Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“It means something,” Dion said. “Means we should settle up with the fucks who killed him.”

The doctor was waiting at the front desk when they got back from the loading dock and he cleaned Joe’s wound and sutured it while Joe got his reports from the police officers he’d sent for.

“The men he had working for him today,” Joe said to Sergeant Bick of the Third District, “they on his permanent payroll?”

“No, Mr. Coughlin.”

“Did they know they were going after my men in the streets?”

Sergeant Bick looked at the floor. “I gotta assume so.”

“I gotta too,” Joe said.

“We can’t kill cops,” Dion said.

Joe was looking into Bick’s eyes when he said, “Why not?”

“It’s frowned upon,” Dion said.

Joe said to Bick, “You know of any cops who are with Pescatore now?”

“Everyone who shot it out today, sir? They’re writing reports right now. The mayor’s not happy. The chamber of commerce is livid.”

“The mayor’s not happy?” Joe said. “The chamber of fucking commerce?” He slapped Bick’s hat off the top of his head. “I’m not happy! Fuck everyone else! I’m not happy!”

There was an odd silence in the room, and no one knew where to put their eyes. To the best of anyone’s recollection, even Dion’s, no one had ever heard Joe raise his voice before.

When he spoke to Bick again, his voice had returned to its normal pitch. “Pescatore doesn’t fly. He doesn’t like boats, either. That means he’s got only two ways out of this city. So he’s either part of a convoy heading north on Forty-one. Or he’s on the train. So, Sergeant Bick? Pick up your fucking hat and find him.”

A few minutes later, in the manager’s office, Joe called Graciela.

“How you feeling?”

“Your child is a brute,” she said.

“My child, uh?”

“He kick, kick, kick. All the time.”

“On the bright side,” Joe said, “only four more months to go.”

“You,” she said, “are so very funny. I would like to get you pregnant next time. I would like you to feel your stomach in your windpipe. And have to pee more times than you blink.”

“We’ll give that a try.” Joe finished his cigarette and lit another.

“I heard about a gunfight on Eighth Avenue today,” she said, and her voice was much smaller and much harder.

“Yes.”

“Is it over?”

“No,” Joe said.

“You are at war?”

“We are at war,” Joe said. “Yes.”

“When will you be finished?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ever?”

“I don’t know.”

For a minute they said nothing. He heard her smoking from her end and she could hear him smoking from his. He checked his father’s watch and saw that it was now running a full half an hour behind, even though he’d reset it on the boat.

“You don’t see it,” she said eventually.

“See what?”

“That you have been at war since the day we met. And why?”

“To make a living.”

“Is dying a living?”

“I’m not dead,” he said.

“By the end of the day you could be, Joseph. You could. Even if you win today’s battle and the next one and the one after that, there is so much violence in what you do, that it must—it must—come back for you. It will find you.”

Just what his father had told him.

Joe smoked and blew it up toward the ceiling and watched it evaporate. He couldn’t say there wasn’t truth in her words, just as there may have been some in his father’s. But he didn’t have the time for the truth right now.

He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here.”

“I don’t either,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“How do you know it’s a boy?”

“Because he’s kicking at things all the time,” she said. “Just like you.”

“Ah.”

“Joseph?” She inhaled on her cigarette. “Don’t leave me to raise him on my own.”

The only train scheduled to leave Tampa that afternoon was the Orange Blossom Special. Seaboard’s two standard trains had already left and no more were scheduled until tomorrow. The Orange Blossom Special was a deluxe passenger train that ran to and from Tampa in the winter months only. The problem for Maso, Digger, and their men was that it was booked solid.

While they were working on bribing the conductor, the police showed up. And not the ones on their payroll.

Maso and Digger were sitting in the back of an Auburn sedan in a field just west of Union Station, where they had a clear view of the redbrick building and its cake-icing white trim and the five tracks that ran from the back of it, gunmetal rails of hot rolled steel that stretched from this small brick building and endlessly flat land to points north and east and west, splaying like veins across the country.

“Should’ve gotten into railroads,” Maso said. “When there was still a chance back in the teens.”

“We got trucks,” Digger said. “That’s better.”

“Trucks ain’t getting us out of this.”

“Let’s just drive,” Digger said.

“You don’t think they’ll notice a bunch of wops in swell cars and black hats driving through the fucking orange groves?”

“We drive at night.”

Maso shook his head. “Roadblocks. By now? That Irish cocksucker has them set up on every road from here to Jacksonville.”

“Well, a train ain’t the way to go, Pop.”

“Yes,” Maso said, “it is.”

“I can get us a plane out of Jacksonville in—”

“You fly on one of those fucking deathtraps. Don’t ask me to.”

“Pop, they’re safe. They’re safer than… than—”

“Than trains?” Maso pointed. As he did, the air popped with a percussive echo and smoke rose from a field about a mile away.

“Duck hunting?” Digger said.

Maso looked over at his son and thought how sad it was that a man this stupid was the smartest of his three offspring.

“You seen any ducks around here?”

“So then…?” Digger’s eyes narrowed. He actually couldn’t figure it out.