Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ I’m not happy to sell them. But I don’t want to drive one.”

      “You fought in Korea?”

      “Nah,” Ronnie said. “Before my time.”

      “So you were in Vietnam?”

      Ronnie pointed at his feet. “Bad arches.”

      “My dad fought.”

      “Yeah? He come back all messed up?”

      “Got cancer eventually,” Matthew said. “I don’t know if it was the Agent Orange or the two packs a day.”

      “You know quitting cigarettes is harder than quitting heroin?”

      “No,” Matthew said. “I didn’t know that.”

      “There’s no secondhand heroin,” Ronnie said. “You want heroin, you gotta go find it. Cigarettes are everywhere. Fucks with your head.” He paused. “Your old man ever try to quit?”

      “Not once.”

      “Sounds like he had a death wish.”

      “He was complicated,” Matthew said. “But he signed up to fight. Didn’t wait for the draft. I feel like I would have done the same. And if they said I had some physical impairment, I would have asked for a waiver, snuck back in, whatever it took.”

      “You say that now,” Ronnie said. “Wait until some shit goes down.” He selected a toothpick, dug out a spot of food jammed above his incisor. “The weapons back then were shit and, pardon my language, who the fuck wanted to sit in a jungle waiting to get captured? End up like John McCain? All bent in thirty different directions? Nah.” He rubbed his top front teeth with his index finger, then leaned back from the sink, adjusted his shirt, made sure his collar was straight, adjusted his belt. “If it was up to me, I would have told the generals to bomb Berkeley, that would have ended the war fast.” He took out his billfold again, came out with a business card. “You got a pen?”

      Matthew did. It was a black Smith & Wesson tactical pen, the kind you could use to bust out your car window if you found yourself rammed off the road into a frozen lake, or as a weapon if you were fighting up close. He handed it to the head of the biggest organized crime outfit west of New York, who started to scrawl a message on the back of the card.

      “Next time you’re in the market, bring this card into any of my dealerships, my boys will take good . . .” Ronnie began to say, but Matthew didn’t let him finish.

      He grabbed Ronnie by the hair and slammed his face into the sink, crushing his nose and snapping his jaw in a single move. Slammed him a second time, across his eyebrows, shattered his orbital bones. Split his forehead open like it had a zipper. Third time, he turned Ronnie’s head slightly to the right, aimed down an inch, then severed the top of Ronnie’s ear on the sharp marble edge of the counter, and dropped him face-first onto the tile floor. What teeth Ronnie had left clattered around him.

      Improvisational skills were a hallmark of good FBI agents. The Bureau even had its agents-in-training work with acting coaches and comics to refine the skill. Matthew liked that aspect of the job. Pretending to be someone else. Day like today, Matthew wasn’t sure if he was someone different or who he’d always been.

      Matthew got down on one knee, tipped Ronnie on his side, examined the damage.

      It wasn’t easy to tell the difference between Ronnie’s mouth and his nose, his eyes and his scalp.

      He’d live. Not happily. But he’d live.

      Matthew could put him out of his misery. Drag him into a stall, flip him onto his back, let him choke to death on his own blood. Maybe Matthew could pinch Ronnie’s nose to help death along. He’d last a minute, probably less. Even if his boys came in and found him, there was a good chance Ronnie would asphyxiate enough to get some decent brain damage, spend the rest of his life watching cartoons and eating Jell-O.

      Tough to run the Family with mush brains.

      But that was the easy way out.

      Painless, in the end, really.

      It had been three years since Sal Cupertine was disappeared. Matthew and Jeff couldn’t find him. The rest of the FBI couldn’t find him, not that they’d given it much effort. The public hadn’t spotted him, not even after all the news programs ran his photo. If Sal Cupertine was still alive, he was doing a good job of pretending he wasn’t, which was curious to Matthew. Unless he was living in a cave somewhere, he’d need a new face by this point, and it wasn’t like the movies: You could get all the plastic surgery you wanted, but your face was still your face. Maybe all this new facial-recognition software wouldn’t make an exact match, but a 50 percent match would be enough to get a warrant if everything else lined up. The FBI did a dry run at the Super Bowl a few months earlier, running 100,000 people in one day, arresting a couple dozen wanted felons. Small database searches made it easier—if Sal Cupertine showed up somewhere the government was looking for the most wanted criminals on the planet, he’d pop right up. And the technology was only getting better: The system they had at the casino updated every few months with new patches, predictive biometrics that could spot extensive makeup, nose jobs, Botox, even artificial aging, what the techs called Tanning Salon Soul Man Face.

      If it had a nickname, you were already beaten.

      So, yeah, maybe Matthew should have dragged Ronnie into a stall and tortured him for answers, but then what? Ronnie wasn’t the boss of Chicago because he was stupid. Maybe Ronnie Cupertine knew where Sal was at one time, but surely that time had passed. Sal Cupertine had spent fifteen years on the streets of Chicago killing with impunity. He knew people were looking for him. If he’d left his wife and kid alone for three long years it wasn’t because he was enjoying his life. He’d poke his head up eventually. And Matthew would be there waiting.

      Matthew picked up his Smith & Wesson pen and Ronnie’s business card, took some time to wash his hands, strands of Ronnie’s hair filling up the sink, buttoned up his jacket so the flecks of Ronnie’s blood wouldn’t be visible on his white shirt, slipped his arrowhead name tag into this pocket. Wet one of Curtis’s towels, wiped Ronnie’s blood, hair, spit, and skin from the edge of the counter, tossed it in the trash. Checked his reflection in the mirror, then had a thought, got back down on the floor, shoved his hand in Ronnie’s pants pocket, came out with his billfold. Counted the cash. Five grand. He’d give it to Nina, save for fifty bucks to get his suit and shoes cleaned, then headed out, just as Ronnie Cupertine let out a low moan and shit himself.

      There were two guys lingering outside, heads down, pacing, backs to the door, talking on their phones. They wore identical Adidas sweat suits, though one guy had on white Nikes, the other old-school black Pumas. It was odd, since the Family guys tended to dress like they were in business, at least the ones who went around with Ronnie. These two weren’t even wearing Kevlar. He scanned them for weapons, saw both were going for fashion over utility, guns stuffed in the back of their waistbands, like in the movies. Matthew could shoot both of these guys between the eyes, or simply walk up and disarm them, before either realized how stupid it was to keep their guns behind them. At Quantico, during live-action fire drills, they’d practice on guys like this, since most of the time, if you’re FBI, you’re rousing assholes from their houses, not shooting it out with bank robbers armed with AK-47s on the streets of LA. These guys hadn’t received the memo, Matthew thought, that rolling with nines shoved up your ass was no way to conduct modern warfare.

      Everything was СКАЧАТЬ