World Gone By: A Novel (Joe Coughlin Series) Read online

  In one way or another, all those killings haunted her. The man in Des Moines had held a picture of his family in front of his face, forcing her to fire the bullet through it to reach his brain; the one in Philly kept saying “Just tell me why”; the woman in Georgetown had let out a plaintive sigh before she’d crumpled to the wet pavement.

  The one killing that didn’t haunt Theresa was Tony’s. She only wished she’d done it sooner, before Peter was old enough to miss his parents. He’d been staying with her sister in Lutz that fateful weekend because Theresa had wanted him out of the line of fire when she kicked Tony out of his own house. His drinking, whoring, and black moods had been spiraling out of control since the summer, and Theresa had finally reached her limit. Tony hadn’t reached his, though, which is how he came to hit her with a wine bottle and how she came to crush his fucking head with a mallet.

  At the Tampa City jail, she called King Lucius. Half an hour later, Jimmy Arnold, house counsel to King Lucius and his various corporations, was sitting across from her. Theresa was worried about two things—going to the chair and finding herself unable to provide for Peter. Her control over whether she was electrocuted up in the state penitentiary at Raiford ended with her husband’s life. As for securing Peter’s future comfort, however, she’d been waiting on payment for a job from King Lucius himself, a job that had harvested so bountiful a profit margin that her 5 percent stake would ensure that the stomachs of Peter, Peter’s children, and Peter’s grandchildren never rumbled for anything but a second helping.

  Jimmy Arnold assured her that on both counts the outlook was rosier than she presumed. In the first matter, he’d already informed the Hillsborough County district attorney Archibald Boll of her history of being beaten by her deceased husband, beatings that had been documented on the two occasions Tony’s fury had put her in the hospital. The DA, a very smart and politically conscious man, would not send an abused wife to the death chamber when there were plenty of German and Jap spies Old Sparky would be glad to host first. As for the monies due her from the Savannah job, Jimmy Arnold was authorized to say that King Lucius was still in the process of finding a buyer for the merchandise in question but as soon as he’d done so and the monies had been received, she would be the second participant to get her cut, after King Lucius himself, of course.

  Three days after the arrest, Archibald Boll dropped by to offer her a deal. A handsome middle-aged man in a coarse linen suit and matching half-fedora, Archibald Boll’s eyes carried the playful light of a grade school mischief maker. Theresa concluded fairly quickly that he was attracted to her, but he was all business when it came to discussing her plea. She would agree before the court that she had committed voluntary manslaughter with extenuating circumstances, a plea that would normally ensure someone with a criminal record as extensive as her own twelve years in prison. But today and today only, Archibald Boll assured her, the district attorney’s office of the city of Tampa was offering sixty-two months, to be served at the women’s wing of the state prison in Raiford. Which was the location, yes, of Old Sparky, but Archibald Boll promised Theresa she’d never see it.

  “Five years.” Theresa couldn’t believe it.

  “And two months,” Archibald Boll said, his moony gaze gliding up from her waist to her breasts. “You make the plea tomorrow, we’ll have you on the bus out the next morning.”

  So tomorrow night, Theresa knew, you’ll pay your visit.

  But she didn’t care—for five years and a chance to be out in time for Peter’s eighth birthday, she’d fuck not only Archibald Boll but every ADA in his office and still consider herself lucky not to have a metal cap placed to her skull and ten thousand volts of electricity sent surging through her veins.

  “Do we have a deal?” Archibald Boll asked, eyes on her legs now.

  “We have a deal.”

  In court, when the judge asked how she pled, Theresa answered, “Guilty,” and the judge conferred upon her a sentence of “not more than one thousand eight hundred and ninety days, less time served.” They took Theresa back to the jail to await the morning bus to Raiford. Early that evening, when her first visitor was announced, she expected to see Archibald Boll enter the gloamy corridor outside her cell, the tent already pitched in his linen trousers.

  Instead it was Jimmy Arnold. He brought her a meal of cold fried chicken and potato salad, better than any meal she’d have for the next sixty-two months, and she wolfed down the chicken and sucked the grease off her fingers without any pretense of dignity. Jimmy Arnold took no interest in any of this. When she handed the plate back to him, he handed her the photograph of her and Peter that had sat atop her dresser. He also handed her the drawing Peter had made of her—a featureless and misshapen oval on top of an askew triangle with a single stick arm, no feet. He’d drawn it shortly after his second birthday, however, and by those standards it was a Rembrandt. Theresa looked down at Jimmy Arnold’s two gifts and tried to keep the emotion from her eyes and her throat.

  Jimmy Arnold crossed his legs at the ankles and stretched in his chair. He let out a loud yawn and dry-coughed into his fist. He said, “We’ll miss you, Theresa.”

  She ate the last of the potato salad. “Back before you know it.”

  “There’re just so few with your talents.”

  “In floral arrangement?”

  He watched her carefully as his chuckle died. “No, the other thing.”

  “That just takes a gray heart.”

  “There’s more to it.” He waved a finger at her. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  She shrugged and looked back at the picture her son had drawn.

