Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“Never did get that to stick, did you?” Fat Monte said.

“No, never did,” Jeff said. “Fortunately there’s no statute of limitations.”

“No witnesses plus no statute of limitations equals you walking around holding your dick,” Fat Monte said.

“Between us?” Jeff leaned across the table, so that he was only a few inches away from Fat Monte’s face, so close he could smell Fat Monte’s acrid breath, the creepy bastard actually breathing out of his mouth in these short, quick pulses. “I didn’t mind you killing a drug dealer. One less piece of paperwork I had to worry about. But what gets me, Monte, is why you’d kill Chema and Neto Espinoza. My guess is that Chema saw whatever went down with Sal.” He paused for just a second, tried to think of his next words carefully, see how Fat Monte reacted. “Probably saw the trade go down. Or he could have just been the driver, since I can’t imagine Sal Cupertine sitting by while your fat ass drove him around in the dark. Okay, fine. You can’t be leaving witnesses around. But Neto? He was already in prison and wasn’t going to be leaving any time soon, not with a million dollars of H on his ticket. That just seems. . sloppy. . to me. Because then I gotta walk that back, see who Neto is down with, see that he was on your crew, and that up in Stateville he somehow ends up rooming with Lemonhead Nicolino. You couldn’t have farmed the job out to the Aryans?”

Jeff sat back, took a sip of his beer, and let Fat Monte process the information.

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Fat Monte said.

“Thirty-seven times, Monte? You think I wouldn’t notice Neto was stabbed thirty-seven times in the chest?”

Fat Monte had another shot halfway to his mouth but thought better of it. He set the glass back down on the table. Jeff thought he saw a little shake in his hand. “Maybe you think I’m a little bitch like your friend Paul Bruno,” Fat Monte said. “See, I don’t scare. Prison doesn’t scare me, either, so why don’t you just go ahead and call your assault team down to secure the bar and take me in.”

Hearing Paul Bruno’s name immediately gave Jeff pause. That Fat Monte knew he was a snitch made Jeff reconsider a few things. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, not with Ronnie Cupertine’s connections. Maybe he had a guy in the bureau. Or maybe he just bugged all the cars he sold and serviced out of his shop. Most likely, though, he was keeping tabs on Paul Bruno. It’s what Jeff had predicted for Bruno’s fate, he just didn’t want to believe it could come to pass so quickly.

“You want to be on the hook for Paul’s murder, too?” Jeff asked, just to see how Monte reacted. “Because I’m happy to add that to your ticket.”

“You’d need to find a body first,” Monte said.

“Funny thing,” Jeff said, “I didn’t even know he was missing.”

Fat Monte started to say something, stopped, and then started to laugh. “Maybe he committed suicide,” he said. “You never know.”

“Pretty hard to hide your own body,” Jeff said.

“I got somewhere to be,” Fat Monte said. He took another shot, slammed the glass onto the table, and then started to stand up. Before Jeff could even make a move, Matthew reached out with his right hand and grabbed Fat Monte Moretti by the balls and yanked down. Fat Monte shrieked and fell to both knees and then onto his side. Matthew stood up as though to help him back up, but in the process managed to also kick Fat Monte in the face. Not too hard. Just hard enough to break his nose.

“Whoa,” Matthew said, as friendly as can be, “easy there.” He reached down and seized Fat Monte by the back of his neck and hefted him back up onto his stool. Fat Monte’s face was a bloody mess, his nose now pointing to the right, his eyes filled with tears. “Maybe you should go a little easy on those shots.” A waitress came rushing over with a rag filled with ice, which Fat Monte took without saying a word.

“Is he going to be all right?” she asked.

“He’ll be fine,” Matthew said.

“Do you want me to call an ambulance for you, Monte?” she asked. Monte. She knew his name; he was a regular at the Four Treys now, the kind of guy who the servers knew by name, the kind of guy who wasn’t likely to make a scene now because this was where he actually came to chill out, where he came to not be who he was during business hours. . whenever those happened to be for members of the Family.

“Yeah,” Fat Monte croaked out, “call 911.”

The waitress turned to Jeff. “Is he being serious?”

“I don’t think so,” Jeff said. “But then, you probably know him better than I do.”

“Are you being serious, Monte?” she asked. “Do you want me to call your wife?”

“No,” Fat Monte said.

“No you don’t want me to call your wife or no you’re not being serious?” the waitress asked.

“Both,” he said. “And bring me some Tylenol, doll, if you could.”

“You’re not gonna sue or anything, are you, Monte?” the waitress asked. Fat Monte shook his head, which looked like it hurt. “All right then,” she said, and she walked away.

“Nice girl,” Matthew said once she was gone. “You sure you don’t want her to call your wife, Monte? How about your mommy?”

“Fuck you,” Fat Monte said, though there wasn’t much behind it. It occurred to Jeff that this might be the first time in his adult life that Fat Monte had actually been on the other end of a beatdown, even if a single punch hadn’t been thrown. That was the thing about being trained how to fight versus just picking it up on the streets. You learned how to do the most amount of damage with the least amount of exertion. Matthew managed to emasculate Fat Monte in two distinct ways. “How the fuck am I supposed to explain to my wife how I ended up with a broken nose?”

“Maybe you should ask yourself how you’ll explain it to Ronnie Cupertine,” Jeff said.

Fat Monte pulled the rag from his face, examined all the blood — as if he thought looking at it might somehow fix the situation — then pressed it back up against his nose. “What kind of feds are you?”

“Tell me about Sal Cupertine,” Matthew said, “or one day you’ll be walking down the street and I’ll be inside of a building with a sniper’s rifle, aimed right here.” Matthew reached over and touched a spot on Fat Monte’s back. “You feel that? That’s the part of your spine that controls your bladder, your bowels, all your sexual functions. That’s where the bullet is going to go. And you know what? It will be perfectly legal because you’re a known criminal with a gun and I’m an FBI agent. You’ll be shitting into a bag for the rest of your life, trying to make your limp dick work. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and do it when you walk out of this place tonight, because I’m sure you’ve got some heat on you and you’re surely on probation. Save us all some time.”

“I want my lawyer,” Fat Monte said.

Matthew actually started to laugh. Jeff thought Matthew was enjoying this a bit too much. Here was Fat Monte Moretti, one of the most feared gangsters in all of Chicago, a man probably responsible for a dozen or more murders, asking for his lawyer, undone by a broken nose and the realization that sometimes you really don’t have any rights.

“Let me put it to you this way,” Jeff said. “You’re free to go any time. But understand that as soon as you walk out the door, you’re a dead man. Either my partner here will shoot you, or it’s gonna be the Gangster 2–6, or it’s going to be someone in the Family, once we put out the word that you were seen at this nice bar consorting with the FBI. You could say we’re actually here to help you.”