The cement had hardened. It squeezed Joe’s toes, heels, ankles. It squeezed everything so hard he could only assume some of the bones in his feet were broken. Maybe all of them.
He met Albert’s eyes and flicked his own at his left inside pocket.
“Stand him up.”
“No,” Joe tried to say, “look in my pocket.”
“Mmmm! Mmmm! Mmmm!” Albert mimicked, his eyes bulging. “Coughlin, show a little class. Don’t beg.”
They slashed the rope over Joe’s chest. Gino Valocco walked over with a hacksaw and dropped to his knees and sawed away at the front chair legs, cutting them free of the chair bottom.
“Albert,” he said through the tape, “look in this pocket. This pocket. This pocket. This one.”
Every time he said “this,” he jerked his head and his eyes toward the pocket.
Albert laughed and continued to mimic him and some of the other men joined in, Fausto Scarfone going so far as to imitate an ape. He made “hoo hoo hoo” sounds and scratched his armpits. Over and over, he jerked his head to the left.
The left chair leg came free of the seat, and Gino went to work on the right.
“Those are good cuffs,” Albert said to Ilario Nobile. “Take ’em off. He ain’t going anywhere.”
Joe could see he’d hooked him. He wanted to see in Joe’s pocket, but he had to find a way to do it without appearing to give in to his victim’s wishes.
Ilario removed the cuffs and tossed them to Albert’s feet because apparently Albert hadn’t earned enough respect to have them handed to him.
The right chair leg broke free of the seat and they pulled the chair off Joe and he stood upright in the tub of cement.
Albert said, “You get to use your hand once. You either rip the tape off your mouth or you show me what you’re trying to buy your pathetic fucking life with. You can’t do both.”
Joe didn’t hesitate. He reached into his pocket. He removed the photograph and flung it at Albert’s feet.
Albert picked it up off the deck as a dot appeared over his left shoulder, just beyond Egmont Key. Albert looked at the photo with a cocked eyebrow and that small, smug fucking smile of his, and he saw nothing special about it. His eyes flicked all the way to the left again and he began to move them slowly to the right and then his head went very still.
The dot became a dark triangle, moving fast over the glassy gray sea—a hell of a lot faster than the tug, fast as it was, could move.
Albert looked at Joe. It was a sharp and furious look. Joe saw clearly that he wasn’t furious because Joe had stumbled upon his secret. He was furious because he’d been kept as deep in the dark as Joe.
All this time, he’d thought she was dead too.
Christ, Albert, he wanted to say, in this we’re both her sons.
Even with six inches of electrical tape across his mouth, Joe knew Albert could see him smile.
The dark triangle was now, quite clearly, a boat. A classic runabout modified to accommodate extra passengers or bottles in the stern. Cut its speed by a third but that still made it faster than anything on the water. Several of the men on deck pointed and nudged one another.
Albert ripped the tape off Joe’s mouth.
The sound of the boat reached them. A buzz, like a distant wasp swarm.
Albert held the photograph in Joe’s face. “She’s dead.”
“Look dead to you, does she?”
“Where is she?” Albert’s voice was ragged enough for several men to look over at him.
“In the fucking picture, Albert.”
“Tell me where it was taken.”
“Sure,” Joe said, “and I’m sure nothing will happen to me then.”
Albert slammed both his fists into Joe’s ears and the sky pinwheeled overhead.
Gino Valocco shouted something in Italian. He pointed starboard.
A second boat had appeared, another modified runabout, with four men in it, coming out from behind a spoil bank about four hundred yards away.
“Where is she?”
The ringing in Joe’s ears was like a cymbal symphony. He shook his head repeatedly.
“Love to tell you,” he said, “but I’d love not to fucking drown more.”
Albert pointed at first one boat, then the other. “They won’t stop us. Are you a fucking idiot? Where is she?”
“Oh, let me think,” Joe said.
“Where?”
“In the photograph.”
“It’s an old one. You just folded up an old—”
“Yeah, I thought that too at first. But look at that asshole in the tux. The tall one, all the way to the right, leaning against the piano? Look at the newspaper. The one by his elbow, Albert. Look at the fucking headline.”
PRESIDENT-ELECT ROOSEVELT SURVIVES MIAMI ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
“That was last month, Albert.”
Now both boats were within 350 yards.
Albert looked at the boats, looked at Maso’s men, looked back at Joe. He let out a long breath through pursed lips. “You think they’re going to rescue you? They’re half our size and we have the high ground. You could send six boats our way and we’ll turn every last one of them into fucking matchsticks.” He turned to the men. “Kill them.”
They lined up along the gunwales. They knelt. Joe counted an even dozen of them. Five to starboard, five to port, Ilario and Fausto heading into the cabin for something. Most of the men on deck carried tommy guns and a few handguns but none had the rifles necessary for long-range shooting.
Ilario and Fausto made that point moot when they dragged a crate back out of the cabin. Joe noticed for the first time that there was a bronze tripod bolted to the deck at the gunwale and a toolbox sitting beside it. Then he realized it wasn’t a tripod exactly; it was a deck mount. For a gun. A big fucking gun. Ilario reached into the crate and removed two ammunition belts of .30-06 rounds that he lay beside the tripod. He and Fausto then reached into the crate and came back out with a 1903 ten-barrel Gatling. They placed it on top of the deck mount and went to work securing it.
The approaching runabouts grew louder. They were maybe 250 yards away now, which put them about a hundred yards out of range for anything but the Gatling. But once that fucker got locked onto the deck mount, it was capable of firing up to nine hundred rounds a minute. One sustained burst into either of the boats and the only thing left would be meat for the sharks.
Albert said, “Tell me where she is, and I’ll make it fast. One shot. You’ll never feel it. If you make me force it out of you, I’ll tear the pieces off you long after you’ve told me. I’ll stack them on the deck until the stack falls over.”
