Live by Night Page 0,101

piece of Joe's toast. "You think you're going to push me out?"

Joe nodded. "I think I did, Albert."

Albert shook his head. "Soon as you're dead, the Suarezes will fall in line and you can be damn sure the dealers will."

"If you wanted me dead, you would have done it. You came to negotiate."

Albert shook his head. "I do want you dead and there's no negotiation. I just wanted you to see that I've changed. I've mellowed. We're going to walk out the back door and leave the girl behind. Won't touch a hair on her head, though, Lord knows, she could spare it." Albert stood. He buttoned his suit coat over his softening belly. He straightened the brim of his hat. "You make a fuss, we take her with us, kill you both."

"That's the proposition?"

"That's it."

Joe nodded. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and placed it on the table. He smoothed it. He looked up at Albert and began reading the names listed there. "Pete McCafferty, Dave Kerrigan, Gerard Mueler, Dick Kipper, Fergus Dempsey, Archibald - "

Albert pulled the list from Joe's fingers, read the rest of it.

"You can't find them, can you, Albert? All your best soldiers, and they're not answering their phones or their doorbells. You keep telling yourself it's a coincidence, but you know that's bullshit. We got to them. Every one of them. And, Albert, I hate to tell you this, but they're not coming back to you."

Albert chuckled, but his normally ruddy face was now the white of an elephant tusk. He looked at Bones and Loomis and chuckled some more. Bones chuckled along with him, but Loomis looked sick.

"While we're on the subject of people in your organization," Joe said, "how'd you know where to find me?"

Albert glanced at Graciela, a little bit of color returning to his face. "You're simple, Joe - just follow the pussy."

Graciela's jaw tightened but she said nothing.

"It's a good line, I guess," Joe said, "but unless you knew where to find me last night - and you didn't, because nobody did - then you wouldn't have been able to tail me here."

"You got me." Albert held up his hands. "I guess I have other methods."

"Like a guy inside my organization?"

The smile slid through Albert's eyes before he blinked it away.

"Same guy who told you to take me in the cafe, not on the street?"

No smile in Albert's eyes anymore. They turned flatter than pennies.

"He tell you if you took me in the cafe, I wouldn't put up a fight because of the girl? Tell you I'd even take you to a bag of cash I stashed in a flop over in Hyde Park?"

Brendan Loomis said, "Shoot him, boss. Shoot him now."

Joe said, "You should have shot me coming through the door."

"Who says I won't?"

"I do," Dion said, coming up behind Loomis and Bones, a long-barrel .38 pointed at each of them. Sal Urso entered through the front door and Lefty Downer came in behind Sal, both of them wearing trench coats on a cloudless day.

The cafe owner and the couple at the counter were officially rattled now. The old man kept patting his chest. The cafe owner thumbed her rosary beads, her lips moving frantically.

Joe asked Graciela, "Could you go tell them we won't hurt them?"

She nodded and got up from the table.

Albert said to Dion, "So betrayal's your defining personality trait, eh, fat boy?"

"Only once, you dandy fuck," Dion said. "Shoulda thought long and hard about what I did to your boy Blum last year before you bought my bullshit this time around."

"How many more we got on the street?" Joe asked.

"Four cars full," Dion said.

Joe stood. "Albert, I don't want to kill anybody in this cafe but that doesn't mean I won't if you give me half a reason."

Albert smiled, smug as always, even outnumbered and outgunned. "We won't give you a quarter of a reason. How's that for cooperation?"

Joe spit in his face.

Albert's eyes went as small as peppercorns.

For a very long moment, no one in the cafe moved.

"I'm going to reach for my handkerchief," Albert said.

"You reach for anything, we plug you where you stand," Joe said. "Use your fucking sleeve."

As he did, Albert's smile returned but his eyes remained filled with murder. "So you're either killing me or running me out of town."

"That's right."

"Which?"

Joe looked at the cafe owner and her rosary, at Graciela standing beside her, her hand on the woman's shoulder.

"Don't think I feel like killing you