  “Now that you’re on the shelf for a while,” he said, “who would you say is the best?”

  She looked up at the ceiling and out at the other cells. “At floral arrangements.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, let’s call it that. Who’s the best florist in Tampa now that you’re no longer in the running for the title?”

  She didn’t have to think long on the subject. “Billy.”

  “Kovich?”

  She nodded.

  Jimmy Arnold took that into consideration. “You consider him better than Mank?”

  She nodded. “You see Mank coming.”

  “And on whose shift should this happen?”

  She didn’t follow the question. “Shift?”

  “Detectives,” he said.

  “You mean locally?”

  He nodded.

  “You . . .” She looked around the cell, as if to assure herself she was still in it and of this earth. “You want a local contractor to handle a local contract?”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said.

  That went against two decades of King Lucius policy.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It must be someone the target knows. No one else could get close enough.” He uncrossed his ankles and fanned himself with his hat. “If you think Kovich is the man for the job, I’ll make inquiries.”

  She said, “Does the target have reason to suspect his life could be in danger?”

  Jimmy Arnold thought about it and eventually nodded. “He works in our business. Don’t we all sleep with one eye open?”

  Theresa nodded. “Then, yeah, Kovich is your man. Everybody likes him, even if no one can understand why.”

  “Let’s next consider the question of police jurisdiction and the character of the detectives who are working on the day in question.”

  “What day?”

  “A Wednesday.”

  She ratcheted through a series of names, shifts, and scenarios.

  “Ideally,” she said, “you would want Kovich to do it between noon and eight in either Ybor, Port Tampa, or Hyde Park. That would ensure a high likelihood that Detectives Feeney and Boatman respond to the call.”

  His lips moved silently over the names as he fussed with the crease in his trouser leg, his brow furrowing a bit. “Do policemen observe holy days?”

  “If they’re Catholic, I sup
pose. Which holy day?”

  “Ash Wednesday.”

  “There’s not much to observing Ash Wednesday.”

  “No?” He seemed genuinely perplexed. “It’s been so long since I’ve practiced the faith myself.”

  She said, “You go to mass, the priest makes the sign of the cross on your forehead with damp ash, you leave. That’s it.”

  “That’s it,” he repeated in a soft whisper. He gave his surroundings a kind of distracted smile, like he was a bit surprised to find himself here. He stood. “Good luck, Mrs. Del Fresco. We’ll be seeing you.”

  She watched Jimmy Arnold lift his briefcase off the floor, and she knew she shouldn’t ask the question but she couldn’t help it.

  “Who’s the target?” she said.

  He looked through the bars at her. Just as she’d known she shouldn’t ask the question, he knew he shouldn’t answer it. But Jimmy Arnold was famous in their circles for an interesting paradox at his center—ask him the most innocuous question about any of his clients and he wouldn’t answer if you set fire to his scrotum. Ask him the most salacious details about anything else, however, and he was all hen.

  “Are you sure you want to know?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He gave the dark green hallway a glance both ways before he leaned back into the bars, put his lips between them, and said the name.

  “Joe Coughlin.”

  IN THE MORNING SHE BOARDED the bus and it carried her northeast for two hundred miles. Inland Florida was not the Florida of blue ocean, white sand, and crushed-white-shell parking lots. It was a land sun bleached and sickened after too many droughts and wildfires. For six and a half hours they bumped along back roads and bad roads, and most of the people they saw, white or colored or Indian, looked too thin.

  The woman chained to Theresa’s left wrist didn’t talk for fifty miles and then introduced herself as Mrs. Sarah Nez of Zephyrhills. She shook Theresa’s hand, assured her she was innocent of all the crimes for which she’d been convicted, and went another twenty-five miles before she moved again. Theresa rested her forehead against the window and looked out at the broiled land through the dust the tires kicked up. Beyond fields so dry the grass resembled paper, she could identify swampland by the smell and the green fog that rose from the far edges of the blanched fields. She thought about her son and the money she was owed to provide for his future, and she hoped King Lucius would make good on his debt because she had no one who could collect if he didn’t.

  Speaking of debt, she’d been stunned last night when District Attorney Archibald Boll failed to show up at her cell. She’d lain awake with a grateful body but a racing mind. If he hadn’t expected her to repay him sexually, why had he offered such a sweetheart deal in the first place? There were no acts of kindness in her business, only acts of cunning; no gifts, only delayed bills. So if Archibald Boll hadn’t wanted money from her—and he certainly hadn’t given any indication he expected any—then that left sex or information.

  Maybe, she told herself, he’d softened her up with the light sentence and now he’d let her stew on it a bit, let her sense of obligation grow. Then he’d come visit her at Raiford sometime this summer to collect on the debt. Except that DAs didn’t work that way—they dangled the easy sentence in front of your eyes, but didn’t give it to you until you’d done their bidding. They never gave you the easy sentence up front. Made no sense.

