For a moment, Joe didn’t understand. And then he did.
He looked up at Emma and it no longer mattered what they did to him. He was okay with dying because living hurt too much.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s sorry,” Albert White said. “We’re all sorry.” He gestured toward somebody Joe couldn’t see. “Take her out of here.”
A beefy guy in a coarse wool jacket and knit hat pulled down on his forehead put his hands on Emma’s arm.
“You said you wouldn’t kill him,” Emma said to Albert.
Albert shrugged.
“Albert,” Emma said. “That was the deal.”
“And I’ll honor it,” Albert said. “Don’t you worry.”
“Albert,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.
“Dear?” Albert’s voice was far too calm.
“I never would have led him here if—”
Albert slapped her face with one hand and smoothed his shirt with the other. Slapped her hard enough to split her lips.
He looked down at his shirt. “You think you’re safe? You think I’m going to be humiliated by a whore? You’re under the impression I’m mush for you. Maybe I was yesterday, but I’ve been up all night. And I’ve already replaced you. Get me? You’ll see.”
“You said—”
Albert wiped her blood off his hand with a kerchief. “Put her in the fucking car, Donnie. Now, Donnie.”
The beefy guy wrapped Emma in a bear hug and started walking backward. “Joe! Please don’t hurt him anymore! Joe, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She screamed and kicked and scratched Donnie’s head. “Joe, I love you! I love you!”
The elevator gate slammed shut and the car rose out of the basement.
Albert squatted beside him and put a cigarette between his lips. A match flared and the tobacco cackled and he said, “Inhale. You’ll get your wits back faster.”
Joe did. For a minute, he sat on the floor and smoked and Albert crouched beside him and smoked his own cigarette and Brendan Loomis stood there watching.
“What’re you going to do with her?” Joe asked once he trusted himself to speak.
“With her? She just sold you down the river.”
“For a good reason, I bet.” He looked at Albert. “There was a good reason, right?”
Albert chuckled. “You’re some kind of rube, aren’t you?”
Joe raised a split eyebrow and the blood fell in his eye. He wiped at it. “What’re you going to do with her?”
“You should be more worried about what I’m going to do to you.”
“I am,” Joe admitted, “but I’m asking what you’re going to do with her.”
“Don’t know yet.” Albert shrugged and pulled a speck of tobacco off his tongue, flicked it away. “But you, Joe, you’re going to be the message.” He turned to Brendan. “Get him up.”
“What message?” Joe said as Brendan Loomis slipped his arms under him from behind and hoisted him to his feet.
“What happened to Joe Coughlin is what will happen to you if you cross Albert White and his crew.”
Joe said nothing. Nothing occurred to him. He was twenty years old. That’s all he was going to get in this world—twenty years. He hadn’t wept since he was fourteen but it was all he could do, looking into Albert’s eyes, not to break down and beg for his life.
Albert’s face softened. “I can’t let you live, Joe. If I could see any way I could, I’d try to make it work. And it’s not about the girl, if that helps. I can get whores anywhere. Got a pretty new one waiting for me as soon as I’m done with you.” He studied his hands for a moment. “But you shot up a small town and stole sixty thousand dollars without my permission and left three cops dead. That brings a shit-brown rain down on all of us. Because now every cop in New England thinks Boston gangsters are mad dogs to be put down like mad dogs. And I need to make everyone understand that’s just not true.” He said to Loomis. “Where’s Bones?”
Bones was Julian Bones, another of Albert’s gun monkeys.
“In the alley, engine running.”
“Let’s go.”
Albert led the way to the elevator and opened the gate and Brendan Loomis dragged Joe into the car.
“Turn him around.”
Joe was spun in place and the cigarette fell from his lips when Loomis gripped the back of his head and pushed his face into the wall. They pulled his hands behind his back. Coarse rope snaked around his wrists, Loomis pulling it tight with every loop before he tied off the ends. Joe, something of an expert on the subject, knew a secure knot when he felt one. They could leave him alone in this elevator and not come back till April and he still wouldn’t have freed himself.
