Gangsterland

PROLOGUE. April 1998

When Sal Cupertine was going to kill a guy, he’d walk right up and shoot him in the back of the head. Shoot someone in the face, there’s a good chance they’ll survive. Sal never messed around with a gut shot or trying to get someone in the heart. It was stupid and made a mess. You get told to kill a guy, you killed a guy. You didn’t leave it up to variations in the wind and barometric pressure and all that Green Beret shit he saw on TV. No, Sal knew, you just went up and did it. Be professional about it and no one suffers.

Still, he’d begun to appreciate that sometimes a little distance wasn’t a bad thing, particularly since he’d been picking pieces of those Donnie Brasco motherfuckers off himself for the last three hours. One of the guys had a mustache, and Sal was certain that the hair he’d finally been able to dig from beneath his thumbnail was from him, since it was coarse and light brown and didn’t have any blood on it, which meant it probably got jammed in there when he was choking him out. A mistake all around, that’s what that was. But what could he do now? Three hours sitting in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla aside Fat Monte, who wasn’t even fat anymore since he’d done six months and got hooked up with some steroids and had apparently hit the weights pretty hard, and all Sal had come to conclude was that he was probably only a few hours, at most, from his own death.

Not that Sal was actually afraid, at least not yet. Fat Monte hadn’t taken his cell phone from him, which was a good sign; but it kept vibrating in his pocket, which to Sal meant his wife, Jennifer, was wondering where he was. She knew he wasn’t exactly a nine-to-five guy, knew that when he was off doing Family business that he could be gone until the next day, or might need to jet down to Florida or over to Detroit, but even in those cases he was pretty good about giving her a heads-up that he wouldn’t be back for dinner. The bosses understood that he couldn’t just disappear for weeks on end without a word, now that he had a kid. Because once the wives got talking, it was everybody’s problem. And on this day, of all days, he told Jennifer he’d pick up a prescription for her over at the twenty-four-hour Walgreens. His son, William, was in preschool over at Mt. Carmel Academy and brought home a dozen infectious diseases a week, or at least that’s what it felt like, all three of them constantly battling some kind of respiratory shit that winter. The codeine cough medicine was helping, and Sal promised to pick up a refill on his way home, and that all would have happened if he hadn’t lost it on those Donnie Brascos. And now here he was, maybe two hundred miles outside of Chicago in the middle of the night, nothing but black farmland on either side of the highway, Fat Monte breathing through his mouth next to him, two young guys up front — a half-Latino kid called Chema riding shotgun and Fat Monte’s cousin Neal driving, though he spent more time looking in the rearview mirror than at the road, which wasn’t helping Sal’s sense of dread.

He wasn’t afraid to die, but he was afraid of how it would feel to leave Jennifer and William behind. It wasn’t something he’d thought about before, but today had been full of revelations. Dying was fine. He could handle that. He was only thirty-five, but he’d had enough close calls in the past that he wasn’t mystical about the process. He knew there’d come a time when he was on the other end of a gun and that would be that. But he didn’t want Jennifer and William to suffer for his stupidity. This whole deal was different. Preventable. That’s what kept niggling at him: Somehow all this was going to roll back on them.

He fished his buzzing phone out of his pocket. If he was going to die tonight, at least he’d see his wife’s name one last time.

“The fuck you doing?” Fat Monte said, though he didn’t snatch the phone from Sal’s hand. Interesting.

“It’s been going off all night,” Sal said. He didn’t answer to Fat Monte, and he wasn’t about to start, so he kept himself calm, went the honest route. “My wife’s sick.”

“Man, cops can triangulate that shit. You gotta lose that thing.”

“You think they’re looking for me?”

“Oh, you think your fingerprints aren’t on record? Your first mistake, and it was a doozy. A little restraint, Sal, and you’d be home right now.”

“Yeah,” Sal said. “Well, things got clumsy. I admit that.”

“You don’t have to admit shit,” Fat Monte said. “Everyone already knows it’s true.”

Everyone. Sal hated to think about what that meant. Monte still hadn’t asked for the phone, so Sal just turned it off and stuffed it back into his pocket.

One thing for certain, if it were Monte who’d fucked up, Sal would have already killed him. That much he knew. And he wouldn’t have bothered with any witnesses, either, especially not the half-Latino kid, whose neck Sal could see was covered in sweat; the bosses were all about diversifying lately, not keeping to the strict Italian edict, particularly not with so many good soldiers doing time. Supply and demand and a lack of good staff turned everything upside down.

