Live by Night Page 0,145

the wall as they came up the ladder. A piece of metal - who knew from what - had entered Carmine's brain through his eye, and he stared back at them with his good one, an unlit cigarette still drooping from his lips.

They wrenched the door off its hinges and went into the boiler room and through the boiler room into the distillery and the kitchen beyond. The door between the kitchen and the manager's office had a circular window in the center that looked out onto a small access way with a rubber floor. The manager's door was ajar, and the office beyond showed evidence of a recent war party - wax paper with crumbs on top, coffee cups, an empty bottle of rye, overflowing ashtrays.

Dion took a look and said to Joe, "Never expected to see old age, myself."

Joe exhaled through his mouth and went through the door. They went through the manager's office and came out behind the front desk and by that point they knew the hotel was empty. It didn't feel ambush-empty, it felt empty-empty. The place for an ambush had been the boiler room. If they'd wanted to draw them in a little farther just to be sure they caught any stragglers, the kitchen would have been the spot. The lobby, though, was a logistical nightmare - too many places to hide, too easy to scatter, and ten steps from the street.

They sent some men up to the tenth in the elevator and a few more by way of the stairs, just in case Maso had come up with an ambush plan Joe simply couldn't fathom. The men came back and reported that the tenth was cleaned out, though they had found both Sal and Lefty laid out on the beds in 1009 and 1010.

"Bring 'em down," Joe said.

"Yes, sir."

"And have someone bring Carmine in from the ladder too."

Dion lit a cigar. "I can't believe I shot Carmine in the face."

"You didn't shoot him," Joe said. "Ricochets."

"Splitting hairs," Dion said.

Joe lit a cigarette and allowed Pozzetta, who'd been an army medic in Panama, to take another look at his arm.

Pozzetta said, "You need to get that treated, boss. Get you some drugs."

"We got drugs," Dion said.

"The right drugs," Pozzetta said.

"Go out the back," Joe said. "Go get me what I need or find the doc'."

"Yes, sir," Pozzetta said.

Half a dozen members of the Tampa PD on their payroll were called and came down. One of them brought a meat wagon and Joe said good-bye to Sal and Lefty and Carmine Parone, who just ninety minutes ago had dug Joe out of a cement bucket. It was Sal who got to him the most, though; only in retrospect did the full measure of their five years together hit him. He'd had him into the house for dinner countless times, sometimes brought sandwiches to him in the car at night. He'd entrusted him with his life, with Graciela's life.

Dion put a hand on his back. "This is a tough one."

"We gave him a hard time."

"What?"

"This morning in my office. You and me. We gave him a hard time, D."

"Yeah." Dion nodded a couple of times and then blessed himself. "Why'd we do that again?"

"I don't even know," Joe said.

"There had to be a reason."

"I wish it meant something," Joe said and stepped back so his men could load them into the meat wagon.

"It means something," Dion said. "Means we should settle up with the fucks who killed him."

The doctor was waiting at the front desk when they got back from the loading dock and he cleaned Joe's wound and sutured it while Joe got his reports from the police officers he'd sent for.

"The men he had working for him today," Joe said to Sergeant Bick of the Third District, "they on his permanent payroll?"

"No, Mr. Coughlin."

"Did they know they were going after my men in the streets?"

Sergeant Bick looked at the floor. "I gotta assume so."

"I gotta too," Joe said.

"We can't kill cops," Dion said.

Joe was looking into Bick's eyes when he said, "Why not?"

"It's frowned upon," Dion said.

Joe said to Bick, "You know of any cops who are with Pescatore now?"

"Everyone who shot it out today, sir? They're writing reports right now. The mayor's not happy. The chamber of commerce is livid."

"The mayor's not happy?" Joe said. "The chamber of fucking commerce?" He slapped Bick's hat off the top of his head. "I'm not happy! Fuck everyone else! I'm not happy!"

There was an odd silence