Live by Night Page 0,2

her voice again.

Her eyes pulsed a bit when he pushed the sock into her mouth and then she tried to spit it out - they usually did - shaking her head as she saw the twine in his hand, but he was ready for her. He drew it tight across her mouth and back along the sides of her face. As he tied it off at the back of her head, she looked at him as if, until this point, the whole transaction had been perfectly honorable - a kick, even - but now he'd gone and sullied it.

"It's half silk," he said.

Another arch of her eyebrow.

"The sock," he said. "Go join your friends."

She knelt by Brendan Loomis, who'd never taken his eyes off Joe, not once the whole time.

Joe looked at the door to the counting room, looked at the padlock on the door. He let Loomis follow his gaze and then he looked Loomis in the eyes. Loomis's eyes went dull as he waited to see what the next move would be.

Joe held his gaze and said, "Let's go, boys. We're done."

Loomis blinked once, slowly, and Joe decided to take that as a peace offering - or the possibility of one - and got the hell out of there.

When they left, they drove along the waterfront. The sky was a hard blue streaked with hard yellow. The gulls rose and fell, cawing. The bucket of a ship crane swung in hard over the wharf road, then swung back with a scream as Paolo drove over its shadow. Longshoremen, stevedores, and teamsters stood at their pilings, smoking in the bright cold. A group of them threw rocks at the gulls.

Joe rolled down his window, took the cold air on his face, against his eyes. It smelled like salt, fish blood, and gasoline.

Dion Bartolo looked back at him from the front seat. "You asked the doll her name?"

Joe said, "Making conversation."

"You cuff her hands like you're putting a pin on her, asking her to the dance?"

Joe leaned his head out the open window for a minute, sucked the dirty air in as deep as he could. Paolo drove off the docks and up toward Broadway, the Nash Roadster doing thirty miles an hour easy.

"I seen her before," Paolo said.

Joe pulled his head back in the car. "Where?"

"I don't know. But I did. I know it." He bounced the Nash onto Broadway and they all bounced with it. "You should write her a poem maybe."

"Write her a fucking poem," Joe said. "Why don't you slow down and stop driving like we did something?"

Dion turned toward Joe, placed his arm on the seat back. "He actually wrote a poem to a girl once, my brother."

"No kidding?"

Paolo met his eyes in the rearview mirror and gave him a solemn nod.

"What happened?"

"Nothing," Dion said. "She couldn't read."

They headed south toward Dorchester and got stuck in traffic by a horse that dropped dead just outside Andrew Square. Traffic had to be routed around it and its overturned ice cart. Shards of ice glistened in the cobblestone cracks like metal shavings, and the iceman stood beside the carcass, kicking the horse in the ribs. Joe thought about her the whole way. Her hands had been dry and soft. They were very small and pink at the base of the palms. The veins in her wrist were violet. She had a black freckle on the back of her right ear but not on her left.

The Bartolo brothers lived on Dorchester Avenue above a butcher and a cobbler. The butcher and the cobbler had married sisters and hated each other only slightly less than they hated their wives. This didn't stop them, however, from running a speakeasy in their shared basement. Nightly, people came from the other sixteen parishes of Dorchester, as well as from parishes as far away as the North Shore, to drink the best liquor south of Montreal and hear a Negro songstress named Delilah Deluth sing about heartbreak in a place whose unofficial name was The Shoelace, which infuriated the butcher so much he'd gone bald over it. The Bartolo brothers were in The Shoelace almost every night, which was fine, but going so far as to reside above the place seemed idiotic to Joe. It would only take one legitimate raid by honest cops or T-Men, however unlikely that might be, and it would be nothing for them to kick in Dion and Paolo's door and discover money, guns, and jewelry that two