Читать книгу Gangster Nation - Tod Goldberg - Страница 10

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 pretended not to hear the sirens. Kaufman and Broad had gutted three warehouses down to the studs for a development they were calling the Timber Factory Lofts, but for two years, nothing had come to pass; the sign offering Executive Loft Spaces Starting in the Low 800s! didn’t even have a phone number on it. So Matthew broke in one night—which was hardly breaking and entering, since there wasn’t even a lock on the door—scoped out a suitable space, set up the chair, rolled out some Visqueen, even found an old Teddy Ruxpin at Goodwill and tossed it on the floor, came in one night with a boombox, blared a mixture of punk rock and Sarah McLachlan for forty-five minutes, checked the acoustics and the taste of the neighbors.

Warped Tour or Lilith Fair, no one said a thing.

He could take a hacksaw to Ronnie Cupertine, and as long as he played music at the same time, no one would give a shit.

Then Matthew proceeded to phase two, which entailed watching Ronnie for months.

He didn’t have anything else to do.

Two years ago, he’d spent six months hiding out in Jeff Hopper’s house in Walla Walla after Hopper turned up dead, trying to piece together what the fuck happened. Hopper had gone to Las Vegas, Matthew to Palm Springs, to follow a lead on Sal Cupertine’s disappearance, after Hopper figured out that Cupertine was smuggled from Illinois in a frozen meat truck, most likely to Nevada or California. The two of them were to reconnect in a few days, make their next move, except Matthew never heard another word from Hopper. He just disappeared. Then he turned up dead. But not before telling the Tribune everything Jeff and Matthew had learned in their investigation . . . save for any mention of Matthew’s name, which was probably why he still walked the earth.

It didn’t make any sense. It was the opposite of everything he and Matthew had been working toward, their entire focus being the capture of Sal Cupertine for the murder of those three FBI agents and the CI. Delivering actual justice, not this media bullshit. Going to the press before he had Sal Cupertine in cuffs, and without telling Matthew ahead of time? No. That wasn’t his style. And neither was the giant picture of Hopper that graced the front page of the paper, right next to a grainy photo of Sal Cupertine. Jeff would never consent to that.

After leaving Walla Walla, when Hopper’s estate was settled and the bank sent a sheriff over to give Matthew the boot, Matthew spent another month at a Ramada in Springfield waiting to get called in on the corruption trial of Kirk Biglione, his former boss at the FBI. That never came to pass, either. Biglione took a deal before anything went to the jury, the FBI admitting that they’d disregarded evidence to keep a long-running—and ill-fated—surveillance program of the Family going, even admitting that they delivered a box of ashes to Sal Cupertine’s wife, Jennifer, that were actually the remains of Chema Espinoza, a soldier in the Gangster 2-6 who was doing scut work for the Family and ended up in that landfill for his troubles. That would have been a decent civil lawsuit if Sal Cupertine hadn’t been a Mafia hit man and if Jennifer Cupertine was interested in being deposed, which Matthew figured she probably wasn’t. Biglione didn’t even get any time, just a suspended sentence, and was now doing big-money corporate security in Detroit, making a hundred times the salary he pulled from the government.

Matthew kept tabs on him, waiting for his next fuckup. Biglione had fired Matthew for doing the right thing. That wasn’t something he was going to forget. Ever.

But Matthew kept tabs on everyone these days . . . which made tracking Ronnie Cupertine easy. Ronnie had come out of the whole FBI corruption scandal without a single charge against him, his crimes dumped on Fat Monte Moretti, who was dead, and Sal Cupertine, who was in the wind and on his way to becoming something of an urban legend, and then half a dozen soldiers and capos willing to take a five-year bid for shit they didn’t do. If the courts, the FBI, or the media couldn’t hold Ronnie Cupertine accountable, Matthew Drew figured he could.

Catching him? That was another matter.

Ronnie Cupertine’s Gold Coast manor had a six-foot wrought-iron gate out front, topped with cameras, and there was a private security guard out front, some rent-a-cop with a badge, flashlight, Glock, and walkie-talkie, usually sitting in the front seat of an armed response squad car—not unusual in a neighborhood where Cupertine’s neighbors included most of the Cubs roster and a quarter century of Chicago’s robber-baron industrialists. What was unusual was that Ronnie also owned the house across the street and the one next door, on the corner, giving himself a de facto compound, all on public streets, which was smart. You couldn’t bug a public street. Likewise, Matthew couldn’t just park his car in front of Ronnie Cupertine’s house, not unless he wanted his plates run, the Family good about having tendrils in mundane government operations like the DMV. He also didn’t like the idea of getting shot at from three different angles, since those two houses were filled with a rotating band of Ronnie’s guys.

