Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg
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don’t want you walking back in here,” Matthew said. Then he did the only thing he thought would emphasize the point, which was to stomp on Killer’s ankles until they snapped. He then went back inside, found Killer’s girl crouched under the craps table trying to find all of her boyfriend’s teeth, told his floor guys to get her a bag and get her the fuck out of the casino, since looking at her there on the floor, she didn’t seem all that threatening anymore, just a woman who had terrible taste in men but loved one enough to pick up his teeth. That was worth something.
Was it all an extreme response? Maybe. Washing a few Gs through the casino wasn’t a hanging offense—hell, it was practically why casinos in the Midwest existed—but it was about the point: Matthew Drew hadn’t qualified for assault team work at Quantico, hadn’t made it all the way to the FBI’s top shop in Chicago, so people with their crimes cataloged on their faces could dictate his behavior. That’s just not how life worked.
And yet.
He’d somehow missed Ronnie Cupertine walking through the door, as did everyone else working the Eye in the Sky, not that anyone would have complained, least of all any of the Chuyalla management. Ronnie Cupertine was a celebrity, so famous for running the Family that people didn’t really believe he ran the Family.
It was . . . impossible.
And yet.
Ronnie Cupertine gave everyone credit at his half a dozen car dealerships around Chicago. Warrantied every purchase for two years. Paid for the entire Little League from Chicago to Springfield. Donated a million dollars to establish Hope from Fear, a battered women’s home on the South Side. Pumped a couple hundred grand into AIDS and cancer research at Northwestern every year. The Chicago Historical Society needed money to preserve a building? Ronnie Cupertine wrote a check. The Field Museum was short fifty Gs for an art exhibit? No problem. Ronnie Cupertine even gave money for an independent film festival and attended the gala, shook hands with the actors and actresses, his wife on his arm draped in diamonds and furs, because Ronnie Cupertine? He was the philanthropic king of Chicago.
So he occasionally had a motherfucker killed.
At least Ronnie Cupertine didn’t have a tattoo on his forehead.
Ronnie zipped up and flushed, made his way over to the sink next to Matthew. Up close, Matthew could smell the liquor seeping out of Ronnie’s pores. How long had he been at the casino? How many times had Matthew missed seeing him? Ronnie ran the hot water for a few seconds, then took a towel, soaked it, and scrubbed at his face, letting out an exasperated grunt when he was done.
“Tough night?” Matthew asked.
“Too much smoke in this place,” Ronnie said. “Feel like it’s in my skin, you know? Lungs are all congested. It’s unhealthy. Even Atlantic City has better ventilation.” He leaned toward the mirror, inspected his face, licked his pinkies, used them to push down his eyebrows. “Fuck it. Can’t tell an Indian not to smoke, right? It was their tobacco in the first place, right?”
“Everyone’s got their culture,” Matthew said.
“You believe that,” Ronnie said, “then you should work for me.” He took another towel, dried his face, then reached into his pocket, slipped a fifty from his billfold into Curtis’s tip jar. “You new here?”
“Been here a few months.”
“I haven’t seen you before.”
“I bought my car from you, actually.”
“Yeah?” Ronnie looked at Matthew in the mirror. “You from Chicago?”
“Not originally,” Matthew said. “Relocated for a job. Didn’t pan out. So here I am.”
“You recognize me from TV?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Matthew said. How much time did he have before one of Ronnie’s boys came in, looking for their actual boss? Two, three minutes? Maybe five, at the most. It would be disrespectful to walk in on a boss while he was taking a shit, so maybe it would be more like ten. But that seemed like an excessive amount of time to be guarding the door, which Matthew presumed they were doing. They must have swept through and somehow missed seeing Matthew’s feet in the back of the handicapped stall. Or they hadn’t looked very hard. Matthew reached into his pocket, took out his car keys, jingled them. “You sold me a Mustang.”
“You get a good deal?”
“Not bad,” Matthew said. “Carburetor gave out after twenty-five thousand miles.”
“I replace it?”
“You did.”
“I don’t welch,” Ronnie said. It was a catchphrase from one of his commercials, so popular it was even on the flyers that came in the junk mail and inside the Tribune on Sundays. “My opinion, that’s the problem with Detroit these days,” he continued. Ronnie checked his face in the mirror again, picked a piece of lint from his chin. “It’s like they forgot how to build muscle cars. Give me something with a big trunk, big tires, and nothing with the name of some country we bombed the shit out of on any of the materials, right? Every time I see a Japanese or Korean car I ask myself what the fuck we fought for, right?” He paused. “Not that I’m not happy to sell them. But I don’t want to drive one.”
“You fought in Korea?”
“Nah,” Ronnie said. “Before my time.”
“So you were in Vietnam?”
Ronnie pointed at his feet. “Bad arches.”
“My dad fought.”
“Yeah? He come back all messed up?”
“Got cancer eventually,” Matthew said. “I don’t know if it was the Agent Orange or the two packs a day.”
“You know quitting cigarettes is harder than quitting heroin?”
“No,” Matthew said. “I didn’t know that.”
“There’s no secondhand heroin,” Ronnie said. “You want heroin, you gotta go find it. Cigarettes are everywhere. Fucks with your head.” He paused. “Your old man ever try to quit?”
“Not once.”
“Sounds like he had a death wish.”
“He was complicated,” Matthew said. “But he signed up to fight. Didn’t wait for the draft. I feel like I would have done the same. And if they said I had some physical impairment, I would have asked for a waiver, snuck back in, whatever it took.”
“You say that now,” Ronnie said. “Wait until some shit goes down.” He selected a toothpick, dug out a spot of food jammed above his incisor. “The weapons back then were shit and, pardon my language, who the fuck wanted to sit in a jungle waiting to get captured? End up like John McCain? All bent in thirty different directions? Nah.” He rubbed his top front teeth with his index finger, then leaned back from the sink, adjusted his shirt, made sure his collar was straight, adjusted his belt. “If it was up to me, I would have told the generals to bomb Berkeley, that would have ended the war fast.” He took out his billfold again, came out with a business card. “You got a pen?”
Matthew did. It was a black Smith & Wesson tactical pen, the kind you could use to bust out your car window if you found yourself rammed off the road into a frozen lake, or as a weapon if you were fighting up close. He handed it to the head of the biggest organized crime outfit west of New York, who started to scrawl a message on the back of the card.
“Next time you’re in the market, bring this card into any of my dealerships, my boys will take good . . .” Ronnie began to say, but Matthew didn’t let him finish.
He grabbed Ronnie by the hair and slammed his face into the sink, crushing his nose and snapping his jaw in a single move. Slammed him a second time, across his eyebrows, shattered his orbital bones. Split his forehead open like it had a zipper. Third time, he turned Ronnie’s head slightly to the right, aimed down an