Live by Night

OE MADE A BIG MISTAKE IN

rousting the gangsters game, but if he hadn't, he would never have discovered Emma Gould

"•ome years later, on a tugboat in the , Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin's feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him over­board, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern. And it occurred to him that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life—good or bad—had been set in motion that morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.

They met shortly after dawn in 1926, when Joe and the Bartolo brothers robbed the gaming room at the back of an Albert White speakeasy in South Boston. Before they entered it, Joe and the Bartolos had no idea the speakeasy belonged to Albert White. If they had, they would have run in the other direction and set fire to any trail they could have left behind.

They came down the back stairs smoothly enough. They passed through the empty bar area without incident. The bar and casino took up the rear of a fur­niture warehouse along the waterfront that Joe's boss, (continued on page 180)

LIVE BY NIGHT

(continued from page 65) Tim Hickey, had assured him was owned by some harmless Greeks recently arrived from Maryland. But when they walked into the back room, they found a poker game in full swing, the five players drink­ing amber Canadian from heavy crystal glasses, a gray carpet of cigarette smoke hanging overhead. A pile of money rose from the center of the table.

Not one of the men looked Greek. Or harmless. They had hung their suit jack­ets over the backs of their chairs, which left the guns on their hips exposed. When Joe, Dion and Paulo walked in with pis­tols extended, none of the men went for the guns, but Joe could tell a couple were thinking about it.

A woman had been serving drinks to the table. She put the tray aside, lifted her cigarette out of an ashtray and took a drag, looked about to yawn with three guns pointed at her. Like she was going to ask to see something more impressive for an encore.

Joe and the Bartolos wore hats pulled down over their eyes, and black handker­chiefs covered the lower halves of their faces. Which was a good thing, because if anyone in this crowd recognized them, they'd have about half a day left to live.

A walk in the park, Tim Hickey had said. Hit them at dawn, when the only people left in the place would be a couple of mokes in the counting room.

As opposed to five gun thugs playing poker.

One of the players said, "You know whose place this is?"

Joe didn't recognize the guy, but he knew the guy next to him—Brenny Loomis, ex-boxer and a member of the Albert White Mob, Tim Hickey's biggest rival in the bootlegging business. Lately, Albert was rumored to be stockpiling Thompson machine guns for an impend­ing war. The word was out—choose a side or choose a headstone.

Joe said, "Everyone does as they're told, no one gets so much as a scratch."

The guy beside Loomis ran his mouth again. "I asked you know whose game this was, you fucking dunce."

Dion Bartolo hit him in the mouth with his pistol. Hit him hard enough to knock him out of his chair and draw some blood. It got everyone else thinking how much better it was to be the one who wasn't get­ting pistol-whipped than the one who was.

Joe said, "Everyone but the girl, get on your knees. Put your hands behind your head and lace the fingers."

Brenny Loomis locked eyes with Joe. "I'll call your mother when this is over, boy. Suggest a nice dark suit for your coffin."

Loomis, a former club boxer at Mechan­ics Hall and sparring partner for Mean Mo Mullins, was said to have a punch like a bag of cue balls. He killed people for Albert White. Not for a living, exclusively, but rumor was he wanted Albert to know that, should it ever become a full-time position, he had seniority.

Joe had never experienced fear like he did looking into Loomis's tiny brown eyes, but he gestured at the floor with his gun nonetheless, quite surprised that his hand didn't shake. Brendan Loomis laced his hands behind his head and got on his knees. Once he did, the others did the same.

Joe said to the girl, "Come over here, miss. We won't harm you."

She stubbed out her cigarette and looked at him like she was thinking about lighting another, maybe freshening her drink. She crossed to him, a girl near his own age, maybe 20 or so, with winter eyes and skin so pale he could almost see through it to the blood and tissue underneath.

He watched her come as the Bartolo brothers relieved the cardplayers of their weapons. The pistols made heavy thumps as they tossed them onto a nearby black­jack table, but the girl didn't even flinch. In her eyes, firelights danced behind the late-December gray.

She stepped right up to his gun and said, "And what will the gentleman be having with his robbery this morning?"

Joe handed her one of the two canvas sacks he'd walked in with. "The money on the table, please."

"Coming right up, sir."

As she crossed back to the table, he pulled one pair of handcuffs from the other sack, then tossed the sack to Paulo. Paulo bent by the first cardplayer and handcuffed his wrists at the small of his back, then moved on to the next.

