Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“Joseph.” She stood in the doorway and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We may need to face something.”

“What’s that, doll?”

“I think I’m with child.”

For a few moments Joe thought she’d smuggled one of the street urchins back from the shelter with her. He actually glanced past her left hip before it dawned on him.

“You’re…?”

She smiled. “Pregnant.”

He got off the bed and stood before her and wasn’t sure if he should touch her because he was afraid she’d break.

She put her arms around his neck. “It’s okay. You’re going to be a father.” She kissed him, her hands finding the back of his head where his scalp tingled. Actually everything tingled, as if he’d woken to find himself encased in fresh skin.

“Say something.” She looked at him, curious.

“Thanks,” he said because nothing else occurred to him.

“Thanks?” She laughed and kissed him again, mashing his lips with her own. “Thanks?”

“You’re going to be an amazing mother.”

She pressed her forehead to his. “And you’ll be a great father.”

If I live, he thought.

And knew she was thinking it too.

So he was a little off his feed that morning when he entered Nino’s Coffee Shop without looking through the windows first.

There were only three tables in the coffee shop, a crime for a place that served coffee this good, and two of them were occupied by Klan. Not that an outsider would have recognized them as such, but Joe had no trouble seeing hoods even if they weren’t wearing them—Clement Dover and Drew Altman and Brewster Engals, at one table, the older, smart guard; at the other, Julius Stanton, Haley Lewis, Carl Joe Crewson, and Charlie Bailey, morons all, more likely to set themselves on fire than any cross they were trying to burn. But, like a lot of dumb people who didn’t have the sense to know how dumb they were, mean and merciless.

As soon as he stepped over the threshold, Joe knew it wasn’t an ambush. He could see in their eyes that they hadn’t expected to see him. They’d just come here for the coffee, maybe to intimidate the owners into paying some protection. Sal was right outside, but that wasn’t the same thing as inside. Joe pushed his suit jacket back and left his hand there, one inch from his gun as he looked at Engals, the leader of this particular pack, a fireman with Engine 9 at Lutz Junction.

Engals nodded, a small smile growing on his lips, and he flicked his eyes at something behind Joe, at the third table by the window. Joe glanced over, saw Loretta Figgis sitting there, watching the whole thing happen. Joe removed his hand from his hip, let his suit jacket fall free. No one was getting into a gun battle with the Madonna of Tampa Bay sitting five feet away.

Joe nodded back and Engals said, “Another time then.”

Joe tipped his hat and turned to exit when Loretta said, “Mr. Coughlin, sit. Please.”

Joe said, “No, no, Miss Loretta. You look like you’re having a peaceful morning without me disrupting it.”

“I insist,” she said as Carmen Arenas, the owner’s wife, came to the table.

Joe shrugged and removed his hat. “The usual, Carmen.”

“Yes, Mr. Coughlin. Miss Figgis?”

“I will have another, yes.”

Joe sat and placed his hat on his knee.

“Do those gentlemen not like you?” Loretta asked.

Joe noticed she wasn’t wearing white today. Her dress was more a light peach. In most people, you wouldn’t notice, but pure white had become so identified with Loretta Figgis that seeing her in anything else was a bit like seeing her naked.

“They aren’t going to invite me for Sunday dinner anytime soon,” Joe told her.

“Why?” She leaned into the table as Carmen brought their coffees.

“I lie down with mud people, work with mud people, fraternize with mud people.” He looked over his shoulder. “I leave anything out, Engals?”

“’Sides you killed four of our number?”

Joe nodded his thanks and turned back to Loretta. “Oh, and they think I killed four friends of theirs.”

“Did you?”

“You’re not wearing white,” he said.

“It’s almost white,” she said.

“How will that go over with your”—he searched for the word but couldn’t come up with anything better than—“followers?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Coughlin,” she said, and there was no false brightness in her voice, no desperate serenity in her eyes.

The Klavern boys got up from their tables and filed past, each of them managing either to bump Joe’s chair or hit his foot with his own.

“Be seeing you, ” Dover said to him and then tipped his hat to Loretta. “Ma’am.”

They filed out and then it was just Joe and Loretta and the sound of last night’s rain ticking off the balcony gutter and down onto the boardwalk. Joe studied Loretta as he sipped his coffee. She’d lost the sharp light that had lived in her eyes since the day she walked back out of her father’s house two years ago, having traded the black mourning dress of her death for the white dress of her rebirth.

“Why does my father hate you so much?”

“I’m a criminal. He used to be chief of police.”

“But he liked you then. He even pointed you out to me once when I was still in high school and said, ‘That’s the mayor of Ybor. He keeps the peace.’ ”

“He said that, huh?”

“He did.”

Joe drank some more coffee. “Those were more innocent days, I guess.”

She sipped her own coffee. “So what did you do to deserve his rancor?”

Joe shook his head.

Now it was her turn to study him for a long, uncomfortable minute. He held her eyes as she searched his. Searched until the realization dawned.

“You were how he knew where to find me.”

Joe said nothing, his jaw clenching and unclenching.

“It was you.” She nodded and looked down at the table. “What did you have?”

She stared at him for another uncomfortable period of time before he answered.

“Photographs.”

“And you showed them to him.”

“I showed him two.”

“How many did you have?”

“Dozens.”

She looked down at the table again, turned her cup on its saucer. “We’re all going to hell.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?” She twirled the coffee cup again. “Do you know what truth I’ve learned these last two years of preaching and fainting and thrusting my soul out to God?”

He shook his head.

“That this is heaven.” She indicated the street, the roof above their heads. “We’re in it now.”

“How come it feels so much like hell?”

“Because we fucked it all up.” Her sweet and serene smile returned. “This is paradise. And it’s lost.”

Joe was surprised by the depths of his own mourning for her loss of belief. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he had hoped that if anyone did have a direct line to the Almighty, it was Loretta.

“When you started,” he asked her, “you did believe, though, didn’t you?”

She stared back at him with clear eyes. “With such a certainty, it just had to be divinely inspired. It felt like my blood had been replaced with fire. Not burning fire, just a constant warmth that never ebbed. I’d felt that way as a child, I think. I felt safe and loved and so sure this is how life would always be. I would always have my daddy and my mommy and the world would look just like Tampa and everyone would know my name and wish good things for me. But I grew up, and I went west. And when all those beliefs turned out to be lies? When I realized I wasn’t special, I wasn’t safe?” She turned her arms to show him the track marks. “I took the news poorly.”