Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

Joe removed his gun and placed it back in its holster. He noticed Sal looking white as ash and moist as a hot towel. “I’m going as soon as this meeting with Maso’s over. You know how the old man can talk.”

“Which is what I come here to discuss.” Dion opened the moleskin notebook he carried with him everywhere, thumbed the pages. “There’s a lot of things I don’t like about this.”

“Such as?”

“Him and his guys took over half a train to come down here. That’s an awful big entourage.”

“He’s old—he got the nurse with him everywhere, maybe a doctor, and he keeps four gunners around him at all times.”

Dion nodded. “Well, he’s got at least twenty guys with him. That’s not twenty nurses. He took over the Romero Hotel on Eighth. The whole hotel. Why?”

“Security.”

“But he always stays at the Tampa Bay Hotel. Just takes over a floor. His security’s guaranteed that way. Why commandeer a whole hotel in the middle of Ybor?”

“I think he’s getting more paranoid,” Joe said.

He wondered what he’d say to her when he saw her. Remember me?

Or was that too corny?

“Boss,” Dion said, “listen to me for a second. He didn’t take the Seaboard out here direct. He started on the Illinois Central. He stopped in Detroit, KC, Cincinnati, and Chicago.”

“Right. Where all his whiskey partners are.”

“It’s also where all the bosses are. All the ones who matter outside of New York and Providence, and guess where he went two weeks ago?”

Joe looked across the desk at his friend. “New York and Providence.”

“Yup.”

“So you think what?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think he’s barnstorming the country asking permission to take us out?”

“Maybe.”

Joe shook his head. “Makes no sense, D. In five years, we’ve quadrupled the profits of this organization. This was a fucking cow town when we got here. Last year we netted—what?—eleven million from rum alone?”

“Eleven-five,” Dion said. “And we’ve more than quadrupled.”

“So why fuck up a good thing? I don’t buy Maso’s ‘Joseph, you’re like a son to me’ bullshit any more than you do. But he respects the numbers. And our numbers are first-rate.”

Dion nodded. “I agree it makes no sense to take us out. But I don’t like these signs. I don’t like how they make my stomach feel.”

“That’s the paella you ate last night.”

Dion gave him a weak smile. “Sure. Maybe that’s it.”

Joe stood. He parted the blinds and looked out on the factory floor. Dion was worried, but Dion was paid to worry. So he was doing his job. In the end, Joe knew, everyone in this business did what they did to make the most money they could make. Simple as that. And Joe made money. Bags and bags of it that went up the seaboard with the bottles of rum and filled the safe in Maso’s mansion in Nahant. Every year Joe made more than he had the year before. Maso was ruthless and he’d grown a bit less predictable as his health declined. But he was, above all else, greedy. And Joe fed that greed. He kept its stomach warm and full. There was no logical reason Maso would risk going hungry again to replace Joe. And why replace Joe? He’d committed no transgressions. He didn’t skim off the top. He posed no threat to Maso’s power.

Joe turned from the window. “Do whatever you have to do to guarantee my safety at that meeting.”

“I can’t guarantee your safety at the meeting,” Dion said. “That’s my problem with it. He’s got you walking into a building where he’s bought up every room. They’re probably sweeping the place right now, so I can’t get any soldiers in there, I can’t tuck any weapons anywhere, nothing. You’re going in blind. And we’ll be on the outside just as blind. If they decide you’re not walking out of that building?” Dion tapped the desktop with his index finger several times. “Then you are not walking out of that building.”

Joe considered his friend for a long time. “What’s gotten into you?”

“A feeling.”

“A feeling ain’t a fact,” Joe said. “And the facts are there’s no percentage in killing me. It benefits no one.”

“As far as you know.”

The Romero Hotel was a ten-story redbrick building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. It catered to commercial travelers who weren’t quite important enough for their companies to put them up at the Tampa Hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotel—every room had a toilet and washbasin, and the sheets were changed every second day; room service was available in the morning and on Friday and Saturday evenings—but it wasn’t palatial by any means.

Joe, Sal, and Lefty were met at the front door by Adamo and Gino Valocco, brothers from Calabria. Joe had known Gino in Charlestown Pen’, and they chatted as they walked through the lobby.

“Where you living now?” Joe said.

“Salem,” Gino said. “It’s not so bad.”

“You settled down?”

Gino nodded. “Found a nice Italian girl. Two kids now.”

“Two?” Joe said. “You work fast.”

“I like a big family. You?”

Joe wasn’t telling a fucking gun monkey, pleasant as he could be to chat with, about his impending fatherhood. “Still thinking about it.”

“Don’t wait too long,” Gino said. “You need the energy for when they’re young.”

It was one of the things about the business Joe always found charming and absurd at the same time—five men walking to an elevator, four of them carrying machine guns, all of them packing handguns, two of them asking each other about the wife and kids.

At the elevator, Joe kept Gino talking about his kids a bit more as he tried to catch a whiff of ambush odor. Once they climbed in that elevator, any illusions they had of an exit route ended.

But that’s all they were—illusions. The moment they’d walked through the front door, they’d given up their freedom. Given up their lives if Maso, for some demented motive Joe couldn’t fathom, wanted to end them. The elevator was just the smaller box within the bigger box. But the fact that they were in a box was impossible to argue.

Maybe Dion was right.

And maybe Dion was wrong.