his voice. Raised it to a roar. And it was a terrifying sound. "Where the fuck are they?"
"Shit." Albert snapped his fingers. "It's the tunnels. They dropped into the tunnels."
Maso turned to him. "What tunnels?"
"The ones running underneath this fucking neighborhood. It's how they get the booze in."
"So put men in the tunnels," Digger said.
"No one knows where most of them are." Albert jerked a thumb at Joe. "That's this asshole's genius. Ain't that right, Joe?"
Joe nodded, first at Albert and then at Maso. "This is our town."
"Yeah, well, not anymore," Albert said and drove the butt of the Thompson into the back of Joe's head.
Chapter Twenty-five
Higher Ground
Joe woke to blackness.
He couldn't see and he couldn't speak. At first he feared somebody had gone so far as to stitch his lips together, but after a minute or so, he suspected something that pressed up against the base of his nose might be tape. The more he accepted this, the more the tacky sensation around his lips, as if the skin were smeared with bubble gum, made sense.
His eyes weren't taped, though. What had initially presented itself as total dark began to give way to the occasional shape on the other side of a dense shroud of wool or rope.
It's a hood, something in his chest told him. They've got a hood over you.
His hands were cuffed behind his back. Definitely not rope binding them; metal all the way. His legs felt tied, and not terribly tight judging by how much he could move them - what felt like a full inch before he met resistance.
He lay on his right side, his face pressed to warm wood. He could smell low tide. He could smell fish and fish blood. He realized he'd been hearing the engine for some time before he recognized it as such. He'd been on enough boats in his life to recognize what it powered. And then the other sensations coalesced and made sense - the slap of waves against the hull, the rise and fall of the wood on which he lay. He could hardly be sure of this but he didn't hear any other engines, no matter how hard he concentrated on isolating the various sounds around him. He heard men's voices and footsteps passing back and forth on the deck and, after a while, he discerned the sharp inhale and fluttering exhale of someone close by smoking a cigarette. But no other engines, and the boat wasn't going terribly fast. Didn't feel like it anyway. Didn't sound like something in flight. Which meant it was fair to assume no one was coming after them.
"Someone get Albert. He's awake."
Then they were lifting him - one hand sinking through the hood and into his hair, two more hands under his armpits. He was dragged back along the deck and dropped into a chair, could feel the hard wooden seat under him and the hard wood slats at his back. Hands slid over his wrists and then the cuffs were unlocked. They'd barely had time to pop open before his arms were pulled around the back of the chair and the cuffs were snapped back on. Someone tied his arms and chest to the chair, tied them just short of too tight to breathe. Then someone - maybe the same someone, maybe someone else - did the same to his legs, tying them so tight to the chair legs that movement was out of the question.
They tilted the chair back and he screamed against the tape, the sound of it in his ears, because they were pushing him over the side of the boat. Even with the hood covering his head, he clenched his eyes shut, and he could hear his breath exit his nostrils so desperate and ragged. If breath could beg, his did.
The chair stopped tipping when it met a wall. Joe sat there at a forty-degree angle or so. He guessed his feet and the front chair legs were a foot and a half to two feet off the deck.
Someone removed his shoes. Then his socks. Then the hood.
He batted his eyelids rapid-time at the sudden return of light. And not any light - Florida light, immeasurably strong even though it was diffused by banks of roiling gray clouds. He couldn't see any sun, but the light managed to bounce off a nickel-plated sea. Somehow the brightness lived in the gray, lived in the clouds, lived in the sea, not strong enough to point to,