Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“What’s it been?” Albert said. “A little over two years?”

“Two and a half,” Joe said and sipped his coffee.

“If you say so,” Albert said. “You’re the one who went to prison, and if there’s one thing I know about convicts it’s that they count days real keen.” He reached over Joe’s arm and plucked a sausage off his plate, started eating it like it was a chicken leg. “Why didn’t you go for your heater?”

“Maybe I’m not carrying.”

Albert said, “No, truly.”

“I figure you’re a businessman, Albert, and this place is a bit public for a gunfight.”

“I disagree.” Albert gave the place the once-over. “Looks perfectly acceptable to me. Good lighting, nice sight lines, not too much clutter.”

The café owner, a nervous Cuban woman in her fifties, looked even more nervous. She could read the energy between the men and she wanted that energy to leave through the windows or leave through the door but leave soon. An older couple sat at the counter by her and they were oblivious, arguing over whether to see a flicker tonight at Tampa Theatre or catch Tito Broca’s set at the Tropicale.

Otherwise, the place was empty.

Joe checked on Graciela. Her eyes were a fair bit wider than usual, and a vein he’d never seen before had appeared, throbbing, in the center of her throat, but otherwise she seemed calm, hands as steady as her breathing.

Albert took another bite of sausage and leaned toward her. “What’s your name, hon’?”

“Graciela.”

“You a light nigger or a dark spic? I can’t tell.”

She smiled at him. “I’m from Austria. Isn’t it obvious?”

Albert roared. He slapped his thigh and slapped the table and even the oblivious old couple looked over.

“Oh, that’s a good one.” He said to Loomis and Bones, “Austria.”

They didn’t get it.

“Austria!” he said, thrusting both hands out at them, the sausage still dangling from one. He sighed. “Forget it.” He turned back. “So Graciela from Austria, what’s your full name?”

“Graciela Dominga Maela Corrales.”

Albert whistled. “That’s quite a mouthful, but I bet you have plenty of experience with mouthfuls, don’t you, hon’?”

“Don’t,” Joe said. “Just… Albert? Don’t. Leave her out of this.”

Albert turned back to Joe as he chewed the last of the sausage. “Past experience would suggest I’m not good at that, Joe.”

Joe nodded. “What do you want here?”

“I want to know why you didn’t learn anything in prison. Too busy taking it up the ass? You get out, come down here, and in two days you try to muscle me? How fucking stupid they make you in there, Joe?”

“Maybe I was just trying to get your attention,” Joe said.

“Then you were a smashing success,” Albert said. “Today we started hearing back from my bars, my restaurants, my pool halls, every speak I got tucked away from here to Sarasota that they don’t pay me anymore. They pay you. So naturally I went to talk to Esteban Suarez, and he’s suddenly got more armed guards than the U.S. Mint. Can’t be bothered to meet with me. You think you and a gang of wops and, what, niggers I hear?”

“Cubans.”

Albert helped himself to a piece of Joe’s toast. “You think you’re going to push me out?”

Joe nodded. “I think I did, Albert.”

Albert shook his head. “Soon as you’re dead, the Suarezes will fall in line and you can be damn sure the dealers will.”

“If you wanted me dead, you would have done it. You came to negotiate.”

Albert shook his head. “I do want you dead and there’s no negotiation. I just wanted you to see that I’ve changed. I’ve mellowed. We’re going to walk out the back door and leave the girl behind. Won’t touch a hair on her head, though, Lord knows, she could spare it.” Albert stood. He buttoned his suit coat over his softening belly. He straightened the brim of his hat. “You make a fuss, we take her with us, kill you both.”

“That’s the proposition?”

“That’s it.”

Joe nodded. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. He smoothed it. He looked up at Albert and began reading the names listed there. “Pete McCafferty, Dave Kerrigan, Gerard Mueler, Dick Kipper, Fergus Dempsey, Archibald—”

Albert pulled the list from Joe’s fingers, read the rest of it.

“You can’t find them, can you, Albert? All your best soldiers, and they’re not answering their phones or their doorbells. You keep telling yourself it’s a coincidence, but you know that’s bullshit. We got to them. Every one of them. And, Albert, I hate to tell you this, but they’re not coming back to you.”

Albert chuckled, but his normally ruddy face was now the white of an elephant tusk. He looked at Bones and Loomis and chuckled some more. Bones chuckled along with him, but Loomis looked sick.

“While we’re on the subject of people in your organization,” Joe said, “how’d you know where to find me?”

Albert glanced at Graciela, a little bit of color returning to his face. “You’re simple, Joe—just follow the pussy.”

Graciela’s jaw tightened but she said nothing.

“It’s a good line, I guess,” Joe said, “but unless you knew where to find me last night—and you didn’t, because nobody did—then you wouldn’t have been able to tail me here.”

“You got me.” Albert held up his hands. “I guess I have other methods.”

“Like a guy inside my organization?”

The smile slid through Albert’s eyes before he blinked it away.

“Same guy who told you to take me in the café, not on the street?”

No smile in Albert’s eyes anymore. They turned flatter than pennies.

“He tell you if you took me in the café, I wouldn’t put up a fight because of the girl? Tell you I’d even take you to a bag of cash I stashed in a flop over in Hyde Park?”

Brendan Loomis said, “Shoot him, boss. Shoot him now.”

Joe said, “You should have shot me coming through the door.”

“Who says I won’t?”

“I do,” Dion said, coming up behind Loomis and Bones, a long-barrel .38 pointed at each of them. Sal Urso entered through the front door and Lefty Downer came in behind Sal, both of them wearing trench coats on a cloudless day.