But half a block away was a brand-new Starbucks where Matthew could sit all day if he pretended to peck away at his laptop. So he’d grab the big chair by the window, nurse latte after latte, and watch Cupertine pace his sidewalk, taking calls.

He always had one of his kids with him, usually the little girl, Cupertine knowing no one would take a shot at him with his kid right there. Still, one of his Family guys would always be a few steps behind, thick with Kevlar; even the Mafia had body armor these days. With a sniper’s rifle, Matthew could take Cupertine out from that distance, no problem, and not even get blood spatter on the kid. Could put one in Ronnie’s body guy with no problem, too, since he wasn’t wearing Kevlar on his face. Might even put a bullet into the armed response vehicle down the block, just for kicks.

But he wasn’t an assassin.

Not yet, anyway.

So Matthew waited for Ronnie to slip—run outside in his underwear to get the newspaper, step out for a smoke by himself on the day his body guy had the stomach flu—thinking then that maybe he could poison the security guy . . . or involve himself in a minor hit-and-run, if need be.

Matthew just needed a tiny opening.

It never happened.

Ronnie Cupertine was never alone. He never fucked up. There wasn’t a single moment when Matthew could have exacted his plan without needing to kill two or three other people in the process. Ronnie flew out of town, he flew with three guys. He drove to Trader Joe’s for some artichoke dip, he drove with two guys and a second car running interference. He went to his daughter’s ballet recital, there was a guy at the front door, a guy at the back, a guy on his body.

Not that any of them ever noticed Matthew. They were meat, plain and simple. But they were human beings. Just because they had shitty jobs didn’t mean they deserved to die.

But then, one day, Matthew woke up in the Chicago apartment he was back to sharing with his sister, Nina, two miles from the FBI office he was legally barred from, and didn’t pretend to go out on a job interview—instead he actually went on the interview, not because he wanted to, but because the night before, Nina walked into his bedroom and handed him a Post-it with a phone number. “You got a call while you were out,” she said, “doing whatever it is you do.”

“Great,” he said. He stuck the Post-it to his desk calendar, which he hadn’t changed since 1999.

“It was about a job.”

“Wonderful,” he said.

“They called yesterday, too,” she said.

She stood there in his doorway, arms crossed over her chest, not moving. “Look at you. What are you doing to yourself?”

“I’m trying to figure a few things out,” he said.

“By doing what?” He couldn’t exactly tell her he was stalking Ronnie Cupertine, not that she didn’t already know enough to be worried. When the world flipped after Fat Monte’s suicide, he’d taken her with him to hide out in Walla Walla, Hopper worried that the Family might come after them, which hadn’t transpired. “Look,” she said, “I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be up in your head, but Matt, I’m right here, and I need you.” She sat down on the edge of his bed. “Also, wash your sheets. It smells like a frat house in here.”

“How do you know that?”

She waved him off. “Mom says she can’t send me any more rent money,” she said, “and that she’d appreciate it if you’d return her calls every now and then, too.” Their mom lived alone, back in the family home in Maryland, which she was trying to sell. Matthew had shared this apartment with Nina for two years, splitting costs while they both got on their feet, Nina in college, Matthew at the FBI. He’d kept paying half the rent even after he lost his job, with the money Hopper gave him, because Matthew didn’t want her with a bunch of roommates. He told her he didn’t think it was safe, which, he recognized now, was silly. Nothing is safe. Nowhere is safe. But that money was gone. And his unemployment was up, too.

The last few months, they’d both subsisted on a little bit of inheritance they’d received from their father’s life insurance.

“I’ll call her,” Matthew said.

“I’m worried,” Nina said. She leaned back on Matthew’s bed, closed her eyes, and shook out her hands and feet, an old habit she’d carried from childhood.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Clearly you’re a liar,” she said. She sat back up. “Mom doesn’t think she can help out on tuition, either. I’m going to get a loan.”

“No,” Matthew said. “You don’t have to.” He tried to sound bright. “I’m going to take care of everything. Okay?” He picked up the Post-it. “I’m going to call this, first thing.”

