Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

“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.