Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

Shit.

He’d control what he could control on his own, let the Family figure out how to take care of the girl, get any videotapes. They were good at that sort of thing, particularly at a union hotel like the Parker. But the feds, those guys needed to go.

An old hotel like the Parker was actually a good place to kill a person: Thick walls and dense carpeting absorbed sound well, and, unlike some fucking Marriott, these old hotels didn’t lump rooms together as densely. Plus, they didn’t have huge banks of supermodern elevators shuttling hundreds at a time, opting instead for the charm of flying into the air in just a few ornate oak coffins. What really made the old elevators nice was that they still had stop buttons you could yank out to freeze the elevator in place, which Sal did when he got to the eleventh floor. In the amount of time Sal would take to do his job, if he did it right, no one would think twice about the elevator wait time.

In retrospect, Sal should have found out if the Mexican was on the take, not that it mattered, really, since he was the first one Sal shot when he opened the hotel room door. In that case, it wasn’t personal; it was just about getting shit taken care of as quickly as possible. The first two Donnie Brascos went next, no problem, but the third guy decided he wanted to O.K. Corral the place; Sal eventually wrestled him to the ground and broke his windpipe. It was all done in maybe two minutes. Three at the most. And then Sal calmly walked down the hall to the service elevator and left.

At first, he was going to pick up Jennifer and William and make a run for it, but he knew that would end poorly for everyone. So he did the only thing that made sense to him: He called his cousin Ronnie Cupertine, his only direct relative still in the Family, but who now split time between Chicago and Detroit, since he had used-car dealerships in both cities. Ronnie was one of those guys people on the street assumed was connected, mostly because he looked like such a cliché with his affinity for pinkie rings and pin-striped suits. He ran ads in the Tribune where he’d make used-car buyers “offers they couldn’t refuse” and comical spots on TV where he dressed in a zoot suit and carried a tommy gun, called the other dealerships “dirty rats,” and promised that the credit agencies would be taking “dirt naps” when he was done with them. The joke, of course, was that he was a real fucking gangster, and most of the cars he came upon and was thus able to sell at such a cheap rate were chops from Canada, bought in bulk.

“I fucked up,” Sal told Ronnie. In the background, Sal could hear a cartoon playing on the television. Ronnie had four kids, all under thirteen, all in private school. A real bastion of society.

“What happened?”

“I took out some company guys,” Sal said. It was probably the wrong thing to say. Sal was using a cell that he ripped new SIM cards from about twice a week, but Ronnie always thought he was being bugged, even though he routinely went around his house with a metal detector and the Family always kept a couple guys in the phone company. The whole world was changing, and no one in the Family knew dick about computers or technology. They knew only enough to be paranoid.

“Where are you?”

“Driving around,” Sal said, but in truth he was parked across the street from Ronnie’s Gold Coast manor. Built in the 1950s, the house was three stories high with a basement that Ronnie had turned into a fully operational sportsbook, though he’d become so rich that he used it now only to host parties and Vegas Night fund-raisers for the Boys & Girls Club. Used to be in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Ronnie would run a full casino out of the place, but the Jamaicans with their online books and the Indians with their casinos had made all that sort of high-roller action obsolete. Why bother getting in with a bunch of gangsters when you could do it legally?

The house was surrounded by a six-foot wrought iron gate and towering old-growth hackberry and bur oak trees, which gave the place the appearance of a fortress, even if there was now a hopscotch course chalked on the sidewalk out front. If someone wanted to roll up on the place, they’d need a team of well-armed arborists with them.

“Get off the fucking road,” Ronnie said. “They got cameras everywhere.”

“Where should I go, your place?” Sal teasing him now, letting him know that he could bring Ronnie down with him if he wanted. Sal didn’t want to do that, not yet, but he wanted to make sure Ronnie knew the stakes.

“No,” Ronnie said, “are you crazy? My kids are here.”

“So I can’t see my cousins anymore, Ronnie? That’s how it is?”

“Sal,” Ronnie said, “let’s not get melodramatic here.”

“Then where, Ronnie? You tell me where to go.”

“I can’t have you here if it gets hot,” he said. “You have to understand how that would look.”

“Maybe you should try to understand how I look,” Sal said. “I’m picking brains out of my hair, okay?”

Ronnie didn’t say anything for a minute, which Sal didn’t like. Ronnie was one of those people who thought he always knew what was what, which struck Sal as funny since Ronnie hadn’t even graduated high school. Now he was a self-made millionaire, or that’s what people thought, when in truth he was just another link on the same crooked chain.

“Fifteen minutes,” Ronnie said eventually, “that place where we played kickball.”

Ronnie was fifteen years older than Sal, but all the kids in the family — the actual family — had lived around the block from the Winston Academy and used to use their big grassy field up over on the other side of North Seminary to knock the ball around. It was a pretty good neighborhood to grow up in, but now the boutiques and espresso joints were creeping in, replacing everything. It had been years since Sal had been over there during the daytime, not since he’d gone into the school to break the principal’s arm. Gave the guy a compound fracture on orders from way up the line. Guy didn’t even owe anything, which made Sal think there was something larger at work, but he never bothered to ask. Asking wasn’t his job.

“Okay,” Sal said.

“Monte will be there. You go with him while I sort this shit out.”

“You need to get Jennifer and William to a stash house,” Sal said.

“We’ll do that,” Ronnie said. “One thing at a time.”

“I’m sorry I fucked up,” Sal said, because he was.

“I know you are,” Ronnie said.

“I just, you know, lost it. I saw that they were feds, and, you know, I just saw all the dominos at once. It seemed like the only thing to do.”

“Are you high?”

“No,” Sal said. “A little.”

“You should have walked away,” Ronnie said.

“I don’t walk away,” Sal said.

“See,” Ronnie said, “that’s the problem.”

Ronnie cleared his throat, then didn’t say anything. For a few seconds, Sal listened to the sounds of his little cousins screaming in the background. This was not good.

“Jennifer’s sick,” Sal said.

“Yeah, okay,” Ronnie said.

“The kid, too,” Sal said.

“Sal,” Ronnie said, “I can see you on my security cameras.”

“I’m just saying that she needs to be taken care of, that’s all.”

“Just meet up with Monte. We’ll get this shit done with. Sunday, you’ll come over and we’ll watch the Bears.”

“Yeah,” Sal said, “we’ll do that.” He hung up without saying good-bye because it was April and no one was going to be playing football for another six months.

And now here he was, bumping down a pockmarked road off the highway, Neal hitting every possible divot, no one in the Corolla saying shit, everyone just acting like they always drove out to a farm in the middle of the night. Where were they? Missouri, maybe. No, they hadn’t been gone that long. Indiana? Wisconsin? Sal was disoriented from the darkness and nauseous from the smell of Fat Monte’s sweat.