Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“No,” Joe said, “nothing you can’t take.”

Emil Lawson wiped the floor with a palm before sitting. “You want us to go away? Leave your cell tonight?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“You were asked to do something for Mr. Pescatore and you refused.”

“I didn’t refuse. The final decision wasn’t up to me.”

The shank against Joe’s throat slipped in his sweat and bumped along the side of his neck, taking some skin with it. Basil Chigis returned it to the base of his throat again.

“Your daddy.” Emil Lawson nodded. “The copper. What was he supposed to do?”

What?

“You know what he was supposed to do.”

“Pretend I don’t and answer the question.”

Joe took a long, slow breath. “Brendan Loomis.”

“What about him?”

“He’s in custody. He gets arraigned day after tomorrow.”

Emil Lawson laced his hands behind his head and smiled. “And your daddy was supposed to kill him but he said no.”

“Yeah.”

“No, he said yes.”

“He said no.”

Emil Lawson shook his head. “You’re going to tell the first Pescatore hood you see that your father got word back to you through a guard. He’ll take care of Brenny Loomis. He also found out where Albert White’s been sleeping at night. And you’ve got the address to give to Old Man Pescatore. But only face-to-face. You following me so far, pretty boy?”

Joe nodded.

Emil Lawson handed Joe something wrapped in oilcloth. Joe unwrapped it—another shank, almost as thin as a needle. It had been a screwdriver at one point, the kind people used on the hinges of their eyeglasses. But those weren’t sharp like this. The tip was like a rose thorn. Joe ran his palm over it lightly and cut a path there.

They removed the shanks from his ears and throat.

Emil leaned in close. “When you get close enough to whisper that address in Pescatore’s ear, you drive that shank right through his fucking brain.” He shrugged. “Or his throat. Whatever kills him.”

“I thought you worked for him,” Joe said.

“I work for me.” Emil Lawson shook his head. “I did some jobs for his crew when I was paid to. Now someone else is paying.”

“Albert White,” Joe said.

“That’s my boss.” Emil Lawson leaned forward and lightly slapped Joe’s cheek. “And now he’s your boss too.”

In the small spit of land behind his house on K Street, Thomas Coughlin kept a garden. His efforts with it had, over the years, met with varying degrees of success and failure, but in the two years since Ellen had passed on, he’d had nothing but time; now the bounty of it was such that he made a small profit every year when he sold the surplus.

Years ago, when he was five or six, Joe had decided to help his father harvest in early July. Thomas has been sleeping off a double shift and the several nightcaps he’d consumed with Eddie McKenna afterward. He woke to the sound of his son talking in the backyard. Joe had talked to himself a lot back then, or maybe he spoke to an imagined friend. Either way, he’d had to talk to somebody, Thomas could admit to himself now, because he certainly wasn’t being spoken to much around the house. Thomas worked too much, and Ellen, well, by that point Ellen had firmly established her fondness for Tincture No. 23, a cure-all first introduced to her after one of the miscarriages that had preceded Joe’s birth. Back then, No. 23 wasn’t yet the problem it would become for Ellen, or so Thomas had told himself. But he must have second-guessed that assessment more than he liked to admit because he’d known without asking that Joe was unattended that morning. He lay in bed listening to his youngest jabbering to himself as he tramped back and forth to the porch, and Thomas started to wonder what he tramped back and forth from .

He rose from bed and put on a robe and found his slippers. He walked through the kitchen (where Ellen, dull-eyed but smiling, sat with her cup of tea) and pushed open the back door.

When he saw the porch, his first instinct was to scream. Literally. To drop to his knees and rage at the heavens. His carrots and parsnips and tomatoes—all still green as grass—lay on the porch, their roots splayed like hair across the dirt and wood. Joe came walking up from the garden with another crop in his hands—the beets, this time. He’d transformed into a mole, his skin and hair caked with dirt. The only white left on him could be found in his eyes and his teeth when he smiled, which he did as soon as he saw Thomas.

“Hi, Daddy.”

Thomas was speechless.

“I’m helping you, Daddy.” Joe placed a beet at Thomas’s feet and went back for more.

Thomas, a year’s work ruined, an autumn’s profit vanished, watched his son march off to finish the destruction, and the laugh that quaked up through the center of him surprised no one so much as him. He laughed so loud squirrels took flight from the low branches of the nearest tree. He laughed so hard he could feel the porch shake.

He smiled now to remember it.

He’d told his son recently that life was luck. But life, he’d come to realize as he aged, was also memory. The recollection of moments often proved richer than the moments themselves.

Out of habit, he reached for his watch before he recalled that it was no longer in his pocket. He’d miss it, even if the truth of the watch was a bit more complicated than the legend that had arisen around it. It was a gift from Barrett W. Stanford Sr., that was true. And Thomas had, without question, risked his life to save Barrett W. Stanford II, the manager of First Boston in Codman Square. Also true was that Thomas had, in the performance of his duties, discharged his service revolver a single time into the brain of one Maurice Dobson, twenty-six, ending his life immediately.

But in the instant before he pulled that trigger, Thomas had seen something no one else had: the true nature of Maurice Dobson’s intent. He would tell the hostage, Barrett W. Stanford II, about it first, and then relate the same tale to Eddie McKenna, then to his watch commander, and then to the members of the BPD Shooting Board. With their permission, he told the same story to the members of the press and also to Barrett W. Stanford Sr., who was so overcome with gratitude that he gave Thomas a watch that had been presented to him in Zurich by Joseph Emile Philippe himself. Thomas attempted three times to refuse such an extravagant gift, but Barrett W. Stanford Sr. wouldn’t hear of it.

So he carried the watch, not with the pride that so many presumed, but with a gravely intimate respect. In the legend, Maurice Dobson’s intent was to kill Barrett W. Stanford II. And who could argue with that interpretation, given that he’d placed a pistol to Barrett’s throat?

But the intent Thomas had read in Maurice Dobson’s eyes in that final instant—and it was that quick: an instant—was surrender. Thomas had stood four feet away, service revolver drawn and steady in his hand, finger on the trigger, so ready to pull it—and you had to be, or else why draw the gun in the first place?—that when he saw an acceptance of his fate pass through Maurice Dobson’s pebble-gray eyes, an acceptance that he was going to jail, that this was over now, Thomas felt unfairly denied. Denied of what, he couldn’t rightly say at first. But as soon as he pulled the trigger, he knew.

The bullet entered the left eye of the unfortunate Maurice Dobson, the late Maurice Dobson before he even reached the floor, and the heat of it singed a stripe into the skin just below Barrett W. Stanford II’s temple. When the finality of the bullet’s purpose conjoined with finality of its usage, Thomas understood what had been denied him and why he’d taken such permanent steps to rectify that denial.