  What made even less sense was the contract on Joe Coughlin. No matter how hard she tried—and she’d been trying all night—Theresa couldn’t wrap her head around it. Since he’d stepped down as boss ten years ago, Joe Coughlin had proved a bigger asset to the Bartolo Family and all the other families and crews in town than he’d been when he’d run things. He embodied the highest ideal of a man in their business—he made money for his friends. Therefore, he had a lot of friends.

  But enemies?

  Theresa knew he’d once had a few, but that was ten years ago, and they’d all been erased in a single day. The police and the public knew about the bullet through the throat that had ended the hopes, dreams, and eating habits of Maso Pescatore, a bullet Coughlin was rumored to have personally fired. But no one but people like Theresa and her associates, people in the Life, knew about the dozen men who’d gone out on a boat to throw Joe Coughlin overboard only to never return, mown down by machine guns and close-range .45s. They’d then been tossed overboard into the Gulf of Mexico, turned into shark chum on a day already hot and uncharitable.

  Those victims, and a long dead policeman, were the last enemies anyone knew Coughlin to have had. Since stepping down as boss, he’d stayed away from the heavy stuff, taking cues from Meyer Lansky, with whom he owned several concerns in Cuba. Rarely photographed and, if so, never with others in the Life, he apparently spent his days dreaming up new ways to make everyone even more money than he’d made them the year before.

  Long before the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor and war broke out, Joe Coughlin had advised all the major players in the Florida and Cuban liquor concerns to begin stockpiling industrial alcohol to convert to rubber. No one knew what the fuck he was talking about—what did alcohol have to do with rubber and, even if it did, what did that have to do with them? But because he’d made them so much money in the ’30s, they listened to him. And by the time the Japs had taken over half the world’s rubber-producing regions in the spring of ’42, Uncle Sam came running to pay top dollar for anything the government could use to make boots, tires, and bumpers, hell, even asphalt, Theresa had heard. The crews who’d listened to Coughlin—including King Lucius’s—made so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. One of the few men who didn’t listen, Philly Carmona in Miami, took such an ill view of the guy who’d advised him against the deal that he shot him in the stomach.

  Everyone in their business had enemies, yes, but as she drifted in and out of a lazy doze on the bus, Theresa couldn’t put a face to any of Joe Coughlin’s. Talk about killing a golden goose.

  A snake slid through the dry gully outside her window. The snake was black and as long as Theresa. It slithered out of the gully and into the brush and Theresa drifted into a near-dream in which it slithered across the floor of her bedroom in the Brooklyn tenement where she’d lived upon first arriving in this country when she was ten. She thought it might be a good thing to have a snake in that room because rats had always been the real problem in those tenements, and snakes ate rats. But then the snake vanished from the floor and she could feel it sliding up the bed toward her. She could feel it but she couldn’t see it and she couldn’t move because the dream wouldn’t allow it. The snake’s scales were rough and cold against her neck. It knotted itself around her throat and its metal links dug into her windpipe.

  Theresa reached behind her and gripped Sarah Nez’s ear, gripped it so hard she could have pulled it from the woman’s head if she’d had enough time. But she was already running out of oxygen. Sarah had used the chain that united their wrists. She made small grunting noises as she twisted it tighter, working that chain like a winch.

  “If you accept Christ,” she whispered, “if you accept Christ as your Savior, He will welcome you home. He will love you. Accept Him and fear not.”

  Theresa turned her body in toward the window and managed to get her feet pressed to the wall. When she snapped her head back, she heard Sarah’s nose break and she pushed off the wall at the same time. They ended up in the aisle and Sarah’s grip loosened long enough for Theresa to croak out something approximating a scream, more like a yelp really, and she thought she might have seen one of the guards moving toward them but everything was fading. Everything was fading and then faded and then black.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, she still couldn’t speak properly; all that came out was a gnarled and clogged-up whisper. The bruises that ringed her neck had turned from purple to yellow recently. It hurt to eat, and a cough could bring her close to tears.

  The second woman who tried to kill her used a metal tray stolen from the
infirmary. She hit Theresa on the back of the head with it while Theresa was taking a shower, and the blow felt far too reminiscent of some of Tony’s. The weakness of most people in a fight—men and women—was that they paused. This woman was no different. The force of her first blow knocked Theresa to the floor, and the sound of it seemed to surprise the woman. She stared down at Theresa too long before she dropped to her knees and raised the tray again. If she’d been any good—if she’d been Theresa, for example—she would have followed her victim to the floor immediately, tossed the tray aside, and bludgeoned her against the tile. By the time the woman got to her knees and raised her arms, Theresa had made a fist and turned the knuckle of her middle finger into a point. She drove that point into the center of the woman’s throat. Not once, not twice, but four times. The tray fell and Theresa used the woman’s body to stand as the woman gasped for oxygen that wouldn’t come in the middle of the shower room.

  When the guards arrived, they found the woman turning blue on the floor. The doctor was called. A nurse showed up first, and by that point the woman had begun taking gasping, desperate breaths. Theresa watched all this calmly from the edge of the room. She’d dried off and changed into her prison blues. She’d bummed a cigarette off one of the girls; in exchange, she promised to teach the girl how to do to someone what she’d just done to Thelma, which, she’d learned, was the failed killer’s name.