Loomis spun him back around, then went to work the crank, and Albert pulled a fresh cigarette from a pewter case and put it between Joe’s lips and lit it for him. In the flare of the match, Joe could see that Albert took no joy from any of this, that when Joe was sinking to the bottom of the Mystic River with a leather noose around his head and sacks full of rocks tied to his ankles, Albert would rue the price of doing business in a dirty world.
For tonight anyway.
On the first floor, they left the elevator and walked down an empty service corridor, the sounds of the party reaching them through the walls—dueling pianos and a horn section going full blast and lots of gay laughter.
They reached the door at the end of the corridor. DELIVERIES had been stamped across the center in fresh yellow paint.
“I’ll make sure it’s clear.” Loomis opened the door onto a March night that had grown much rawer. A light sprinkle fell and gave a tinfoil smell to the iron fire escapes. Joe could also smell the building, the newness of the exterior, as if limestone dust kicked up by the drills still hung in the air.
Albert turned Joe to him and fixed his tie. He licked both his palms and smoothed Joe’s hair. He looked bereft. “I never wanted to grow up to be a man who kills people to maintain my profit margin, and yet I am. I never get a single night’s decent sleep—not fucking one, Joe. I get up every day in fear and lay my head back to the pillow at night the same way.” He straightened Joe’s collar. “You?”
“What?”
“Ever wanted to be anything else?”
“No.”
Albert picked something off Joe’s shoulder, flicked it away with his finger. “I told her if she delivered you to us, I wouldn’t kill you. Nobody else believed you’d be stupid enough to show up tonight, but I hedged my bets. So she agreed to lead you to me to save you. Or so she told herself. But you and I know I have to kill you, don’t we, Joe?” He looked at Joe with heartbroken eyes, glassy with moisture. “Don’t we?”
Joe nodded.
Albert nodded as well. He leaned in and whispered in Joe’s ear, “And then I’m going to kill her too.”
“What?”
“Because I loved her too.” Albert raised his eyebrows up and down. “And because the only way you could have known to knock over my poker game on that particular morning? Would be if she tipped you.”
Joe said, “Wait.” He said, “Look. She didn’t tip me to anything.”
“What else would you say?” Albert fixed his collar, smoothed his shirt. “Look at it this way—if what you sweethearts have is true love? Then you’ll meet tonight in heaven.”
He buried a fist in Joe’s stomach, driving it up to the solar plexus. Joe doubled over and lost all his oxygen again. He jerked at the rope around his wrists and tried to butt Albert with his head, but Albert merely slapped his face away and opened the door to the alley.
He grabbed Joe by the hair and straightened him up, so Joe could see the car waiting for him, the back door open, Julian Bones standing by it. Loomis crossed the alley and grabbed Joe’s elbow, and they dragged him over the threshold. Joe could smell the b
ackseat foot wells now. He could smell the oil rags and dirt.
Just as they were about to hoist him in, they dropped him. He fell to his knees on the cobblestones and he heard Albert yell, “Go! Go! Go!” and their footsteps on the cobblestones. Maybe they’d already shot him in the back of the head because the heavens descended in bars of light.
His face was saturated in white, and the buildings along the alley erupted in blue and red, and tires squealed and somebody shouted something through a megaphone and someone fired a gun and then another gun.
A man walked through the white light toward Joe, a trim and confident man, a man who wore command like a birthmark.
His father.
More men walked out of the white behind him, and Joe was soon surrounded by a dozen members of the Boston Police Department.
His father cocked his head. “So you’re a cop killer now, Joseph.”
Joe said, “I didn’t kill anybody.”
His father ignored that. “Looks like your accomplices were about to take you on the dead man’s drive. Did they decide you were too much of a liability?”
Several of the policemen had removed their billy clubs.
“Emma’s in the back of a car. They’re going to kill her.”
“Who?”
“Albert White, Brendan Loomis, Julian Bones, and some guy named Donnie.”
