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

ten years, maybe fifteen. Joe wasn’t a frugal man, so he figured it’d last him four regular years. But on the run, it would last him eighteen months. No more. By then, he’d figure something out. It was what he was good at, thinking on the fly.
    Unquestionably, a voice that sounded suspiciously like his oldest brother’s said. It’s worked out so well so far .
    He called Uncle Bobo’s blind pig but got the same result as the Gould house. Then he remembered that Emma was attending the opening soiree at the Hotel Statler tonight at six. Joe pulled his watch from his vest: ten minutes to four.
    Two hours to kill in a city that was, by now, looking to kill him.
    That was far too much time out in the open. In that time they’d learn his name, his address, and come up with a list of his known associates and favorite haunts. They’d lock down all the train and bus stations, even the rural ones, and put up every last roadblock.
    But that could cut both ways. The roadblocks would prohibit entry into the city under the logic that he was still outside it. No one would ever assume he was here, planning to slip right back out again. And they wouldn’t assume that because only the world’s dumbest criminal would risk returning to the only city he’d ever called home after committing the biggest crime the region had seen in five or six years.
    Which made him the dumbest criminal in the world.
    Or the smartest. Because pretty much the only place they weren’t searching right now was the place right under their noses.
    Or so he told himself.
    What he could still do—what he should have done in Pittsfield—was vanish. Not in two hours. Now. Not wait around for a woman who might choose not to join him under the present circumstances. Just leave with the shirt on his back and a bag of money in his hand. The roads were all being watched, yes. Same for trains and buses. And even if he could get out to the farmlands south and west of the city and steal a horse, it wouldn’t do him any good because he didn’t know how to ride one.
    That left the sea.
    He’d need a boat, but not a pleasure craft and not an obvious rumrunner like a sea skiff or a garvey. He’d need a worker’s boat, one with rusted cleats and frayed tackle, a deck piled high with dented lobster traps. Something moored in Hull or Green Harbor or Gloucester. If he boarded by seven, it would probably be three or four in the morning before the fisherman noticed it missing.
    So now he was stealing from workingmen.
    Except the boat would be registered. Would have to be, or he’d move on to another. He’d get the address off the registration, mail the owner enough money to buy two boats or just get the fuck out of the lobster business altogether.
    It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he’d pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else. But he also stole because it was fun and he was good at it and it led to other things he was good at like bootlegging and rum-running, which is why he knew his way around boats in the first place. Last June, he’d run a boat from a no-name fishing village in Ontario across Lake Huron to Bay City, Michigan, another from Jacksonville to Baltimore in October, and just last winter ferried cases of newly distilled rum out of Sarasota and across the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, where he’d blown his entire profit one weekend in the French Quarter on sins that, even now, he could only remember in fragments.
    So he could pilot most boats, which meant he could steal most boats. He could walk out this door and be on the South Shore in thirty minutes. The North Shore would take a little longer, but this time of year there’d probably be more boats up there to choose from. If he set out from Gloucester or Rockport, he could reach