The girl swept the pot off the center of the table—Joe noting not just bills but watches and jewelry in there too—and then gathered up everyone's stakes. Paulo finished cuffing the men on the floor and then went to work gagging them.

Joe scanned the room—the roulette wheel was behind him, the craps table against the wall under the stairs. He counted three blackjack tables and one baccarat table. Six slot machines took up the rear wall. A low table with a dozen phones on top constituted the wire service, a board behind it listing the horses from last night's 12th race at Readville. The only other door besides the one they'd come through was chalk-marked with a T for toi­let, which made sense because people had to piss when they drank.

Except that when they'd come through the bar, Joe had seen two bathrooms, which would certainly suffice. And this bathroom had a padlock on it.

He looked over at Brenny Loomis, lying on the floor with a gag in his mouth but watching the wheels turn in Joe's head. Joe watched the wheels in Loomis's head do their own turning. And he knew what he'd known the moment he saw that padlock— the bathroom wasn't a bathroom.

It was the counting room.

Albert White's counting room.

Judging by the business Hickey casi­nos had done the past two days—the first chilly weekend of October—Joe suspected a small fortune sat behind that door.

Albert White's small fortune.

The girl came back to him with the bag of poker swag. "Your dessert, sir," she said

and handed him the bag. He couldn't get over how level her gaze was. She didn't just stare at him, she stared through him. He was certain she could see his face behind the handkerchief and the low hat. Some morning he'd pass her walking to get cigarettes, hear her yell, "That's him!" He wouldn't even have time to close his eyes before the bullets hit him.

He took the sack and dangled the set of cuffs from his finger. "Turn around."

"Yes, sir. Right away, sir." She turned her back to him and crossed her arms be­hind her. Her knuckles pressed against the small of her back, the fingertips dan­gling over her ass, Joe realizing the last thing he should be doing was concentrat­ing on anyone's ass, period.

He snapped the first cuff around her wrist. "I'll be gentle."

"Don't put yourself out on my account." She looked back over her shoulder at him. 'Just try not to leave marks."

Jesus.

"What's your name?"

"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"

"Wanted."

"By all the girls or just the law?"

He couldn't keep up with her and cover the room at the same time, so he turned her to him and pulled the gag out of his pocket. The gags were men's socks that Paulo Bartolo had stolen from the Wool-worths where he worked.

"You're going to put a sock in my mouth."

"Yes."

"A sock. In my mouth."

"Never been used before," Joe said. "I promise."

She cocked an eyebrow. It was the same tarnished-brass color as her hair and soft and shiny as ermine.

"I wouldn't lie to you," Joe said and felt, in that moment, as if he were telling the truth.

"That's usually what liars say." She opened her mouth like a child resigned to a spoonful of medicine, and he thought of saying something else to her but he couldn't think of what. He thought of ask­ing her something, just so he could hear her voice again.

Her eyes pulsed a bit when he pushed the sock into her mouth and then she tried to spit it out—they usually did— shaking her head, but he was ready for her. He clamped his hand over her mouth. She looked at him as if, until this point, the whole transaction had been perfectly honorable—a kick, even—but now he'd gone and sullied it.

"It's half silk," he said.

Another arch of her eyebrow.

"The sock," he said. "Go join your friends."

She knelt by Brendan Loomis, who'd never taken his eyes off Joe, not once the whole time.

Joe looked at the door to the counting room, looked at the padlock on the door. He let Loomis follow his gaze and then he looked Loomis in the eyes. Loomis's eyes went dull as he waited to see what the next move would be.

Joe held his gaze and said, "Let's go, boys. We're done."

Loomis blinked once, slowly, and Joe decided to take that as a peace offering— or the possibility of one—and got the hell out of there.

When they left, they drove along the water­front. The sky was a hard blue streaked with hard yellow. The gulls rose and fell, cawing. The bucket of a ship crane swung in hard over the wharf road, then swung back with a scream as Paulo drove over its shadow. Longshoremen, stevedores and teamsters stood at their pilings, smoking in the bright cold. A group of them threw rocks at the gulls.

Joe rolled down his window, took the cold air on his face, against his eyes. It smelled like salt, fish blood and gasoline.

Dion Bartolo looked back at him from the front seat. "You asked the doll her name?"

Joe said, "Making conversation."

"You cuff her hands like you're putting a pin on her, asking her to the dance?"

Joe leaned his head out the open win­dow for a minute, sucked the dirty air in as deep as he could. Paulo drove off the docks and up toward Broadway, the Nash road­ster doing 30 miles an hour easy.