That’s what got him in trouble in the first place.

Three new guys started hanging around the fringes of the Family, trying to get inside any way they could, coming up with stashes of top-of-the-line televisions, heroin, even a truck full of leather office furniture, to the point that the bosses couldn’t ignore them. The TVs and office furniture were one thing, but when they produced bags and bags of the highest-grade heroin — Sal was no good on heroin, it made him twitchy and overly aggressive, but he’d been convinced to give it a taste and had something like a religious sexual experience that night — the bosses began to wonder where they were connecting from, since the Family had controlled the heroin in Chicago for the better part of a century. So they told Sal to dig around, learn what he could, and report back when he knew anything definitive.

This truth-digging expedition was a significant growth in his duties. He was good at the whole stalk-and-kill process, that was simple work, but now the Family wanted him to be the point man on the business side, too. Not just lurking in the shadows. Out in the daylight and everything. He hadn’t ever shown his face to a stranger in the game. At least not a stranger who wasn’t about to become a corpse. But this was a chance to become a legit player, no more midnight murders, more time with his wife and kid. Whatever. It was a chance for something better than the business of killing. He even hazarded to tell Jennifer that big things were coming for them, that if everything went right, in the next year maybe they’d be able to take a vacation or see about moving somewhere warmer, both of them sick of freezing every winter in Chicago. Jennifer was taking art classes at City College — she enrolled at Olive-Harvey all the way down on the South Side so no one would recognize her, which Sal thought was stupid since no other wives were going to go anywhere near a community college — and every other week or so she’d bring in a painting of the ocean or a drawing of palm trees swaying in the wind. Though she wasn’t really much of an artist, Sal liked the idea of her one day sitting on a beach chair all day and drawing.

Plus, the downtime between jobs could be maddening for Sal, to the point that he started doing outside work just to make ends meet around the holidays and such — it was nothing to drive down to East Saint Louis to take out some Crip for a shop owner, or even over to Springfield to put one in the head of a cheating spouse — but that was also dangerous. The bosses allowed a little freelance work, but not to the level Sal had entered into recently. But when the kid is sick every other week and you don’t have health insurance, man, you do what you have to do.

Sal was pretty sure they had been driving aimlessly for hours. Chema, the mixed kid, consulted his map every now and then and told Neal to take exits, and then Neal would drive around for a bit before getting back onto the highway in a different direction, not saying a word the whole time. Even Sal could sort of appreciate the irony of the situation: He’d been killing people for the Family for over fifteen years, and now he was on a night ride into the fields for shooting three of those Donnie Brasco rejects in the face that afternoon and choking out the fourth. It was amateur hour on his part, really. Just one simple mistake.

He’d gone to a fancy hotel just off Michigan Avenue — the Parker House — to meet the Donnie Brascos and their Mexican connect on heroin. The meeting had gone well enough; the Mexican guy let him get a taste of some shit called Dark Chocolate Tar that immediately turned Sal’s brain into a fuzzy, calm place.

Just a dab of Dark Chocolate Tar on his tongue gave him a serene feeling of total clarity. He left the hotel room feeling. . good. The world was softer. He’d had a nice meeting with some enterprising businessmen, that’s all, and they seemed like perfectly decent people, relatively speaking. He wouldn’t have to kill them. They’d die in their own time — probably sooner than later because they were criminals — but he wouldn’t be the instrument of their death.

He was already out on the street and thinking about maybe getting some goulash over at the Russian tearoom when a random thought struck. Who was actually staying at the hotel? Which was followed by: Why were they even meeting at a hotel? They could have done this whole deal in the parking lot of a Krispy Kreme. He stopped on the sidewalk and tried to remember the exact layout of the room he’d just been in no more than ten minutes earlier: a king-size bed; bags of heroin spread out on the desk next to the bed, buffet-style; and four guys in tracksuits standing around smiling. He’d gone into the bathroom to take a piss before leaving because when he was high he actually loved the way taking a piss felt, just one of those weird things, and he was impressed by how nice the bathroom was, how everything gold-plated shined.

But why wasn’t there a tube of toothpaste on the counter? Why wasn’t there any luggage in the room? Sal closed his eyes, right there in the middle of the sidewalk, and focused on every last detail he could remember, because if there was one thing he was known for, it was his memory. He hated it because guys called him Rain Man, but facts were facts: He saw something once, he saw it forever.