On the streets beyond the alley, several women screamed. A car horn blared, followed by the solid thump of a crash. More screams. In the alley, the rain turned from a drizzle to a heavy downpour.
His father looked at his men, then back at Joe. “Fine company you keep, son. Any other fairy tales you have for me?”
“It’s not a fairy tale.” Joe spit blood from his mouth. “They’re going to kill her, Dad.”
“Well, we won’t kill you, Joseph. In fact, I won’t touch you a’tall. But some of my coworkers would like a word.”
Thomas Coughlin leaned forward, hands on his knees, and stared at his son.
Somewhere behind that gaze of iron lived a man who’d slept on the floor of Joe’s hospital room for three days when Joe had the fever back in 1911, who’d read each of the city’s eight newspapers to him, cover to cover, who told him he loved him, who told him if God wanted his son, He’d have to go through him, Thomas Xavier Coughlin, and God would know, sure, what a rough proposition that could turn out to be.
“Dad, listen to me. She’s—”
His father spit in his face.
“He’s all yours,” he said to his men and walked away.
“Find the car!” Joe screamed. “Find Donnie! She’s in a car with Donnie!”
The first blow—a fist—connected with Joe’s jaw. The second, a shot from a billy club, he was pretty sure, hit his temple. After that, all light disappeared from the night.
Chapter Six
All the Sinners Saints
The ambulance driver gave Thomas his first hint of the publicity nightmare about to descend on the BPD.
As they strapped Joe to a wooden gurney and lifted him into the back of the ambulance, the driver said, “You throw this kid off the roof?”
The rain came down in a clatter so loud they all had to shout.
Thomas’s aide and driver, Sergeant Michael Pooley, said, “His injuries were sustained before we arrived.”
“Yeah?” The ambulance driver looked from one to the other, water pouring from the black brim of his white cap. “Horseshit.”
Thomas could feel the temperature rising in the alley, even in the rain, so he pointed at his son on the gurney. “This man was involved in the murders of those three police officers in New Hampshire.”
Sergeant Pooley said, “Feel better now, asshole?”
The ambulance driver was checking Joe’s pulse, eyes on his wristwatch. “I read the papers. All I do most days—sit up in my cab and read the fucking papers. And this kid was the driver. And while they were chasing him, they shot another police car all to hell.” He placed Joe’s wrist on his chest. “He didn’t do it, though.”
Thomas looked at Joe’s face—torn black lips, flattened nose, eyes swelled shut, a collapsed cheekbone, black blood crusted in his eyes and ears and nose and the corners of his mouth. Blood of Thomas’s blood. His creation.
“But if he hadn’t robbed the bank,” Thomas said, “they wouldn’t be dead.”
“If the other cops hadn’t used a fucking machine gun, they wouldn’t be dead.” The driver closed the doors, looked at Pooley and Thomas, and Thomas was surprised by the revulsion in his eyes. “Your guys probably just beat this kid to death. But he’s the criminal?”
Two guard units pulled in behind the ambulance, and all three vehicles drove off into the night. Thomas had to keep reminding himself to think of the beaten man in the ambulance as “Joe.” Thinking of him as “son” was too overwhelming. His flesh and blood, and a lot of that blood and some of that flesh lay in this alley.
He said to Pooley, “You put that APB out on Albert White?”
Pooley nodded. “And Loomis and Bones and Donnie No Last Name, but we assume it’s Donnie Gishler, one of White’s guys.”
“Make Gishler a priority. Get it out to all units that he might have a woman in the car. Where’s Forman?”
Pooley chin-gestured. “Up the alley.”
Thomas started walking and Pooley fell in line. When they reached the crowd of policemen by the service door, Thomas avoided looking at the puddle of Joe’s blood near his right foot, a puddle rich enough to receive the rain and still remain a bright red. Instead, he focused on his chief of detectives, Steve Forman.
“You got anything on the cars?”
Forman flipped open his steno notebook. “Dishwasher said there was a Cole Roadster parked in the alley between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty. After that, dishwasher said it was gone, said this Dodge replaced it.”
