TWO

MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2002

LAS VEGAS, NV

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING ON THE FBI’S MOST WANTED LIST, MATTHEW DREW realized, was the lack of dining options. You couldn’t just go to Chili’s and plop down at the bar and order some chicken fingers and a Bud Light, because invariably there was a TV behind the bar and you never knew when you might show up on it. Twice he’d been in joints where they’d run news stories about the bodies found in Portland, actually mentioned his name but no photo, which was a relief, but even then, he immediately lost his appetite and was suddenly out twenty bucks. So he started eating at odd times, often in Chinatown, which rarely ran English-language TV unless there was a ball game on, or he’d buy something he could grill from the Rancho Swap Meet across from Lorenzi Park, where he was living in an RV, or he’d grab something from the Broadacres Marketplace, a maze of Mexican-food stalls and flea market vendors off of Pecos and Las Vegas Boulevard.

But even then, he always felt eyes on him, owing primarily to the fact that he was, generously, a huge motherfucker. He’d played lacrosse at Tufts but unlike most of his teammates, who were lean and fast, Matthew stood over six foot three and tipped the scales at 225, which had made him an imposing defender. Once he joined the FBI, he wanted to look cool in a suit, be able to chase a perp down and not break a sweat, so he dropped down to 215. Now, with nothing much to do but eat and work out, he was closer to 245, but that was fine. His job these days was to be as imposing as possible, so people didn’t stare too long for fear of pissing him off. Turns out, though, the key to being memorable was being a giant white boy fumbling your chopsticks in Chinatown or mispronouncing carnitas at the Mexican-food market. By his first month hiding in Las Vegas, vendors started to greet him with his order already written down.

So Matthew found himself eating at places owned by organized crime figures, like a Russian place called Odessa, down the block from the Hard Rock. The prices were pretty reasonable, and the clientele was primarily Eastern European goons—who would sooner shake your dick off at the urinal than make eye contact—and Russian émigrés, looking for a taste of home. The joint was owned by some Russian mobster, which didn’t mean anything in this town. The entire ethos of the city—of the state, really—was that you were about to get robbed, that the only safeguard you had against ruination was your own willpower, and even that was prone to manipulation through free alcohol, sensory deprivation, and sexual coercion. No matter where you went in Las Vegas, you were totally fucked. That these mob-owned places still operated out in the open told Matthew a simpler tale: they weren’t currently wired by the feds.

Plus, at Odessa, you could get a decent plate of sautéed liver and potatoes twenty-four hours a day, which was appealing since mornings were his nights now, the world easier to navigate under a cloak of darkness, which is why Matthew was sitting at the bar, nursing a large screwdriver, and reading the Review-Journal at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday, staring at Melanie Moss. Her family had run a full-page ad on page 3 of the paper every Tuesday for the last two months. Matthew didn’t know where she was, not for sure, but he had a good sense that Sal Cupertine had killed her. The why is what baffled him. He hadn’t asked Sal about it, not yet anyway, but he vowed to find out about that shit, give that family some rest. He’d run into her ex-husband and daughter in Carson City back in December, the fuse that sent him to Las Vegas in the first place. If he could solve her murder, that would be one more way to cover his ass. And he needed as much cover as possible.

Just as he was about to leave, a bald woman sat down next to him. Matthew checked her out with a glance. She had a gun on her hip. Another on her ankle. Wouldn’t be surprised if she had brass knuckles in her purse. Matthew made her for Homeland Security, one of the humps stuck in town still looking for connections to Bin Laden, months after the 9/11 bombers left planet Earth. Like maybe no one had realized OBL was chilling at Del Webb, playing shuffleboard and fucking old Jewish ladies. Typical government shit. A year behind, interrogating strippers and cocktail waitresses in Mojave Desert black sites, as if whatever evidence gleaned here might bring back the thousands of dead. It was fruitless. Bin Laden was across the world and the United States was dry-humping strip clubs in Vegas for intel about dead pilots.

Still, the bald head was a good look for the agent, Matthew thinking maybe she’d been a marine in her previous life. It went well with the guns, anyway, if you were into that. Which he was.

