Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ and then got shipped out of the city in a truck full of frozen meat. And now this fuckwit Vic Acosta, who lost his club to the government and didn’t even have the good sense to burn it down first.

      David caught it all one morning while he sat at his kitchen table, eating his oatmeal, the one food that didn’t hurt his jaw. His old face flashed on the screen for ten seconds, the first time David had seen it in a couple years, along with some grainy video of him ordering a tuna sandwich inside a Subway in Chicago. David thinking how nice it would be to eat a sandwich without it sending white hot pain into his nasal cavity and out his ears, thinking, Shit, I hope Jennifer doesn’t see this. Thinking, Shit, I hope my mother doesn’t see this. Even if he hadn’t seen his mother in fifteen years.

      First couple years after he dropped out of high school, he was deep in the life, and she was still in Chicago, going by her maiden name, Arlene Rigliano, because she’d given up the Family. He’d bump into her on the street, she’d act like he didn’t exist, and he was so hard, he didn’t want to believe he’d ever been someone’s kid, so what did it matter?

      Except one time. He and Jennifer were in Target, buying mouthwash and cereal and greeting cards, that real-life stuff, and suddenly his mother came around the bend in the paper towel aisle. It was just the two of them there under those bright white lights—Jennifer still lingering in the vitamin row, adding up how much they’d spent; Target an indulgence for them in those days, they were so broke, they had to keep track of every dime, bouncing checks not the kind of thing Sal Cupertine wanted to get nicked for—Sal done up in a leather duster like he was in a western, Arlene white haired, wearing high-waisted pants, pushing a cart filled with laundry detergent, ice cream, cottage cheese, Diet Pepsi, the opposite of how Sal remembered her. When his dad was alive, his mother was always in designer jeans and ribbed turtlenecks, coral lipstick, perfect hair, a glass of wine or a Marlboro red in her hand. Then his dad got thrown off a building. Maybe it would have been different if they both hadn’t seen it happen from Billy Cupertine’s convertible, waiting for him to come back down from an errand he had to run, be gone two seconds, that’s what he said, and then fifteen minutes later he came back down all right. After that Sal’s mother couldn’t even put a comb through her hair for a few years, barely made it out of bed, started to take up with men who drove TR7s. By then, Sal was under Ronnie’s sway.

      “Look at you,” she said, stopped there at the end of the aisle, right next to a display of Bounty, the contempt in her voice metallic. “A real professional.”

      “That’s right,” Sal said. He was twenty-six. He didn’t know shit. Wouldn’t for years. His mother was just the lady who didn’t want him to be in the Family. If he had a time machine, man, he’d use it to punch himself in the gut.

      “They murdered your father,” she said.

      “Someone was going to,” he said.

      “If only they’d waited a few years,” she said, “you could have done it.”

      A boy and girl came running into the aisle, chasing a blue ball that came bouncing past, stopped, looked at Sal, and ran in the other direction. He had that effect.

      She tilted her head to the right, tried to look around Sal, saw Jennifer back there. “She looks well.”

      “She is.”

      “You have any kids?”

      “Not yet.”

      “Don’t,” she said, then she just turned around, left her cart where it was, and walked out. Sal played that scene in his head a hundred times, a thousand times, all the different things he should have said, though never once did he tell Jennifer about it. His mother lived in Arizona now, remarried, that was the story, which meant she was close by, could be in Las Vegas, even, dumping quarters into the slots at Treasure Island.

      Then his face on the TV melted away into a shot of a U.S. Marshal in a shirt and a tie, sitting in his office at Panthers, talking about the perils of running a strip club. The Mafia in Las Vegas a big fucking joke.

      David didn’t think it was funny. As it was, every time some hump in New York or Chicago or Miami got busted doing some gangster shit, they’d drag Sal Cupertine back into the news for a few days, sure to mention that the FBI was offering a $500,000 reward for his capture now that they admitted he wasn’t dead. David conveniently got a head cold whenever that happened, kept his face away from the public, since Las Vegas was filled with bounty hunters, professional and amateur, the town the last stop for fugitives. Every other week America’s Most Wanted would feature some pedophile asshole who was last spotted on camera inside the ice cream parlor at the Frontier, or would note that some white supremacist militia wacko was apprehended in the parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall, the trunk of his car filled with ropes and handcuffs and diapers and brass knuckles and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It was only a matter of time before John Walsh spent thirty minutes talking about Sal Cupertine and then what? Jennifer would see that, for sure. His mom, too. And everyone else, everywhere. David would have to fake shingles for a month.

      Everyone thought Las Vegas was the kind of place you could hide in, that you could fuck up all you wanted. But the truth, David had learned, was that Las Vegas was a small, mostly conservative town and more isolated than a Hawaiian island. Five miles out of the city limits, going in any direction, sat the wild desert, hundreds of miles and several hours from the next big city, which meant you saw the same people everywhere . . . provided you didn’t go to the Strip, which David never did, and neither did any other local, unless they were going to their jobs, but even then, you saw your neighbor, one blackjack table over, everyone in everyone’s business, and all of it now getting captured on camera, the video processed and stored on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for a subpoena. Casinos used to be a place you could fuck off in, not worry about being an asshole, and maybe that was still true, but now, all the while, you were also being mined for your data, David reading about how all these big gaming companies were tracking your every move: how much you spent, how long you stayed in one place, your betting patterns, your body language, did you smile when the cocktail girl walked by, even how long you sat in the toilet, since they had a camera on you walking in and a camera on you walking out.

      Being home wasn’t much different.

      If someone strange showed up in your Summerlin or Henderson or Green Valley neighborhood, didn’t go to your church or your temple, didn’t wave hello in the morning, never got Nevada plates on their car, let their pit bull shit on your lawn, watered their own lawn with a hose instead of sprinklers, never finished their backyard, then you could bet the Mormons on the street would make a fuss, put in a call to the HOA. If you kept fucking up, the HOA would eventually call the cops, the cops would bring in the sheriff, sheriff would bring in the marshals, next thing, there would be a standoff, shots fired, and a body being wheeled out of your community draped with a white sheet, and it turns out you’ve got a grow house on the block, not Cartel level, but enough to fill Centennial High School and Bishop Gorman High School with narcotic-quality weed.

      Thus, David recognized the need to be prepared. He wasn’t going to be caught slipping again, like when that agent showed up. The national news had already rolled into Las Vegas just to talk shit in light of the Panthers debacle, and eventually some enterprising reporter would realize Panthers was only two blocks from the Wild Horse, whose owner, they’d learn, was Bennie Savone, also a reputed wiseguy, who was arrested on some RICO shit that didn’t stick . . . was currently doing time on the beating of a Nebraska-based dentist . . . and then that reporter and a cameraman would be knocking on the door of the temple to get some background color for their story . . . and, well, that would not do.

      Even on a night like tonight, behind the walls of the Vineyards, whose security was tight—Bennie couldn’t live in a place where anyone СКАЧАТЬ