"I seen her before," Paulo said.

Joe pulled his head back in the car. "Where?"

"I don't know. But I did. I know it." He bounced the Nash onto Broadway and they all bounced with it. "You should write her a poem maybe."

"Write her a fucking poem," Joe said. "Why don't you slow down and stop driv­ing like we did something?"

Dion turned toward Joe, placed his arm on the seat back. "He actually wrote a poem to a girl once, my brother."

"No kidding?"

Paulo met his eyes in the rearview mir­ror and gave him a solemn nod.

"What happened?"

"Nothing," Dion said. "She couldn't read."

They headed south toward Dorches­ter and got stuck in traffic by a horse that dropped dead just outside Andrew Square. Traffic had to be routed around it and its overturned ice cart. Shards of ice glistened in the cobblestone cracks like metal shavings, and the iceman stood be­side the carcass, kicking the horse in the ribs. Joe thought about her the whole way. Her hands had been dry and soft. They were very small and pink at the base of the palms. The veins in her wrist were violet. She had a black freckle on the back of her right ear but not on her left.

The Bartolo brothers lived on Dorches­ter Avenue above a butcher and a cobbler. The butcher and the cobbler had married sisters and hated each other only slightly less than they hated their wives. This didn't stop them, however, from running a speak­easy in their shared basement. Nightly, people came from the other 16 parishes of Dorchester, as well as from parishes as far away as the North Shore, to drink the best liquor south of Montreal and hear a Negro songstress named Delilah Deluth sing about heartbreak in a place whose unofficial name was the Shoelace, which

infuriated the butcher so much he'd gone bald over it. The Bartolo brothers were in the Shoelace almost every night, which was fine, but going so far as to reside above the place seemed idiotic to Joe. It would only take one legitimate raid by honest cops or T-men, however unlikely that might be, and it would be nothing for them to kick in Paulo and Dion's door and discover mon­ey, guns and jewelry that two wops who worked in a department store and a gro­cer's, respectively, could never account for.

True, the jewelry usually went right back out the door to Hymie Drago, the fence they'd been using since they were teenag­ers, but the money usually went no fur­ther than a gaming table in the back of the Shoelace, or into their mattresses.

Joe leaned against the icebox and watched Paulo put his and his brother's split there that morning, just pull back the sweat-yellowed sheet to reveal one of a series of slits they'd cut into the side, Dion handing the stacks of bills to Paulo and Paulo shoving them in like he was stuffing a holiday bird.

At 23, Paulo was the oldest of them. Dion, younger by two years, seemed older, however, maybe because he was smarter or

maybe because he was meaner. Joe, who would turn 20 next month, was the young­est of them but had been acknowledged as the brains of the operation since they'd joined forces to knock over newsstands when Joe was 13.

Paulo rose from the floor. "I know where I seen her." He slapped the dust off his knees.

Joe came off the icebox. "Where?"

"But he's not sweet on her," Dion said.

"Where?" Joe repeated.

Paulo pointed at the floor. "Downstairs."

"In the Shoelace?"

Paulo nodded. "She come in with Albert."

"Albert who?"

"Albert, the King of Montenegro," Dion said. "Albert Who Do You Think?"

Unfortunately, there was only one Albert in Boston who could be referred to without a last name. Albert White, the guy they'd just robbed.

Albert was a former hero of the Philip­pine Moro Wars and a former policeman who'd lost his job, like Joe's own brother, after the strike in '19. Currently he was the owner of White's Garage and Auto­motive Glass Repair (formerly Halloran's Tire and Automotive), White's Downtown Cafe (formerly Halloran's Lunch Counter) and White's Freight and Transcontinental

Shipping (formerly Halloran's Trucking). Rumored to have personally rubbed out Bitsy Halloran. Bitsy got himself shot 11 times in an oak phone booth inside a Rexall drugstore in Egleston Square. So many shots fired at such close range, they set the booth on fire. It was rumored Albert had bought the charred remains of the phone booth, restored it, kept it in the study of the home he owned on Ashmont Hill and made all his calls from it.

"So she's Albert's girl." It deflated Joe to think of her as just another gangster's moll. He'd already had visions of them racing across the country in a stolen car, unencumbered by a past or a future, chasing a red sky and a setting sun all the way to Mexico.

"I seen them together three times," Paulo said.

"So now it's three times."

Paulo looked down at his fingers for confirmation. "Yeah."

