“So what is it you want me to do?” Chema asked.
Sal pulled out his wallet and handed it to Chema, who immediately pocketed it. “Couple weeks from now, mail this to my wife. Same address as on my license.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Sal said. “There’s maybe two grand in there. Make sure there’s two grand in there when my wife gets it, too.”
Chema bit at his bottom lip but didn’t say anything for a second. “Your wife,” he said finally, “she like Mexican food?”
“Not really,” Sal said.
“My girl makes these Mexican wedding cookies, maybe something like that?”
“Sure,” Sal said. “If not, my son would eat them.”
Chema bit at his lip again, and Sal couldn’t help but wonder what was going through his head.
Fat Monte opened the car door before Chema could respond.
“Neal, Chema,” Fat Monte said, “give your coats and shirts to Sal.” Neal and Chema looked at each other once in mild surprise but did what they were told. At the same time, Fat Monte took off his jacket and handed it to Sal, too. “Put all this shit on over your clothes.”
“Where am I going?” Sal asked. He was out of the car now, layering shirts and jackets on top of his own suit jacket and button-down, the way he always dressed for a business meeting.
“I don’t know,” Fat Monte said. “But my guess is you’re gonna be in the fridge until you’re at least a couple states away. The truck is only gonna be at forty-five degrees, so it’ll be like springtime in Chicago.”
Forty-five degrees. Sal could live with that.
Fat Monte walked Sal over to the big rig, and the two of them stood for a moment at the bottom of the loading ramp. They watched one of the uniformed guys inside the truck clear a spot. There were maybe ten blankets, a pillow, a flashlight, a couple of bottles of water, a box of Ritz Crackers, a walkie-talkie, even a chair. All the comforts of home, surrounded by boxes of ground beef. When the worker saw the two of them, he said, “This gonna work, boss?”
“That’ll be fine,” Sal said.
“You start having a problem, just get on the walkie-talkie and the driver will pull over,” the worker said.
They had all the angles worked out, which made Sal think maybe this wasn’t the first time the Family had smuggled a man out of town this way, which gave him an odd bit of relief.
“This is where we part ways,” Fat Monte said.
“How long we know each other?” Sal asked.
“Couple concurrent sentences,” Fat Monte said, being funny now, which gave Sal pause. Fat Monte wasn’t exactly known for his quick wit.
“Ten years for robbery,” Sal said. “Another fifteen for assault.”
“That’s about right,” Fat Monte said. “Listen, I need your phone and your piece.”
It was polite enough, not an order, which made Sal willing to hand them over. Fat Monte threw the phone onto the ground and then crushed it under his shoe, but didn’t bother to pocket the.38.
“You ever come back to Chicago,” Fat Monte said, “I’ll have to kill you and your entire family, and I don’t want to do that.” Fat Monte clapped Sal once on the shoulder and then walked back toward the Corolla.
It wasn’t five minutes later, after he had found a reasonably comfortable way to sit wedged up against a wall of meat, that Sal heard the two quick gunshots.
CHAPTER ONE
David Cohen. Sal Cupertine rolled that name around in his mouth. David Cohen. When he was a kid, he hated his own name, probably because every kid on the block had an uncle named Sal. But as he got older, he started to like it, started to see how it conveyed a sense of power and menace, two things he liked, at least in the abstract.
David was biblical, which had its own worth. Sal wasn’t a religious man, never had been, and he certainly couldn’t be if he killed people for a living. Residual guilt and remorse he could deal with, but trying to reason with an entire other life, one that started after death? Sal couldn’t be bothered with that shit.
Cohen. Well. That was something else all together. Sal had known a fair amount of Jews in his life, and the Family always got along with the Kosher Nostra that moved ecstasy and counterfeit paper around the college campuses; those guys were mostly Israeli and Russian Jews, the days of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky pretty much a thing of the past once they figured they could get rich by owning Hollywood and the banks. The Israelis and Russians in Chicago were young and respectful since they viewed the Family like something mystical they’d seen only on television and in the movies.
All those guys were named Yaakov or Boris or Vitaly or Zvika, and they had thick accents and wore vests and big watches and drove Range Rovers, so everyone knew they weren’t your local Rosenblatts and Levys. With real business, though, they were ruthless. They’d send a message by killing a guy’s dog and girlfriend; fuck him up emotionally for the rest of his life without ever actually putting hands on him. Someone owes you money, you break their spirit and they will pay you forever, they said, and though he hated to admit it, Sal saw the wisdom in it. The problem was that the only way the Family had stayed in business for so long was that they didn’t hurt innocent civilians or pets. You kill a guy’s kids or dog, that’s the sort of shit that ends up in the newspaper and actually gets investigated. Kill some shitbag, it’s just a dead shitbag. Kill four federal agents, and your entire world could change.
But David Cohen? That wasn’t a tough guy. That was a guy who fixed your glasses. That was your lawyer.
“David Cohen,” Sal said, but it didn’t sound quite right and probably wouldn’t for another two weeks, or at least until he got his jaw unwired.
Six months he’d been gone, and during that time no one had addressed him directly or looked him in the eye. Seven days he’d spent in and out of refrigerated meat trucks while they figured out what to do with him before they finally dumped him in Las Vegas.
Or at least he was pretty sure it was Las Vegas.
The local newspaper, the Review-Journal, had a columnist named Harvey B. Curran who spent half his time writing gossip about all the “wiseguys” in town and the other half writing gossip about the people who were taking bribes from the “wiseguys” in order to further whatever their aims. And there was the fact that Oscar Goodman was probably going to run for mayor, every night on the local news another feature about how he’d revitalize the city and bring back that Rat Pack vibe, no one even giving a shit that he was the mouthpiece for fucking Mount Olympus — Lansky, Leonetti, the whole Scarfo family.
Everything was all out in the open. Except, of course, for Sal. Six months he’d been in the same house, not allowed to walk out the front door, only out back, only at night. Not that he’d been up for any travel, not with the litany of surgeries he’d gone through: a new nose and chin, a bunch of teeth ripped out and replaced with permanent implants. They’d lasered off his tattoos, shaved his head, got him to start wearing glasses. And the last thing, he hoped, was this new jaw. Even the surgeries had been done in secret — driven in the back of a windowless van in the middle of the night and hustled into a doctor’s office, Sal shot up full of anesthesia and then waking up back in the house. It was at the point now where he didn’t even bother taking the pain medication. Every part of his body hurt, and all the Percocets in the world weren’t going to make it any better, not while he was being held captive in an elegant two-story house with a saltwater pool, indoor hot tub and sauna, full gym, and a good five hundred cable channels pumped into every room in the joint.