Read Online Live by Night by Dennis Lehane - Free Book Online

while he considered his options. There weren’t many. By the time night fell, he’d probably be out of them.
    It was in all the late editions:
    THREE PITTSFIELD POLICEMEN CUT DOWN
    ( The Boston Globe )
    3 MASS. POLICE OFFICERS BRUTALLY SLAIN
    ( The Evening Standard )
    COP SLAUGHTER IN WESTERN MASS.
    ( The American )
    The two men Joe had come across in the pond were identified as Donald Belinski and Virgil Orten. Both had left wives behind. Orten had left two children. After studying their photos for a bit, Joe decided that Orten had been the one driving the car and Belinski had been the one who pointed up at him from the water.
    He knew the real reason they were dead was because one of their brother lawmen had been stupid enough to fire a fucking tommy gun from a car bouncing across uneven ground. He knew that. He also knew that he was Hickey’s termite and Donald and Virgil never would have been in that field if he and the Bartolo brothers hadn’t come to their small city to rob one of their small banks.
    The third dead cop, Jacob Zobe, was a state trooper who’d pulled over a car along the edge of the October Mountain State Forest. He’d been shot once in the stomach, which bent him over, and once through the top of his skull, which finished him off. The killer or killers ran over his ankle as they sped away, snapping the bone in half.
    The shooting sounded like Dion. It was how he fought—punched a guy in the stomach to fold him in half and then worked the head until he went down for good. Dion, to the best of Joe’s knowledge, had never killed a man before, but he’d come close a few times, and he hated cops.
    Investigators had yet to identify any suspects, at least publicly. Two of the suspects were described as “heavyset” and “of foreign descent and odor,” while the third—possibly a foreigner as well—had been shot in the face. Joe looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. Technically, he supposed, it was true; the earlobe was attached to the face. Or, in his case, it had been.
    Even though no one had their names yet, a sketch artist with the Pittsfield Police Department had rendered their likenesses. So while most papers ran pictures of the three dead cops below the fold, above it they printed sketches of Dion, Paolo, and Joe. Dion and Paolo looked more jowly than normal and Joe would have to ask Emma if his face looked that thin and wolfish in the flesh, but otherwise, the resemblance was remarkable.
    A four-state dragnet was in effect. The Bureau of Investigation had been consulted and was said to be joining the pursuit.
    By now his father would have seen the papers. His father, Thomas Coughlin, deputy superintendent of the Boston Police Department.
    His son, party to a cop killing.
    Since Joe’s mother had passed two years ago, his father worked himself to numb exhaustion six days a week. With a dragnet in effect for his own son, he’d have a cot brought into his office, probably not come home until they closed the case.
    The family home was a four-story row house. It was an impressive structure, a redbrick bowfront where all the center rooms looked out at the street and boasted curved window seats. It was a house of mahogany staircases, pocket doors, and parquet floors, six bedrooms, two bathrooms, both with indoor plumbing, a dining room fit for the great hall of an English castle.
    When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe’s answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn’t a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house, not a magnificent home.
    J oe let himself into his father’s house. From the phone in the kitchen, he called the Gould household and got no answer. The satchel he’d carried into the house with him contained sixty-two thousand dollars. Even split three ways, it was enough to last any reasonably frugal man