't going to make anyone look twice once the scab fell away. And even now, the majority of the black scab clung to the underside of his ear; it was noticeable, no question, but not in the way a black eye or broken nose would have been.

He had a few sips of the Finke's while he chose a suit from his father's closet. There were fifteen of them, about thirteen too many for a policeman's salary. Same with the shoes, the shirts, the ties and hats. Joe chose a striped malacca tan single-breasted suit from Hart Schaffner & Marx with a white Arrow shirt. The silk tie was black with diagonal red stripes every four inches or so, the shoes a pair of black Nettletons, and the hat a Knapp-Felt, as smooth as a dove's breast. He stripped off his own clothes and folded them neatly on the floor. He placed his pistol and his shoes on top and changed into his father's clothes, then returned the pistol to the waistband at the small of his back.

Judging by the length of the trousers, he and his father weren't exactly the same height after all. His father was a little taller. And his hat size a bit smaller than Joe's. Joe dealt with the hat problem by tilting it back off the crown a bit so it looked jaunty. As for the length of his trousers, he double-rolled the cuffs and used safety pins from his late mother's sewing table to hold them in place.

He carried his old clothes and the bottle of good rum down into his father's study. Even now he couldn't deny that crossing the threshold into that room when his father wasn't present felt sacrilegious. He stood at the threshold and listened to the house—the ticking of its cast-iron radiators, the scratch of the chime hammers in the grandfather clock down the hall as they prepared to strike four. Even though he was positive the house was empty, he felt watched.

When the hammers did, in fact, fall on the chimes, Joe entered the office.

The desk sat in front of tall bay windows overlooking the street. It was an ornate Victorian partners desk, built in Dublin in the middle of the last century. The kind of desk no tenant farmer's son from the shitheel side of Clonakilty could have reasonably expected to ever grace his home. The same could be said for the matching credenza under the window, the Oriental rug, the thick, amber drapes, the Waterford decanters, the oak bookshelves and leather-bound books his father never bothered to read, the bronze curtain rods, the antique leather sofa and armchairs, the walnut humidor.

Joe opened one of the cabinets beneath the bookshelves and crouched to confront the safe he found there. He dialed the combination—3-12-10, the months in which he and his two brothers had been born—and opened the safe. Some of his mother's jewelry was in it, five hundred dollars in cash, the deed to the house, his parents' birth certificates, a stack of papers Joe didn't bother examining, and a little more than a thousand dollars in treasury bonds. Joe removed it all and placed it on the floor to the right of the cabinet door. At the back of the safe was a wall made of the same thick steel as the rest of it. Joe popped it off by pressing his thumbs hard against the upper corners and lay it on the floor of the first safe while he faced the dial of the second.

The combination here had been much harder to figure out. He'd tried all the birthdays in the family and got nowhere. He tried the numbers of the stationhouses where his father had worked over the years. Same result. When he recalled that his father sometimes said good luck, bad luck, and death all came in threes, he tried every permutation of that number. No luck. He'd started the process when he was fourteen. One day when he was seventeen, he'd noticed some correspondence his father had left out on his desk—a letter to a friend who'd become fire chief in Lewiston, Maine. The letter was typed on his father's Underwood and filled with lies that wrapped 'round and 'round the paper like ribbon—“Ellen and I are blessed, still as smitten as the day we met . . .” “Aiden recovered quite well from the dark events of 9/19 . . . ” “Connor has made remarkable strides with his infirmity . . . ” and “Looks like Joseph will enter Boston College in the fall. He speaks of working in the bond trade . . .” At the bottom of all this bullshit, he'd signed it
Yours, TXC
. It was the way he signed everything. Never wrote out his full name, as if to do so would somehow compromise him.