Live by Night (Coughlin 2)
“ ’Cause we got us a Communist for a president.”
“No,” Joe said, “not even close, actually. But I’m not here to debate politics with you, RD. I’m here to tell you that the reason Prohibition will end is because—”
“Prohibition ain’t gonna end in a God-fearing country.”
“Yes, it will. Because the country needs all the millions it didn’t get the past ten years on tariffs and import taxes and distribution taxes and interstate transport levies and, shit, you name it—could be billions they gave away. And they’re going to ask me and people like me—you, for example—to make millions of dollars selling legal booze so we can save the country for them. And that’s exactly why, in the spirit of the moment, they’ll allow this state to legalize gambling. Long as we buy off the right county commissioners, the right city councillors and state senators. We could do that. And you could be part of it, RD.”
“I don’t want to be part of nothing with you.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To tell you to your face, mister, that you’re a cancer. You’re the pestilence that gonna bring this country to its knees. You and your nigger whore girlfriend and your dirty spic friends and your dirty dago friends. I’m a take the Parisian. Not sixty percent—the whole place. Then? I’m a take all your clubs. I’m a take everything you got. Might even go by your fancy house and tear me off a piece that nigger girl ’fore I cut her throat.” He looked back at his boys and laughed. He turned to Joe again. “You ain’t got this yet, but you leaving town, boy. You just forgot to pack your bags.”
Joe looked into RD’s bright, mean eyes. Stared deep into them until he got all the way past anything bright and was left with nothing but the mean. It was like staring into the eyes of a dog beat so much and starved so much and uglied so much that all it had to give back to the world was its teeth.
In that moment, he pitied him.
RD Pruitt saw that pity in Joe’s eyes. And what surged up in his own was a howl of outrage. And a knife. Joe saw the knife coming in his eyes and by the time he glanced down at RD’s hand, he’d already buried it in Joe’s abdomen.
Joe gripped RD’s wrist, gripped it fiercely, so RD couldn’t move that knife right, left, up, or down. Joe’s own knife clattered to the floor. RD struggled against Joe’s grip, both their teeth gritted now.
“I got you,” RD said. “I got you.”
Joe removed his hands from RD’s wrist and punched the heels of his palms into the center of RD and chucked him back. The knife slid back out and Joe fell on the floor and RD laughed and the two boys with him laughed.
“Got you!” RD said and walked toward Joe.
Joe watched his own blood drip from the blade. He held up a hand. “Wait.”
RD stopped. “That’s what everyone says.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.” Joe looked up into the darkness, saw the stars on the dome above the rotunda. “Okay. Now.”
“Then who you talking to?” RD said, a step too slow, always a step too slow, which was probably what made him so ass-dumb mean.
Dion and Sal Urso turned on the searchlights they’d lugged up to the rotunda this afternoon. It was like a harvest moon popping out from behind a bank of storm clouds. The ballroom turned white.
When the bullets rained down, RD Pruitt, his cousin, Carver, and Carver’s cousin, Harold, did the bone-yard foxtrot, like they were having terrible coughing fits while running across hot coals. Dion, of late, had turned into an artist with the Thompson, and he stitched an X up one side and down the other of RD Pruitt’s body. By the time they stopped firing, scraps of the three men were flung all over the ballroom.
Joe heard their footsteps on the stairs as they ran down to him.
Dion called to Sal when they entered the ballroom, “Get the doc’, get the doc’.”
Sal’s footsteps ran the other way as Dion ran over to Joe and ripped open his shirt.
“Oooh, Nellie.”
“What? Bad?”
Dion shrugged off his coat and then tore off his own shirt. He wadded it up and pressed it to the wound. “Hold it there.”
“Bad?” Joe repeated.
“Ain’t good,” Dion said. “How do you feel?”
“Feet are cold. Stomach’s on fire. I want to scream actually.”
“Scream, then,” Dion said. “Ain’t no one else around.”
Joe did. The force of it shocked him. It echoed all over the hotel.
“Feel better?”
“You know what?” Joe said. “No.”
“Then don’t do it again. Well, he’s on his way. The doc’.”
“You bring him with you?”
Dion nodded. “He’s on the boat. Sal’s already hit the signal light by now. He’ll be motoring up to the dock lickety-split.”
“That’s good.”
“Why didn’t you make some kind of noise when he put it in? We couldn’t fucking see you up there. We just kept waiting for the signal.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “It seemed important not to give him the satisfaction. Oh, Jesus, this hurts.”
Dion gave him his hand and Joe clenched it.
“Why’d you let him get so close if you weren’t going to stab him?”
“So what?”
“So close? With the knife? You were supposed to stab him.”
“I shouldn’t have shown him those pictures, D.”
“You showed him pictures?”
“No. What? No. I mean Figgis. I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Christ. That’s what we had to do to put this fucking mad dog down.”
“It’s not the right price.”
“But it’s the price. You don’t go letting this piece of shit stab you because the price is the price.”
“Okay.”
“Hey. Stay awake.”
“Stop slapping my face.”
“Stop closing your eyes.”
“It’s going to make a nice casino.”
“What?”
“Trust me,” Joe said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mi Gran Amor
Five weeks.
That’s how long he spent in a hospital bed. First in the Gonzalez Clinic on Fourteenth, just up the block from the Circulo Cubano, and then, under the alias Rodriguo Martinez, at the Centro Asturiano Hospital twelve blocks east. The Cubans might have fought with the Spaniards and the southern Spaniards might have fought with the northern Spaniards, and all of them had their beefs with the Italians and the American Negroes, but when it came to medical care, Ybor was a mutual aid collective. Everyone down there knew that no one in white Tampa would lift a finger to stop up a hole in their hearts if there was a Caucasian nearby who needed treatment for a fucking hangnail.