Live by Night

Joe looked at Chief Figgis, then back at RD. “I’m thinking fifteen is about as generous as it gets for a job I’m not even asking you to show up to.”

RD scratched his stubble some more and looked down at the table for a bit. He looked up eventually, gave them his most boyish smile.

“You’re right, Mr. Coughlin. That is a fair deal, sir. And I’m just pleased as corn on the cob to agree to it.”

Chief Figgis leaned back in his chair, hands on his flat belly. “That’s great to hear, Robert Drew. I just knew we could come to an accord.”

“And we did,” RD said. “How will I pick up my cut?”

“Just drop by the bar every second Tuesday around seven at night,” Joe said. “Ask for the manager, Sian McAlpin.”

“Schwan?”

“Close enough,” Joe said.

“He a papist too?”

“He’s a she, and I never asked her.”

“Sian McAlpin. The Parisian. Tuesday nights.” RD slapped the table with his palms and stood up. “Well, that’s just great, I tell ya. A pleasure, Mr. Coughlin. Irv.” He tipped his hat to them both and gave them a half-wave, half-salute as he left.

For a full minute, no one said anything.

Eventually Joe turned in his chair a bit and asked Chief Figgis, “How soft is that kid’s head?”

“As a grape.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Do you think he’ll really take the deal?”

Figgis shrugged. “Time will tell.”

When RD showed up at the Parisian for his cut, he thanked Sian McAlpin when she handed it to him. He asked her to spell her name for him and told her it was right pretty when she did. He said he looked forward to their long association and had a drink at the bar. He was pleasant to all he encountered. Then he walked out, got in his car, and drove out past the Vayo Cigar Factory to Phyllis’s Place, the first speak where Joe had a drink in Ybor.

The bomb RD Pruitt threw into Phyllis’s Place wasn’t much of a bomb, but it didn’t have to be. The main room was so small a tall man couldn’t clap his hands without his elbows hitting the wall.

No one was killed, but a drummer named Cooey Cole lost his left thumb and never played again, and a seventeen-year-old girl who’d come in to pick up her daddy and drive him home lost a foot.

Joe sent three two-man teams to find the bugsy fuck, but RD Pruitt went hard to ground. They scoured the whole of Ybor, then the whole of West Tampa, then the whole of Tampa itself. Nobody could find him.

A week later, RD walked into another of Joe’s speaks on the east side, a place frequented almost exclusively by black Cubans. Walked in while the band was in full swing and the place was jumping. Ambled up to the stage and shot the bass trombonist in the knee and shot the singer in the stomach. He flipped an envelope onto the stage and walked out the back door.

The envelope was addressed to Sir Joseph Coughlin Nigger Fucker. Inside was a two-word note:

Sixty percent.

Joe went to see Kelvin Beauregard at his cannery. He took Dion and Sal Urso with him, and they met in Beauregard’s office at the back of the building. It looked down on the sealing floor. Several dozen women dressed in frocks and aprons with matching headbands stood on the sweltering floor around a serpentine system of conveyor belts. Beauregard watched them through a floor-to-ceiling window. He didn’t get up when Joe and his men entered. He didn’t look at them for a full minute. Then he turned in his chair and smiled and jerked his thumb at the glass.

“Got my eye on a new one,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Dion said, “New becomes old the second you drive it off the lot.”

Kelvin Beauregard raised an eyebrow. “Good point, good point. Gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

He took a cigar from a humidor on his desk but didn’t offer anyone else one.

Joe crossed his right leg over his left and hitched the crease in the ankle cuff. “We’d like to see if you could talk some sense into RD Pruitt.”

Beauregard said, “Ain’t too many people had success doing that in their lives.”

“Be that as it may,” Joe said, “we’d like you to try.”

Beauregard bit the end off his cigar and spit it into a wastebasket. “RD’s a grown man. He’s not requested my counsel, so it would be disrespectful to give it. Even if I agreed with the reason. And tell me, because I’m confused, what the reason would be?”

Joe waited until Beauregard had lit his cigar, waited while he stared through the flame at him and then stared through the smoke at him.

“In the interest of his own self-preservation,” Joe said, “RD needs to quit shooting up my clubs and meet with me so we can come to an accommodation.”

“Clubs? What kind of clubs?”

Joe looked over at Dion and Sal and said nothing.

“Bridge clubs?” Beauregard said. “Rotary clubs? I belong to the Greater Tampa Rotary Club, myself, and I don’t recall seeing you—”

“I come to you as an adult to discuss a piece of business,” Joe said, “and you want to play fucking games.”

Kelvin Beauregard put his feet up on his desk. “Is that what I want to do?”

“You sent this boy up against us. You knew he was crazy enough to do it. But all you’re going to do is get him killed.”

“I sent who?”