And then he actually did. It was a headhunter for a new Indian casino opening outside Milwaukee, who told Matthew that he’d been referred to them. Matthew figured it was someone at the FBI doing him a favor. They needed a head of security to run the whole shop, six figures, moving expenses, everything. The headhunter told him he could write his own ticket, maybe end up in Las Vegas in a few years, get a house with a pool, no more winter, basically be retired for the next thirty-five years . . . if he spent two, three years making it work in Milwaukee. It was close enough to Chicago that he could still keep an eye on Nina, but far enough away that he wouldn’t be running into Gangster 2-6 shot callers and Family enforcers at Target. It also meant he couldn’t drive over to Cupertine’s house whenever he wanted, couldn’t roll by his car dealerships (not that Ronnie Cupertine ever showed up at any of them), couldn’t wait out by one of the Family’s bars in Bridgeport or Andersonville, couldn’t run by his murder warehouse to check on the Teddy Ruxpin.

And, all things considered, that was probably a good thing.

Because what Matthew Drew had come to realize was that he was obsessed with Ronnie Cupertine, but Ronnie Cupertine didn’t give a shit about him. Probably never had. Hadn’t even noticed he was being stalked. Matthew had lone wolfed him for so long, he wasn’t even sure he knew why he wanted to kill him anymore. Oh, sure, he blamed him for Jeff Hopper’s death, but the fact was he didn’t even know if Ronnie had been directly responsible. Matthew could dig up the bodies of Al Capone and J. Edgar Hoover, piss on them, rebury them, and the net result would be the same as putting one between Ronnie Cupertine’s eyes: Jeff Hopper would still be dead, his men would still be dead, and both of their killers would still be out there. Matthew’s career would still be over, and the Mafia would beat on, the FBI would beat on, history forgetting about it all, the minor wars of thugs and government agencies usually not enough to merit any civilian review whatsoever.

You wanted to be remembered, you had to kill innocent people.

Sal Cupertine, wherever the fuck he was, would never know any different. Ronnie Cupertine was a Mob boss, a killer, sold shitty cars, but he wasn’t the only one. Every crime these days was organized. The Cartels moved heroin and coke into the cities, the Mafia middled it to the gangs, the gangs sold it to the people, the people got hooked, lost their jobs, had to rob a liquor store for the fifty bucks they needed to score . . . and the cycle started all over again. That wasn’t Ronnie Cupertine’s fault. That was just his job.

The obsession, Matthew then understood, had become the result of the thing, not the thing itself.

The thing was Sal. He’d killed the FBI agents. He didn’t need to do that. He wanted to do that.

It was disorganized.

No planning.

The thing was Sal Cupertine. If he had to, Matthew would get that tattooed on the back of his hand so he wouldn’t forget going forward. Every time he raised his fist, he’d know why.

•

Now here it was, Saturday morning at the ass end of a twelve-hour shift running the casino’s security, Matthew ducking into the high-roller restroom, the one with all the marble fixtures. Bottles of Drakkar, Polo, Grey Flannel, and something called Joop lined the countertop—high rollers in a Wisconsin Indian casino being a relative thing, at least as it related to their smell—along with an array of toothpicks, mouthwash, mints, and Hershey’s chocolates.

The Chuyalla were the biggest employer for miles, the hotel and casino the best thing to happen to the region since a women’s prison was built up in Fond du Lac a few years earlier. In fact, the tribe had its own cops, its own courts. The Chuyalla was one of the few Wisconsin tribes that operated its own justice system, everything except prisons.

There was an old guy in a velvet vest named Curtis who sat on a stool next to the sink and expected money for handing you a towel. When Matthew felt low—which was often lately—he thought about Curtis, who had to be pushing eighty, and how he spent his whole day listening to, and smelling, people’s bodily functions. Not even doctors got paid enough for that indignity, not even the ones who were curing cancer or doing brain surgery. Because people never did really heal, always waiting for the next thing to break.

But he didn’t really empathize with Curtis. At some point, he’d made a choice—this was his life. So when he spied Curtis there, with the jaundiced caste to the skin around his eyes and the picked-open scabs on his forearms, Matthew didn’t want to help the man out with a dollar. He wanted to tell him to move to Oregon, where they had assisted suicide. Stop waiting for the end. It was already here.

“How you doing, boss?” Curtis asked.

“Fine,” Matthew said. He was heading to his preferred stall, the handicapped one at the very end. In Matthew’s experience, anytime someone called you “boss” what they were really saying was: I think you’re a fucking asshole.

Matthew closed the door to the stall and locked it, sat down, closed his eyes, counted backward from two hundred. Then he started over from three hundred and did it again and again and again. He didn’t even need to go to the bathroom. He just wanted to not worry about anything for a few minutes. It’s bad when your one sanctuary is literally the shittiest place on earth, but that’s where Matthew Drew found himself these days. He was working in a fucking Indian casino because he needed the money, looking the other way when Native Mob OGs bought chips in the morning and cashed them in at midnight, never once playing a single hand in between and beating up on any rival gangs who showed their face on the game floor.

