Live by Night (36 page)

The men shouted at one another, changing their positions as the runabouts began to move erratically, the one on the port side adopting a serpentine pattern while the starboard assault boat jerked right-left, right-left, the engines ratcheting up in pitch.

Albert said, “Just tell me.”

Joe shook his head.

“Please,” Albert said so quietly no one else could hear. With the boat engines and the Gatling assembly, Joe could barely hear. “I love her.”

“I loved her too.”

“No,” Albert said. “I
love
her.”

They finished securing the Gatling to the deck mount. Ilario inserted the ammunition belt into the feed guide and blew at any dust that might be in the hopper.

Albert leaned into Joe. He looked around them. “I don't want this. Who wants
this
? I just want to feel like I felt when I made her laugh or when she threw an ashtray at my head. I don't even care about the fucking. I just want to watch her drink coffee in a hotel bathrobe. You
have
that, I hear. With the spic woman?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “I do.”

“What is she by the way? Nigger or spic?”

“Both,” Joe said.

“And that doesn't bother you?”

“Albert,” Joe said, “why on earth would it bother me?”

Ilario Nobile, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, manned the crank handle of the Gatling while Fausto took a seat below the gun, the first of the ammunition belts lying across his lap like a grandmother's blanket.

Albert drew his long-barrel .38 and placed it to Joe's forehead. “Tell me.”

No one heard the fourth engine until it was too late.

Joe looked as deep into Albert as he ever had and what he saw there was someone as shit-scared-terrified as everyone else he'd ever known.

“No.”

Farruco Diaz's plane appeared out of the western clouds. It came in high but dove fast. Dion stood tall in the rear seat, his machine gun secured to the mount Farruco Diaz had busted Joe's balls about for months until he let him install it. Dion wore thick goggles and seemed to be laughing.

The first thing Dion and his machine gun aimed at was the Gatling.

Ilario turned to his left and Dion's bullets blew off his ear and moved through his neck like a scythe and the ricochets bounced off the gun and bounced off the deck mount and the deck cleats, and collided with Fausto Scarfone. Fausto's arms danced in the air by his head and then he tipped over, spitting red everywhere.

The deck was spitting too—wood and metal and sparks. The men ducked, crouched, and curled into balls. They screamed and fumbled with their weapons. Two fell off the boat.

Farruco Diaz's plane banked and surged toward the clouds and the gunners recovered. They got to their feet and fired away. The steeper the plane climbed, the more vertical they fired.

And some of the bullets came back down.

Albert took one in the shoulder. Another guy grabbed the back of his neck and fell to the deck.

The smaller boats were now close enough to be fired upon. But all of Albert's gunners had turned their backs to shoot at Farruco's plane. Joe's gunners weren't the best shots—they were in boats and boats that were moving wildly—but they didn't have to be. They managed to hit hips and knees and abdomens and a third of the men on the boat flopped to the deck and made the noises men made when they were shot in the hip and the knees and the abdomen.

The plane came back for a second pass. Men were firing from the boats and Dion was working that machine gun like it was a fireman's hose and he was the fire chief. Albert righted himself and pointed his .32 long-barrel at Joe as the back of the boat turned into a tornado of dust and chips of wood and men failing to escape a fusillade of lead and Joe lost sight of Albert.

Joe was hit in the arm by a bullet fragment and once in the head by a wood chip the size of a bottle cap. It ripped off a piece of his left eyebrow and nicked the top of his left ear on its way into the Gulf. A Colt .45 landed at the base of the tub, and Joe picked it up and dropped the magazine into his hand long enough to confirm there were at least six bullets left in it before he slammed it back home.

By the time Carmine Parone reached him, the blood flowing out of the left side of his face looked a lot worse than it was. Carmine gave Joe a towel, and he and one of the new kids, Peter Wallace, set to work on the cement with axes. While Joe had assumed it had already set, it hadn't, and after fifteen or sixteen swings of the axes and a shovel Carmine had found in the galley, they got him out of there.

Farruco Diaz set his plane down on the water and cut the engine. The plane glided over to them. Dion climbed aboard and the men went about killing the wounded.