“I’ve never been here before,” the bald woman said, like she felt Matthew’s eyes on her. “What’s good?”

“I like the liver,” Matthew said.

“No organ meats for me,” she said. She scanned the menu and when the bartender came by, she ordered bacon and eggs, over easy.

“Over easy,” Matthew said. “Never knew a cop to order eggs anything but over hard.”

“Not a cop,” she said.

“Just like the look?”

“Only so many ways to wear a gun,” she said. That was the other thing about dining in openly criminal operations: They were filled with cops and law-enforcement figures. No one bothered them, everyone in the game, so fuck it, have a meal, get back out on the street and do your work. Matthew had to act like he didn’t give a shit, like he belonged, and then he’d become invisible, too. Maybe no one gave a fuck in the first place. “You Metro?”

“Private security,” he said.

“Local?”

“No,” he said. “In town on a job.”

“Oh yeah?” She tapped the ad in the newspaper. “Well, that’s a crazy story. Turned up missing on 9/11, her belongings scattered across the state. No body. No sign of a struggle. Car is found half a mile from her home. A real-ass mystery.” The bald woman kept staring at the ad. “She was pretty.”

“Maybe she still is,” Matthew said.

“My experience, women don’t disappear and then turn up. What happens is someone finds their DNA.”

“I lost my sister,” he said, “but she turned up. Part of me wishes she hadn’t.” Why did he say that? What was he doing telling true stories about himself to this stranger with guns? All he did these days was tell lies. But there it was, the truth, unfettered. And this woman was right. His sister didn’t disappear. She was murdered by The Family or the Native Mob, or both, working together. Still, whenever he thought of her—which was often—he didn’t think of her dead. He thought of her as out there, somewhere, floating in the distance, just beyond his reach. She was lost to him, and everything he’d done since the day he found her in the trunk of her car had been him trying to set the world right. Vengeance wasn’t enough. He wanted someone to bring order to the chaos in his mind. He wasn’t the man he used to be; he knew that.

“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Met the wrong people,” Matthew said.

The bald woman put her hands up. “You don’t need to tell me,” she said. “This Melanie Moss, though. Imagine going missing on 9/11. What are the odds?”

“Same as any other day,” Matthew said. “Bad shit happens 24-7.”

“True. Absolutely true.” The bald woman gave Matthew a wan smile. “Nothing prepares you for this life, right?” She picked up the newspaper, read the fine print, set it back down. “Temple I belong to gave the family some money for it. See?” She pointed to the bottom of the ad.

There it was, along the bottom, barely large enough to read: “The Moss family thanks Temple Beth Israel, the National Association of Funeral Home Directors, and the City of Carson City for their generous contributions, which has made this ad possible.”

The bald woman didn’t look Jewish to Matthew, but then in the permanent midnight of Odessa it was hard to divine anyone’s countenance. But also, did this woman not know Temple Beth Israel was a criminal operation? Maybe it didn’t matter. Everything was criminal. Countrywide was running a Ponzi scheme and calling them ARM loans. Starbucks was busting unions in the United States and exploiting farm workers in Ethiopia. Nike was running Chinese sweatshops. But this bald lady would likely be surprised to know her rabbi was a mob button man.

“It was the last place she was seen alive,” the woman said. “And the Talmud says a lot about collective grief, I’m learning. She wasn’t Jewish, but the place she was last seen, it was our home, so we pay homage to that.”

“It’s a nice gesture.”

“It’s what the culture demands,” the bald lady said. “She doesn’t belong to her family anymore. She’s now a symbol for all the unresolved shit everyone has in their lives. The culture demands resolution. It’s why people put up those missing posters in New York after the towers came down. No one really believed their loved ones had concussions and were wandering SoHo. Collective grief makes you do crazy shit that, when looked at obliquely, seems outside what you’d rationally think yourself capable of doing.”

“Like this ad,” Matthew said. Like trying to murder Ronnie Cupertine. Like not killing Sal Cupertine when you discovered him in a hospital bed. Like hiding from the law when you know you’re doomed.