"What's she doing fetching drinks at his poker games then?"

"What else she going to do?" Dion said. "Retire?"

"No, but...."

"Albert's married," Dion said. "Who's to say how long a party gal lasts on his arm?"

"She strike you as a party gal?"

Dion slowly thumbed the cap off a bot­

tle of Canadian gin, his flat eyes on Joe.

"She didn't strike me as anything but a

gal bagged up our money. I couldn't

even tell you what color her hair was. I

couldn't "

"Dark blonde. Almost light brown, but not quite."

"She's Albert's girl." Dion poured them all a drink.

"So she is," Joe said.

"Bad enough we just knocked over the man's joint. Don't go getting any ideas about taking anything else from him. All right?"

Joe didn't say anything.

"All right?" Dion repeated.

"All right." Joe reached for his drink. "Fine."

She didn't come into the Shoelace for the next three nights. Joe was sure of it—he'd been there, open to close, every night.

Albert came in, wearing one of his sig­nature pin-striped off-white suits. Like he was in Lisbon or something. He wore them with brown fedoras that matched his brown shoes, which matched the brown pinstripes. When the snow came, he wore brown suits with off-white pinstripes, an off-white hat and white-and-brown spats. When February rolled around, he went in for dark brown suits and dark brown shoes with a black hat, but Joe imagined, for the most part, he'd be easy to gun down at night. Shoot him in an alley from 20 yards away with a cheap pistol. You wouldn't even need a streetlamp to see that white turn red.

Albert, Albert, Joe thought as Albert glided past his bar stool in the Shoelace on the third night, I could kill you if I knew the first thing about killing.

Problem was, Albert didn't go into alleys much and when he did he had four body­guards with him. And even if you did get through them and you did kill him—and Joe, no killer, wondered why the fuck he found himself thinking about killing Albert White in the first place—all you'd manage to do would be to derail a business empire for Albert White's partners, who included the police, the Italians, the Jew mobs in Mattapan and several legitimate business­men, including bankers and investors with interests in Cuban and Florida sugarcane. Derailing business like that in a city this small would be like feeding zoo animals with fresh cuts on your hand.

Albert looked at him once. Looked at him in such a way that Joe thought, He knows, he knows. He knows I robbed him. Knows I want his girl. He knows.

But Albert said, "Got a light?"

Joe struck a match off the bar and lit Albert White's cigarette.

When Albert blew out the match, he blew smoke into Joe's face. He said, "Thanks, kid," and walked away, the man's flesh as white as his suit, the man's lips as red as the blood that flowed in and out of his heart.

The fourth day after the robbery, Joe played a hunch and went back to the fur­niture warehouse. He almost missed her; apparently the secretaries ended their shift the same time as the laborers, and the secretaries ran small while the forklift op­erators and stevedores cast wider shadows. The men came out with their longshore­men's hooks hanging from the shoulders of their dirty jackets, talking loud and swarming the young women, whistling and telling jokes only they laughed at. The women must have been used to it, though, because they managed to move their own circle out of the larger one, and some of the men stayed behind, and others strag­gled, and a few more broke off to head to­ward the worst-kept secret on the docks—a houseboat that had been serving alcohol since the first sun that rose on Boston under Prohibition.

The pack of women stayed tight and moved smoothly up the dock and Joe only saw her because another girl with the same color hair stopped to adjust her heel and Emma's face took her place in the crowd.

Joe left the spot where he'd been stand­ing, near the loading dock of the Gillette Company, and fell into step about 50 yards behind the group. He told himself she was Albert White's girl. Told himself he was out of his mind and he needed to stop this now. Not only should he not be following Albert White's girl along the waterfront of South Boston, he shouldn't even be in the state until he learned for sure whether or not anyone could finger him for the poker game robbery. Tim Hickey was down south on a rum deal and couldn't fill in the blanks about how they'd ended up knocking over the wrong card game, and the Bartolo brothers were keeping their heads down and noses clean until they heard what was what, but here was Joe, supposedly the smart one, sniff-

ing around Emma Gould like a starving dog following the scent of a cook fire.

Walk away, walk away, walk away.

Joe knew the voice was right. The voice was reason. And if not reason, then his guardian angel.

Problem was, he wasn't interested in guardian angels today. He was interested in her.

