Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“I found you,” Jeff Hopper said, his voice barely a whisper.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” David said.

“I would have let you live,” Jeff said.

Jeff Hopper tried to take a breath, and then another, but they wouldn’t come; his body tensed and he tried to raise his head, tried to fight what was coming, and then he relaxed, his eyes fluttering. “I found Sal Cupertine,” he said.

“You did,” Sal Cupertine said, and then he leaned over and squeezed Jeff Hopper’s carotid off so that he’d pass out before he drowned on his own blood.

A mitzvah .

Sal Cupertine parked Jeff Hopper’s rented Pontiac across the street from Wingfield Park in Reno and then walked a few blocks down Second Street, looking for a place to make a phone call. It was midnight, and though he’d spent the last seven hours on the road from Las Vegas, Sal didn’t feel tired. In fact, for the first time in a good nine months, Sal Cupertine felt positively alive.

Though it was a Thursday night, and not much more than thirty degrees outside, there were people streaming in and out of the hotels, casinos, and restaurants along Sal’s path. There was also music — country, rock, rap — that bleated out of each passing car, each open door into each casino, each set of headphones of the people who brushed too close to Sal. But that was fine. How long had it been since he’d let anyone actually near him? Actually touch him? Plenty of people at Temple Beth Israel hugged him or kissed him on the cheek or felt the need to have some kind of human contact with him after receiving his counsel, but it was never Sal’s choice, never something he actually courted.

Though, in that way, he supposed, it was a choice. He wanted to save physical interactions for the two people whose touch he actually missed. But today, his first day back among the living — and his last day for a good long time, too, he recognized — Sal went ahead and let people bump into him, let people look him in the eye, even let people smile at him.

Not that many did any of those things. He was still Sal Cupertine, after all. Still the Rain Man. Still the last person you ever wanted to show up behind you, anywhere, at any time. These days, though, when Sal Cupertine was going to kill a guy, it really didn’t matter which way the guy was facing.

Sal had spent much of his time driving between Las Vegas and Reno trying to find an upside to all this, other than the fact that he probably wouldn’t have to kill another person for a while. And that was good, since killing Jeff Hopper hadn’t given Sal any gratification, had in fact upset him a great deal, at least for a time, since he realized just how far down the road he’d been sold. That he’d once again done what someone else should have done.

And now, thanks to a small alteration in the deal he’d made earlier with Gray Beard, Jeff Hopper — or at least a portion of him — was on his way back to Chicago. Seemed only fair since Chicago had sent Paul Bruno to Las Vegas, and after going through the paperwork Sal found in Jeff’s car, Sal thought there was perhaps a tad bit of poetic justice in that.

It had been a long day, and Sal needed a drink, maybe a big piece of fish, since he couldn’t quite handle the idea of cutting into some bloody piece of meat for the second time that day. Sal didn’t know if the casinos in Reno had the same facial-recognition software as the ones in Las Vegas, but he wasn’t taking any chances, so he ducked into a bar called the Brass Nickel. It was in between a pawn shop and a Vietnamese restaurant called Pho Saigon that Sal recognized from Hopper’s list of Kochel Farms clients. It was the kind of place that had grainy pictures of their dishes taped up to the window, so Sal spent a moment looking at something called bo luc lac —which didn’t look like much more than some meat, onions, lettuce, and white rice — and thanking God he hadn’t ended up on that plate.

There were a dozen or so people inside the Brass Nickel. Sal went up to the bar, ordered a Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks, got five dollars in quarters, and headed over to check out the pay phone. It was between the men’s room — distinguished by the painting of a cowboy with his gun drawn that covered the door — and the ladies room — woman with her dress pulled up, revealing sexy garters, of course — in a back hallway that smelled of Lysol and beer piss. Not the kind of place people tended to spend much time waiting around.

Perfect.

Sal punched in the numbers, deposited a buck seventy-five for five minutes, and listened to the space between his past and present close around the sound of a phone ringing.

Ronnie Cupertine answered his cell phone on the third ring by saying, “Who the fuck is this?”

“It’s your dead cousin,” Sal said.

There was a pause on the line, and Sal could hear SportsCenter on in the background — someone on the Lakers was “cooler than the other side of the pillow”—and the sound of water running. Ronnie was probably in his favorite spot: watching TV from the shitter in his basement.

“Good that you called,” Ronnie said. “Save me the trouble.”

“I figured,” Sal said.

“You somewhere safe?”

“Safe enough,” Sal said.

“You in Chicago?”

“You’d know if I was in Chicago,” Sal said.

Ronnie laughed. “I suppose I would.”

“You fucked up,” Sal said.

“You think so?” Ronnie said, and then Sal heard a toilet flush.

“I had to clean up your mess, again,” Sal said.

“I knew you would,” Ronnie said. “It’s what you’ve always been best at. It’s why you’ve always been so valuable to me. To everyone.”

“I don’t work for you anymore,” Sal said. “Let’s make that clear. I work for Bennie Savone.”

“See, I heard someone dimed him out to the feds,” Ronnie said. “Seems like that strip club of his is doing some very shady things. Real shame.”

“He’ll be out in thirty days,” Sal said, though he didn’t believe that. “Maybe less.”

“Could be someone dimes him out again,” Ronnie said. “Could be every few months, the feds learn something else about your boss. Could be they eventually start looking into that Jew business, too, because I know I’ve been looking at my business model, and while cars and drugs are lucrative, they’re nothing compared to God and death. Now that’s a long-range business. Could be you need some protection out there now that fed charges are sitting on your boss. Could be I make sure the fed’s phone doesn’t ring for a while.”

“Snitching on yourself,” Sal said. “Where’d you learn that?”

“You don’t stay in this business for as long as I have without learning a few tricks,” Ronnie said. “Sometimes, it’s just easier to have the feds take care of my problems. Could be you’ve learned that yourself these last couple days.”

“Could be,” Sal said, “you get into your car one morning and I’m in the backseat.”

“And then what? I’m dead. So what? I’m dead. Your best-case scenario still involves the gas chamber, if you’re lucky. We might as well enjoy our time together, you and me.”

“How much?” Sal said.

“Your boss, he’s got quite the scam out there,” he said. “Do you know what he charges just to bury a body? I can get some Mexican to dig a hole for a whole lot less.”

“How much?” Sal said again.

“I can’t tell you how much until I get a look at your books,” Ronnie said, “and I’m not planning on making a trip to Las Vegas anytime soon. Probably wouldn’t look good, you know? So why don’t we just agree that I’m in on this now. Full partner. You’re my guy in Las Vegas.”