Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“He’s got a stockpile somewhere,” Maso said on one of their walks. “He’s waiting until he’s bled New England of rum, and then he’ll ride in, the savior, with his own supply.”

“Who’d be stupid enough to supply him?” Joe knew of most of the suppliers in South Florida.

“It’s not stupid,” Maso said. “It’s smart. It’s what I’d do if I had to choose between a slick operator like Albert and an old man who’s been inside since before the czar lost Russia.”

“But you’ve got eyes and ears everywhere.”

The old man nodded. “But they’re not exactly my eyes and they’re not exactly my ears so they’re not connected to my hand. And my hand wields the power.”

That night, one of the guards on Maso’s payroll was off duty in a South End speakeasy when he left with a woman no one had ever seen before. A real looker, though, and definitely a pro. The guard was found three hours later in Franklin Square, sitting on a bench, a canyon cut through his Adam’s apple, deader than Thomas Jefferson.

Maso’s sentence ended in three months, and it was all starting to feel a bit desperate on Albert’s part, and the desperation only made things more dangerous. Just last night, Boyd Holter, Maso’s best forger, had been tossed off the Ames Building downtown. He’d landed on his tailbone, pieces of his spine spitting up into his brainpan like gravel.

Maso’s people responded by blowing up one of Albert’s fronts, a butcher’s shop on Morton Street. The hairdresser and the haberdashery on either side of the butcher also burned to the ground, and several cars along the street lost their windows and paint.

So far, no winner, just a lot of mess.

Along the wall, Joe and Maso stopped to watch an orange moon as big as the sky itself rise over the factory smokestacks and the fields of ash and black poison, and Maso handed Joe a folded piece of paper.

Joe didn’t look at them anymore, just folded them another couple of times and hid them in a slot he’d cut in the sole of his shoe until he saw his father next.

“Open it,” Maso said before Joe could pocket it.

Joe looked at him, the moon making it feel like daylight up here.

Maso nodded.

Joe turned the piece of paper in his hand and thumbed the top edge back. At first, he couldn’t make sense of the two words he saw there:

Brendan Loomis.

Maso said, “He was arrested last night. Beat a man outside of Filene’s. Because they both wanted to buy the same coat. Because he’s a savage who doesn’t think. The victim has friends, so Albert White’s right hand is not returning to Albert’s wrist anytime in the immediate future.” He looked at Joe, the moon turning his flesh orange. “You hate him?”

Joe said, “Of course.”

“Good.” Maso patted his arm once. “Give the note to your father.”

At the bottom of the copper mesh screen between Joe and his father was a gap big enough to slide notes back and forth. Joe meant to place Maso’s note on his side of the gap and push, but he couldn’t bring himself to lift it off his knee.

That summer his father’s face had grown translucent, like onion skin, and the veins in his hands had turned unreasonably bright—bright blue, bright red. His eyes and shoulders sagged. His hair had thinned. He looked every day and more of his sixty years.

But that morning something had put a bit of snap back into his speech and some life into the broken green of his eyes.

“You’ll never guess who’s coming to town,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your brother Aiden himself.”

Ah. That explained it. The favorite son. The beloved prodigal.

“Danny’s coming, uh? Where’s he been?”

Thomas said, “Oh, he’s been all over. He wrote me a letter that took fifteen minutes to read. He’s been to Tulsa and Austin and even Mexico. Of late, he’s apparently been in New York. But he’s coming to town tomorrow.”

“With Nora?”

“He didn’t mention her,” Thomas said in a tone that suggested he would prefer to do the same.

“Did he say why he was coming to town?”

Thomas shook his head. “Just said he’d be passing through.” Hi trailed off as he looked around at the walls like he couldn’t get used to them. And he probably couldn’t. Who could, unless they had to? “You holding up?”

“I’m…” Joe shrugged.

“What?”

“Trying, Dad. Trying.”

“Well, that’s all you can do.”

“Yeah.”

They stared through the mesh at each other and Joe found the courage to remove the note from his knee and push it across to his father.

His father unfolded it and looked at the name there. For a long moment, Joe wasn’t sure if he was still breathing. And then…

“No.”

“What?”

“No.” Thomas pushed the note back across the table and said it again. “No.”

“‘No’ isn’t a word Maso likes, Dad.”

“So it’s ‘Maso’ now.”

Joe said nothing.

“I don’t do murder for hire, Joseph.”

“That’s not what they’re asking,” Joe said, thinking, Is it?

“How naive can you be before it becomes unforgivable?” His father’s breath exited through his nostrils. “If they give you the name of a man in police custody, then they want that man found hanging in his cell or shot in the back ‘trying to escape.’ So, Joseph, given the degree of ignorance you seem willfully to cling to in such matters, I need you to hear exactly what I have to say.”

Joe met his father’s stare, surprised by the depths of love and loss he saw there. His father, it seemed quite clear, now sat at the culmination of a life’s journey, and the words about to leave his mouth were a summation of it.

“I will not take the life of another without cause.”

“Even a killer?” Joe said.

“Even a killer.”

“And the man responsible for the death of a woman I loved.”

“You told me you think she’s alive.”

“That’s not the point,” Joe said.

“No,” his father agreed, “it’s not. The point is that I don’t engage in murder. Not for anyone. Certainly not for that dago devil you’ve sworn your allegiance to.”

“I’ve got to survive in here,” Joe said. “In here.”