Live by Night Page 0,19

much closer to the body. The heat radiated off the driver's roasted flesh in waves. He leaned back out of the car, certain he'd seen two cops in that cruiser as they'd raced across the field. He got another whiff of cooked flesh and lowered his head.

The other cop lay in the pond at his feet. He looked up from the sandy floor, the left side of his body as blackened as his partner's, the flesh on the right curdled but still white. He was about Joe's age, maybe a year older. His right arm pointed up. He'd probably used it to pull himself out of the burning car and fell into the water on his back, and it had stayed that way when he died.

But it still looked like he was pointing at Joe, the message clear:

You did this.

You. No one else. No one living anyway.

You're the first termite.
Chapter Four
A Hole at the Center of Things

Back in the city, he dumped the car he'd stolen in Lenox and replaced it with a Dodge 126 he found parked along Pleasant Street in Dorchester. He drove it to K Street in South Boston and sat down the street from the house he'd grown up in while he considered his options. There weren't many. By the time night fell, he'd probably be out of them.

It was in all the late editions:

THREE PITTSFIELD POLICEMEN CUT DOWN

(The Boston Globe)

3 MASS. POLICE OFFICERS BRUTALLY SLAIN

(The Evening Standard)

COP SLAUGHTER IN WESTERN MASS.

(The American)

The two men Joe had come across in the pond were identified as Donald Belinski and Virgil Orten. Both had left wives behind. Orten had left two children. After studying their photos for a bit, Joe decided that Orten had been the one driving the car and Belinski had been the one who pointed up at him from the water.

He knew the real reason they were dead was because one of their brother lawmen had been stupid enough to fire a fucking tommy gun from a car bouncing across uneven ground. He knew that. He also knew that he was Hickey's termite and Donald and Virgil never would have been in that field if he and the Bartolo brothers hadn't come to their small city to rob one of their small banks.

The third dead cop, Jacob Zobe, was a state trooper who'd pulled over a car along the edge of the October Mountain State Forest. He'd been shot once in the stomach, which bent him over, and once through the top of his skull, which finished him off. The killer or killers ran over his ankle as they sped away, snapping the bone in half.

The shooting sounded like Dion. It was how he fought - punched a guy in the stomach to fold him in half and then worked the head until he went down for good. Dion, to the best of Joe's knowledge, had never killed a man before, but he'd come close a few times, and he hated cops.

Investigators had yet to identify any suspects, at least publicly. Two of the suspects were described as "heavyset" and "of foreign descent and odor," while the third - possibly a foreigner as well - had been shot in the face. Joe looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Technically, he supposed, it was true; the earlobe was attached to the face. Or, in his case, it had been.

Even though no one had their names yet, a sketch artist with the Pittsfield Police Department had rendered their likenesses. So while most papers ran pictures of the three dead cops below the fold, above it they printed sketches of Dion, Paolo, and Joe. Dion and Paolo looked more jowly than normal and Joe would have to ask Emma if his face looked that thin and wolfish in the flesh, but otherwise, the resemblance was remarkable.

A four-state dragnet was in effect. The Bureau of Investigation had been consulted and was said to be joining the pursuit.

By now his father would have seen the papers. His father, Thomas Coughlin, deputy superintendent of the Boston Police Department.

His son, party to a cop killing.

Since Joe's mother had passed two years ago, his father worked himself to numb exhaustion six days a week. With a dragnet in effect for his own son, he'd have a cot brought into his office, probably not come home until they closed the case.

The family home was a four-story row house. It was an impressive structure, a redbrick bowfront where all the center rooms looked