Sal turned around and walked back to the Parker House. By the time he was inside the lobby, the soft fuzz from the tiny bit of heroin he’d tasted had turned jagged, and all the mirrored surfaces inside the hotel were making him angry. The hotel was done up like it was 1935, pictures of Al Capone on the wall and Tiffany-style lamps everywhere, their light magnified a thousand times over by the ornate floor-to-ceiling-mirrors and shined marble floors. Every step Sal took toward the registration counter was met with another glint, another flash, until Sal swore people were snapping his photo.

Oh, he thought, this will not do.

He approached a young woman at the front desk.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I need to check out,” Sal said, and he gave the woman the room number. The woman stared at her computer screen for a few seconds, tapped at her keyboard a few times, and then sighed. “There a problem?” Sal asked.

“Oh, no,” the woman said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that it looks like this is going through corporate. Did you make the reservation yourself?”

“No,” Sal said, thinking now, realizing where this was all going, “my office made it.”

“Ah, okay,” the woman said. “Well, it looks like you’ve got a government purchase order, so we can just go ahead and charge your incidentals to a card, or you can pay cash.”

“Cash,” Sal said. “And could I get a copy of the bill?”

“Of course,” she said. She made a few more taps on her keyboard, and within a few seconds Sal was looking at a bill for just over five hundred dollars in room service charges. He looked at the name on the bill — one Jeff Hopper with an address on Roosevelt Road in Chicago, the motherfucker not even bothering to hide the fact that he worked at the FBI. What an insult.

Sal patted his back pocket. “Oh, darn it,” he said, “I think I left my wallet in the room. Could I get a key and then I’ll come right back down and finish checking out?”

“Sure,” the woman said, because who wouldn’t trust an FBI agent named Jeff Hopper with a government purchase order and five hundred dollars in room service charges?

General etiquette suggested that killing an FBI agent, let alone three, maybe four, presuming the Mexican was one of theirs, too, was not good business. You could kill a cop if he was crooked, or you could put a bullet into a city councilman if it looked like he was going to go running to the law to get out of his debts. But you just didn’t go around lighting up FBI agents. For the better part of the last decade, at least, the Family had a quiet détente with the authorities since although they moved a huge sum of heroin in and around Chicago and even up into Canada, they didn’t go around killing innocent children or housewives, and no one ever died in cross fire at the mall, not like the fucking kiddie gangsters in the baseball caps and baggy pants and lowered Pontiacs. They were running a professional business, and as long as the Family didn’t act too egregiously, the feds didn’t get involved. But in the last year, with the economy all moving to the Internet, the world got so much smaller, which meant you didn’t need to know someone locally to get your drugs or to get you a clean piece, and thus things had heated up between the Chicago Family and their rivals down south in Memphis for a smaller marketplace. And then there was online gambling — two months ago Sal was sent to Jamaica to kill a guy and ended up taking down five others just to make a point — all of which had caused the Family to retrench and consider different revenue streams. Killing everyone who took an interest in the business would be a twenty-four-hour-a-day proposition and would include half of Hollywood, too. But killing feds, specifically, was like asking for a RICO hailstorm.

Sal knew and understood all that. But what became crystal clear to him on the walk from the registration counter to the elevator was that if anyone was going down, it was going to be him alone. They’d yank his ass into the FBI field office and start showing him pictures of his family, start talking to him about how his son was going to be a foster kid raised in some butthole town or maybe even moved out to Indiana for “his own safety.” And then they’d show him some video of Jennifer getting boiled, showing her pictures of every person he’d ever killed, and then, what could she do? She’d have to roll on him. She sure as shit wasn’t going to do time, right?

Sal did some quick math. How many people had seen his face? The three Donnie Brascos. The Mexican. The girl at the counter. There was surely a camera over the registration desk, which meant some rent-a-cop in the bowels of the hotel had probably put an eyeball on him.

Six people. He could kill six people. Hell yeah. He’d done that plenty of times.

But if he killed the girl and the rent-a-cop, he’d need to kill another dozen people just to get out of the hotel alive, and, frankly, he didn’t have enough bullets for that, nor any real desire for it. That wasn’t something he could return from.

Shit.

He’d control what he could control on his own, let the Family figure out how to take care of the girl, get any videotapes. They were good at that sort of thing, particularly at a union hotel like the Parker. But the feds, those guys needed to go.