“How you doing?” Dion asked Joe.

Ricardo Cormarto tracked a young man who was dragging himself toward the stern, his legs a mess, but the rest of him looking ready for a night out in a beige suit and cream-colored shirt, mango-red tie flipped over his shoulder, like he was preparing to eat a lobster bisque. Cormarto put a burst into his spine and the young man exhaled an outraged sigh, so Cormarto put another burst into his head.

Joe looked at the bodies piled on the deck and said to Wallace, “If he's alive in all that, bring him to me.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Wallace said.

He tried flexing his ankles but it hurt too much. He placed a hand to the ladder under the wheelhouse and said to Dion, “What was the question again?”

“How you doing?”

“Oh,” Joe said, “you know.”

A guy by the gunwale begged for his life in Italian, but Carmine Parone shot him in the chest and kicked him overboard.

Fasani flipped Gino Valocco over onto his back next. Gino held his hands in front of his face, the blood coming from his side. Joe remembered their conversation about parenting, about there never being a good time to have a kid.

Gino said what everyone said. He said, “Wait.” He said, “Hold—”

But Fasani shot him through the heart and kicked him into the Gulf.

Joe looked away only to find Dion looking at him steadily, carefully. “They would have killed every last one of us. Hunted us down. You know that.”

Joe blinked an affirmative.

“And why?”

Joe didn't answer.

“No, Joe. Why?”

Joe still didn't answer.

“Greed,” Dion said. “Not sensible greed, not fucking
sane
greed. Endless greed. Because it's never enough for them.” Dion's face was purple with rage when he leaned in so close to Joe their noses touched. “It's never fucking
enough
.”

Dion leaned back and Joe stared at his friend a long time and in that time he heard someone say there was no one left to kill.

“It's never enough for any of us,” Joe said. “You, me, Pescatore. Tastes too good.”

“What?”

“The night,” Joe said. “Tastes too good. You live by day, you play by their rules. So we live by night and play by ours. But, D? We don't really have any rules.”

Dion gave that some thought. “Not too many, no.”

“Starting to wear me out.”

“I know it,” Dion said. “I can see it.”

Fasani and Wallace dragged Albert White across the deck and dropped him in front of Joe.

He was missing the back of his head and there was a black gout of blood where his heart should have been. Joe squatted by the corpse and fished his father's watch from Albert's vest pocket. He checked it quickly for damage, found none, and pocketed it. He sat back on the deck.

“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

T
he 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.

“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.”

T
he 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.

“He just blew up the tracks,” Maso said and looked across at his son. “You get your retard from your mother, by the way. Woman couldn't win a game of checkers against a bowl of fucking soup.”

M
aso and his men waited by a pay phone on Platt while Anthony Servidone went on ahead with a suitcase full of money to the Tampa Bay Hotel. He called an hour later to report that the rooms were taken care of. There was no police presence and no local hoods as far as he could see. Send in the security detail.

They did. Not that there was much of one left after whatever had happened on that tugboat. They'd sent twelve guys out on that boat, thirteen if you counted that Slick Sammy fuck, Albert White. That left a security detail of seven men plus Maso's personal bodyguard, Seppe Carbone. Seppe was from the same town Maso had grown up in, Alcamo, on the northwest coast of Sicily, though Seppe was much younger, so he and Maso had grown up there in different times. Still, Seppe was a man from that town—merciless, fearless, and loyal to the death.

After Anthony Servidone called back to confirm that the security detail had cleared the floor and the lobby, Seppe drove Maso and Digger to the back of the Tampa Bay Hotel, and they took the service elevator to the seventh floor.

“How long?” Digger said.

“Day after tomorrow,” Maso said. “We keep our heads down until then. Even that mick son of a bitch doesn't have the pull to keep roadblocks up that long. We drive down to Miami, catch the train from there.”

“I want a girl,” Digger said.

Maso slapped his son hard in the back of the head. “What part of lying low don't you understand? A girl? A fucking
girl
? Why don't you ask her to bring some friends, maybe a couple of guns, you dumb fuck.”