Live by Night

Sal said, “She’s about twenty yards behind us. Full tank of gas, uniforms on the seat.” He looked Dion up and down. “You weren’t an easy fit, mister.”

Dion slapped the side of his head but not too hard. “What’s it like out there?”

“The laws are everywhere. They’re looking for Spaniards, though.”

“Not Cubans?”

Sal shook his head. “You got this city riled up, son.”

The last of the sailors had mustered and the chief was giving them orders, pointing at the crates.

“Time to move,” Joe said. “Good to meet you, Sal.”

“You too, sir. I’ll see you there.”

They left the edge of the crowd and found the truck where Sal had said it would be. It was a two-ton flatbed with a steel bed and steel roll bars covered by a canvas tarp. They hopped up front, and Joe ground the shifter into first and they lurched out onto Nineteenth Street.

Twenty minutes later, they pulled over along the side of Route 41. There was a forest here, longleaf pines taller than Joe had imagined a tree could get and smaller slash and pond pines, all rising from a thick warren of overgrown palmetto and briars and scrub oak. By the smell of it, he guessed a swamp lay somewhere just east of them. Graciela was waiting for them by a tree that had snapped in half during a recent storm. She’d changed the dress she’d been wearing for a gaudy black net evening gown with zigzag hem. Imitation gold seed beads, black sequins, and a low neckline that exposed her cleavage and the edges of her brassiere cups completed the impression of a party girl who’d stayed out well past the end of the party and drifted, in the light of day, into a much crueler place.

Joe looked at her through the windshield and didn’t get out of the truck. He could hear his own breathing.

“I can do it for you,” Dion said.

“No,” Joe said. “My plan, my responsibility.”

“You got no problem delegating other things.”

He turned and looked at Dion. “You saying I want to do this?”

“I seen the way you look at each other.” Dion shrugged. “Maybe she likes it rough. Maybe you do too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about — the way we look at each other? You keep your eyes on your work, not on her.”

“All due respect,” Dion said, “you too.”

Shit, Joe thought, as soon as a guy felt sure you weren’t going to kill him, he sassed you.

Joe got out of the truck and Graciela watched him come. She’d already done some of the work herself — there was a tear in her dress by her left shoulder blade and light scratches on her left breast and she’d bit her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. As he approached, she dabbed at it with a handkerchief.

Dion got out of the truck on his side and they both looked over at him. He held up the uniform Sal Urso had left on the seat for him.

“Go about your business,” Dion said. “I’m gonna change.” He chuckled and walked to the back of the truck.

Graciela held out her right arm. “You don’t have much time.”

Suddenly Joe didn’t know how to take someone’s hand. It seemed unnatural.

“You don’t,” she said.

He reached out, took her hand in his. It was harder than any woman’s hand he’d ever touched. The heels of the palm were rocks from rolling cigars all day, the slim fingers as strong as ivory.

“Now?” he asked her.

“Now would be best,” she said.

He gripped her wrist with his left hand and curled the fingers of his right into the flesh by her shoulder. He pulled his nails down her arm. At the elbow he broke off and took a breath because his head felt like it was filled with wet newspaper.

She snatched her wrist out of his grip and looked at the scratches on her arm. “You have to make them look real.”

“They look plenty real.”

She pointed at her biceps. “They’re pink. And they stop at the elbow. They need to bleed, bobo niño, and go down to my hand. Yes? You remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Joe said. “It’s my plan.”

“Then act like it.” She thrust her arm at him. “Dig and pull.”

Joe wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard laughter coming from the back of the truck. He wrapped his hand firmly around her bicep this time and his fingernails sank into the faint tracks he’d already laid. Graciela wasn’t quite as brave as her talk. Her eyes wiggled in their sockets and her flesh quivered.

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Hurry, hurry.”

She locked eyes with him and he pulled his hand down the inside of her arm, stripping the skin as he went, opening the seams in her flesh. As he continued on past her elbow, she hissed and turned her arm so that his nails plowed along her forearm and ended at her wrist.

When he dropped her hand, she slapped him with it.

“Christ,” he said, “I’m not doing it because I like it.”

“So you claim.” She slapped him again, this time across the lower jaw and the top of his neck.

“Hey! I can’t pull up to a fucking guard shack with welts all over my face.”

“Then you better stop me,” she said and swung for him again.