Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ the pink marble urinal, one arm propped up against the tile wall. Curtis was gone from his spot, probably at the buffet, getting his free breakfast of pancakes and yesterday’s link sausage. Matthew was pretty sure he was hallucinating. He’d only ever seen Ronnie through his binoculars or on TV, acting like a tough guy in his car dealership commercials, always in a trench coat and hat, blowing holes into credit-rating reports with his fake tommy gun.

      In Matthew’s head, Ronnie Cupertine was maybe six foot two, six foot three, but wasn’t it funny how distance and anger made someone bigger in your mind? Because Ronnie couldn’t be more than five nine, Matthew saw, even with the little heel on his dress shoe. Back in the day, Ronnie was supposed to have been a hands-on bad guy, hammers and blowtorches and dismemberments with rusty screwdrivers and such. It seemed inconceivable, looking at him now in his tailored slacks, his perfect white shirt, his platinum President Rolex, his manicured nails, his understated black cufflinks. But Matthew had listened to the old FBI wire recordings, had read all the files, had seen the pictures of the decomposed bodies: Tino Loria, under the floorboards of his mother’s house in Wheaton; his brother Frank, missing his hands, feet, and ears, under a swing set in a backyard in Buffalo Grove; Mike Zornes, built into the community pool in Mundelein; of course, Chema Espinoza, cut up, burned, and dumped in the Poyter Landfill.

      Ronnie was always smart about having his boys bury their bodies away from the crime, out in the suburbs where no one bothered to look, at least not until someone snitched or new construction came along. The exception was when he wanted obvious messages to be sent, which was usually when he had his cousin Sal shoot someone in the back of the head, in public, because who was going to say anything? Or the time Ronnie and his boys pushed Sal’s father, who they called Dark Billy, right off the IBM Building while it was still under construction. Newspapers called it a construction accident, except Dark Billy Cupertine never did a day of construction work in his life, other than building a network for heroin distribution. Ronnie Cupertine probably hadn’t personally killed someone since then, maybe longer, but only because he’d been effective enough to get other people to do that work for him.

      “Good morning, boss,” Matthew said, and Ronnie jerked back from the urinal, splashing piss onto his thousand-dollar shoes.

      “Jesus fuck,” Ronnie said.

      It was him all right.

      Ronnie glared at Matthew for two, three, four seconds like he was trying to figure out if Matthew was some asshole up from Memphis, hiding out in the bathroom waiting to kill him. So Matthew gave him that smile he used with people he was meeting for the first time, the one that showed off his perfect teeth and the one dimple on his left cheek. Matthew was always bigger than most, always more imposing, and it helped disarm them. He felt normal about his size only when he was playing lacrosse or, later, when he worked for the FBI, and everyone seemed like they’d been cut from the same fabric, physically, at least. Nina always had to tell her friends he was as friendly as a St. Bernard, which wasn’t true in the least. But he could look like one when he needed to.

      “Didn’t mean to startle you,” Matthew said, then turned his body slightly to the right so Ronnie could see his gold arrowhead-shaped name tag, the one that said captain matthew drew, like he was commanding a whaling ship. The Indians were funny about giving everyone a rank. “You’re safe here.”

      “My one bit of luck all night,” Ronnie said. He looked over his shoulder at the door, shook his head once, muttered, “Fucking idiots,” then went back to his business, the poor bastard squirting dashes of piss every few seconds like a sprinkler. Matthew’s dad had been like that a few years ago. One day it was an enlarged prostate, the next day it was cancer, the next day he was dead. That’s what it seemed like, anyway.

      Matthew stepped over to the bank of sinks, started to wash his hands. He was in the gray suit he liked to wear on the Friday night/Saturday morning shift. It was big through the shoulders, so he was able to wear the harness holster he preferred, his .357 SIG under his left arm, a sap under his right. It wasn’t legal in Wisconsin for private citizens or security guards to conceal a sap, strictly speaking, but the rules on Indian land were fungible, and who was going to stop him?

      Nine months he’d been working security for the Chuyalla tribe, splitting his time between the casino and the hotel, his bosses happy to tell potential convention clients how Matthew was ex-FBI, as if the accountants, notaries, travel agents, and paralegals renting space might need someone qualified for tactical assault to assist them with their awards banquet. Matthew wasn’t sure why the Indians wanted some former fed on their security payroll. Everyone else was local talent—ex–tribal cops and Desert Storm vets, guys who looked the part, anyway, even if they were shit at their jobs. Maybe they liked that he wasn’t Chuyalla, so he wasn’t constantly kicking his cousins out of the casino. Or maybe they just liked that Matthew didn’t mind putting blood on the floor.

      Earlier that night, he’d sapped a Latin King who’d walked into the casino to play some craps. Matthew made him and his girl on the parking lot cam, had his picture run through their facial-recognition database before he even hit the tables. Ten minutes later he had a positive ID on one Desmond Christopher, called his info into the tribal police, who gave him his sheet: thirty-nine years old, five foot nine, 227 pounds—not fat, just swollen with prison muscles like a linebacker, though he looked skinnier now, probably the meth—known Latin Kings shot caller and meth wholesaler with two years down in Stateville on trafficking, another nine months for pimping, five years at Waupun for attempted murder on a Gangster Disciples soldier, which wasn’t surprising since the dumb shit had Killer tattooed across his forehead in Old English script.

      The Chuyalla were sensitive about providing a family environment, and they hated the Mexican gangs working their way north into Native land, so Matthew went down to the floor to encourage the gentleman to take his drug money elsewhere. They were more tolerant toward the Native gangs, since the Chuyalla rented them a ballroom once a month to hold their council meetings; plus most of them were Chuyalla, and those that weren’t were careful not to show too much disrespect. The Native Mob controlled all the interests on reservation land, but the Mexican gangs were creeping closer and closer, the Cartels down south emboldening them with better guns and extra cash, which helped when they ended up getting arrested. Bloods and Crips kept to the big cities, but even still, on a weekend night, they’d roll in to wash their money at the tables, at least until Matthew pulled them out by their faces.

      “Time to go,” Matthew told Killer, then reached down onto the craps table, picked up Killer’s bet—fifty on the hard eight; all these street gangsters bet the hard eight—and dropped it back on his chip stack. He had maybe another four grand piled in front of him. If he wasn’t washing money, he was doing a pretty good job faking it.

      “Me and my girl come here all the time,” Killer said. He wasn’t angry. Not yet, anyway. Probably because he knew he was caught. Last thing he wanted was the cops coming to see him. A felon with his sheet, he was always a parole violation waiting to happen. His girl was maybe twenty-two, and though she didn’t have any tattoos on her face, she did have an ace of spades playing card the size of a fist on her neck, prison ink for thieves and con artists. Consorting with her was probably a violation in itself.

      “Don’t make a scene,” Matthew said, “and you won’t go back to prison.”

      Killer looked around the table. There were two Red Hat Society ladies, a couple white boys with the backwards baseball caps and bottles of Michelob, an old-timer with his lip filled with dip. A bachelorette party, one woman in a veil with a balloon penis taped to her forehead, all her drunk friends in matching black tank tops that said mandy’s hitched! across their chests. “One of you got a problem?” Killer asked. They all kept their eyes down. “See? I’m just out on Friday night, keeping my own. No one said shit when I lost five bills here last week.”

      “Yeah,” his girl said, СКАЧАТЬ