An old hotel like the Parker was actually a good place to kill a person: Thick walls and dense carpeting absorbed sound well, and, unlike some fucking Marriott, these old hotels didn’t lump rooms together as densely. Plus, they didn’t have huge banks of supermodern elevators shuttling hundreds at a time, opting instead for the charm of flying into the air in just a few ornate oak coffins. What really made the old elevators nice was that they still had stop buttons you could yank out to freeze the elevator in place, which Sal did when he got to the eleventh floor. In the amount of time Sal would take to do his job, if he did it right, no one would think twice about the elevator wait time.

In retrospect, Sal should have found out if the Mexican was on the take, not that it mattered, really, since he was the first one Sal shot when he opened the hotel room door. In that case, it wasn’t personal; it was just about getting shit taken care of as quickly as possible. The first two Donnie Brascos went next, no problem, but the third guy decided he wanted to O.K. Corral the place; Sal eventually wrestled him to the ground and broke his windpipe. It was all done in maybe two minutes. Three at the most. And then Sal calmly walked down the hall to the service elevator and left.

At first, he was going to pick up Jennifer and William and make a run for it, but he knew that would end poorly for everyone. So he did the only thing that made sense to him: He called his cousin Ronnie Cupertine, his only direct relative still in the Family, but who now split time between Chicago and Detroit, since he had used-car dealerships in both cities. Ronnie was one of those guys people on the street assumed was connected, mostly because he looked like such a cliché with his affinity for pinkie rings and pin-striped suits. He ran ads in the Tribune where he’d make used-car buyers “offers they couldn’t refuse” and comical spots on TV where he dressed in a zoot suit and carried a tommy gun, called the other dealerships “dirty rats,” and promised that the credit agencies would be taking “dirt naps” when he was done with them. The joke, of course, was that he was a real fucking gangster, and most of the cars he came upon and was thus able to sell at such a cheap rate were chops from Canada, bought in bulk.

“I fucked up,” Sal told Ronnie. In the background, Sal could hear a cartoon playing on the television. Ronnie had four kids, all under thirteen, all in private school. A real bastion of society.

“What happened?”

“I took out some company guys,” Sal said. It was probably the wrong thing to say. Sal was using a cell that he ripped new SIM cards from about twice a week, but Ronnie always thought he was being bugged, even though he routinely went around his house with a metal detector and the Family always kept a couple guys in the phone company. The whole world was changing, and no one in the Family knew dick about computers or technology. They knew only enough to be paranoid.

“Where are you?”

“Driving around,” Sal said, but in truth he was parked across the street from Ronnie’s Gold Coast manor. Built in the 1950s, the house was three stories high with a basement that Ronnie had turned into a fully operational sportsbook, though he’d become so rich that he used it now only to host parties and Vegas Night fund-raisers for the Boys & Girls Club. Used to be in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Ronnie would run a full casino out of the place, but the Jamaicans with their online books and the Indians with their casinos had made all that sort of high-roller action obsolete. Why bother getting in with a bunch of gangsters when you could do it legally?

The house was surrounded by a six-foot wrought iron gate and towering old-growth hackberry and bur oak trees, which gave the place the appearance of a fortress, even if there was now a hopscotch course chalked on the sidewalk out front. If someone wanted to roll up on the place, they’d need a team of well-armed arborists with them.

“Get off the fucking road,” Ronnie said. “They got cameras everywhere.”

“Where should I go, your place?” Sal teasing him now, letting him know that he could bring Ronnie down with him if he wanted. Sal didn’t want to do that, not yet, but he wanted to make sure Ronnie knew the stakes.

“No,” Ronnie said, “are you crazy? My kids are here.”

“So I can’t see my cousins anymore, Ronnie? That’s how it is?”

“Sal,” Ronnie said, “let’s not get melodramatic here.”

“Then where, Ronnie? You tell me where to go.”

“I can’t have you here if it gets hot,” he said. “You have to understand how that would look.”

“Maybe you should try to understand how I look,” Sal said. “I’m picking brains out of my hair, okay?”

Ronnie didn’t say anything for a minute, which Sal didn’t like. Ronnie was one of those people who thought he always knew what was what, which struck Sal as funny since Ronnie hadn’t even graduated high school. Now he was a self-made millionaire, or that’s what people thought, when in truth he was just another link on the same crooked chain.

“Fifteen minutes,” Ronnie said eventually, “that place where we played kickball.”