The group of women walked off the waterfront and dispersed at Broadway Station. Most walked to a bench on the streetcar side, but Emma descended into the subway. Joe gave her a head start, then followed her through the turnstiles and down another set of steps and onto a northbound train. It was crowded on the train and hot but he never took his eyes off her, which was a good thing be­cause she left the train one stop later, at South Station.

South Station was a transfer station where three subway lines, two el lines, a streetcar line, two bus lines and the com­muter rail all converged. Stepping out of the car and onto the platform turned him into a billiard ball on the break—he was bounced, pinned and bounced again. He lost sight of her. He was not a tall man like his brothers, one of whom was tall and the other abnormally so. But thank God he wasn't short, just medium. He stepped up on his toes and tried to press through the throng that way. It made the going slower, but he got a flash of her butterscotch hair bobbing by the transfer tunnel to the Atlantic Avenue Elevated.

He reached the platform just as the cars arrived. She stood two doors ahead of him in the same car when the train left the station and the city opened up in front of them, its blues and browns and brick red deepening in the onset of dusk. Windows in the office buildings had turned yellow. Streetlamps came on, block by block. The harbor bled out from the edges of the skyline. Emma leaned

against a window and Joe watched it all unfurl behind her. She stared out blankly at the crowded car, her eyes alighting on nothing but wary just the same. They were so pale, her eyes, paler even than her skin. The pale of very cold gin. Her jaw and nose were both slightly pointed and dusted with freckles. Nothing about her invited approach. She seemed locked behind her own cold and beautiful face.

And what will the gentleman be having with his robbery this morning?

Just try not to leave marks.

That's usually what liars say.

When they passed through Battery-march Station and rattled over the North End, Joe looked down at the ghetto, teem­ing with Italians—Italian people, Italian dialects, Italian customs and food—and he couldn't help but think of his oldest brother, Danny, the Irish cop who'd loved the Italian ghetto so much he'd lived and worked there. Danny was a big man, taller than just about anyone Joe had ever met. He'd been a hell of a boxer, a hell of a cop, and he knew little of fear. An orga­nizer and vice president of the policemen's union, he'd met the fate of every cop who'd chosen to go out on strike in September 1919—he'd lost his job without hope of reinstatement and been blackballed from all law enforcement positions on the East­ern Seaboard. It broke him. Or so the story went. He'd ended up in a Negro section of Tulsa, Oklahoma that had burned to the ground in a riot four years ago. Since then, Joe's family had heard only rumors about his whereabouts and those of his wife, Nora—Austin, Baltimore, Philadelphia.

Growing up, Joe had adored his brother. Then he'd come to hate him. Now he mostly didn't think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.

Down the other end of the car, Emma Gould said, "Excuse me, excuse me," as she worked her way toward the doors. Joe looked out the window and saw that

they were approaching City Square in Charlestown.

Charlestown. No wonder she hadn't gotten rattled with a gun pointed at her. In Charlestown, they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee.

He followed her to a two-story house at the end of Union Street. Just before she reached the house, she took a right down a pathway that ran along the side, and by the time Joe got to the alley behind the house, she was gone. He looked up and down the alley—nothing but similar two-story houses, most of them saltbox shacks with rotting window frames and tar patches in the roof. She could have gone into any of them, but she'd chosen the last walkway on the block. He assumed hers was the blue-gray one he was facing, with steel doors over a wooden bulkhead.

Just past the house was a wooden gate. It was locked, so he grabbed the top of it, hoisted himself up and took a look at another alley, narrower than the one he was in. Aside from a few trash cans, it was empty. He let himself back down and searched his pocket for one of the hair­pins he rarely left home without.

Haifa minute later he stood on the other side of the gate and waited.

It didn't take long. This time of day— quitting time—it never did. Two pairs of footsteps came up the alley, two men talk­ing about the latest plane that had gone down trying to cross the Atlantic, no sign of the pilot, an Englishman, or the wreckage. One second it was in the air, the next it was gone for good. One of the men knocked on the bulkhead, and after a few seconds, Joe heard him say, "Blacksmith."

One of the bulkhead doors was pulled back with a whine, and then a few mo­ments later, it was dropped back in place and locked.

Joe waited five minutes, clocking it, and then he exited the second alley and knocked on the bulkhead.

A muffled voice said, "What?"

"Blacksmith."

There was a ratcheting sound as some­one threw the bolt back and Joe lifted the bulkhead door. He climbed into the small stairwell and let himself down it, lowering the bulkhead door as he went. At the bot­tom of the stairwell, he faced a second door. It opened as he was reaching for it. An old bald guy with a cauliflower nose and blown blood vessels splayed across his cheekbones waved him inside, a grim scowl on his face.