“Her family knows she’s dead. But a couple days ago, I see the ad, and I start thinking, Well, maybe there’s something the cops missed, so I go online down the rabbit hole of her life. Next thing I’m reading a message board,” she said, “that says she was probably abducted by aliens who’d escaped Area 51. That’s why they found her car and all her effects but not her body.” She pointed up into the darkness of Odessa’s ceiling. “She’s now in the cosmos, somewhere. With her captors. There’s an entire community of people who believe that.”

“People just want something to make sense,” Matthew said, “even if it doesn’t.”

“To me,” the bald woman said, “that’s as dangerous as the people blowing up buildings or beheading journalists. Because it’s more insidious. They know it’s not true, right? Somewhere, deep inside, these people know she wasn’t abducted, but it’s easier to make up a conspiracy than to deal with the hard reality that most shit just happens and it’s totally beyond our control. There isn’t always a why. At least these religious nuts have some god to take the blame.”

The waitress came by, dropped off the woman’s bacon and eggs. She tore a piece of toast, dipped it into the egg yolk. “I bring this all up, Agent Drew, to let you know I’m a person who deals in objective reality.” She dug into her purse, came out with a business card, slid it over to him. Special Agent Kristy Levine, FBI Organized Crime & Terrorism Task Force. “Which tells me there’s no fucking way someone on the FBI’s Most Wanted list would be hanging out in a place run by the Russian mob, so it must not be you.”

Matthew stood up. He had about a foot on Kristy. He could snap her like a twig and then pick his teeth with her arms. But he wasn’t going to fight a bald woman. And, sure, he had a nine on his ankle, but he wasn’t about to murder a federal agent.

Matthew hazarded a look over his shoulder, sure there’d be five guys with their guns pulled . . . but it was just a couple of strippers coming off the late-late shift, a table of five men in matching sweat suits inexplicably eating a cake, an Asian couple with a baby in the wrong fucking restaurant, and then a couple Russian working girls and their muscle. It was quiet, no one really talking, just eating or looking at their menus. Seven a.m., a block off the Strip, inside a mobbed-up Russian restaurant, you gotta want to be here.

Still, if the FBI didn’t have a team inside Odessa, that probably meant there was an assault squad outside, another team over at Gray Beard’s RV, and then a full blackout team storming wherever the fuck Sal Cupertine was pretending to be Rabbi David Cohen.

“Have a seat before I have to shoot you,” Kristy said, not looking up from her meal. “Lee sent me.”

Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba. Matthew sat down. Pondered the situation. If she was going to arrest him, she would have done so already. If Senior Special Agent Poremba sent her, he needed to trust that Poremba hadn’t fucked him.

The only person—apart from Sal Cupertine—who knew Matthew Drew was in Las Vegas was Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba, since Poremba had sent him out this way in the first place. When Matthew got tabbed as a serial-killing lunatic, after those bodies were discovered in Portland, he contacted Poremba straightaway, to tell him he’d been framed, that it wasn’t true, even if all the evidence pointed directly at him. The police reports for his stalking of the Cupertine family. His attempted murder of Ronnie Cupertine. And, of course, the motive: to avenge the murder of his sister. And then there was the fact that the gun used in all of the killings was his, no attempt to hide it. Matthew had no idea how many more bodies had been added to his sheet, but he imagined whoever was framing him was doing so in a prolific, if measured, manner. Killing only those who didn’t have anyone to speak for them.

It was a long-ass list.

What Poremba told him, three months ago, chilled him through and through: “You’re safer on the streets. If you turn yourself in, The Family will murder you in prison. Get your own evidence, build your own case, and when you’re ready, come to me only. In the meantime, don’t get caught.” So he’d set him up with a drop—a mailbox at the Postal Express in Summerlin—and sent him cash, burner phones, even a card on his birthday. Matthew wasn’t dumb. He knew Poremba was keeping him as a trump card on something larger.

