Live by Night

What he could still do — what he should have done in Pittsfield — was vanish. Not in two hours. Now. Not wait around for a woman who might choose not to join him under the present circumstances. Just leave with the shirt on his back and a bag of money in his hand. The roads were all being watched, yes. Same for trains and buses. And even if he could get out to the farmlands south and west of the city and steal a horse, it wouldn’t do him any good because he didn’t know how to ride one.

That left the sea.

He’d need a boat, but not a pleasure craft and not an obvious rumrunner like a sea skiff or a garvey. He’d need a worker’s boat, one with rusted cleats and frayed tackle, a deck piled high with dented lobster traps. Something moored in Hull or Green Harbor or Gloucester. If he boarded by seven, it would probably be three or four in the morning before the fisherman noticed it missing.

So now he was stealing from workingmen.

Except the boat would be registered. Would have to be, or he’d move on to another. He’d get the address off the registration, mail the owner enough money to buy two boats or just get the fuck out of the lobster business altogether.

It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he’d pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else. But he also stole because it was fun and he was good at it and it led to other things he was good at like bootlegging and rum-running, which is why he knew his way around boats in the first place. Last June, he’d run a boat from a no-name fishing village in Ontario across Lake Huron to Bay City, Michigan, another from Jacksonville to Baltimore in October, and just last winter ferried cases of newly distilled rum out of Sarasota and across the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, where he’d blown his entire profit one weekend in the French Quarter on sins that, even now, he could only remember in fragments.

So he could pilot most boats, which meant he could steal most boats. He could walk out this door and be on the South Shore in thirty minutes. The North Shore would take a little longer, but this time of year there’d probably be more boats up there to choose from. If he set out from Gloucester or Rockport, he could reach Nova Scotia in three to four days. And then he’d send for Emma after a couple of months.

Which seemed a bit long.

But she’d wait for him. She loved him. She’d never said it, true, but he could feel her wanting to. She loved him. He loved her.

She’d wait.

Maybe he’d just swing by the hotel. Pop his head in real quick, see if he could spot her. If they both vanished, they’d be impossible to trace. But if he disappeared and then sent for her, by that point, the cops or the BI could have figured out who she was and what she meant to him and she’d show up in Halifax with a posse on her tail. He’d open the door to greet her, they’d both go down in bullet rain.

She wouldn’t wait.

He either went with her now or without her forever.

He looked at himself in the glass of his mother’s china cabinet and remembered why he’d come here in the first place — no matter where he decided to go, he wouldn’t get far dressed like this. The left shoulder of his coat was black with blood, his shoes and trouser cuffs were caked in mud, his shirt torn from the woods and speckled with blood.

In the kitchen, he opened the bread box and pulled out a bottle of A. Finke’s Widow Rum. Or, as most called it, Finke’s. He removed his shoes and carried them and the rum with him up the service stairs to his father’s bedroom. In the bathroom, he washed as much of the dried blood from his ear as he could, careful not to disturb the heart of the scab. When he was certain it wasn’t going to bleed, he took a few steps back and appraised it in relation to the other ear and the rest of his face. As deformities went, it wasn’t going to make anyone look twice once the scab fell away. And even now, the majority of the black scab clung to the underside of his ear; it was noticeable, no question, but not in the way a black eye or broken nose would have been.

He had a few sips of the Finke’s while he chose a suit from his father’s closet. There were fifteen of them, about thirteen too many for a policeman’s salary. Same with the shoes, the shirts, the ties and hats. Joe chose a striped malacca tan single-breasted suit from Hart Schaffner & Marx with a white Arrow shirt. The silk tie was black with diagonal red stripes every four inches or so, the shoes a pair of black Nettletons, and the hat a Knapp-Felt, as smooth as a dove’s breast. He stripped off his own clothes and folded them neatly on the floor. He placed his pistol and his shoes on top and changed into his father’s clothes, then returned the pistol to the waistband at the small of his back.