They’re men, he told himself, not demons. A man can be killed. Even three men. You just need to act.
Staring into Basil Chigis’s pale blue flames, he felt their sway over him diminish the more he reminded himself these men held no special powers, no more so than he anyway—the mind and the limbs and willpower, all working as one—and so it was entirely possible that he could overpower them.
But then what? Where would he go? His cell was seven feet long and eleven feet wide.
You have to be willing to kill them. Strike now. Before they do. And after they’re down, snap their fucking necks.
Even as he imagined it, he knew it was impossible. If it was just one man and he acted before one assumed he would, he might have had a chance. But to successfully attack three of them from a sitting position?
The fear spread down through his intestines and up through his throat. It squeezed his brain like a hand. He couldn’t stop sweating and his arms trembled against his sleeves.
The movement came from the right and left simultaneously. By the time he sensed it, the tips of the shanks were pressed against his eardrums. He couldn’t see the shanks but he could see the one Basil Chigis pulled from the folds of his prison uniform. It was a slim metal rod, half the length of a pool cue, and Basil had to cock his elbow when he placed the tip to the base of Joe’s throat. He reached behind him and pulled something out of the back of his waistband, and Joe wanted to un-see it because he didn’t want to believe it was in the room with them. Basil Chigis raised a mallet high behind the butt end of the long shank.
Hail Mary, Joe thought, full of grace…
He forgot the rest of it. He’d been an altar boy for six years and he forgot.
Basil Chigis’s eyes had not changed. There was no clear intent in them. His left fist gripped the shaft of the metal rod. His right clenched the mallet handle. One swing of his arm and the metal tip would puncture Joe’s throat and drive straight down into his heart.
…the Lord is with thee. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…
No, no. That was grace, something you said over dinner. The Hail Mary went differently. It went…
He couldn’t remember.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, forgive us our trespasses as we—
The door to the cell opened and Emil Lawson entered. He crossed to the circle, knelt to the right of Basil Chigis, and cocked his head at Joe.
“I heard you were pretty,” he said. “They didn’t lie.” He stroked the stubble on his cheeks. “Can you think of anything I can’t take from you right now?”
My soul? Joe wondered. But in this place, this dark, they could probably get that too.
Damned if he’d answer, though.
Emil Lawson said, “You answer the question or I’ll pluck an eye out and feed it to Basil.”
“No,” Joe said, “nothing you can’t take.”
Emil Lawson wiped the floor with a palm before sitting. “You want us to go away? Leave your cell tonight?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“You were asked to do something for Mr. Pescatore and you refused.”
“I didn’t refuse. The final decision wasn’t up to me.”
The shank against Joe’s throat slipped in his sweat and bumped along the side of his neck, taking some skin with it. Basil Chigis returned it to the base of his throat again.
“Your daddy.” Emil Lawson nodded. “The copper. What was he supposed to do?”
What?
“You know what he was supposed to do.”
“Pretend I don’t and answer the question.”
Joe took a long, slow breath. “Brendan Loomis.”
“What about him?”
“He’s in custody. He gets arraigned day after tomorrow.”
Emil Lawson laced his hands behind his head and smiled. “And your daddy was supposed to kill him but he said no.”
“Yeah.”
“No, he said yes.”
“He said no.”
Emil Lawson shook his head. “You’re going to tell the first Pescatore hood you see that your father got word back to you through a guard. He’ll take care of Brenny Loomis. He also found out where Albert White’s been sleeping at night. And you’ve got the address to give to Old Man Pescatore. But only face-to-face. You following me so far, pretty boy?”
Joe nodded.
Emil Lawson handed Joe something wrapped in oilcloth. Joe unwrapped it—another shank, almost as thin as a needle. It had been a screwdriver at one point, the kind people used on the hinges of their eyeglasses. But those weren’t sharp like this. The tip was like a rose thorn. Joe ran his palm over it lightly and cut a path there.
They removed the shanks from his ears and throat.
Emil leaned in close. “When you get close enough to whisper that address in Pescatore’s ear, you drive that shank right through his fucking brain.” He shrugged. “Or his throat. Whatever kills him.”
“I thought you worked for him,” Joe said.
“I work for me.” Emil Lawson shook his head. “I did some jobs for his crew when I was paid to. Now someone else is paying.”
“Albert White,” Joe said.
“That’s my boss.” Emil Lawson leaned forward and lightly slapped Joe’s cheek. “And now he’s your boss too.”
In the small spit of land behind his house on K Street, Thomas Coughlin kept a garden. His efforts with it had, over the years, met with varying degrees of success and failure, but in the two years since Ellen had passed on, he’d had nothing but time; now the bounty of it was such that he made a small profit every year when he sold the surplus.
Years ago, when he was five or six, Joe had decided to help his father harvest in early July. Thomas has been sleeping off a double shift and the several nightcaps he’d consumed with Eddie McKenna afterward. He woke to the sound of his son talking in the backyard. Joe had talked to himself a lot back then, or maybe he spoke to an imagined friend. Either way, he’d had to talk to somebody, Thomas could admit to himself now, because he certainly wasn’t being spoken to much around the house. Thomas worked too much, and Ellen, well, by that point Ellen had firmly established her fondness for Tincture No. 23, a cure-all first introduced to her after one of the miscarriages that had preceded Joe’s birth. Back then, No. 23 wasn’t yet the problem it would become for Ellen, or so Thomas had told himself. But he must have second-guessed that assessment more than he liked to admit because he’d known without asking that Joe was unattended that morning. He lay in bed listening to his youngest jabbering to himself as he tramped back and forth to the porch, and Thomas started to wonder what he tramped back and forth from.
He rose from bed and put on a robe and found his slippers. He walked through the kitchen (where Ellen, dull-eyed but smiling, sat with her cup of tea) and pushed open the back door.
When he saw the porch, his first instinct was to scream. Literally. To drop to his knees and rage at the heavens. His carrots and parsnips and tomatoes—all still green as grass—lay on the porch, their roots splayed like hair across the dirt and wood. Joe came walking up from the garden with another crop in his hands—the beets, this time. He’d transformed into a mole, his skin and hair caked with dirt. The only white left on him could be found in his eyes and his teeth when he smiled, which he did as soon as he saw Thomas.
“Hi, Daddy.”
Thomas was speechless.
“I’m helping you, Daddy.” Joe placed a beet at Thomas’s feet and went back for more.