Which is why Matthew went to the only wild card he had: Sal Cupertine, who he found in the hospital in Summerlin, living as Rabbi David Cohen. Sal knew Matthew hadn’t killed Ronnie’s family. Sal knew how the bodies ended up in Portland, because they came through the funeral home he operated for Bennie Savone first. The one person on the planet who could clear his name was the one person on the planet who couldn’t clear his name. It wasn’t a catch-22; it was a fucking bear trap. Sal wouldn’t move until he found his wife and kid. Matthew couldn’t move until he could figure out a way to get Sal safe passage . . . to somewhere. Safe enough to clear Matthew. After that? Cupertine could fuck himself. He’d started all of this, by murdering those three FBI agents and the CI at the Parker. He had to do his time. Either someone volunteered where Cupertine’s wife and kid were or Matthew found out himself. Until then, his options were limited. So he’d spent the last months doing what he knew how to do: trying to track down a woman and a child in protective custody. They could be anywhere in America, theoretically, but Matthew knew the truth of the matter—a child like William Cupertine would require a different level of attention, which would include proximity to a university that might have the proper kind of mental health professionals. The threat level meant they couldn’t be isolated from a major FBI field office. There would need to be either an organized crime division nearby or a team capable of handling a major assault. Access to a major airport. And having worked organized crime, he had a general idea of where they’d stashed witnesses before. It was just a matter of being methodical and then hoping Poremba might gain intel along the way.

All of which proved challenging, of course, once he was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

“He lets you call him Lee?”

“I’ve got about eighteen months to live,” Kristy said. “I’m trying to be minimalist in all things.”

“Cancer?”

Kristy nodded.

“And you’re still working?”

“I don’t have any friends out here,” she said. “It’s either I work or I sit in my condo, watching game shows.”

Matthew finished off his screwdriver, asked the bartender for another.

“That sounds good,” Kristy said to the bartender. “I’ll take one, too.”

“You get to drink on duty?” Matthew said.

“You never did when you were an agent?”

“I never got off probation,” he said. “But you know that.”

“Seems to me higher-ups were a little hasty with you,” Kristy said. “Top command is all new these days. Could be you find your way back in.”

“How many agents go from the Most Wanted list to the Kansas City field office?”

“Depends what kind of collateral you bring. Sal Cupertine would be a big win for the bureau at a time when they really need one. Seems to me, you and Agent Hopper got closer than anyone.”

“We were the only ones looking,” Matthew said.

“Like I said, top command is all new. You’re in Las Vegas for a reason, right?”

Matthew got the bartender’s attention again. This time, he ordered a scotch. “Here’s what I can tell you. You want to draw Sal Cupertine out,” Matthew said, “put his wife on the news.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Matthew said, “someone blew up her house, her kid shot a security guard in the back of the head, and no one has seen or heard from them since. You really think Sal Cupertine disappeared four years ago and never once got into contact with her? Come on. As long as she’s in protective custody, Sal Cupertine will stay hidden. Once he knows where she is, he’ll move. All the research Hopper and I did on him, the only thing that proved consistently true was that he loved his wife and kid. Everyone else could get fucked.”

“I’m gonna guess she’s somewhere with only one road in and one road out,” Kristy said, “and it’s heavily mined. Anyone looking for her is a bad guy. Even the good guys.”

“That’s my point,” Matthew said. “You want to capture Sal Cupertine, put her on blast.”

Before Matthew could continue, a walking steroid sat down on the other side of him. Sweatpants. White tank top. Spiderwebs and barbed wire on his arm. Waved over the bartender. She reached under the counter, came out with an envelope, handed it over. Steroid looked at Kristy. She nodded. He nodded back. What the fuck was going on? “The agent’s breakfast is on the house, Svetlana,” he said to the bartender.

“Thanks, Mr. Dmitrov,” Kristy said.

“Feeling better?”

“No,” Kristy said.

“The borscht will remind you of the old country.”

“There’s a reason we left,” Kristy said.

“Svetlana will package up a bowl. You come back anytime, okay?”

“Thank you, Mr. Dmitrov,” Kristy said.