Lucky to even have this job.

Twenty-seven years old going on infinity.

Ten minutes later, Matthew stepped out of the toilet and found Ronnie Cupertine at 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, and she got up into Matthew’s face, pointing a finger at his chin like she was shooting a gun. Getting loud. “Everyone was real nice to us.” She pointed at the craps dealer now, a Chuyalla who everyone called Puny because he was a good 400 pounds. “Right, Puny?” Puny didn’t respond, which was good, because he would have been out of a job. “D, this pussy can’t tell you what to do.”

“Chill,” Killer said.

“I don’t need to chill,” she said. “This marshmallow motherfucker needs to chill.”

The casino floor was filled with an Elderhostel group, fifty retirees in town for some kind of educational tour of Milwaukee, and they were all craning their necks around the slots now, standing up at their five-dollar blackjack tables; a couple ladies even had their cameras out, getting a real education. This wasn’t a show Matthew really wanted to put on.

“I’m not going to ask again,” Matthew said.

“You didn’t ask in the first place,” Killer said. “I know my rights. Fourteenth Amendment and shit. You can’t just be discriminating against me.”

“I don’t know,” Matthew said. “Felon in possession of a hooker? That seems like a crime. But you can check with the ACLU.”

Killer stared at him. “I say the word your whole family is in the ground.”

There it was. He’d been waiting for it.

First two smacks of his sap went on either side of Killer’s head, right across the ears. Matthew had to hold Killer up by his shirt so he could get his second shot in, since the first probably would have knocked him to the ground, and Matthew had a point to make, something Killer could take back to the rest of the Latin Kings: Listening is important.

The shot across the lips? Well, that was for talking shit. Matthew busted Killer’s mouth open to the bone and out came most of his teeth, including two gold ones, his girl shrieking like Matthew had hit her, too, which he wasn’t planning on doing.

He then dragged Killer through the casino by the throat, out through the loading dock, bounced his open wound of a face off a few Dumpsters, giving him a better-than-average chance of picking up a staph infection, and dropped him on the pavement, away from the cameras, not that it mattered, since Matthew was the guy who handled the video. Killer screamed the whole time, or made a noise that used to be screaming, back when his face worked right.

“I don’t want you walking back in here,” Matthew said. Then he did the only thing he thought would emphasize the point, which was to stomp on Killer’s ankles until they snapped. He then went back inside, found Killer’s girl crouched under the craps table trying to find all of her boyfriend’s teeth, told his floor guys to get her a bag and get her the fuck out of the casino, since looking at her there on the floor, she didn’t seem all that threatening anymore, just a woman who had terrible taste in men but loved one enough to pick up his teeth. That was worth something.

Was it all an extreme response? Maybe. Washing a few Gs through the casino wasn’t a hanging offense—hell, it was practically why casinos in the Midwest existed—but it was about the point: Matthew Drew hadn’t qualified for assault team work at Quantico, hadn’t made it all the way to the FBI’s top shop in Chicago, so people with their crimes cataloged on their faces could dictate his behavior. That’s just not how life worked.

And yet.

He’d somehow missed Ronnie Cupertine walking through the door, as did everyone else working the Eye in the Sky, not that anyone would have complained, least of all any of the Chuyalla management. Ronnie Cupertine was a celebrity, so famous for running the Family that people didn’t really believe he ran the Family.

It was . . . impossible.

And yet.

Ronnie Cupertine gave everyone credit at his half a dozen car dealerships around Chicago. Warrantied every purchase for two years. Paid for the entire Little League from Chicago to Springfield. Donated a million dollars to establish Hope from Fear, a battered women’s home on the South Side. Pumped a couple hundred grand into AIDS and cancer research at Northwestern every year. The Chicago Historical Society needed money to preserve a building? Ronnie Cupertine wrote a check. The Field Museum was short fifty Gs for an art exhibit? No problem. Ronnie Cupertine even gave money for an independent film festival and attended the gala, shook hands with the actors and actresses, his wife on his arm draped in diamonds and furs, because Ronnie Cupertine? He was the philanthropic king of Chicago.

So he occasionally had a motherfucker killed.

At least Ronnie Cupertine didn’t have a tattoo on his forehead.

