Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” he said. “Because maybe that’s the line you gave Bruno when you flipped him and now he’s dead. You know Ronnie don’t forget, right?”

“So then what is this?” Jeff said.

“Making my own bed,” Monte said. He cleared his throat, and Jeff heard the clinking of ice again. “First thing, you get that body from the dump, you call my mother. You got her phone number?”

“Yes,” Jeff said. He had phone numbers for every extended member of the Family, and the FBI had bugs on most of them, too.

“You call her, tell her you got my cousin Neal. She’s gonna lose it. Don’t play with her, don’t dig on her, no pressure, okay? She’s not in the game, never has been, she just tried her best, you know? That kid was practically a retard, not a evil bone in his body, just real sweet, wanted to start a puppy farm, always had gerbils and hamsters and shit, used to wash them. . Ronnie always had this idea that he was the perfect guy to have along for things because, well, fuck, what did he know? Right?”

Jeff had only passing knowledge of Neal Moretti: He was inconsequential to even the smallest investigations Jeff had been party to, his most notable trait being his last name and that he was frequently used as a driver.

And now he was rotting in the landfill.

Fat Monte rambled on about his cousin, his words running into each other, and Jeff realized this wasn’t just a confession of some kind, it was maybe a coda, too, that Fat Monte was winding down toward something dreadful, trying to get his mind right. This was not good.

“Okay, okay,” Jeff said. “I’ll call your mother. We’ll find Neal. We’ll do whatever we need to do to get that to happen right away.”

“He was like my brother,” Fat Monte said finally. “I’ve done plenty of bad things, you know that, right? You know that?”

“I know that.”

“But I was never like Sal. I tried to be this cold-blooded motherfucker, and maybe most of the time I was, that steroid shit, that made it worse for a while, but I tried to get off that when I met my girl, and all of a sudden, all this shit, it starts visiting on me, like flashbacks. So I get back on it, get that rush, you know, invincible. Most of the time, I can put it in the back somewhere, but Neal, Neal, he was like my brother, right? And I had to do him. There’s no returning from that, that’s what I keep thinking about, thinking about how my wife, Hannah is her name, you knew about her, right? What if she found out about that? She’d never be able to see me like she saw me before, and that, that, that, that wouldn’t be something I could deal with.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Jeff said. He was throwing on his pants, had already slipped into a sweatshirt while Monte was going on, was looking for his shoes, trying to figure out how he’d call 911 while he was on the phone, trying to figure out how he’d explain to the cops — shit, to the FBI — how it was that he was on the phone with Fat Monte Moretti and the tenor of their conversation. He’d need to figure that out. But at that moment, his biggest concern was getting to wherever Monte was, since he was becoming increasingly aware of how much Fat Monte was talking about his wife as if she didn’t exist anymore.

“Yeah, yeah,” Fat Monte said.

“Why don’t you tell me where you are,” Jeff said. He found his car keys and was walking out into the frigid darkness. “Why don’t you tell me where we can meet and talk, Monte. Just man-to-man. No bullshit.”

“Kochel Farms,” Fat Monte said.

“You need to tell me where that is,” Jeff said.

“I ain’t there, but you’ll find it,” Fat Monte said.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Let’s just do one thing at a time. I’m getting into my car right now. Why don’t you let me buy you some steak and eggs over at the White Palace. You know where that is?”

“It’s too late,” Fat Monte said.

“No, no, it’s not, Monte,” Jeff said. “We can figure out a good solution here. Get you out of town, into a program, you and Hannah into a house with a lawn and a garage. Send you out to California, whatever you want. Okay? We can do that. I have that authority.”

“Just get him out of that dump,” Fat Monte said, and then the next thing Jeff heard was the distinctive blast of a.357, followed by the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor.

Rabbi David Cohen hated to wait. In Chicago, if he had to sit on someone in order to take him out, well, that wasn’t really waiting. That was working. It was part of a process with a discernible end point. Now, however, it was a completely different story. Since his coming-out party at the Hanukkah carnival, he’d become, it seemed, the go-to rabbi/problem solver for any Jew in Las Vegas under the age of fifty — and he’d have to drop everything, get over to the temple, sit in his office, and wait for them to show up.

Most arrived on time, but then once they were in his office, his new congregants had no compunction about staying longer than their allotted appointment. So David would have to wait for them to get to the point of their problem, which was tiring because it required mental focus in addition to the monastic ability to just sit and listen. Stillness was of paramount importance, according to Rabbi Kales, who was strict about this, telling David over and over again that most people just wanted someone to listen to them, that it wasn’t really up to him to solve their problems as much as provide them the road map to their own decisions. He was to do this by dispensing as many nuggets as possible from all his readings — the Torah, Midrash, Talmud, whatever — though he’d found that if he paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen it generally had the same effect.

That probably wasn’t going to work today, not with Claudia Levine. She was a New York Jew who’d moved to Las Vegas five years earlier when her husband, Mark, took a job in the accounting department at the Rio and then moved a few streets over to the Palace Station, but that was just too dirty for his taste — physically dirty, as in they didn’t clean it often enough — so he moved up the street to a new resort in Summerlin, which was good because it cut down his commute, since they were living in a charming little townhouse over at the Adagio on the corner of Buffalo and Vegas, just a few blocks down the way from the temple, though, for Claudia’s taste, there were a few too many strippers living there, too, which made her fear the pool.

David still had no idea of the exact nature of Claudia’s problem, and he was due to meet with Jerry Ford in fifteen minutes. Their little business operation had taken off in the last few weeks. After the holidays, there were far more bodies to be disposed of from natural deaths — old people, David had found, were all about holding on through the holidays before biting it, since no one liked to have Grandpa keel over during Hanukkah or on New Year’s Eve — and unnatural deaths. It made sense: David couldn’t ever remember killing someone on Christmas, or even the week after. Even hit men took that time off.

But once the second of January rolled around, it was open season. By the middle of January, David had already presided over fifteen funerals, equally divided between real people and hit jobs.

It was the suicides that left David unnerved. It was one thing to bury some old lady who’d been alive since before there were paved roads and then another thing altogether when he had to eulogize some UNLV student who threw him or herself out of a dorm window. Usually, Rabbi Kales stepped in because of the long relationship he had with the families, but more and more often, David found himself being thrust into situations that weren’t criminal in the least, Bennie telling him it was part of their long-range plan, the selling of this long con.