Live by Night

When he stopped, he left his face in his hands, and the dog came over and lay beside him on the porch and pressed its head against Figgis’s outer thigh and shuddered, its lips flapping.

“We’ve got her with a special doctor,” Joe said.

Figgis lowered his hands, looked at Joe with hate in his red eyes. “What kind of doctor?”

“Kind gets people off heroin, Irv.”

Figgis held up one finger. “Do not ever call me by my Christian name again. You will call me Chief Figgis and Chief Figgis only for whatever days or years remain in our acquaintance. Are we clear?”

“We didn’t do this to her,” Joe said. “We just found her. And pulled her out of where she was, which was a pretty bad spot.”

“And then figured out how to profit from it.” Figgis pointed at the picture of his daughter with the three men and the metal collar and chain. “You people peddle in that. Whether it’s my daughter or someone else’s.”

“I don’t,” Joe said, knowing how feeble it sounded. “I just run rum.”

Figgis wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and then the backs of them. “The profit from the rum buys the organization the other things. Don’t you sit there, sir, and pretend it don’t. Name your price.”

“What?”

“Your price. For telling me where my daughter is.” He turned and looked at Joe. “You tell me. Tell me where she is.”

“She’s with a good doctor.”

Figgis thumped his fist off his porch.

“In a clean facility,” Joe said.

Figgis punched the floorboard.

“I can’t tell you,” Joe said.

“Until?”

Joe looked at him for a long time.

Eventually Figgis rose and the dog rose with him. He went through his screen door and Joe heard him dialing. When he spoke into the phone his voice was higher and hoarser than normal. “RD, you’re gonna meet this boy again and there ain’t another discussion to be had on that matter.”

On the porch, Joe lit a cigarette. A few blocks away, horns beeped distantly on Howard.

“Yeah,” Figgis said into the phone, “I’ll come too.”

Joe plucked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and gave it to the small breeze.

“You’ll be safe. I swear.”

He hung up and stood at the screen for some time before pushing the door open, and he and the dog came back out on the porch.

“He’ll meet you on Longboat Key, where they built that Ritz, at ten tonight. He said you come alone.”

“Okay.”

“When do I get her location?”

“When I walk out of my meeting with RD alive.”

Joe walked to his car.

“Do it yourself.”

He looked back at Figgis. “What?”

“If you’re going to kill him, be man enough to pull the trigger yourself. Ain’t no pride in having other people do what you’re too weak to do yourself.”

“Ain’t no pride in most things,” Joe said.

“You’re wrong. I wake up every morning, look myself in the mirror, and know I walk a righteous path. You?” Figgis let the question hang in the air.

Joe opened his car door, started to get in.

“Wait.”

Joe looked back at the man on the porch, who was now less of a man because Joe had stolen a crucial part of him and was going to drive off with it.

Figgis flashed his torn eyes at Joe’s suit jacket. His voice was shaky. “You got any more in there?”

Joe could feel them sitting in the pocket, as repugnant as abscessed gums.

“No.” He got into his car and drove off.

Chapter nineteen No Better Days

John Ringling, the circus impresario and great benefactor to Sarasota, had built the Ritz-Carlton on Longboat Key back in ’26, whereupon he’d promptly run into money problems and left it sitting there on a cove, its back to the Gulf, rooms with no furniture, walls with no crown molding.

Back when he’d first moved to Tampa, Joe had taken a dozen trips along the coastline, looking for spots to off-load contraband. He and Esteban had some boats running molasses into the Port of Tampa, and they had the town so locked up they only lost one in ten loads. But they also paid boats to run bottled rum, Spanish anís, and orujo straight from Havana to West Central Florida. This allowed them to skip the distilling process on U.S. soil, which removed a time-consuming step, but it left the boats open to a wider array of Volstead enforcers, including T-men, G-men, and the Coast Guard. And no matter how crazy and how talented a pilot Farruco Diaz was, all he could do was spot the laws coming, not stop them. (Which is why he continued to lobby for a machine gun and gunner to go with his machine gun mount.)

Until such a day as Joe and Esteban decided to declare open war on the Coast Guard and J. Edgar’s men, however, the small barrier islands that dotted this stretch of Gulf coastline — Longboat Key, Casey Key, Siesta Key, among others — were perfect places to duck and hide or temporarily stow a load.

They were also perfect places to get boxed in, because those same keys had only two ways on and off — one, the boat you’d sailed in on, and two, a bridge. One bridge. So if the laws were closing in, megaphones blaring, searchlights scouring, and you didn’t have a way to fly off the island, then you, sir, were going to jail.