Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

Dion led Joe to the ladder and descended.

“Where we going?”

“You’ll see.”

At the bottom of the hold, the men had closed the door behind them. He and Dion stood on a dirt floor that smelled of everything ever off-loaded in the Tampa sun—bananas and pineapple and grain. Oil and potatoes and gas and vinegar. Gunpowder. Spoiled fruit and fresh coffee, the grounds crunching underfoot. Dion placed the flat of his hand to the cement wall opposite the ladder and moved his hand to the right and the wall went with it—just popped up and out of a seam Joe couldn’t see from two feet away. Dion revealed a door and rapped on it twice, then waited, his lips moving as he counted. Then he rapped it another four times and a voice on the other side said, “Who’s it?”

“Fireplace,” Dion said, and the door opened.

A corridor faced them, as thin as the man on the other side of the door, who was dressed in a shirt that might have been white before the sweat tanned it for the ages. His trousers were a brown denim, and he wore a kerchief around his neck and a cowboy hat. A six-gun stuck out of the waistband of his denim trousers. The cowboy nodded at Dion and allowed them to pass before he pushed the wall back into place.

The corridor was so narrow Dion’s shoulders brushed along the walls as he walked ahead of Joe. Dim lights hung from a pipe above them, one bare bulb for every twenty feet or so, half of them out. Joe was pretty sure he could make out a door down the far end of the corridor. He guessed it was about five hundred yards away, which meant he could easily be imagining it. They slogged through mud, water dripping from the ceiling and puddling the floor, and Dion explained that the tunnels commonly flooded; every now and then they’d find a dead drunk in the morning, the last of the stragglers from the night before who’d decided to take an ill-advised nap.

“Seriously?” Joe asked.

“Yeah. Know what makes it worse? Sometimes the rats get to them.”

Joe looked all around himself. “That’s just about the nastiest fucking thing I’ve heard all month.”

Dion shrugged and kept walking and Joe looked up and down the walls and then at the pathway ahead. No rats. Yet.

“The money from the Pittsfield bank,” Dion said as they walked.

Joe said, “It’s safe.” Above him, he could hear the clack of trolley wheels followed by the slow heavy clop of what he assumed was a horse.

“Safe where?” Dion looked back over his shoulder at him.

Joe said, “How’d they know?”

Above them several horns beeped and an engine revved.

“Know what?” Dion said, and Joe noticed he’d grown closer to bald, his dark hair still thick and oily on the sides but ropey and hesitant up top.

“Where to ambush us.”

Dion looked back at him again. “They just did.”

“There’s no way they ‘just did.’ We scouted that location for weeks. The cops never came out that way because they had no reason to—nothing to protect and no one to serve.”

Dion nodded his big head. “Well, they didn’t hear anything from me.”

“Me, either,” Joe said.

Near the end of the tunnel now, the door revealed itself to be brushed steel with an iron dead bolt. The street sounds had given way to the distant clank of silverware and plates being stacked and waiters’ footsteps rushing back and forth. Joe pulled his father’s watch from his pocket and clicked it open: noon.

Dion produced a sizable key ring from somewhere in his wide trousers. He opened the locks on the door, threw back the bars, and unlocked the bolt. He removed the key from the ring and handed it to Joe. “Take it. You’ll use it, believe me.”

Joe pocketed the key.

“Who owns this place?”

“Ormino did.”

“Did?”

“Oh, you didn’t read today’s papers?”

Joe shook his head.

“Ormino sprung a few leaks last night.”

Dion opened the door, and they climbed a ladder to another door that was unlocked. They opened it and entered a vast, dank room with a cement floor and cement walls. Tables ran along the walls, and on top of the tables were what Joe would have expected to see—fermentors and extractors, retorts and Bunsen burners, beakers and vats and skimming utensils.

“Best money can buy,” Dion said, pointing out thermometers fixed to the walls and connected to the stills by rubber tubing. “You want light rum, you got to remove the fraction at between one sixty-eight and one eighty-six Fahrenheit. That’s really important to keep people from, you know, dying when they drink your hooch. These babies don’t make a mistake, they—”

“I know how to make rum,” Joe said. “In fact, you name the substance, D, after two years in prison, I know how to recondense it. I could probably distill your fucking shoes. What I don’t see here, though, are two things that are pretty essential to making rum.”

“Oh?” Dion said. “What’s that?”

“Molasses and workers.”

“Shoulda mentioned,” Dion said, “we got a problem there.”

They passed through an empty speakeasy and said “Fireplace” through another closed door and entered the kitchen of an Italian restaurant on East Palm Avenue. They passed through the kitchen and into the dining room, where they found a table near the street and close to a tall black fan so heavy it looked like it would take three men and an ox to move it.

“Our distributor is coming up empty.” Dion unfolded his napkin and tucked it into his collar, smoothed it over his tie.

“I can see that,” Joe said. “Why?”

“Boats have been sinking is what I hear.”

“Who’s the distributor again?”

“Guy named Gary L. Smith.”

“Ellsmith?”

“No,” Dion said. “ L. The middle initial. He insists you use it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a Southern thing.”

“Not just an asshole thing?”

“Could be that too.”

The waiter brought their menus and Dion ordered them two lemonades, assuring Joe it would be the best he ever tasted.

“Why do we need a distributor?” Joe asked. “Why aren’t we dealing directly with the supplier?”

“Well, there’s a lot of them. And they’re all Cuban. Smith deals with Cubans so we don’t have to. He also deals with the Dixies.”

“The runners.”

Dion nodded as the waiter brought their lemonades. “Yeah, the local guns from here to Virginia. They run it across Florida and up the seaboard.”

“But you’ve been losing a lot of those loads too.”

“Yeah.”

“So how many boats can sink and how many trucks can get hit before it’s more than bad luck?”

“Yeah,” Dion said again because apparently he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Joe sipped his lemonade. He wasn’t sure it was the best he’d ever tasted, and even if it were, it was lemonade. Hard to get fucking excited about lemonade.

“You do what I suggested in my letter?”

Dion nodded. “To a T.”

“How many ended up where I figured?”

“A high percentage.”

Joe scanned the menu for something he recognized.

“Try the osso buco,” Dion said. “Best in the city.”

“Everything’s the ‘best in the city’ with you,” Joe said. “The lemonade, the thermometers.”

Dion shrugged and opened his own menu. “I have refined tastes.”

“That’s it,” Joe said. He closed his menu and caught the waiter’s eye. “Let’s eat and then drop in on Gary L. Smith.”

Dion studied his menu. “A pleasure.”

The morning edition of the Tampa Tribune lay on a table in the waiting room of Gary L. Smith’s office. Lou Ormino’s corpse sat in a car with shattered windows and blood on the seats. In black-and-white, the death photo looked like they all did—undignified. The headline read: