Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

Joe looked at her through the windshield and didn’t get out of the truck. He could hear his own breathing.

“I can do it for you,” Dion said.

“No,” Joe said. “My plan, my responsibility.”

“You got no problem delegating other things.”

He turned and looked at Dion. “You saying I want to do this?”

“I seen the way you look at each other.” Dion shrugged. “Maybe she likes it rough. Maybe you do too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about—the way we look at each other? You keep your eyes on your work, not on her.”

“All due respect,” Dion said, “you too.”

Shit, Joe thought, as soon as a guy felt sure you weren’t going to kill him, he sassed you.

Joe got out of the truck and Graciela watched him come. She’d already done some of the work herself—there was a tear in her dress by her left shoulder blade and light scratches on her left breast and she’d bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. As he approached, she dabbed at it with a handkerchief.

Dion got out of the truck on his side and they both looked over at him. He held up the uniform Sal Urso had left on the seat for him.

“Go about your business,” Dion said. “I’m gonna change.” He chuckled and walked to the back of the truck.

Graciela held out her right arm. “You don’t have much time.”

Suddenly Joe didn’t know how to take someone’s hand. It seemed unnatural.

“You don’t,” she said.

He reached out, took her hand in his. It was harder than any woman’s hand he’d ever touched. The heels of the palm were rocks from rolling cigars all day, the slim fingers as strong as ivory.

“Now?” he asked her.

“Now would be best,” she said.

He gripped her wrist with his left hand and curled the fingers of his right into the flesh by her shoulder. He pulled his nails down her arm. At the elbow he broke off and took a breath because his head felt like it was filled with wet newspaper.

She snatched her wrist out of his grip and looked at the scratches on her arm. “You have to make them look real.”

“They look plenty real.”

She pointed at her biceps. “They’re pink. And they stop at the elbow. They need to bleed, bobo niño, and go down to my hand. Yes? You remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Joe said. “It’s my plan.”

“Then act like it.” She thrust her arm at him. “Dig and pull.”

Joe wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard laughter coming from the back of the truck. He wrapped his hand firmly around her bicep this time and his fingernails sank into the faint tracks he’d already laid. Graciela wasn’t quite as brave as her talk. Her eyes wiggled in their sockets and her flesh quivered.

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Hurry, hurry.”

She locked eyes with him and he pulled his hand down the inside of her arm, stripping the skin as he went, opening the seams in her flesh. As he continued on past her elbow, she hissed and turned her arm so that his nails plowed along her forearm and ended at her wrist.

When he dropped her hand, she slapped him with it.

“Christ,” he said, “I’m not doing it because I like it.”

“So you claim.” She slapped him again, this time across the lower jaw and the top of his neck.

“Hey! I can’t pull up to a fucking guard shack with welts all over my face.”

“Then you better stop me,” she said and swung for him again.

He sidestepped this one because she’d telegraphed it for him and then he did what they’d agreed on—what had certainly seemed easier to discuss than to do until she’d hit him twice to get his blood up. The back of his hand connected with her cheek, all knuckle. Her upper body snapped to the side and her hair covered her face and she stayed that way for a moment, breathing hard. When she righted herself, her face had turned red and the skin around her right eye twitched. She spit into the palmetto bush on the side of the road.

She wouldn’t look at him. “I have it from here.”

He wanted to say something but he couldn’t think of what, so he walked around the front of the truck, Dion watching him from the passenger seat. He stopped as he opened the door and looked back at her. “I hated doing that.”

“And yet,” she said and spit onto the road, “it was your plan.”

On the road, Dion said, “Hey, I don’t like hitting ’em either but sometimes it’s all a dame respects.”

“I didn’t hit her because she had it coming,” Joe said.

“No, you hit her to help her get her hands on a bunch of BARs and Thompsons to send back to all her little friends on Sin Island.” Dion shrugged. “It’s a shitty business, so we do shitty things. She asked you to get the guns. You came up with a way to get them.”

“Ain’t got ’em yet,” Joe said.

They pulled to the side of the road one last time for Joe to change into his uniform. Dion rapped his hand on the wall between the cab and the back of the truck and said, “Everybody be as quiet as cats when the dogs are around. ¿Comprende? ”

From the back of the truck came a chorus of “Sí,” and then the only thing they could hear were the ever-present insects in the trees.

“You ready?” Joe said.

Dion slapped the side of the door. “Why I get up every morning, chum.”

The National Guard Armory was way up in unincorporated Tampa, at the northern edge of Hillsborough County, a harsh landscape of citrus groves and cypress swamps and broom sage fields gone dry and brittle in the sun, waiting for the chance to burn and turn the whole county black with the smoke.

Two guards manned the gate, one armed with a Colt .45, the other with a Browning automatic rifle, the very items they’d come to steal. The guard with the sidearm was tall and lanky with dark spiky hair and the sunken cheeks of a very old man or a very young man with bad teeth. The boy with the BAR was barely out of diapers; he had burnt orange hair and dull eyes. Black pimples covered his face like pepper.

He was no problem, but the lanky one worried Joe. Something about him was too coiled and too keen. He took his time when he looked at you and he didn’t care what you thought about it.

“You the ones got blowed up?” His teeth, as Joe had guessed, were gray and slanted, several tipping back into his mouth like old headstones in a flooded graveyard.

Dion nodded. “Put a hole in our hull.”

The lanky boy looked past Joe at Dion. “Shit, tubby, how much you pay to pass your last FITREP?”

The short one left the shack with his BAR cradled lazily in his arm, the barrel slanting across his hip. He started down the side of the truck, his mouth half open like he was hoping it would rain.

The one by the door said, “I asked you a question, tubby.”

Dion smiled pleasantly. “Fifty bucks.”

“That what you paid?”

“Yep,” Dion said.

“Got yourself a bargain. And who was that you paid, exactly?”

“What’s that?”

“Name and rank of the man you paid,” the boy said.

“Chief Petty Officer Brogan,” Dion said. “Why, you thinking of joining?”

The guy blinked and gave them both a cold smile but said nothing, just stood there while the smile evaporated. “Don’t accept bribes myself.”

“All right,” Joe said, his nerves getting the better of him.

“All right?”

Joe nodded and resisted the urge to smile like a fool, show the guy how nice he was.

“I know it’s all right. I know.”

Joe waited.

“I know it’s all right,” the guy repeated. “Gave you the impression I needed your counsel on the matter?”

Joe said nothing.