Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“Come to my house?” he said to Joe.

“Save you the trouble of hauling me in.”

“Why would I haul you in?”

“Some of my men tell me you were looking for me.”

“Oh, right, right.” Figgis reached the porch and put his foot on the steps for a moment. “You shoot Kelvin Beauregard in the head?”

Joe squinted up at him. “Who’s Kelvin Beauregard?”

“There endeth my questions,” Figgis said. “Want a beer? It’s near beer but it’s not bad.”

“Much obliged,” Joe said.

Figgis went into the house and came back out with two near beers and a dog. The beers were cold and the dog was old, a gray bloodhound with soft ears the size of banana leaves. He lay on the porch between Joe and the door and snored with both eyes open.

“I need to get to RD,” Joe said after thanking Figgis for the beer.

“I expect you would feel that way.”

“You know how this ends if you don’t help me,” Joe said.

“No,” Chief Figgis said, “I don’t.”

“It ends with more bodies, more bloodshed, more newspapers writing about ‘Cigar City Slaughter’ and the like. It ends with you getting pushed out.”

“You too.”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Difference is, when you get pushed out, someone does it with a bullet to the back of your ear.”

“If he goes away,” Joe says, “the war ends. Peace returns.”

Figgis shook his head. “I’m not selling my wife’s brother down the river.”

Joe looked out on the street. It was a lovely brick street with several tidy bungalows cheerfully painted and some old Southern homes with farmers’ porches and even a couple of bowfront brownstones at the head of the street. The oaks were all stately and tall and the air smelled of gardenias.

“I don’t want to do this,” Joe said.

“Do what?”

“What you’re about to make me do.”

“I’m not making you do anything, Coughlin.”

“Yeah,” Joe said softly, “you are.”

He removed the first of the photos from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the porch beside Chief Figgis. Figgis knew he shouldn’t look at it. He just knew it. And for a moment, he kept his chin tilted hard toward his right shoulder. But then he turned his head back and looked down at what Joe had laid on his porch, two steps from the front door to his home, and his face was stricken white.

He looked up at Joe, then down at the photo and quickly away, and Joe went in for the kill.

He placed a second photo beside the first. “She didn’t make it to Hollywood, Irv. She just made it to Los Angeles.”

Irving Figgis took a quick glance at the second photo, enough that it burned his eyes. He shut them tight and whispered, “That’s not right, that’s not right,” over and over.

He wept. Sobbed, actually. Hands over his face, head down, back heaving.

When he stopped, he left his face in his hands, and the dog came over and lay beside him on the porch and pressed its head against Figgis’s outer thigh and shuddered, its lips flapping.

“We’ve got her with a special doctor,” Joe said.

Figgis lowered his hands, looked at Joe with hate in his red eyes. “What kind of doctor?”

“Kind gets people off heroin, Irv.”

Figgis held up one finger. “Do not ever call me by my Christian name again. You will call me Chief Figgis and Chief Figgis only for whatever days or years remain in our acquaintance. Are we clear?”

“We didn’t do this to her,” Joe said. “We just found her. And pulled her out of where she was, which was a pretty bad spot.”

“And then figured out how to profit from it.” Figgis pointed at the picture of his daughter with the three men and the metal collar and chain. “You people peddle in that. Whether it’s my daughter or someone else’s.”

“I don’t,” Joe said, knowing how feeble it sounded. “I just run rum.”

Figgis wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and then the backs of them. “The profit from the rum buys the organization the other things. Don’t you sit there, sir, and pretend it don’t. Name your price.”

“What?”

“Your price. For telling me where my daughter is.” He turned and looked at Joe. “You tell me. Tell me where she is.”

“She’s with a good doctor.”

Figgis thumped his fist off his porch.

“In a clean facility,” Joe said.

Figgis punched the floorboard.

“I can’t tell you,” Joe said.

“Until?”

Joe looked at him for a long time.

Eventually Figgis rose and the dog rose with him. He went through his screen door and Joe heard him dialing. When he spoke into the phone his voice was higher and hoarser than normal. “RD, you’re gonna meet this boy again and there ain’t another discussion to be had on that matter.”

On the porch, Joe lit a cigarette. A few blocks away, horns beeped distantly on Howard.

“Yeah,” Figgis said into the phone, “I’ll come too.”

Joe plucked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and gave it to the small breeze.

“You’ll be safe. I swear.”

He hung up and stood at the screen for some time before pushing the door open, and he and the dog came back out on the porch.

“He’ll meet you on Longboat Key, where they built that Ritz, at ten tonight. He said you come alone.”

“Okay.”

“When do I get her location?”

“When I walk out of my meeting with RD alive.”

Joe walked to his car.

“Do it yourself.”

He looked back at Figgis. “What?”

“If you’re going to kill him, be man enough to pull the trigger yourself. Ain’t no pride in having other people do what you’re too weak to do yourself.”

“Ain’t no pride in most things,” Joe said.

“You’re wrong. I wake up every morning, look myself in the mirror, and know I walk a righteous path. You?” Figgis let the question hang in the air.

Joe opened his car door, started to get in.

“Wait.”

Joe looked back at the man on the porch, who was now less of a man because Joe had stolen a crucial part of him and was going to drive off with it.

Figgis flashed his torn eyes at Joe’s suit jacket. His voice was shaky. “You got any more in there?”

Joe could feel them sitting in the pocket, as repugnant as abscessed gums.

“No.” He got into his car and drove off.

John Ringling, the circus impresario and great benefactor to Sarasota, had built the Ritz-Carlton on Longboat Key back in ’26, whereupon he’d promptly run into money problems and left it sitting there on a cove, its back to the Gulf, rooms with no furniture, walls with no crown molding.

Back when he’d first moved to Tampa, Joe had taken a dozen trips along the coastline, looking for spots to off-load contraband. He and Esteban had some boats running molasses into the Port of Tampa, and they had the town so locked up they only lost one in ten loads. But they also paid boats to run bottled rum, Spanish anís, and orujo straight from Havana to West Central Florida. This allowed them to skip the distilling process on U.S. soil, which removed a time-consuming step, but it left the boats open to a wider array of Volstead enforcers, including T-men, G-men, and the Coast Guard. And no matter how crazy and how talented a pilot Farruco Diaz was, all he could do was spot the laws coming, not stop them. (Which is why he continued to lobby for a machine gun and gunner to go with his machine gun mount.)

Until such a day as Joe and Esteban decided to declare open war on the Coast Guard and J. Edgar’s men, however, the small barrier islands that dotted this stretch of Gulf coastline—Longboat Key, Casey Key, Siesta Key, among others—were perfect places to duck and hide or temporarily stow a load.