Live by Night by Dennis Lehane Page A

shattered and the glass fell to the dirt street.
    Joe turned onto East Street and found the alley they’d scouted last week, banged a left into it, and stood on the gas pedal. For several blocks he drove parallel to the railroad tracks that ran behind the mills. By now they could assume the police were involved, not enough so that they were setting up roadblocks or anything, but enough that they could follow tire tracks off the dirt road by the bank, know the general direction in which they’d headed.
    They’d stolen three cars that morning, all in Chicopee, about sixty miles south. They’d picked up the Auburn they were in now, as well as a black Cole with bald tires and a ’24 Essex Coach with a raspy engine.
    Joe crossed the railroad tracks and drove another mile along Silver Lake to a foundry that had burned down some years before, the black shell of it listing to the right in a field of weeds and cattails. Both cars were waiting for them when Joe pulled into the back of the building, where the wall was long gone, and they parked beside the Cole and got out of the Auburn.
    Dion lifted Joe by his overcoat lapels and pushed him against the Auburn’s hood. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
    â€œIt was a mistake,” Joe said.
    â€œ Last week it was a mistake,” Dion said. “This week it’s a fucking pattern.”
    Joe couldn’t argue. But he still said, “Take your hands off me.”
    Dion let go of Joe’s lapels. He breathed heavily through his nostrils and pointed a stiff finger at Joe. “You’re fucking up.”
    Joe took the hats and the kerchiefs and the guns and put them in a bag with the money. He put the bag in the back of the Essex Coach. “I know it.”
    Dion held out his fat hands. “We’ve been partners since we were little fucking kids, but this is bad.”
    â€œYeah.” Joe agreed because he didn’t see the point in lying about the obvious.
    The police cars—four of them—came through a wall of brown weeds on the edge of the field behind the foundry. The weeds were the color of a riverbed and stood six or seven feet tall. The cruisers flattened them and revealed a small tent community behind them. A woman in a gray shawl and her baby leaned over a recently doused campfire, trying to scoop whatever heat was left into their coats.
    Joe jumped into the Essex and drove out of the foundry. The Bartolo brothers drove past him in their Cole, the back end sliding away from them as they hit a patch of dry red dirt. The dirt spewed onto Joe’s windshield and covered it. He leaned out the window and wiped at the dirt with his left arm while he drove with his right. The Essex bounced high off the uneven ground and something took a bite out of Joe’s ear. When he pulled his head back in, he could see a lot better, but blood poured from his ear, sluicing under his collar and down his chest.
    A series of pings and thunks hit the back window, the sound of someone skipping coins off a tin roof, and then the window blew out and a bullet sparked off the dashboard. A cruiser appeared on Joe’s left and then another on his right. The one to his right had a cop in the backseat who rested the barrel of a Thompson on the window frame and opened fire. Joe stepped on the brakes so hard the steel coils of his seat pressed against his back ribs. The passenger windows exploded. Then the front window. The dashboard spit pieces of itself all over Joe and the front seat.
    The cruiser to his right tried to brake as it turned in toward him. It rose on its nose and left the ground like something lifted by a gust. Joe had time to see it land on its side before the other cruiser rammed the back of his Essex and a boulder appeared out of the weeds just before the tree line.
    The front of the Essex collapsed and the rest of it snapped to the right, Joe snapping with it. He never felt himself leave the car until he hit the tree. He