Ronnie zipped up and flushed, made his way over to the sink next to Matthew. Up close, Matthew could smell the liquor seeping out of Ronnie’s pores. How long had he been at the casino? How many times had Matthew missed seeing him? Ronnie ran the hot water for a few seconds, then took a towel, soaked it, and scrubbed at his face, letting out an exasperated grunt when he was done.

“Tough night?” Matthew asked.

“Too much smoke in this place,” Ronnie said. “Feel like it’s in my skin, you know? Lungs are all congested. It’s unhealthy. Even Atlantic City has better ventilation.” He leaned toward the mirror, inspected his face, licked his pinkies, used them to push down his eyebrows. “Fuck it. Can’t tell an Indian not to smoke, right? It was their tobacco in the first place, right?”

“Everyone’s got their culture,” Matthew said.

“You believe that,” Ronnie said, “then you should work for me.” He took another towel, dried his face, then reached into his pocket, slipped a fifty from his billfold into Curtis’s tip jar. “You new here?”

“Been here a few months.”

“I haven’t seen you before.”

“I bought my car from you, actually.”

“Yeah?” Ronnie looked at Matthew in the mirror. “You from Chicago?”

“Not originally,” Matthew said. “Relocated for a job. Didn’t pan out. So here I am.”

“You recognize me from TV?” he asked.

“That’s it,” Matthew said. How much time did he have before one of Ronnie’s boys came in, looking for their actual boss? Two, three minutes? Maybe five, at the most. It would be disrespectful to walk in on a boss while he was taking a shit, so maybe it would be more like ten. But that seemed like an excessive amount of time to be guarding the door, which Matthew presumed they were doing. They must have swept through and somehow missed seeing Matthew’s feet in the back of the handicapped stall. Or they hadn’t looked very hard. Matthew reached into his pocket, took out his car keys, jingled them. “You sold me a Mustang.”

“You get a good deal?”

“Not bad,” Matthew said. “Carburetor gave out after twenty-five thousand miles.”

“I replace it?”

“You did.”

“I don’t welch,” Ronnie said. It was a catchphrase from one of his commercials, so popular it was even on the flyers that came in the junk mail and inside the Tribune on Sundays. “My opinion, that’s the problem with Detroit these days,” he continued. Ronnie checked his face in the mirror again, picked a piece of lint from his chin. “It’s like they forgot how to build muscle cars. Give me something with a big trunk, big tires, and nothing with the name of some country we bombed the shit out of on any of the materials, right? Every time I see a Japanese or Korean car I ask myself what the fuck we fought for, right?” He paused. “Not that 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 slower in Wisconsin.

“Excuse me, boss,” Matthew said to the one in the white Nikes, and the guy turned around, surprised to find someone standing there. He had a cross tattooed on his neck—one with the full body of Christ splayed out, though it wasn’t especially well done, shitty prison ink making Jesus look more like a melted Kris Kristofferson—and one of those pencil-thin goatees.

“What?” he said. He wasn’t Italian, which was odd. The Family didn’t usually use their affiliates for personal security. They didn’t mind having them sell their drugs or do their scut work, like Chema and Neto Espinoza had done, but it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for a positive work environment, Chema chopped up and dumped in a landfill, Neto murdered in Stateville. But everyone had bills.

“You with the guy in the bathroom?”

“Why do you care?”

“I think he fell down,” Matthew said.

“Shit,” the man said, flipped his phone closed, pushed past Matthew, grabbed the other guy, and both disappeared into the bathroom, still not pulling their guns. Matthew could follow them into the bathroom and plug them both in the back of the head if he so wished.

Instead, Matthew headed to his office upstairs.

He still had another fifteen minutes on the clock, so he took a little time to run through the security footage, found the feed of himself walking in and out of the bathroom, wiped it from the system, wiped it from the backup system, too. The perk of being in charge. Tomorrow, he’d come in early, track Ronnie Cupertine’s movements through the casino, see who he played with, see if he met with anyone. Ronnie Cupertine could fly to Las Vegas if he wanted to gamble for real money, so there had to be something else to get him up to this shithole in the middle of the night.

Matthew Drew, who’d spent six months as an FBI agent and another six months pretending to be one while searching for Sal Cupertine, locked his office and headed out through the service exit, saw that housekeeping hadn’t managed to get all of Killer’s blood out of the carpet, took a mental note to have that taken care of on Sunday, too, then made his way to the employee parking lot, where he was the only non-Chuyalla with a reserved spot. Found his Mustang, the piece of shit, got in, and called 911 from his cell, the operator telling him an ambulance was already on its way, again.