Gangsterland: A Novel (37 page)

Rubber gloves.

Wet-Naps.

Knife.

He’d even made himself a silencer for this job, something he was generally adverse to, since it spoke to a kind of weakness. But the difference between killing someone in Chicago and killing someone in Las Vegas came down to simple acoustics: Chicago was
loud
, between the L and all the traffic and the howling wind and the sound of about three million people going about their daily lives. In Las Vegas, though, once you got off the Strip, everything fell quiet, the desert surrounding the city a valley of echoes.

He didn’t have much choice about guns, so he’d taken a nine from the cache in Slim Joe’s closet, filed off the serial number, and cleaned it meticulously, though he didn’t bother to wrap the handle with duct tape, since that just made it more likely he’d trap a finger print. And he was going to melt the gun anyway. He’d have a cab take him to Desert Springs and then he’d walk the mile to Kirsch’s office and wait for him.

If everything went according to plan, he’d be home in time to prepare sufficiently for the Monday morning
minyan
. If it turned upside down, someone else would be making prayers.

At sixty forty-five, David watched from across the street as Dr. Kirsch parked his green Jaguar in his personalized space—there was no bigger honor in Las Vegas than having your name painted on pavement; even the temple sold spaces for seven hundred and fifty bucks a month—and headed inside through his private office door. Fifteen minutes later, he stepped outside, looked both ways, and then propped his door open.

When David walked in, Dr. Kirsch was sitting behind the desk in his office, a wall-to-wall mahogany affair lined with bookshelves filled with framed photos of the doctor with various celebrities. Danny Gans. Wayne Newton. The captain of
The Love Boat.
The guy who played Dan Tanna on
Vega$.
A white tiger. That one was signed.

Dr. Kirsch didn’t seem surprised to see David, even though he said, “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“You’ve never seen me,” David said.

“Right, you’re right, no,” Dr. Kirsch said. He looked over David’s shoulder. “Is Mr. Savone here?”

“No,” David said. “I’m alone. You want to close your blinds?”

“Yes, right,” Dr. Kirsch got up from behind his desk and closed the matchstick bamboo blinds behind him, though David could still make out the passing lights of traffic. Didn’t anyone have decent curtains anymore? “The man who called said there was something minor to be done,” Dr. Kirsch said. “Are you having some issue with your skin? That area around your ears was difficult.”

“Yes,” David said. “My cheeks don’t move right. And I’ve got a lot of jaw pain.” Which was true. If he clenched his teeth too hard, it was like getting a nail through the eye.

“Any bleeding?”

“Not that I’ve seen,” David said. “But I can taste blood in the back of my mouth sometimes.”

“Okay then,” Dr. Kirsch said, “let’s check it out.” He walked David out of his office and down a long hallway lined with photos of showgirls, models, and a lady who did the weather Saturday nights on Channel 8. He stopped and unlocked an exam room. “Lay down on the exam bed, and I’ll take a look, Rabbi.”

David saw the doctor give an inadvertent twitch, like he’d been shocked, which he probably had been at his own stupidity for addressing a man he’d supposedly never met. He began to turn around, which was a mistake, since he ended up getting half his face blown off when David shot him.

Dr. Kirsch dropped to the ground, his jaw and most of his nose completely gone, but he was still alive, twitching on the tile, half of his face splattered all around him.

The upside of this, David considered, was that now it
really
wouldn’t look like a professional job, which had been the point all along. He’d planned on shooting the doctor in the neck, the kind of thing people who aren’t used to killing ended up doing all the time, and if the doctor didn’t die instantly, he’d be dead soon enough and would never know the difference. But David had seen guys survive a face shot, even stay conscious. The human body, man, it wanted to live.

Not that it looked like Dr. Kirsch was long for this world.

David snapped on his rubber gloves and leaned over Dr. Kirsch, tried to figure out what exactly he was breathing from, since he didn’t have a mouth or much of a nose anymore, and decided just to cover what was left of his face with both hands until the twitching stopped. He could shoot him again, but he
didn’t want to have to dig a slug out of his head. Thirty seconds, tops. If that. The guy was probably already comatose.

David pressed his hands over the gaping maw in the center of Dr. Kirsch’s face, but all that seemed to do was help staunch the flow of blood, which was the exact opposite of the point. The other problem was that Dr. Kirsch seemed to be coming to. His eyes fluttered open, and his arms started swinging wildly. David didn’t know if it was adrenaline or actual fight, if the doctor was even aware of what was happening. If he knew that he didn’t have a face.

“Stop moving,” David said quietly. “Just let go.”

Dr. Kirsch focused on David then, another unintended outcome, and then he tried to scratch at David’s face, swiping at him with both hands, until David decided
fuck it
, sat on his chest, pinned his arms down with his knees, grabbed his throat, found a thick gold chain there, which was helpful, and strangled him, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, just like he’d done that Donnie Brasco fuck in Chicago. That guy who wasn’t Jeff Hopper, the guy who’d started this whole problem, except that Dr. Kirsch was harder to kill.

David stood there for a moment and collected himself. He had a plan, and it had gone slightly astray, but, all things considered, it was a minor inconvenience. Dr. Kirsch was dead. Time to move to phase two. There needed to be an order to things, or else he’d end up tracking blood all over the city.

The bullet that took off most of Dr. Kirsch’s face kept going and lodged in the wall, so David dug it out with his butterfly knife and put it in his pocket. It made the scene look authentic; even the dumbest fucks were smart now about not leaving slugs and shell casings around, those forensics shows acting like Mr. Rogers for a generation of crooks.

He stepped back over to Kirsch’s body and jabbed his knife into the doctor’s rear pants pocket and cut his wallet out from the fabric, never once touching the actual body, cut his car keys and cell phone from his front pocket; that would all melt easily enough. The doctor didn’t wear any rings, didn’t even wear a watch, just that thick gold chain that was now garroted into his throat, so he sliced that away, too . . . and that’s when David noticed the pendant on one end.

David should have known what he’d see when he looked down, yet he was still taken by surprise. Two Hebrew letters,
and
, crusted in diamonds, forming the symbol
, the edict to live, the edict to be ethical, the edict of power:
Am Yisrael chai
. The people of Israel live.