Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

He placed the locker key in her hand. “In case anything happens.”

“What?”

“Between here and freedom.”

“No, no, no, no,” she said. “No, no. You take this. I don’t want it.”

He waved it off. “Put it in your purse.”

“Joe, I don’t want this.”

“It’s money.”

“I know what it is and I don’t want it.” She tried handing it to him, but he held his hands high.

“Hold on to it.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll spend it together. I’m with you now. I’m with you, Joe. Take the key.”

She tried handing it to him again but they’d reached the basement.

The window in the door was black because the lights were off for some reason.

They weren’t off for “some” reason, Joe realized. There was only one reason.

He reached for the crank as the gate was thrown open from the other side and Brendan Loomis reached in and pulled Joe out of the car by his tie. He pulled Joe’s pistol free of the small of his back and tossed it off into the dark along the cement floor. Then he punched Joe in the face and the side of his head more times than Joe could count, all of it happening so fast Joe barely got his hands up.

Once he did, he reached back for Emma, thinking somehow he could protect her. But Brendan Loomis had a fist like a butcher’s mallet. Every time it hit Joe’s head—bap bap bap bap—Joe felt his brain go numb and his vision white out. His eyes slid through the white, unable to fix on anything. He heard his own nose break and then—bap bap bap—Loomis hit him in the same spot three more times.

When Loomis let go of his tie, Joe fell to all fours on the cement floor. He heard a series of steady drips, like leaky faucets, and opened his eyes to see his own blood dripping to the cement, the drops the size of nickels, but piling up so fast they turned into amoebas and the amoebas became puddles. He turned his head to see if somehow, some way, Emma had used his beating to slam the elevator door shut and make a run for it, but the elevator wasn’t where he’d left it, or he wasn’t where he’d left the elevator, because all he saw was a cement wall.

That’s when Brendan Loomis kicked him in the stomach hard enough to lift him off the floor. When he landed in a fetal position, he couldn’t find air. He gulped for it, but it wouldn’t come. He tried to rise to his knees, but his legs slid away from him, so he used his elbows to lift his chest off the cement and gulped like a fish, trying to get something down his windpipe but seeing his chest as a black stone, without openings, without gaps, nothing in there but the stone, no room for anything else, because he could not fucking breathe.

It pushed up his esophagus like a balloon through a fountain pen, squeezing his heart, crushing his lungs, closing off his throat, but then, finally, it punched up past his tonsils and out through his mouth. It had a whistle at its tail, a whistle and several gasps, but that was okay, that was fine, because he could breathe again, at least he could breathe.

Loomis kicked him in the groin from behind.

Joe ground his head into the cement floor and coughed and might have puked, he had no idea, the pain something he couldn’t have imagined prior to this. His balls were stuffed into his intestines; flames licked the walls of his stomach; his heart beat so fast it had to give out soon, just had to; his skull felt like someone had pried it open with their hands; his eyes bled. He vomited, vomited for certain, vomited bile and fire onto the floor. He thought he was done and then he did it again. He fell onto his back and looked up at Brendan Loomis.

“You look”—Loomis lit a cigarette—“unfortunate.”

Brendan swung from side to side with the room. Joe stayed where he was, but everything else was on a pendulum. Brendan looked down at Joe as he pulled on a pair of black gloves and flexed his fingers in them until they fit to his liking. Albert White appeared beside him, Albert on the same pendulum, and they both looked down at Joe.

Albert said, “I have to turn you into a message, I’m afraid.”

Joe looked up through the blood in his eyes at Albert in his white dinner jacket.

“To everyone out there who thinks it’s okay to disregard what I say.”

Joe looked for Emma, but he couldn’t find the elevator in all the swinging and swaying.

“It’s not going to be a nice message,” Albert White said. “And I’m sorry about that.” He squatted in front of Joe, his face sad, weary. “My mother always said everything happens for a reason. I’m not sure she was right, but I do think people often become what they’re supposed to be. I thought I was supposed to be a cop but then the city took my job and I became this. And most times I don’t like it, Joe. I fucking hate it to tell the truth, but I can’t deny that it comes natural to me. It fits. What comes natural to you, I’m afraid, is fucking up. All you had to do was run but you didn’t. And I’m sure—look at me.”

Joe’s head had lolled to the left. He rolled it back, met Albert’s kind gaze.

“I’m sure, as you die, you’ll tell yourself you did it for love.” Albert gave Joe a rueful smile. “But that’s not why you fucked up. You fucked up because it’s your nature. Because deep down you feel guilty about what you do, so you want to get caught. But in this line of work, you face your guilt at the end of every night. You turn it over in your hands, you make a ball of it. And then you pitch it into the fire. But you, you don’t do that, so you’ve spent your short life hoping someone will punish you for your sins. Well, I’m that someone.”

Albert rose from his crouch and Joe lost focus for a moment, everything turning to a blur. He caught a flash of silver and then another and he narrowed his eyes until the blurring sharpened and everything came into focus again.

And he wished it hadn’t.

Albert and Brendan still shimmied a bit, but the pendulum was gone. Emma stood beside Albert, her hand on his arm.

For a moment, Joe didn’t understand. And then he did.

He looked up at Emma and it no longer mattered what they did to him. He was okay with dying because living hurt too much.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“She’s sorry,” Albert White said. “We’re all sorry.” He gestured toward somebody Joe couldn’t see. “Take her out of here.”

A beefy guy in a coarse wool jacket and knit hat pulled down on his forehead put his hands on Emma’s arm.

“You said you wouldn’t kill him,” Emma said to Albert.

Albert shrugged.

“Albert,” Emma said. “That was the deal.”

“And I’ll honor it,” Albert said. “Don’t you worry.”

“Albert,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.

“Dear?” Albert’s voice was far too calm.

“I never would have led him here if—”

Albert slapped her face with one hand and smoothed his shirt with the other. Slapped her hard enough to split her lips.

He looked down at his shirt. “You think you’re safe? You think I’m going to be humiliated by a whore? You’re under the impression I’m mush for you. Maybe I was yesterday, but I’ve been up all night. And I’ve already replaced you. Get me? You’ll see.”

“You said—”

Albert wiped her blood off his hand with a kerchief. “Put her in the fucking car, Donnie. Now, Donnie.”

The beefy guy wrapped Emma in a bear hug and started walking backward. “Joe! Please don’t hurt him anymore! Joe, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She screamed and kicked and scratched Donnie’s head. “Joe, I love you! I love you!”

The elevator gate slammed shut and the car rose out of the basement.

Albert squatted beside him and put a cigarette between his lips. A match flared and the tobacco cackled and he said, “Inhale. You’ll get your wits back faster.”