Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

It was a tub. The kind one saw at summer cocktail parties. The hosts would have it filled with ice and bottles of white wine and good beer. There wasn’t any ice in it now, though. Or wine. Or good beer.

Just cement.

Joe bucked against his ropes but it was like bucking against a brick house as it fell on top of him.

Albert stepped behind him and slapped the back of the chair and the chair dropped forward and Joe’s legs sank into the cement.

Albert watched him struggle—or try to—with the distant curiosity of a scientist. About the only thing Joe could move was his head. As soon as his feet entered the bucket, they were there to stay. His legs were already bound fast, ankles to knees, not a twitch of mobility available. The cement had been mixed a little earlier judging by the feel of it. It wasn’t soupy. His feet sank into it like they were sinking into slits in a sponge.

Albert sat on the deck in front of him and watched Joe’s eyes as the cement began to set. The sponge sensation gave way to something firmer under the soles of his feet that proceeded to snake around his ankles.

“Takes a while to harden,” Albert said. “Longer than some would think.”

Joe got his bearings when he saw a small barrier island off to his left that looked an awful lot like Egmont Key. Otherwise, nothing around them but water and sky.

Ilario Nobile brought Albert a canvas folding chair and wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. Albert rose from the deck. He adjusted the chair so the glare off the sea was off his face. He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. They were on a tugboat. Joe and his chair leaned against the rear wall of the wheelhouse, looking out at the back of the boat. It was a great choice in crafts, Joe had to admit; you wouldn’t know it to look at one, but tugs were fast and they could turn on a fucking dime.

Albert spun Thomas Coughlin’s watch on its chain for a minute, like a boy with his yo-yo, sending it out into the air and then back into his palm with a snap. He said to Joe, “It’s running slow. You know that?”

Even if he could have spoken, Joe doubted he would have.

“Big, expensive watch like this, and it can’t even keep the fucking time right.” He shrugged. “All the money in the world, am I right, Joe? All the money in the world, and some things are just meant to run their course.” Albert looked up at the gray sky and out at the gray sea. “This isn’t a race we enter to place second. We all know the stakes. Fuck up, you die. Trust the wrong person? Stake the wrong horse?” He snapped his fingers. “Lights-out. Have a wife? Kids? That’s unfortunate. Planning a trip to Merry Olde England next summer? The plan just changed. Thought you’d be breathing tomorrow? Fucking, eating, taking a bath? You won’t.” He leaned forward and stabbed his finger into Joe’s chest. “You will be sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And the world will be shut to you. Hell, if two fish go up your nose and a few nibble your eyes? You won’t mind. You’ll be with God. Or the devil. Or no place. Where you won’t be, Joe?” He raised his hands to the clouds. “Is here. So take a good last look. Take some deep breaths. Really suck that oxygen in.” He slipped the watch back into his vest, leaned in, grasped Joe’s face in his hands, and kissed the top of his head. “Because you die now.”

The cement had hardened. It squeezed Joe’s toes, heels, ankles. It squeezed everything so hard he could only assume some of the bones in his feet were broken. Maybe all of them.

He met Albert’s eyes and flicked his own at his left inside pocket.

“Stand him up.”

“No,” Joe tried to say, “look in my pocket.”

“Mmmm! Mmmm! Mmmm!” Albert mimicked, his eyes bulging. “Coughlin, show a little class. Don’t beg.”

They slashed the rope over Joe’s chest. Gino Valocco walked over with a hacksaw and dropped to his knees and sawed away at the front chair legs, cutting them free of the chair bottom.

“Albert,” he said through the tape, “look in this pocket. This pocket. This pocket. This one.”

Every time he said “this,” he jerked his head and his eyes toward the pocket.

Albert laughed and continued to mimic him and some of the other men joined in, Fausto Scarfone going so far as to imitate an ape. He made “hoo hoo hoo” sounds and scratched his armpits. Over and over, he jerked his head to the left.

The left chair leg came free of the seat, and Gino went to work on the right.

“Those are good cuffs,” Albert said to Ilario Nobile. “Take ’em off. He ain’t going anywhere.”

Joe could see he’d hooked him. He wanted to see in Joe’s pocket, but he had to find a way to do it without appearing to give in to his victim’s wishes.

Ilario removed the cuffs and tossed them to Albert’s feet because apparently Albert hadn’t earned enough respect to have them handed to him.

The right chair leg broke free of the seat and they pulled the chair off Joe and he stood upright in the tub of cement.

Albert said, “You get to use your hand once. You either rip the tape off your mouth or you show me what you’re trying to buy your pathetic fucking life with. You can’t do both.”

Joe didn’t hesitate. He reached into his pocket. He removed the photograph and flung it at Albert’s feet.

Albert picked it up off the deck as a dot appeared over his left shoulder, just beyond Egmont Key. Albert looked at the photo with a cocked eyebrow and that small, smug fucking smile of his, and he saw nothing special about it. His eyes flicked all the way to the left again and he began to move them slowly to the right and then his head went very still.

The dot became a dark triangle, moving fast over the glassy gray sea—a hell of a lot faster than the tug, fast as it was, could move.

Albert looked at Joe. It was a sharp and furious look. Joe saw clearly that he wasn’t furious because Joe had stumbled upon his secret. He was furious because he’d been kept as deep in the dark as Joe.

All this time, he’d thought she was dead too.

Christ, Albert, he wanted to say, in this we’re both her sons.

Even with six inches of electrical tape across his mouth, Joe knew Albert could see him smile.

The dark triangle was now, quite clearly, a boat. A classic runabout modified to accommodate extra passengers or bottles in the stern. Cut its speed by a third but that still made it faster than anything on the water. Several of the men on deck pointed and nudged one another.

Albert ripped the tape off Joe’s mouth.

The sound of the boat reached them. A buzz, like a distant wasp swarm.

Albert held the photograph in Joe’s face. “She’s dead.”

“Look dead to you, does she?”

“Where is she?” Albert’s voice was ragged enough for several men to look over at him.

“In the fucking picture, Albert.”

“Tell me where it was taken.”

“Sure,” Joe said, “and I’m sure nothing will happen to me then.”

Albert slammed both his fists into Joe’s ears and the sky pinwheeled overhead.

Gino Valocco shouted something in Italian. He pointed starboard.

A second boat had appeared, another modified runabout, with four men in it, coming out from behind a spoil bank about four hundred yards away.

“Where is she?”

The ringing in Joe’s ears was like a cymbal symphony. He shook his head repeatedly.

“Love to tell you,” he said, “but I’d love not to fucking drown more.”

Albert pointed at first one boat, then the other. “They won’t stop us. Are you a fucking idiot? Where is she?”

“Oh, let me think,” Joe said.

“Where?”

“In the photograph.”

“It’s an old one. You just folded up an old—”