Gangsterland: A Novel (2 page)

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.”