The café owner and the couple at the counter were officially rattled now. The old man kept patting his chest. The café owner thumbed her rosary beads, her lips moving frantically.
Joe asked Graciela, “Could you go tell them we won’t hurt them?”
She nodded and got up from the table.
Albert said to Dion, “So betrayal’s your defining personality trait, eh, fat boy?”
“Only once, you dandy fuck,” Dion said. “Shoulda thought long and hard about what I did to your boy Blum last year before you bought my bullshit this time around.”
“How many more we got on the street?” Joe asked.
“Four cars full,” Dion said.
Joe stood. “Albert, I don’t want to kill anybody in this café but that doesn’t mean I won’t if you give me half a reason.”
Albert smiled, smug as always, even outnumbered and outgunned. “We won’t give you a quarter of a reason. How’s that for cooperation?”
Joe spit in his face.
Albert’s eyes went as small as peppercorns.
For a very long moment, no one in the café moved.
“I’m going to reach for my handkerchief,” Albert said.
“You reach for anything, we plug you where you stand,” Joe said. “Use your fucking sleeve.”
As he did, Albert’s smile returned but his eyes remained filled with murder. “So you’re either killing me or running me out of town.”
“That’s right.”
“Which?”
Joe looked at the café owner and her rosary, at Graciela standing beside her, her hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“Don’t think I feel like killing you today, Albert. You don’t have the guns or the funds to start a war, and you’d need years of building new alliances to make me look over my shoulder.”
Albert took a seat. Just as easy as you please. Like he was visiting old friends. Joe remained standing.
“You planned this since the alley,” he said.
“Sure did.”
“At least tell me some of this was just business,” he said.
Joe shook his head. “This was completely personal.”
Albert took that in and nodded. “You want to ask about her?”
Joe felt Graciela’s eyes on him. And Dion’s.
He said, “Not particularly, no. You fucked her, I loved her, and then you killed her. What’s left to discuss?”
Albert shrugged. “I did love her. More than you could imagine.”
“I got a hell of an imagination.”
“Not this good,” he said.
Joe tried to read the face behind Albert’s face, and he got the same feeling he’d gotten in the basement service corridor of the Hotel Statler—that Albert’s feelings for Emma matched his own.
“So why’d you kill her?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Albert said. “You did. The moment you put your dick in her. Thousands of other girls in that city and you a pretty boy to boot, but you take mine. You give a man horns, he has two choices—gore himself or gore you.”
“But you didn’t gore me. You gored her.”
Albert shrugged and Joe could see clearly that it pained him still. Christ, he thought, she owns a piece of both of us.
Albert looked around the café. “Your master ran me out of Boston. Now you’re running me out of Tampa. That the play?”
“Pretty much.”
Albert pointed at Dion. “You know he sold you out in Pittsfield? That he’s the reason you did two years in jail?”
“Yeah, I do. Hey, D.”
Dion never took his eyes off Bones and Loomis. “Yeah?”
“Put a couple bullets in Albert’s brain.”
Albert’s eyes popped wide and the café owner let out a yelp and Dion crossed the floor with his arm extended. Sal and Lefty revealed Thompsons under their raincoats to cover Loomis and Bones, and Dion put the gun to Albert’s temple. Albert scrunched his eyes closed and held up his hands.
Joe said, “Hold it.”
Dion stopped.
Joe fixed his trousers and squatted in front of Albert. “Look in my friend’s eyes.”
Albert looked up at Dion.
“You see any love for you in them, Albert?”
“No.” Albert blinked. “No, I don’t.”
Joe nodded at Dion, and Dion removed the gun from Albert’s head.
“You drive here?”
“What?”
“Did you drive here?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re gonna go to your car and drive north out of the state. I suggest Georgia because as of now I control Alabama, the Mississippi coast, and every town between here and New Orleans.” He smiled at Albert. “And I’ve got a meeting about New Orleans next week.”
“How do I know you won’t have men waiting on the road for me?”
“Hell, Albert, I will have men on the road. In fact, they’re going to follow you out of the state. Ain’t that right, Sal?”
“Car’s all gassed up, Mr. Coughlin.”
Albert got a look at Sal’s tommy gun. “How do I know they won’t kill us on the road?”
“You don’t,” Joe said. “But if you don’t leave Tampa right now and leave for good, I’ll give you the A & P fucking guarantee you won’t see tomorrow. And I know you want to see tomorrow because that’s when you’ll start planning your revenge.”
“Then why leave me alive?”
“So everyone knows I took everything you had, and you weren’t man enough to stop me.” Joe straightened from his crouch. “I’m letting you keep your life, Albert, because I can’t think of a soul who would fucking want it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nobody’s Son
During the good years, Dion said to Joe, “Luck ends.”
He said it more than once.
Joe would reply, “Good luck and bad.”
“It’s just your luck has been good so long,” Dion said, “no one remembers your bad.”
He built a house for himself and Graciela on the corner of Ninth and Nineteenth. He used Spanish labor, Cuban labor, Italians for the marble work, and brought in architects from New Orleans to ensure that a multitude of styles coalesced into a Latin Vieux Carré. He and Graciela made several trips to New Orleans to tour the French Quarter for inspiration and took long walking trips around Ybor as well. They came up with a design that married Greek Revival with Spanish Colonial. The house sported a facade of redbrick and pale concrete balconies with wrought iron rails. The windows were green and kept shuttered so the house looked almost plain from the street, and it was difficult to tell when it was occupied.