The Dodge was what they’d been trying to drag Joe into when Thomas and the cavalry had arrived.
“I want a priority APB on the Roadster,” Thomas said. “It’s being driven by Donald Gishler. There might be a woman in the backseat, Emma Gould. Steve, she’s of the Charlestown Goulds. Know who I mean?”
“Oh, yeah,” Forman said.
“Not Bobo’s kid. She’s Ollie Gould’s.”
“Okay.”
“Send someone to make sure she’s not safe and sound in bed on Union Street. Sergeant Pooley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you seen this Donnie Gishler in the flesh?”
Pooley nodded. “He’s about five-six, a hundred ninety pounds. Usually wears black knit caps. Had a handlebar mustache last time I saw him. The One-Six would have his mug shot.”
“Send someone to get it. And get out the description to all units.”
He looked at the puddle of his son’s blood. A tooth floated in it.
He and his eldest son, Aiden, hadn’t spoken in years, though he did receive the occasional letter filled with bland facts but no personal reflections. He didn’t know where he lived or even if he was alive or dead. His middle son, Connor, had been blinded during the police strike riots of ’19. Physically, he’d adapted to his infirmity with commendable speed, but mentally it had set ablaze his inclination toward self-pity, and he’d quickly turned to alcohol. After he’d failed to drink himself to death, he found religion. Shortly after he abandoned that flirtation (God apparently demanded more from his worshippers than a love affair with martyrdom), he took up residence at the Silas Abbotsford School for the Blind and Crippled. They gave him a custodian’s job—this, for a man who’d been the youngest assistant district attorney in state history assigned as lead prosecutor on a capital case—and he lived out his days there, mopping floors he couldn’t see. Every now and then he was offered a teaching job at the school, but he’d declined them all under the pretense of shyness. There was nothing s
hy about any of Thomas’s sons. Connor had simply decided to shutter himself away from all who loved him. Which, in his case, meant Thomas.
And here now was his youngest son, given over to a life of crime, a life of whores and bootleggers and gun thugs. A life that always seemed to promise glamour and riches but rarely delivered either. And now, because of his compatriots and Thomas’s own men, he might not live through the night.
Thomas stood in the rain and could smell nothing but the stink of his own horrid self.
“Find the girl,” he said to Pooley and Forman.
A patrol officer in Salem spotted Donnie Gishler and Emma Gould. By the time the chase ended, nine cruisers were involved, all from small North Shore towns—Beverly, Peabody, Marblehead. Several of the policemen saw a woman in the backseat of the car; several didn’t; one claimed he saw two or three girls back there, but they later confirmed he’d been drinking. After Donnie Gishler had driven two cruisers off the road at high speed, damaging both, and after the officers had taken his fire (however poorly aimed), they’d fired back.
Donnie Gishler’s Cole Roadster left the road at 9:50 P.M. in heavy rain. They were racing down Ocean Avenue in Marblehead alongside Lady’s Cove when one of the policemen either fired a lucky shot into Gishler’s tire or—more likely at forty miles an hour in the rain—the tire simply blew out from wear and tear. At that part of Ocean Avenue, there was very little avenue and endless ocean. The Cole left the road on three wheels, dipped over the shoulder, and snapped back out, its tires no longer touching ground. It entered eight feet of water with two of its windows shot out and sank before most of the policemen had left their vehicles.
A patrolman from Beverly, Lew Burleigh, stripped down to his skivvies and dove in, but it was dark, even after someone got the idea to point the cruisers’ headlamps at the water. Lew Burleigh dove into the frigid water four times, enough to suffer hypothermia that landed him in the hospital for a day, but he never found the car.
The divers found it the next afternoon, shortly after two, Gishler still behind the wheel. A piece of the steering wheel had snapped off and entered his body through his armpit. The gearshift had perforated his groin. That’s not what killed him, though. One of the more than fifty bullets fired by police that night had hit the back of his head. Even if the tire hadn’t blown out, the car would have entered the water.