Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

An outfit, too, that just so happened to need a lot of frozen meat. The manifests would be key. This was going to take some finessing, and they didn’t have much time. He wanted Sal Cupertine alive.

“Somewhere warm,” Jeff said.

Dr. Larry Kirsch kept a busy schedule. First thing in the morning, he’d leave the Meadows at Sahara, his exclusive guard-gated McMansion development in Summerlin, and get to his practice on the corner of Harmon and Eastern twenty minutes later, do a couple boob jobs before lunch, maybe work on a tummy tuck or a rhinoplasty, and then he’d usually head over to Piero’s for a bite. Some days he’d follow up Piero’s with a beer at Champagnes, the kind of bar where no one knew your name, and then he’d make a round up the street at Desert Springs Hospital to see any of his surgical patients. He’d come back to his office around three, do some Botox and chemical peels, close the day with a face-lift, followed by a lap dance at the Olympic Gardens or Cheetahs, never the Wild Horse.

Sometimes he paid a girl to go out to his car and jerk him off in the parking lot, sometimes he’d just do it himself.

Then he’d spend an hour or two at his ex-wife’s house helping his eleven-year-old son with his homework, grab a burger from Sonic, and then head back to the Meadows at Sahara. Kirsch’s ex and kid had a house in the Scotch 80s, an old Las Vegas neighborhood where mobsters and city officials used to live next door to one another without the need for any kind of gates. If someone was going to kill you, they’d just drag you outside, shoot you in the face, and then bury you in your own backyard.

It wasn’t that easy anymore, unfortunately. David watched the doctor for almost two weeks trying to figure out the best time and place to kill him, but the asshole was never alone. Plus, everywhere he went had cameras and people, and David, for the first time in his life, needed to leave a little bit of a mess.

So, on the morning of the Super Bowl, David called Dr. Kirsch’s cell.

“This is a friend of Bennie Savone’s,” David said when Kirsch answered.

“Oh, okay,” Dr. Kirsch said. “Any friend of Bennie’s is a friend of mine.”

“Right,” David said. “We need some work done tonight.”

“This work,” Dr. Kirsch said, “does it require immediate medical attention?” He lowered his voice. “Is it a bullet wound?”

“Minor procedure,” David said. “No nurses or anything.”

“Of course, of course, I understand,” Dr. Kirsch said. “It’s just that I have plans tonight. It’s the Super Bowl, as I’m sure you’re aware, and. .”

“You’re either at your office at 7 p.m.,” David said, “or the Review-Journal gets a stack of pictures of you whacking off in public.”

Silence.

“When all of your security cameras are off,” David said, “pop your office door open, the one facing Harmon. Any questions?”

“No,” Dr. Kirsch said.

“If you’re even two minutes late,” David said, “your ex-wife gets the pictures, too.”

“This isn’t how Mr. Savone usually speaks to me,” Dr. Kirsch said.

“This isn’t Mr. Savone,” David said, then he dumped his burner cell into his portable foundry — an expense that was already paying for itself — and took an inventory, made sure he was prepared.

Rubber gloves.

Wet-Naps.

Knife.

He’d even made himself a silencer for this job, something he was generally adverse to, since it spoke to a kind of weakness. But the difference between killing someone in Chicago and killing someone in Las Vegas came down to simple acoustics: Chicago was loud , between the L and all the traffic and the howling wind and the sound of about three million people going about their daily lives. In Las Vegas, though, once you got off the Strip, everything fell quiet, the desert surrounding the city a valley of echoes.

He didn’t have much choice about guns, so he’d taken a nine from the cache in Slim Joe’s closet, filed off the serial number, and cleaned it meticulously, though he didn’t bother to wrap the handle with duct tape, since that just made it more likely he’d trap a finger print. And he was going to melt the gun anyway. He’d have a cab take him to Desert Springs and then he’d walk the mile to Kirsch’s office and wait for him.

If everything went according to plan, he’d be home in time to prepare sufficiently for the Monday morning minyan . If it turned upside down, someone else would be making prayers.

At sixty forty-five, David watched from across the street as Dr. Kirsch parked his green Jaguar in his personalized space — there was no bigger honor in Las Vegas than having your name painted on pavement; even the temple sold spaces for seven hundred and fifty bucks a month — and headed inside through his private office door. Fifteen minutes later, he stepped outside, looked both ways, and then propped his door open.

When David walked in, Dr. Kirsch was sitting behind the desk in his office, a wall-to-wall mahogany affair lined with bookshelves filled with framed photos of the doctor with various celebrities. Danny Gans. Wayne Newton. The captain of The Love Boat. The guy who played Dan Tanna on Vega$. A white tiger. That one was signed.

Dr. Kirsch didn’t seem surprised to see David, even though he said, “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“You’ve never seen me,” David said.

“Right, you’re right, no,” Dr. Kirsch said. He looked over David’s shoulder. “Is Mr. Savone here?”

“No,” David said. “I’m alone. You want to close your blinds?”

“Yes, right,” Dr. Kirsch got up from behind his desk and closed the matchstick bamboo blinds behind him, though David could still make out the passing lights of traffic. Didn’t anyone have decent curtains anymore? “The man who called said there was something minor to be done,” Dr. Kirsch said. “Are you having some issue with your skin? That area around your ears was difficult.”

“Yes,” David said. “My cheeks don’t move right. And I’ve got a lot of jaw pain.” Which was true. If he clenched his teeth too hard, it was like getting a nail through the eye.

“Any bleeding?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” David said. “But I can taste blood in the back of my mouth sometimes.”

“Okay then,” Dr. Kirsch said, “let’s check it out.” He walked David out of his office and down a long hallway lined with photos of showgirls, models, and a lady who did the weather Saturday nights on Channel 8. He stopped and unlocked an exam room. “Lay down on the exam bed, and I’ll take a look, Rabbi.”

David saw the doctor give an inadvertent twitch, like he’d been shocked, which he probably had been at his own stupidity for addressing a man he’d supposedly never met. He began to turn around, which was a mistake, since he ended up getting half his face blown off when David shot him.

Dr. Kirsch dropped to the ground, his jaw and most of his nose completely gone, but he was still alive, twitching on the tile, half of his face splattered all around him.

The upside of this, David considered, was that now it really wouldn’t look like a professional job, which had been the point all along. He’d planned on shooting the doctor in the neck, the kind of thing people who aren’t used to killing ended up doing all the time, and if the doctor didn’t die instantly, he’d be dead soon enough and would never know the difference. But David had seen guys survive a face shot, even stay conscious. The human body, man, it wanted to live.