“I was supposed to look him in the eye.”
“How’s that?” Dion said.
“I was supposed to look him in the eye and say, ‘You thought you got me, but I fucking got you.’ ”
“You had that chance four years ago.” Dion lowered his hand to Joe.
“I wanted it again.” Joe took the hand.
“Shit,” Dion said as he lifted him to his feet, “ain’t no one gets that kinda chance twice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Back to Black
The tunnel that led to the Romero Hotel began at Pier 12. From there it ran eight blocks under Ybor City and took fifteen minutes to traverse if the tunnel wasn’t flooded by high tide or overrun with night rats. Luckily for Joe and his crew, it was midday and low tide when they arrived at the pier. They covered the distance in ten minutes. They were sunburned, they were dehydrated, and in Joe’s case they were wounded, but Joe had impressed upon everyone during the ride in from Egmont Key that if Maso was half as smart as Joe knew he was, he’d have put a limit on when he was supposed to hear back from Albert. If he assumed it had all gone to hell, he’d waste no time making tracks.
The tunnel ended at a ladder. The ladder rose to the door of the furnace room. Beyond the furnace room was the kitchen. Past the kitchen was the manager’s office and beyond that was the front desk. In each of the latter three positions, they could see and hear if anything was waiting for them beyond the doors, but between the top of the ladder and the furnace room lay one hell of a question mark. The steel door was always locked because it was, during normal operation, opened only upon hearing a password. The Romero had never been raided because Esteban and Joe paid the owners to pay the proper people to look the other way and also because it brought no attention to itself. It didn’t run an active speakeasy; it merely distilled and distributed.
After several arguments about how to get through a steel door with three bolts and the wrong end of the lock cylinder on their side, they decided that the best shot among them—in this case, Carmine Parone—would cover from the top of the ladder while Dion solved the lock with a shotgun.
“If there’s anyone on the other side of that door, we’re all fish in a barrel,” Joe said.
“No,” Dion said. “Me and Carmine are fish in a barrel. Hell, I’m not even sure we’ll survive the ricochets. Rest of you nancy boys? Shit.” He smiled at Joe. “Fire in the hole.”
Joe and the other men went back down the ladder and stood in the tunnel and they heard Dion say, “Last chance,” to Carmine and then he fired the first shot into the hinge. The blast was loud—metal meeting metal in a concrete and metal enclosure. Dion didn’t pause, either. With the sound of the fragments still pinging around up there, he fired a second and third blast and Joe assumed that if anyone was left in the hotel, they were coming for them now. Hell, if all that was left was people on the tenth floor, they damn sure knew they were here.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Dion shouted.
Carmine hadn’t made it. Dion lifted his body out of the way and sat him against the wall as they came up the ladder. A piece of metal—who knew from what—had entered Carmine’s brain through his eye, and he stared back at them with his good one, an unlit cigarette still drooping from his lips.
They wrenched the door off its hinges and went into the boiler room and through the boiler room into the distillery and the kitchen beyond. The door between the kitchen and the manager’s office had a circular window in the center that looked out onto a small access way with a rubber floor. The manager’s door was ajar, and the office beyond showed evidence of a recent war party—wax paper with crumbs on top, coffee cups, an empty bottle of rye, overflowing ashtrays.
Dion took a look and said to Joe, “Never expected to see old age, myself.”
Joe exhaled through his mouth and went through the door. They went through the manager’s office and came out behind the front desk and by that point they knew the hotel was empty. It didn’t feel ambush-empty, it felt empty-empty. The place for an ambush had been the boiler room. If they’d wanted to draw them in a little farther just to be sure they caught any stragglers, the kitchen would have been the spot. The lobby, though, was a logistical nightmare—too many places to hide, too easy to scatter, and ten steps from the street.
They sent some men up to the tenth in the elevator and a few more by way of the stairs, just in case Maso had come up with an ambush plan Joe simply couldn’t fathom. The men came back and reported that the tenth was cleaned out, though they had found both Sal and Lefty laid out on the beds in 1009 and 1010.
“Bring ’em down,” Joe said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And have someone bring Carmine in from the ladder too.”
Dion lit a cigar. “I can’t believe I shot Carmine in the face.”
“You didn’t shoot him,” Joe said. “Ricochets.”
“Splitting hairs,” Dion said.
Joe lit a cigarette and allowed Pozzetta, who’d been an army medic in Panama, to take another look at his arm.
Pozzetta said, “You need to get that treated, boss. Get you some drugs.”
“We got drugs,” Dion said.
“The right drugs,” Pozzetta said.
“Go out the back,” Joe said. “Go get me what I need or find the doc’.”
“Yes, sir,” Pozzetta said.
Half a dozen members of the Tampa PD on their payroll were called and came down. One of them brought a meat wagon and Joe said good-bye to Sal and Lefty and Carmine Parone, who just ninety minutes ago had dug Joe out of a cement bucket. It was Sal who got to him the most, though; only in retrospect did the full measure of their five years together hit him. He’d had him into the house for dinner countless times, sometimes brought sandwiches to him in the car at night. He’d entrusted him with his life, with Graciela’s life.
Dion put a hand on his back. “This is a tough one.”
“We gave him a hard time.”
“What?”
“This morning in my office. You and me. We gave him a hard time, D.”
“Yeah.” Dion nodded a couple of times and then blessed himself. “Why’d we do that again?”
“I don’t even know,” Joe said.
“There had to be a reason.”
“I wish it meant something,” Joe said and stepped back so his men could load them into the meat wagon.