Ronnie was fifteen years older than Sal, but all the kids in the family — the actual family — had lived around the block from the Winston Academy and used to use their big grassy field up over on the other side of North Seminary to knock the ball around. It was a pretty good neighborhood to grow up in, but now the boutiques and espresso joints were creeping in, replacing everything. It had been years since Sal had been over there during the daytime, not since he’d gone into the school to break the principal’s arm. Gave the guy a compound fracture on orders from way up the line. Guy didn’t even owe anything, which made Sal think there was something larger at work, but he never bothered to ask. Asking wasn’t his job.

“Okay,” Sal said.

“Monte will be there. You go with him while I sort this shit out.”

“You need to get Jennifer and William to a stash house,” Sal said.

“We’ll do that,” Ronnie said. “One thing at a time.”

“I’m sorry I fucked up,” Sal said, because he was.

“I know you are,” Ronnie said.

“I just, you know, lost it. I saw that they were feds, and, you know, I just saw all the dominos at once. It seemed like the only thing to do.”

“Are you high?”

“No,” Sal said. “A little.”

“You should have walked away,” Ronnie said.

“I don’t walk away,” Sal said.

“See,” Ronnie said, “that’s the problem.”

Ronnie cleared his throat, then didn’t say anything. For a few seconds, Sal listened to the sounds of his little cousins screaming in the background. This was not good.

“Jennifer’s sick,” Sal said.

“Yeah, okay,” Ronnie said.

“The kid, too,” Sal said.

“Sal,” Ronnie said, “I can see you on my security cameras.”

“I’m just saying that she needs to be taken care of, that’s all.”

“Just meet up with Monte. We’ll get this shit done with. Sunday, you’ll come over and we’ll watch the Bears.”

“Yeah,” Sal said, “we’ll do that.” He hung up without saying good-bye because it was April and no one was going to be playing football for another six months.

And now here he was, bumping down a pockmarked road off the highway, Neal hitting every possible divot, no one in the Corolla saying shit, everyone just acting like they always drove out to a farm in the middle of the night. Where were they? Missouri, maybe. No, they hadn’t been gone that long. Indiana? Wisconsin? Sal was disoriented from the darkness and nauseous from the smell of Fat Monte’s sweat.

“Where the fuck are we?” Sal finally asked.

“Ronnie said to bring you out here,” Fat Monte said.

“Where is here?”

Fat Monte shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

Great. Sal ditched his nine in a gutter after the Parker and now had only his five-shot.38. He was pretty sure he could take out Fat Monte without a problem, but trying to get at Neal and Chema would pose some problems. They were dumb kids, but you didn’t need to be smart to shoot a gun, plus they both surely had automatics.

“What about you, brown boy? You know where the fuck we are?”

Chema turned in his seat and glared at Sal. Fat Monte then said, “We’re almost there.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know where we were going,” Sal said.

“I don’t,” Fat Monte said, “which is why Chema has the map. Tell him we’re almost there, Chema.”

“We’re almost there,” Chema said, no emotion in his voice at all.

A few minutes later, Fat Monte’s cell phone rang. He looked at it and then handed it to Sal. “It’s Ronnie.”

“You okay?” Ronnie asked when Sal picked up.

“Yeah,” Sal said. “Should I be worried?”

“You caught three feds, so yeah,” Ronnie said.

“What about the Mexican?”

“Not sure yet, no real chatter on him,” Ronnie said. “Probably a legit guy working both sides. Channel 7 didn’t mention him. Channel 2 called him an informant, so who the fuck knows.”

“They say my name?”

“You don’t kill three fucking FBI agents and not get on the news.”

“They put my face up?”

“Yeah,” Ronnie said. “Cops are at your house right now. It’s not a good situation.”

Shit. That meant the last phone call he received from Jennifer was likely not really from her. “You didn’t get my family out?”

“Maybe you’re not understanding the magnitude of this situation.”

“Jennifer,” Sal said, “is solid, Ronnie. You know that.”

“Everyone breaks sometime.”

“She won’t,” Sal said, but he really didn’t know. She knew what he was, or at least she knew the version he gave her, and that was basically the truth: He did bad things to bad people. And she knew that other people considered him one of the bad people, too, had no notions that he was somehow a superhero or vigilante. They’d talked over the years about what to do in the event the police came looking for him, so she knew to keep her mouth shut, knew that she couldn’t be made to testify against him, knew that if the police were looking for him, he was likely already gone.

