Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“Well, here I am,” Thomas said.

“You turned your son the criminal into a victim. That’s an amazing trick. Are you that smart, Deputy Superintendent?”

Thomas said, “Nobody’s that smart.”

Bondurant shook his head. “Not true. A few people are. And you might be one of them. Tell him to plead. There are three dead cops in that town. Their funerals will be all over the front pages tomorrow. If he pleads to the bank robbery and, I don’t know, reckless endangerment, I’ll recommend twelve.”

“Years?”

“For three dead cops? That’s light, Thomas.”

“Five.”

“Excuse me?”

“Five,” Thomas said.

“Not a chance.” Bondurant shook his head.

Thomas sat in his chair and didn’t move.

Bondurant shook his head again.

Thomas crossed his legs at the ankle.

Bondurant said, “Look.”

Thomas cocked his head slightly.

“Let me disabuse you of a notion or two, Deputy Superintendent.”

“Chief inspector.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was demoted yesterday to chief inspector.”

The smile never reached Bondurant’s lips but it slipped through his eyes. A glint and then gone. “Then we can leave unsaid the notion I was going to dispel for you.”

“I have no notions or illusions,” Thomas said. “I’m a practical man.” He removed a photograph from his pocket and placed it on Bondurant’s desk.

Bondurant looked down at the picture. A door, faded red, the number 29 in its center. It was the door to a row house in Back Bay. What fluttered through Bondurant’s eyes this time was the opposite of mirth.

Thomas placed one finger on the man’s desk. “If you move to another building for your liaisons, I’ll know within an hour. I understand you’re building quite the war chest for your run for the governor’s office. Make it deep, counselor. A man with a deep war chest can take on all comers.” Thomas placed his hat on his head. He tugged at the center of the brim until he was sure it sat straight.

Bondurant looked at the piece of paper on his desk. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“ Seeing what you can do is of little interest to me.”

“I’m one man.”

“Five years,” Thomas said. “He gets five years.”

It was another two weeks before a woman’s forearm washed up in Nahant. Three days after that, a fisherman off the coast of Lynn pulled a femur into his net. The medical examiner determined that the femur and the forearm came from the same person—a woman in her early twenties, probably of Northern European stock, freckle-skinned and pale of flesh.

In The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Joseph Coughlin , Joe pled guilty to aiding and abetting an armed robbery. He was sentenced to five years and four months in prison.

He knew she was alive.

He knew it because the alternative was something he couldn’t live with. He had faith in her existence because not to believe left him feeling stripped and flayed.

“She’s gone,” his father said to him just before they transferred him from the Suffolk County Jail to Charlestown Penitentiary.

“No, she’s not.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“No one saw her in the car when it went off the road.”

“At high speed in the rain at night? They put her in the car, son. The car went off the road. She died and floated off into the ocean.”

“Not until I see a body.”

“The parts of the body weren’t enough?” His father held a hand up in apology. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What will it take for you to accept reason?”

“It’s not reason that she’s dead. Not when I know she’s alive.”

The more Joe said it, the more he knew she was dead. He could feel it in the same way he could feel that she’d loved him, even as she’d betrayed him. But if he admitted it, if he faced it, what did he have left but five years in the worst prison in the Northeast? No friends, no God, no family.

“She’s alive, Dad.”

His father considered him for some time. “What did you love about her?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What did you love about this woman?”

Joe searched for the words. Eventually, he stumbled over a few that felt less inadequate than the rest. “She was becoming something with me that was different than what she showed to the rest of the world. Something, I dunno, softer.”

“That’s loving a potential, not a person.”

“How would you know?”

His father cocked his head at that. “You were the child that was supposed to fill the distance between your mother and me. Were you aware of that?”

Joe said, “I knew about the distance.”

“Then you saw how well that plan worked out. People don’t fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they’ve always been.”

Joe said, “I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t? Or won’t?” His father closed his eyes. “Every breath, son, is luck.” He opened his eyes and they were pink in the corners. “Achievement? Depends on luck—to be born in the right place at the right time and be of the right color. To live long enough to be in the right place at the right time to make one’s fortune. Yes, yes, hard work and talent make up the difference. They are crucial, and you know I’d never argue different. But the foundation of all lives is luck. Good or bad. Luck is life and life is luck. And it’s leaking from the moment it lands in your hand. Don’t waste yours pining for a dead woman who wasn’t worthy of you in the first place.”

Joe’s jaw clenched, but all he said was, “You make your luck, Dad.”

“Sometimes,” his father said. “But other times it makes you.”

They sat in silence for a bit. Joe’s heart had never beat so hard. It punched at his chest, a frantic fist. He felt for it the way he’d feel for something outside himself, a stray dog on a wet night, perhaps.

His father looked at his watch, put it back in his vest. “Someone will probably threaten you your first week behind the walls. No later than the second. You’ll see what he wants in his eyes, whether he says it or not.”

Joe’s mouth felt very dry.

“Someone else—a real good egg of a fella—will stand up for you in the yard or in the mess hall. And after he backs the other man down, he’ll offer you his protection for the length of your sentence. Joe? Listen to me. That’s the man you hurt. You hurt him so he can’t get strong enough again to hurt you. You take his elbow or his kneecap. Or both.”

Joe’s heartbeat found an artery in his throat. “And then they’ll leave me alone?”

His father gave him a tight smile and started to nod, but the smile went away and the nod went with it. “No, they won’t.”

“So what will make them stop?”

His father looked away for a moment, his jaw working. When he looked back his eyes were dry. “Nothing.”

The distance from Suffolk County Jail to the Charlestown Penitentiary was a little more than a mile. They could have walked it in the time it took to load them into the bus and bolt their ankle manacles to the floor. Four of them went over that morning—a thin Negro and a fat Russian whose names Joe never learned, Norman, a soft and shaky white kid, and Joe. Norman and Joe had chatted a few times in jail because Norman’s cell was across from Joe’s. Norman had had the misfortune to fall under the spell of the daughter of the man whose livery stable he tended on Pinckney Street in the flat of Beacon Hill. The girl, fifteen, got pregnant, and Norman, seventeen and orphaned since he was twelve, got three years in a maximum security prison for rape.