Live by Night

When the riders departed, thundering out of Ybor along Seventh and firing their rifles in the air, Dion sent men to follow them — two men per horse. Just before dawn, unknown assailants entered the homes of eight local men across the Greater Tampa/St. Petersburg area and beat those men nearly to death, some in front of their families. When a wife intervened in Temple Terrace, they broke her arms with a bat. When a son in Egypt Lake tried to impede them, they tied the boy to a tree and let the ants and mosquitoes have at him. The most prominent of the victims, the dentist Victor Toll, was rumored to have replaced Kelvin Beauregard as the head of the town Klavern. Dr. Toll was tied to the hood of his car. He was forced to lie there in a soup of his blood and smell his own house burn to the ground.

This effectively ended the power of the Ku Klux Klan in Tampa for three years, but the Pescatore Family and the Coughlin-Suarez Gang had no way of knowing that, so they took no chances and moved Joe to the Centro Asturiano Hospital. There a surgical drain was inserted to offset the internal bleeding, the source of which mystified the original doctor, which is why they sent for the second doctor, a gentle Spaniard with the most beautiful fingers Graciela had ever seen.

By this point, Joe was mostly out of danger for hemorrhagic shock, the main killer of abdominal knifing victims. Second to that was liver damage, and his liver had been given a clean bill of health. This, the doctors told him much later, was thanks to his father’s watch, which bore a new scrape on the dust cover. The point of the knife had glanced off the cover first, altering its path, however slightly.

The first doctor had done his best to check for damage to the duodenum, the rectum, the colon, the gallbladder, the spleen, and the terminal ileum, but the conditions had not been ideal. Joe had been stabilized on the dirty floor of an abandoned building and then moved across the bay on a boat. By the time they got him into an operating room, more than an hour had passed.

The second doctor who examined Joe suspected, due to the angle the blade had traveled during its peritoneal penetration, that there was damage to the spleen, and they cut Joe open again. The Spanish doctor was on the money. He repaired the nick in Joe’s spleen and removed the toxic bile that had begun to ulcerate his abdominal wall, though some damage was already done. Joe would require two more surgeries before the month was out.

After the second surgery, he woke to someone sitting at the foot of his bed. His vision was blurred to the point that it turned the air to gauze. But he could make out a thick head and a long jaw. And a tail. The tail thumped against the sheet over his leg and the panther came into focus. It stared at him with its hungry yellow eyes. Joe’s throat constricted and the flesh that covered it was slick with sweat.

The panther licked its upper lip and nose.

It yawned, and Joe wanted to close his eyes in the face of those magnificent teeth, the white of every bone they’d ever cracked in half and torn the meat from.

The mouth closed and the yellow eyes found him again and the cat placed its front paws on his stomach and walked up his body to his head.

Graciela said, “What cat?”

He stared up into her face, blinking at the sweat. It was morning; the air coming through the windows was cool and bore the scent of camellias.

After the surgeries, he was also prohibited from having sex for three months. Alcohol, Cuban food, shellfish, nuts, and corn were forbidden. If he feared that the lack of lovemaking would drive him and Graciela apart (and he did; so did she), it actually had the opposite effect. By the second month, he learned a different way to satisfy her, using his mouth, a way he’d stumbled upon by accident a few times over the years, but which now became his sole method of giving her pleasure. Kneeling before her, her ass cupped in his hands, his mouth covering the gateway to her womb, a gateway he’d come to think of as sacred and sinful and luxuriously slippery all at the same time, he felt he’d finally found something worth taking a knee for. If surrendering all preconceived notions of what a man was expected to give and receive from a woman was what it took to feel as pure and useful as he felt with his head between Graciela’s thighs, then he wished he’d lost those notions years ago. Her initial protestations — no, you can’t; a man does not do that; I must bathe; you cannot possibly like the taste — gave way to something bordering on addiction. For the final month before she could return the favor, Joe realized they were averaging five acts of oral gratification a day.