She also knew that gone could mean a lot of things.

“We’ll see,” Ronnie said. “Meantime, we got you a bus out of town.”

“Listen to me,” Sal said, he turned away from Fat Monte and tried to lower his voice, but it’s tough to be discreet in the backseat of subcompact. “If it comes down to it, I’m not going to be all polite and shit. Just be aware of that. This isn’t some movie. I’ll take a couple with me.”

“We’re aware of that,” Ronnie said, and he hung up.

We. All this we shit. Ronnie’s way of telling him that he’d pissed so far up the rope that it wasn’t just Ronnie deciding his fate. Sal clicked off the phone and handed it back to Fat Monte, who then opened the back of it, took out the SIM, and crushed it under his shoe before tossing it out the window. “You wanna give me your phone?” he asked Sal.

If he did, Jennifer would have no way of reaching him. Maybe ever.

“Not just yet,” Sal said, and Fat Monte just shrugged again. It wasn’t as if he was going to call 911. And it wasn’t as if he could call his wife. Nevertheless, he liked the idea that he still had one small connection to the outside world. As long as that lasted, he was still alive.

The Corolla veered right, and suddenly the rough patch of road turned smooth — or smoother, anyway — and Sal could make out the farm with a bit more clarity. There was a main house, what looked like a several warehouse-size barns just adjacent to the house, and half a dozen grain silos. The headlights passed over the glint of thousands of eyes out in the pasture. Cows. As the Corolla got closer, Sal could also make out a big rig and two smaller trucks as well. There were figures milling about — maybe ten men moving back and forth between the barns and the trucks, each with a dolly stacked high with boxes.

Sal rolled down his window and was immediately assailed with the stench that can come only from a slaughterhouse: a mixture of piss, shit, the iodine stench of raw meat, and the earthy smell of grain. It reminded Sal of road trips when he was a kid — his father always stopping at big corporate farms that had diners or restaurants attached to them, convinced that they had the best food on earth because they had everything fresh. His father dead now, what, twenty-five years? Thrown off a fucking building.

The Corolla pulled to a stop next to the big rig, but Neal didn’t bother to kill the engine. “This is the spot?” Neal asked.

“Yeah,” Fat Monte said. He got out of the car and walked toward the sprawling barn, none of the guys with their dollies giving him even a second glance. With the Corolla’s headlights illuminating the landscape, Sal could see that the men all wore matching uniforms — navy-blue Dickies, gray button-down work shirts with a logo over one pocket, blue baseball caps, and gloves, though it was a pleasant evening, all things considering — and that the trucks all had the same logo, too, on their sides: Kochel Farm Fresh Meats. Condensation flowed out of the back of the refrigerated trucks, which explained the gloves.

Sal reached down and touched his.38. He’d put one in Chema, one in Neal, and then he’d make a break for the darkness. With all these civilians as witnesses, Sal had to hope Fat Monte wouldn’t open up on him, though who knew what people were capable of anymore. He didn’t want to kill Neal. Didn’t even want to kill Chema, but Sal recognized he was about five or ten minutes from being ground into a patty and loaded into a refrigeration unit bound for a supermarket somewhere between here and California.

He looked out his window one last time to make sure he knew where he was running to, and when he did, he saw something that made him sit upright: Fat Monte was standing maybe twenty feet away, talking to a bald guy holding a couple of blankets, a toddler by his side. Three, maybe four years old. Hard to tell in the dark. What the fuck was a little kid doing there?

“Chema,” Sal said, “I want to apologize.” The Latino kid nodded his head but didn’t turn around. So tough, he couldn’t even take an apology like a man. “And I want you to thank me, too.” This got him to turn around.

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Because I was about to shoot you in the back of the head, and I decided against it.” Chema swallowed once, but stayed silent. “Way I figure it, you owe me a pretty big favor.”

“What about Neal, were you gonna shoot him, too?”

“Probably,” Sal said, “but Neal and I got some history. I used to watch you when you were a baby, whenever your mom had to run an errand or had one too many White Russians. Maybe you don’t remember that.”

Neal looked at Sal in the rearview mirror and said, “I thought that was just a joke.”

“Nope,” Sal said, “true story.”

Outside, Sal saw the bald man hand the toddler one of the blankets, and the kid ran it over to the big rig. Fat Monte and the bald man shook hands, and Fat Monte started to make his way back to the Corolla. The two smaller trucks pulled away then, too, leaving just the big rig.

“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.