Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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      Chicago had controlled the street gangs for decades. It was never equal footing. Hard to see the boys falling in line with that. They’d just call Detroit, muscle up. Align with Memphis if they had to.

      The Native gangs, that was different. They owned property. Casinos. Farmland. Had their own cops. Made better sense.

      “Could be,” David said.

      “You been in contact with anyone out there?” Bennie asked.

      “No,” David said, which was true, save for getting his wife some money after all this shit with Hopper went down, but nothing since. But now he was thinking about it. Because this news? It was out of the ordinary. And out of the ordinary meant Ronnie was making some kind of move. He’d survived David tipping off the press about his operations, but he was weak now. He really only had two moves left, if shit got untenable: Kill Sal, or give him up to the authorities, hope he got a plea deal out of it.

      “Haven’t tried to get in touch with your wife?”

      “I don’t have a wife.”

      “Say you did. Would you be talking to her on the down low?”

      “Never,” David said, which was a lie. If he thought he could, he would. But he wasn’t about to put Jennifer and William in jeopardy. One consensual phone call with Jennifer and she could be looking at time; feds might even try to put fifteen accessory-to-murder charges on her if they were feeling particularly litigious.

      “Comes to it,” Bennie said, “you may need to go underground for a bit. We gotta stay nimble, understand?”

      “You put me in another meat truck,” David said, “you better be next to me.”

      Bennie then cupped his hand around his mouth, shouted at his kid, “Come on in, Soph, let’s get you some dinner.” The wedding party on the dock turned and looked, the bride and groom giving a big enthusiastic wave to Bennie, Bennie waving right back. Best day of their lives, all right. “You better get back to your duties, Rabbi,” Bennie said eventually. “Looks like the bride and groom are about to make their big entrance.”

      “‘The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist,” Rabbi David Cohen said, “‘but eternal law enjoins the children of Israel to celebrate the vintage.’”

      “An empire of clean cars for the both of them,” Bennie said.

      David tried to laugh, just to make Bennie feel good, but he couldn’t get his mouth to quite work in that direction, so what came out sounded like someone getting stabbed in the throat.

      “Christ, Rabbi, maybe don’t try that again, at least not in public.”

      “Listen,” David said. “I need to see someone about my face.”

      “I’m working on that,” Bennie said.

      “Work faster,” David said. Bennie couldn’t respond, since Sophie was climbing from the pedal boat. She had on a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit and David could see she was burned on her shoulders and neck, too. She practically glowed. There’d be blisters by the morning.

      David watched Bennie and Sophie walk off, until they faded into the shadows the Red Rocks had cut across the expanse of the Savones’ lawn. David’s night vision was turning to shit. All this and he needed glasses, too? A few minutes later, Bennie and Sophie reappeared, as if by magic, walking up the red brick steps into the house. In the Talmud, they hung witches who practiced magic. Time came, Bennie Savone probably wouldn’t get off much easier than that.

      I just need to make it through September, David thought. He’d have enough money then to start working his plan, because when Bennie got off house arrest and could look closer at the books, David wasn’t sure how much he could pinch. David had maybe four months to get his face fixed, make his nut, get word to Jennifer, secure passports good enough to get him, his wife, and his kid into and out of some small airports, good enough to get them into Mexico, at least, where he could throw around some cash and it wouldn’t matter what their passports looked like, and then . . . Argentina? Maybe. There were Jews in Argentina.

      If he wanted to live with his wife and son, it would have to be somewhere foreign. The FBI wasn’t just going to forget about the Mafia. They hadn’t for the last seventy years, anyway. Didn’t stop during WWI, didn’t stop during WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. They never stopped coming . . . but also never fully completed the job, because the feds needed job security, too. Good to leave a few loose ends, so you could round them up into a ball every few years and then start again. But they didn’t give up on people who killed their men. Sal Cupertine would be on their to-do list until they had his head in a noose.

      Pain shot up into David’s right eye and he realized he was gritting his teeth, which had become a bad habit. He let his mouth open half an inch, exhaled, waited for the pain to subside.

      It didn’t.

      It just lingered there, his face throbbing.

      The sun would be completely down in an hour or so. There would be toasts. Rabbi David Cohen would dance the hora, would pose for photos, would engage the congregants of Temple Beth Israel with talk of next month’s High Holy Days, would touch women on their elbow, men on their shoulder, would chastise the old and the young for eschewing yarmulkes on a wedding day. Rabbi David Cohen would leave the wedding at an appropriate hour, would drive the five miles back to his guard-gated house inside the Lakes at Summerlin Greens, would strip off his suit, stuff his yarmulke into a drawer, go to his in-home gym and work the heavy bag for an hour, until he felt like Sal Cupertine again, made sure he knew who the fuck he still was.

      3

      Matthew Drew should have shot Ronnie Cupertine in the back of the head. That would have solved a lot of problems. Stopped everything. But nothing was going according to plan, and Matthew Drew was a guy who needed a plan.

      For one thing, it was barely six in the morning—Matthew always pictured killing Ronnie around midnight—and for another, he was twenty miles northwest of Milwaukee, inside the shitter at the Chuyalla Indian Casino, not in a warehouse in Chicago with a bat in his hand, contemplating where he was going to bury the body of one of the biggest crime bosses in the country.

      Matthew always imagined beating Ronnie Cupertine to death inside an abandoned warehouse. Black Visqueen over the windows. Graffiti on the walls. Ronnie tied to a chair. An old stuffed bear on the ground, though Matthew wasn’t sure how the bear got there.

      Funny thing was Matthew didn’t think he’d ever been in an abandoned warehouse, didn’t know if warehouses got abandoned. Yet in movies and TV shows, that’s always where the bad shit went down, as if criminals had access to all the prime unoccupied industrial real estate. Most people, if they got murdered, it either happened inside their own home or the home of their killer. Usually in bed. Or the car.

      That wasn’t going to work for Matthew. He wasn’t some criminal.

      So Matthew had gone out and done the physical recon, just like he’d been taught at Quantico. Developers were turning old timber plants along Wolcott—the half-abandoned industrial corridor of Chicago—into loft spaces, and now artists were moving in, setting up coffeehouses and artisan bread stores, places to get henna tattoos, galleries where on Sundays they’d hold open mics and poetry slams. At night, however, the area was still a little rough, so all the artists locked their doors, turned up their music, and СКАЧАТЬ