Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“Tonight,” Esteban said. “Ten o’clock. The moon’s supposed to be quite weak.”

Joe said, “Middle of the night, more like three in the morning, would be ideal. Most everyone will be asleep. No heroes to worry about, few witnesses. That’s the only chance I see of your man making it back off that boat.” He laced his hands behind his head, gave it a bit more thought. “Your mechanic, he Cuban?”

“Yes.”

“How dark?”

Esteban said, “I don’t see—”

“Does he look more like you or more like her?”

“He’s very light-skinned.”

“So he could pass for Spanish.”

Esteban looked at Graciela, then back at Joe. “Certainly.”

“Why is this important?” Graciela asked.

“Because after what we’re about to do to the U.S. Navy, they’re going to remember him. And they’re going to hunt him.”

Graciela said, “And what are we going to do to the U.S. Navy?”

“Blow a hole in that ship, for starters.”

The bomb wasn’t a box of nails and steel washers they bought for short money off a street-corner anarchist. It was an object of much more refinement and precision. Or so they were told.

One of the bartenders at a Pescatore speakeasy on Central Avenue, over in St. Petersburg, guy named Sheldon Boudre, had spent a fair portion of his thirties defusing bombs for the marines. Back in ’15, he’d lost a leg in Haiti because of faulty communication equipment during the occupation of Port-au-Prince and he was still irate about it. He made them a honey of an explosive device—a steel square the size of a child’s shoe box. He told Joe and Dion he’d packed it with ball bearings, brass doorknobs, and enough gunpowder to punch a tunnel through the Washington Monument.

“Make sure you put this directly under the engine.” Sheldon pushed the bomb, wrapped in brown paper, across the bar to them.

“We’re not trying to just blow up an engine,” Joe said. “We want to damage the hull.”

Sheldon sucked his top row of false teeth back and forth against his gums, his eyes on the bar, and Joe realized he’d insulted the man. He waited him out.

“What do you think’s going to happen,” Sheldon said, “when an engine the size of a fucking Studebaker blows through the hull and into Hillsborough Bay?”

“But we don’t want to blow up the whole port,” Dion reminded him.

“That’s the beauty of her.” Sheldon patted the package. “She’s focused. She ain’t scattering all about on you. You just don’t want to be in front of her when she goes.”

“How volatile is, um, she?” Joe asked.

Sheldon’s eyes brimmed. “Hit her with a hammer all day, she’ll forgive you.” He stroked the brown paper wrapping like it was the spine of a cat. “Throw her in the air, you don’t even have to step out of the way when she lands.”

He nodded to himself several times, his lips still moving, and Joe and Dion exchanged a look. If this guy was less than sane, they were about to put a bomb of his making in their car and drive it across Tampa Bay.

Sheldon held up a finger. “There is one small caveat.”

“One small what?”

“Detail you should know about.”

“And that is?”

He gave them an apologetic smile. “Whoever lights her better be a runner.”

The drive from St. Petersburg to Ybor was twenty-five miles, and Joe counted every yard of it. Every bump, every lurch of the car. Every rattle of the chassis became the sound of his immediate death. He and Dion never discussed the fear because they didn’t have to. It filled their eyes, filled the car, turned their sweat metallic. They looked straight ahead mostly, occasionally off to the bay as they crossed the Gandy Bridge and the strip of shoreline on either side of them was sharp white against the dead blue water. Pelicans and egrets took flight from the rails. The pelicans often seized up in midflight and then fell from the sky as if they’d been shot. They’d plunge into the flat sea and swoop back out with contorting fish in their bills, open their mouths, and the fish, no matter what the size, vanished.

Dion hit a pothole, then a metal road bracket, then another pothole. Joe closed his eyes.

The sun flung itself against the windshield and breathed fire through the glass.

Dion reached the other side of the bridge, and the paved road gave way to a stretch of crushed shell and gravel, two lanes dropping to one, the pavement suddenly a patchwork of various grades and consistencies.

“I mean,” Dion said but said nothing else.

They bounced along for a block and then came to a standstill in the traffic and Joe had to fight the urge to bolt the car, abandon Dion, run away from this whole idea. Who in his right mind drove a fucking bomb from one point to another? Who?

An insane person. Guy with a death wish. Someone who thought happiness was a lie told to keep you docile. But Joe had seen happiness; he’d known it. And now he was risking any possibility of ever feeling it again to transport an explosive powerful enough to pitch a thirty-ton engine through a steel-plated hull.

There’d be nothing left of him to recover. No car, no clothes. His thirty teeth would sprinkle the bay like pennies flung into a fountain. Be lucky if they found a knuckle to mail back to the family plot in Cedar Grove.

The last mile was the worst. They left Gandy and drove down a dirt road that ran parallel to some train tracks, the road sloughing to the right with the heat, creviced in all the wrong places. It smelled like mildew and things that had crawled and died in warm mud, and were left there until they fossilized. They entered a patch of high mangroves and soil pocked with puddles and sudden steep holes, and after another couple of minutes of bouncing through that terrain, they arrived at the shack of Daniel Desouza, one of the outfit’s most reliable builders of concealment contraptions.

He’d fashioned them a toolbox with a false bottom. Per his instructions, he’d dirtied the toolbox down, gritted it to the point where it smelled not just of oil and grease and dirt but also of age. The tools he’d placed in it were top of the line, however, and well tended, some wrapped in oilskin, all recently cleaned and oiled.

As they stood by the kitchen table in his one-room shack, he showed them the release on the bottom of the box. His pregnant wife waddled around them, heading to the outhouse, and his two kids played on the floor with a pair of dolls that weren’t much more than rags stitched together with a butcher’s finesse. Joe noted one mattress on the floor for the kids, one for the adults, neither with a sheet or pillow. A mongrel dog wandered in and out, sniffing, and flies buzzed everywhere, mosquitoes too, while Daniel Desouza checked Sheldon’s work for himself out of idle curiosity or sheer insanity, Joe couldn’t tell anymore, numb to it by this point, standing there waiting to meet his Maker as Desouza poked a screwdriver into the bomb and his wife came back in and swatted at the dog. The kids started fighting over one of the rag dolls, screeching all shrill until Desouza shot his wife a look. She left the dog alone and started clouting the kids, slapping them all over their faces and necks.

The kids wailed with shock and indignation.

“You boys got you a nice piece of craft right here, what it is,” Desouza said. “Gonna make itself a statement.”

The younger of his two children, a boy of five or so, stopped crying. He’d been wailing his wail of stunned outrage, but when he stopped, he did so as if he’d snuffed out a match at the core of himself, and his face went blank. He picked one of his father’s wrenches up off the floor and hit the dog in the side of the head with it. The dog snarled and looked like it might lunge for the boy, but then it thought better of it and scurried out of the shack.