“Take care of yourself, Agent. Need you to get that Bin Laden fuck.” He looked at Matthew. “This guy bothering you?”

“No,” Kristy said.

“You a cop?” he asked Matthew.

“No,” Matthew said, “I’m on the Most Wanted list.”

“Join the club,” he said.

When he was gone, Matthew said, “What the fuck was that?”

“Owner’s son,” Kristy said. “Nice guy.”

“He’s a gangster.”

“What are you?”

Matthew shook his head. He had no fucking idea anymore.

“How’d you find me?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Lee’s been sending you marked bills,” she said. “He sent me a spreadsheet. It was either here or the Rancho Swap Meet. Where are you living?”

“Nope,” Matthew said. “That you don’t get.”

“I understand.” She looked over her shoulder. “There’s a whole city beneath Las Vegas,” Kristy said, her voice low. “Six hundred miles of storm drains. After 9/11, we walked every inch, because we got a tip there were bombers living in there, getting ready to take down the Strip.”

“Find anything?”

“Five hundred, maybe seven hundred locals,” she said. “A whole community. Got a mayor and everything.” Kristy reached into her purse, came out with another manilla envelope. She slid it over to him. Inside was a band of twenty-five crisp hundred-dollar bills and a cell phone.

“These marked, too?”

“Of course,” she said. “If something goes sideways, there’s an entrance on Spring Mountain and Rainbow. The Desert Inn Detention Basin. On a sunny day, there’s easy access. You find Cupertine, go there, call me.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Lee believes you,” she said. “So I believe you.”

“I didn’t kill Ronnie Cupertine’s family,” Matthew said.

“It’s enough for me,” she said. “Pray that Ronnie Cupertine doesn’t die between now and then, though,” Kristy said. She pushed her plate away, started to gather up her stuff. “You ever been to Russia?” she asked, as if the first part of the conversation had never happened.

“No,” he said.

Kristy took one last sip of her coffee. “I always wanted to go. My family, they all escaped in something like 1910. Fiddler on the Roof era. Whenever that was. But I think I missed my window.”

“Because of Putin?”

“No, no,” she said. “Fuck him. He’ll be taken out by one of his own sometime. That’s how they do czars.” She pointed at her head. “Got a ticking time bomb set to go off anytime now. I’m not going to die in Russia, all by myself, where no one knows me. End up in an unmarked grave, my kidneys sold for profit.” That made Matthew laugh. Maybe for the first time in a year. “You’ve got a nice smile, Agent,” Kristy said. “Good teeth. Strong prenatal care; that’s what my mom would have said.”

“I’m not an agent anymore,” Matthew said.

“You don’t happen to know where Sal Cupertine is, do you?”

“Is this you asking or Agent Poremba?”

“He killed four FBI agents and a CI,” Kristy said. “So consider it Abe Lincoln asking.”

“My guess?” Matthew said. “We’ll never find him.”

“Then what are you doing in Las Vegas?”

“I like it here,” he said.

Kristy Levine downed her screwdriver and then stood up. She was a tiny thing. Matthew suspected she was unpredictable and fast. “You’re a shit liar, Agent,” she said. “I don’t think you murdered anyone. I want you to know that. And personally? I don’t really care if you did put Ronnie Cupertine into a coma. But murder is murder. I believe that.”

“I meant to kill him,” Matthew said. “Chance came along again, I’d cut his fucking throat.”

“Lee cares about you,” she said.

“I don’t know why,” Matthew said.

“Don’t make him regret it,” she said.

She was halfway out the restaurant when something occurred to Matthew, so he caught up with her just as she was pushing open Odessa’s doors into the harsh light of the Las Vegas morning. “That guy who came to the bar. The owner’s son. He knew you.”

“He does indeed.”

“But you said you’d never been here before.”

“I know how to lie, too,” she said and then she smiled. “If you find Sal Cupertine,” she continued, “the FBI upped the reward to a million dollars. Announcement is coming end of the month, for the anniversary. Come buy me a drink at Pour Decisions. I’m there on Tuesday nights.”