Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

She looked at him with a mild disappointment that was all the more dismissive for being so mild. “No, he’s not.”

“You stick up for him?”

“I’ll tell you he’s not a bad guy. He’s not my guy. He’s not someone I love or admire or anything. But he’s not bad . Don’t always try to make things so simple.”

“He killed Tim. Or ordered him killed.”

“And Tim, he, what, he made his living handing out turkeys to orphans?”

“No, but—”

“But what? No one’s good, no one’s bad. Everyone’s just trying to make their way.” She lit a cigarette and shook the match until it was black and smoldering. “Stop fucking judging everyone.”

He couldn’t stop looking at her birthmark, getting lost in its sand, swirling with it. “You’re still going to see him.”

“Don’t start. If we’re truly leaving town, then—”

“We’re leaving town.” Joe would leave the country if it meant no man ever touched her again.

“Where?”

“Biloxi,” he said, realizing as he said it that it actually wasn’t a bad idea. “Tim had a lot of friends there. Guys I met. Rum guys. Albert gets his supply from Canada. He’s a whiskey guy. So if we get to the Gulf Coast—Biloxi, Mobile, maybe even New Orleans, if we buy off the right people—we might be okay. That’s rum country.”

She thought about it a bit, that birthmark rippling every time she stretched up the bed to tap ash off her cigarette. “I’m supposed to see him for that new hotel opening. The one on Providence Street?”

“The Statler?”

She nodded. “Supposed to have radios in every room. Marble from Italy.”

“And?”

“And if I go to that, he’ll be with his wife. He just wants me there ’cuz, I dunno, ’cuz it excites him to see me when his wife’s on his arm. And after that, I know for a fact he’s going to Detroit for a few days to talk to new suppliers.”

“So?”

“So, it’ll buy us all the time we need. By the time he comes looking for me again, we’ll have a three- or four-day head start.”

Joe thought it through. “Not bad.”

“I know,” she said with another smile. “You think you can clean yourself up, get over to the Statler Saturday? Say, about seven?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then we’re gone,” she said and looked over her shoulder at him. “But no more talk about Albert being a bad guy. My brother’s got a job ’cuz of him. Last winter, he bought my mother a coat.”

“Well, then.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

Joe didn’t want to fight either. Every time they did, he lost, found himself apologizing for things he hadn’t even done, hadn’t even thought of doing, found himself apologizing for not doing them, for not thinking of doing them. It hurt his fucking head.

He kissed her shoulder. “So we won’t fight.”

She gave him a flutter of eyelashes. “Hooray.”

Leaving the First National job in Pittsfield, Dion and Paolo had just jumped in the car when Joe backed into the lamppost because he’d been thinking about the birthmark. The wet sand color of it and the way it moved between her shoulder blades when she looked back at him and told him she might love him, how it did the same thing when she said Albert White wasn’t such a bad guy. A fucking peach actually was ol’ Albert. Friend of the common man, buy your mother a winter coat as long as you used your body to keep him warm. The birthmark was the shape of a butterfly but jagged and sharp around the edges, Joe thinking that might sum up Emma too, and then telling himself forget it, they were leaving town tonight, all their problems solved. She loved him. Wasn’t that the point? Everything else was heading for the rearview mirror. Whatever Emma Gould had, he wanted it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. He wanted it for the rest of his life—the freckles along her collarbone and the bridge of her nose, the hum that left her throat after she’d finished laughing, the way she turned “four” into a two-syllable word.

Dion and Paolo ran out of the bank.

They climbed in the back.

“Drive,” Dion said.

A tall, bald guy with a gray shirt and black suspenders came out of the bank, armed with a club. A club wasn’t a gun, but it could still cause trouble if the guy got close enough.

Joe rammed the gearshift into first with the heel of his hand and hit the gas, but the car went backward instead of forward. Fifteen feet backward. The eyes of the guy with the club popped in surprise.

Dion shouted, “Whoa! Whoa!”

Joe stomped the brake and the clutch. He rammed the shift out of reverse and into first, but they still hit the lamppost. The impact wasn’t bad, just embarrassing. The yokel with the suspenders would tell his wife and friends for the rest of his life how he’d scared three gun thugs so bad they’d reversed a getaway car to get away from him .

When the car lurched forward, the tires kicked dust and small rocks off the dirt road and into the face of the man with the club. By now, another guy stood in front of the bank. He wore a white shirt and brown pants. He extended his arm. Joe saw the guy in the rearview mirror, his arm jumping. For a moment, Joe couldn’t comprehend why, and then he understood. He said, “Get down,” and Dion and Paolo dropped in the backseat. The guy’s arm jerked up again, then jerked a third or fourth time, and the side-view mirror shattered and the glass fell to the dirt street.

Joe turned onto East Street and found the alley they’d scouted last week, banged a left into it, and stood on the gas pedal. For several blocks he drove parallel to the railroad tracks that ran behind the mills. By now they could assume the police were involved, not enough so that they were setting up roadblocks or anything, but enough that they could follow tire tracks off the dirt road by the bank, know the general direction in which they’d headed.

They’d stolen three cars that morning, all in Chicopee, about sixty miles south. They’d picked up the Auburn they were in now, as well as a black Cole with bald tires and a ’24 Essex Coach with a raspy engine.

Joe crossed the railroad tracks and drove another mile along Silver Lake to a foundry that had burned down some years before, the black shell of it listing to the right in a field of weeds and cattails. Both cars were waiting for them when Joe pulled into the back of the building, where the wall was long gone, and they parked beside the Cole and got out of the Auburn.

Dion lifted Joe by his overcoat lapels and pushed him against the Auburn’s hood. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It was a mistake,” Joe said.

“ Last week it was a mistake,” Dion said. “This week it’s a fucking pattern.”

Joe couldn’t argue. But he still said, “Take your hands off me.”

Dion let go of Joe’s lapels. He breathed heavily through his nostrils and pointed a stiff finger at Joe. “You’re fucking up.”

Joe took the hats and the kerchiefs and the guns and put them in a bag with the money. He put the bag in the back of the Essex Coach. “I know it.”

Dion held out his fat hands. “We’ve been partners since we were little fucking kids, but this is bad.”

“Yeah.” Joe agreed because he didn’t see the point in lying about the obvious.

The police cars—four of them—came through a wall of brown weeds on the edge of the field behind the foundry. The weeds were the color of a riverbed and stood six or seven feet tall. The cruisers flattened them and revealed a small tent community behind them. A woman in a gray shawl and her baby leaned over a recently doused campfire, trying to scoop whatever heat was left into their coats.