Live by Night

Thomas shook his head. “Not since…” He’d spent the last two nights at his son’s hospital bed, counting his sins and praying to a God he scarcely believed in anymore. Joe’s doctor had told him that even if Joe came out of the coma, brain damage was a possibility. Thomas, in a rage — that white-hot rage of which everyone from his shit of a father to his wife to his sons had been justifiably frightened — had ordered other men to bludgeon his own son. Now he pictured his shame as a blade left on hot coals until the steel was black and serpent-coils of smoke slithered along the edges. The point entered his abdomen below the rib cage and moved through his insides, cutting and cutting until he couldn’t see or breathe.

“Any more information on the other two, the Bartolos?” the commissioner asked.

“I would’ve thought you’d heard by now.”

Wilson shook his head. “I’ve been in budget meetings all morning.”

“Just came over the Teletype. They got Paolo Bartolo.”

“Who’s they?”

“Vermont State Police.”

“Alive?”

Thomas shook his head.

For some reason they might never understand, Paolo Bartolo had been driving a car stuffed with canned hams; they filled the back and were piled up in the foot well of the passenger seat. When he rolled a red light on South Main Street in St. Albans, about fifteen miles shy of the Canadian border, a state trooper tried to pull him over. Paolo took off. The trooper gave chase and other staties joined in and they eventually drove the car off the road near a dairy farm in Enosburg Falls.

Whether Paolo pulled a gun as he exited his car on a fine spring afternoon was still being ascertained. It was possible that he reached for his waistband. Also possible that he simply didn’t raise his hands fast enough. Given that either Paolo or his brother Dion had executed state trooper Jacob Zobe on the side of a road very similar to this one, the troopers took no chances. Every officer fired his service revolver at least twice.

“How many cops responded?” Wilson asked.

“Seven, I believe, sir.”

“And how many bullets struck the felon?”

“Eleven is the number I heard, but the truth awaits a proper autopsy.”

“And Dion Bartolo?”

“Holed up in Montreal, I’d assume. Or nearby. Dion was always the smarter of the two. Paolo’s the one you’d expect to stick his head up.”

The commissioner lifted a sheet of paper off one small pile on his desk and placed it atop another small pile. He looked out the window, seemed entranced by the Custom House spire a few blocks away. “The department can’t let you walk back out of this office carrying the same rank you carried in, Tom. You understand that?”

“I do, yes.” Thomas glanced around the office he’d coveted for the past ten years and felt no sense of loss.

“And if I demoted you to captain, I’d have to have a division house to hand over to you.”

“Which you don’t.”

“Which I don’t.” The commissioner leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “You can pray exclusively for your son now, Thomas, because your career just reached its highest floor.”

She’s not dead,” Joe said.

He’d come out of the coma four hours before. Thomas had arrived at Mass. General ten minutes after the doctor called. He’d brought the attorney Jack D’Jarvis with him. Jack D’Jarvis was a small, elderly man who wore wool suits of the most forgettable colors — tree bark brown, damp sand gray, blacks that appeared to have been left in the sun too long. His ties usually matched the suits; the collars of his shirts were yellowed, and on the rare occasions he wore a hat, it seemed too big for his head and perched on the tops of his ears. Jack D’Jarvis looked ready to be put out to pasture, and he’d looked that way for the better part of three decades, but no one but a stranger was stupid enough to believe it. He was the best criminal defense lawyer in the city, and few could name a close second. Over the years Jack D’Jarvis had dismantled at least two dozen ironclad cases Thomas had brought to the DA. It was said that when Jack D’Jarvis died, he’d spend his time in heaven springing all his former clients from hell.

The doctors examined Joe for two hours while Thomas and D’Jarvis cooled their heels in the corridor with the young patrolman manning the door.

“I can’t get him off,” D’Jarvis said.

“I know that.”

“Rest assured, though, the second-degree murder charge is a farce and the state’s attorney knows it. But your son will have to do time.”

“How much?”

D’Jarvis shrugged. “Ten years would be my guess.”

“In Charlestown?” Thomas shook his head. “There’ll be nothing left of him to walk back out those doors.”

“Three police officers are dead, Thomas.”

“But he didn’t kill them.”

“Which is why he won’t get the chair. But pretend this is anyone else but your son and you’d want him to get twenty years.”

“But he is my son,” Thomas said.

The doctors exited the room.

One of them stopped to talk to Thomas. “I don’t know what his skull is made of, but we’re guessing it’s not bone.”

“Doctor?”