The men shouted at one another, changing their positions as the runabouts began to move erratically, the one on the port side adopting a serpentine pattern while the starboard assault boat jerked right-left, right-left, the engines ratcheting up in pitch.
Albert said, “Just tell me.”
Joe shook his head.
“Please,” Albert said so quietly no one else could hear. With the boat engines and the Gatling assembly, Joe could barely hear. “I love her.”
“I loved her too.”
“No,” Albert said. “I love her.”
They finished securing the Gatling to the deck mount. Ilario inserted the ammunition belt into the feed guide and blew at any dust that might be in the hopper.
Albert leaned into Joe. He looked around them. “I don’t want this. Who wants this? I just want to feel like I felt when I made her laugh or when she threw an ashtray at my head. I don’t even care about the fucking. I just want to watch her drink coffee in a hotel bathrobe. You have that, I hear. With the spic woman?”
“Yeah,” Joe said, “I do.”
“What is she by the way? Nigger or spic?”
“Both,” Joe said.
<
br /> “And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Albert,” Joe said, “why on earth would it bother me?”
Ilario Nobile, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, manned the crank handle of the Gatling while Fausto took a seat below the gun, the first of the ammunition belts lying across his lap like a grandmother’s blanket.
Albert drew his long-barrel .38 and placed it to Joe’s forehead. “Tell me.”
No one heard the fourth engine until it was too late.
Joe looked as deep into Albert as he ever had and what he saw there was someone as shit-scared-terrified as everyone else he’d ever known.
“No.”
Farruco Diaz’s plane appeared out of the western clouds. It came in high but dove fast. Dion stood tall in the rear seat, his machine gun secured to the mount Farruco Diaz had busted Joe’s balls about for months until he let him install it. Dion wore thick goggles and seemed to be laughing.
The first thing Dion and his machine gun aimed at was the Gatling.
Ilario turned to his left and Dion’s bullets blew off his ear and moved through his neck like a scythe and the ricochets bounced off the gun and bounced off the deck mount and the deck cleats, and collided with Fausto Scarfone. Fausto’s arms danced in the air by his head and then he tipped over, spitting red everywhere.
The deck was spitting too—wood and metal and sparks. The men ducked, crouched, and curled into balls. They screamed and fumbled with their weapons. Two fell off the boat.
Farruco Diaz’s plane banked and surged toward the clouds and the gunners recovered. They got to their feet and fired away. The steeper the plane climbed, the more vertical they fired.
And some of the bullets came back down.
Albert took one in the shoulder. Another guy grabbed the back of his neck and fell to the deck.
The smaller boats were now close enough to be fired upon. But all of Albert’s gunners had turned their backs to shoot at Farruco’s plane. Joe’s gunners weren’t the best shots—they were in boats and boats that were moving wildly—but they didn’t have to be. They managed to hit hips and knees and abdomens and a third of the men on the boat flopped to the deck and made the noises men made when they were shot in the hip and the knees and the abdomen.
The plane came back for a second pass. Men were firing from the boats and Dion was working that machine gun like it was a fireman’s hose and he was the fire chief. Albert righted himself and pointed his .32 long-barrel at Joe as the back of the boat turned into a tornado of dust and chips of wood and men failing to escape a fusillade of lead and Joe lost sight of Albert.
Joe was hit in the arm by a bullet fragment and once in the head by a wood chip the size of a bottle cap. It ripped off a piece of his left eyebrow and nicked the top of his left ear on its way into the Gulf. A Colt .45 landed at the base of the tub, and Joe picked it up and dropped the magazine into his hand long enough to confirm there were at least six bullets left in it before he slammed it back home.
By the time Carmine Parone reached him, the blood flowing out of the left side of his face looked a lot worse than it was. Carmine gave Joe a towel, and he and one of the new kids, Peter Wallace, set to work on the cement with axes. While Joe had assumed it had already set, it hadn’t, and after fifteen or sixteen swings of the axes and a shovel Carmine had found in the galley, they got him out of there.
Farruco Diaz set his plane down on the water and cut the engine. The plane glided over to them. Dion climbed aboard and the men went about killing the wounded.
“How you doing?” Dion asked Joe.
Ricardo Cormarto tracked a young man who was dragging himself toward the stern, his legs a mess, but the rest of him looking ready for a night out in a beige suit and cream-colored shirt, mango-red tie flipped over his shoulder, like he was preparing to eat a lobster bisque. Cormarto put a burst into his spine and the young man exhaled an outraged sigh, so Cormarto put another burst into his head.
Joe looked at the bodies piled on the deck and said to Wallace, “If he’s alive in all that, bring him to me.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Wallace said.
He tried flexing his ankles but it hurt too much. He placed a hand to the ladder under the wheelhouse and said to Dion, “What was the question again?”
“How you doing?”
“Oh,” Joe said, “you know.”
A guy by the gunwale begged for his life in Italian, but Carmine Parone shot him in the chest and kicked him overboard.
Fasani flipped Gino Valocco over onto his back next. Gino held his hands in front of his face, the blood coming from his side. Joe remembered their conversation about parenting, about there never being a good time to have a kid.
Gino said what everyone said. He said, “Wait.” He said, “Hold—”
But Fasani shot him through the heart and kicked him into the Gulf.
Joe looked away only to find Dion looking at him steadily, carefully. “They would have killed every last one of us. Hunted us down. You know that.”
Joe blinked an affirmative.
“And why?”
Joe didn’t answer.
“No, Joe. Why?”
Joe still didn’t answer.
“Greed,” Dion said. “Not sensible greed, not fucking sane greed. Endless greed. Because it’s never enough for 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, bu
t 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 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.