Live by Night Page 0,144
them." Dion's face was purple with rage when he leaned in so close to Joe their noses touched. "It's never fucking enough."
Dion leaned back and Joe stared at his friend a long time and in that time he heard someone say there was no one left to kill.
"It's never enough for any of us," Joe said. "You, me, Pescatore. Tastes too good."
"What?"
"The night," Joe said. "Tastes too good. You live by day, you play by their rules. So we live by night and play by ours. But, D? We don't really have any rules."
Dion gave that some thought. "Not too many, no."
"Starting to wear me out."
"I know it," Dion said. "I can see it."
Fasani and Wallace dragged Albert White across the deck and dropped him in front of Joe.
He was missing the back of his head and there was a black gout of blood where his heart should have been. Joe squatted by the corpse and fished his father's watch from Albert's vest pocket. He checked it quickly for damage, found none, and pocketed it. He sat back on the deck.
"I was supposed to look him in the eye."
"How's that?" Dion said.
"I was supposed to look him in the eye and say, 'You thought you got me, but I fucking got you.' "
"You had that chance four years ago." Dion lowered his hand to Joe.
"I wanted it again." Joe took the hand.
"Shit," Dion said as he lifted him to his feet, "ain't no one gets that kinda chance twice."
Chapter Twenty-six
Back to Black
The tunnel that led to the Romero Hotel began at Pier 12. From there it ran eight blocks under Ybor City and took fifteen minutes to traverse if the tunnel wasn't flooded by high tide or overrun with night rats. Luckily for Joe and his crew, it was midday and low tide when they arrived at the pier. They covered the distance in ten minutes. They were sunburned, they were dehydrated, and in Joe's case they were wounded, but Joe had impressed upon everyone during the ride in from Egmont Key that if Maso was half as smart as Joe knew he was, he'd have put a limit on when he was supposed to hear back from Albert. If he assumed it had all gone to hell, he'd waste no time making tracks.
The tunnel ended at a ladder. The ladder rose to the door of the furnace room. Beyond the furnace room was the kitchen. Past the kitchen was the manager's office and beyond that was the front desk. In each of the latter three positions, they could see and hear if anything was waiting for them beyond the doors, but between the top of the ladder and the furnace room lay one hell of a question mark. The steel door was always locked because it was, during normal operation, opened only upon hearing a password. The Romero had never been raided because Esteban and Joe paid the owners to pay the proper people to look the other way and also because it brought no attention to itself. It didn't run an active speakeasy; it merely distilled and distributed.
After several arguments about how to get through a steel door with three bolts and the wrong end of the lock cylinder on their side, they decided that the best shot among them - in this case, Carmine Parone - would cover from the top of the ladder while Dion solved the lock with a shotgun.
"If there's anyone on the other side of that door, we're all fish in a barrel," Joe said.
"No," Dion said. "Me and Carmine are fish in a barrel. Hell, I'm not even sure we'll survive the ricochets. Rest of you nancy boys? Shit." He smiled at Joe. "Fire in the hole."
Joe and the other men went back down the ladder and stood in the tunnel and they heard Dion say, "Last chance," to Carmine and then he fired the first shot into the hinge. The blast was loud - metal meeting metal in a concrete and metal enclosure. Dion didn't pause, either. With the sound of the fragments still pinging around up there, he fired a second and third blast and Joe assumed that if anyone was left in the hotel, they were coming for them now. Hell, if all that was left was people on the tenth floor, they damn sure knew they were here.
"Let's go, let's go," Dion shouted.
Carmine hadn't made it. Dion lifted his body out of the way and sat him against