It was an unfinished basement with a wood bar in the center of the dirt floor. The tables were wooden barrels, the chairs made of the cheapest pine.

At the bar, Joe sat down near the end closest to the door where a woman with fat that hung off her arms like pregnant bellies served him a bucket of warm beer that tasted a little of soap and a little of sawdust, but not a lot like beer or a lot like alcohol. He looked for Emma Gould in the basement gloom, saw only dockworkers, a couple of sailors and a few working girls.

A piano sat against the brick wall under the stairs, unused, a few keys broken. This was not the kind of speak that went in for entertainment much beyond the bar fight that would open up between the sailors and the dockworkers once they realized they were short two working girls.

She came out the door behind the bar, tying a kerchief off behind her head. She'd traded her blouse and skirt for an off-white fisherman's sweater and brown tweed trousers. She walked the bar, emptying ashtrays and wiping spills, and the woman who'd served Joe his drink removed her apron and went back through the door behind the bar.

When she reached Joe, her eyes flicked on his near-empty bucket. "You want another?"

"Sure."

She glanced at his face and didn't seem fond of the result. "Who told you about the place?"

"Dinny Cooper."

"Don't know him," she said.

That makes two of us, Joe thought, won­dering where the fuck he'd come up with such a stupid name. Dinny? Why didn't he call the guy Lunch?

"He's from Everett."

She wiped the bar in front of him, still not moving to get his drink. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. We worked the Chelsea side of the Mystic last week. Dredge work?"

She shook her head.

"Anyway, Dinny pointed across the river, told me about this place. Said you served good beer."

"Now I know you're lying."

"Because someone said you serve good beer?"

She stared at him the way she had before, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.

"The beer's not that bad," he said and

raised his bucket. "I had some once in this

place this one time? I swear to you it "

"Butter doesn't melt on your tongue, does it?" she said.

"Miss?"

"Does it?"

He decided to try resigned indigna­tion. "I'm not lying, miss. But I can go. I can certainly go." He stood. "What do I owe you for the first one?"

"Two dimes."

She held out her hand and he placed

the coins in them and she placed them in the pocket of her man's trousers. "You won't do it."

"What?" he said.

"Leave. You want me to be so im­pressed that you said you'd leave that I'll decide you're a Clear-Talk Charlie and ask you to stay."

"Nope." He shrugged into his coat. "I'm really going."

She leaned into the bar. "Come here."

He cocked his head.

She crooked a finger at him. "Come here."

He moved a couple of stools out of the way and leaned into the bar.

"You see those fellas in the corner, sitting by the table made out of the apple barrel?"

He didn't need to turn his head. He'd seen them the moment he walked in— three of them. Dockworkers by the look of them, ship masts for shoulders, rocks for hands, eyes you didn't want to catch.

"I see 'em."

"They're my cousins. You see a family resemblance, don't you?"

"No."

She shrugged. "You know what they do for work?"

Their lips were close enough that if they'd opened their mouths and unfurled their tongues, the tips would have met.

"I have no idea."

"They find guys like you who lie about guys named Dinny and they beat them to death." She inched her elbows forward and their faces grew even closer. "Then they throw them in the river."

Joe's scalp and the backs of his ears itched. "Quite the occupation."

"Beats robbing poker games, though, doesn't it?"

For a moment Joe forgot how to move his face.

"Say something clever," Emma Gould said. "Maybe about that sock you put in my mouth. I want to hear something slick and clever."

Joe said nothing.

"And while you're thinking of things," Emma Gould said, "think of this—they're watching us right now. If I tug this earlobe? You won't make the stairs."

He looked at the earlobe she'd indicated with a flick of her pale eyes. The right one. It looked like a chick pea, but softer. He wondered what it would taste like first thing in the morning.

Joe glanced down at the bar. "And if I pull this trigger?"

She followed his gaze, saw the pistol he'd placed between them.

"You won't reach your earlobe," he said.

Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the cen­ter of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with some­thing that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.

"I get off at midnight," she said.

He'd already had visions

of them racing across the

country in a stolen car,

unencumbered by a past or a

future, chasing a red sky all

the way to Mexico.

She stared at him the way she

had before, like she could see

the intestines curled inside

him, the pink of his lungs,

the thoughts that journeyed

among the folds of his brain.

From Live by Night by Dennis Lehane, available in October from William Morrow and Company.