SATURDAY, APRIL 13, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
THE PROBLEM WITH BEING A JEWISH HOLY MAN AND SINGLE, RABBI DAVID Cohen learned early on, is that whenever something bad happened, the entire Hebrew world felt like they had to come by his home with a homemade dish. David broke a toe playing kickball with the Tikvah Preschool kids, eight briskets showed up at his home within twenty-four hours. A sinus infection was worth a kugel, scalloped potatoes, a baked chicken, and a platter of cookies. Even the rumor of illness was good enough for a casserole or six.
Come home from the hospital with a new face? That was apparently a clarion for matzo ball soup. Already that Saturday, Connie Blau, Tiffany Friedman, and Zoe Geller had dropped off about twenty gallons of their very own special recipes, though in each case David was pretty sure they just came by to view his face. With a full beard, he wasn’t sure how much they saw, though he had patches where hair just wouldn’t grow, which gave him the haphazard look of a man with a broken razor or a shitty mirror.
And so when his doorbell rang for the fourth time that morning—it was only 11 a.m.—David had the thought that he could maybe opossum his way out of another guest. Except this time his CCTV showed FBI agent Matthew Drew alongside Gray Beard, both wearing Cox Cable uniforms and holding clipboards, standing at his gate. A Cox Cable van idled behind them, Marvin in the front seat. To the best of David’s knowledge, Gray Beard didn’t have David’s address. He wasn’t surprised he found it, only surprised he used it. Gray Beard and Marvin had done odd jobs for David over the years. A friendship had developed, or at least a close business relationship, one that allowed David to make a call from the hospital and arrange a place for Matthew to stay. But that didn’t mean you just dropped by to watch a ball game.
“Something I can help you with?” David said through the intercom. David had the high ground here. If need be, he could go upstairs and plug all three using one of his long guns. HOA frowned on brain matter on the streets, so he’d need to figure that part out.
“Got a call about an outage,” Gray Beard said.
“Wasn’t from me,” David said. He trusted that Gray Beard and Marvin wouldn’t bring Matthew over to kill him, but . . . still.
“We just need to come inside for five minutes. Adjust some wiring.” Gray Beard pointed at Matthew. “Got a trainee who needs to see how things work.”
“You think showing up at someone’s house without an appointment is a good way of doing that?” David said.
“Emergency situation,” Gray Beard said.
Bennie had David’s entire house wired. Having Matthew Drew inside of it was not going to work. Never mind that Gray Beard and Marvin in his home would put them all in some jeopardy. But if Gray Beard said it was an emergency, David had to put some stock in that, even if he didn’t like it.
“I’ll buzz open the gate,” David said. “Come in through the side yard. The box is out back.” He hit the button to open the gate, retrieved his nine, and went to go wait on whatever was about to happen next.
By the time Matthew, Gray Beard, and Marvin made it into the backyard, David was sitting at a table beneath an umbrella on the far side of the pool. He had a tumbler of scotch, Macallan 30, the good shit, in one hand and his nine in the other.
“Right there is good,” David said. He took a sip of scotch. Matthew Drew seemed smaller from this vantage point. The last time he’d seen the former FBI agent was about six weeks earlier, Matthew pretending to be a long-lost cousin to get access in the ICU, but once David was on a more private floor, those visits had to end. Last thing David needed was for Bennie Savone to meet the man. But during their hospital visits, they’d come to an accord. They were both wanted men who could only be helped by the other.
“That a saltwater pool?” Matthew said.
“It is,” David said.
“That a Glock?”
“It is.”
“Didn’t figure you to be Glock guy,” Matthew said.
“I like to be familiar with what the cops shooting at me might be using. What are you carrying?”
“Situation like this, I’d probably have a personal Smith & Wesson .380, light, easy to conceal, get up close, do some real damage. And then my service Glock for when I needed to put thirty rounds into you. But today, I come in peace.”
“Marvin,” David said, motioning with the gun. “Unbutton that big motherfucker’s shirt for me.”
Marvin looked at Gray Beard, like he needed permission, and then didn’t move.
“It don’t need to be like that,” Gray Beard said. “You want to know if he’s got a gun on him, I’m here to tell you he does not.”
“Not worried about a gun,” David said. “Just want to be sure we’re not broadcasting.”
“What about those cameras?” Matthew pointed to two security cameras mounted on the house. “And those?” Four security cameras pointed over David’s back wall.
“I cut the power. Go look, Marvin.”
Gray Beard said, “Check it.”
Marvin did, pulling out the sliced power cables from each. “Couldn’t have just unplugged them?”
“Never liked them, anyway,” David said.
“It’s fine,” Matthew said. He unbuttoned his Cox Cable uniform shirt, spun around on the patio. Lifted up his pants, showed his ankles. “I’m clean.” He pointed at David. “How about Marvin retrieves your gun and then we can have a brief conversation.”
David didn’t love this idea. But he did have a butterfly knife in his pocket. But if it came to that, David knew which team Gray Beard and Marvin would play for. “Fine,” David said. He flipped his gun around in his hand, so he was holding the barrel. Marvin came over, snapped on a pair of medical gloves, took the gun.
“We leave you alone,” Gray Beard said, “you boys going to play nice?”
Matthew shrugged. “If he can find another glass for that nice scotch,” he said.
When David came back with a glass, Matthew Drew had his eyes closed and face turned up to the sun. “Feels good,” he said. “Not spending a lot of time outdoors, as you might imagine.”
“All this shit to avoid jail,” David said. He poured two fingers of scotch into Matthew’s glass. “What’s the emergency?”
“FBI agent rolled up on me while I was eating lunch,” Matthew said. “Funny thing, you know her.” He told David about his conversation with Kristy Levine, took down most of his scotch in the process. David gave him a refill. Topped himself off, too. It was going to be a long night and it wasn’t even noon.
“She’s not dumb,” David said. “If she looks at your evidence, she’ll come to the same conclusions you did.”
“I haven’t given her anything,” Matthew said. “The FBI won’t make a move until they have enough for an indictment. Poremba has anything on you, right now? It’s inadmissible. He needs to back his way into you. No one is flipping; you have nothing to worry about.”
David wasn’t so sure about that. All he had keeping him safe with Matthew was that he knew the truth about the murder of Ronnie Cupertine’s wife and kids, which had been pinned on Matthew. Namely, that they’d been dug up and sent to Las Vegas for burial, which meant someone in the Mafia—namely Peaches Pocotillo—didn’t want them found. And David knew that it was Ruben Topaz who dropped the bodies off in Portland, because he’d ordered it. The only alibi Drew had for those bodies, filled with bullets from his gun, was sitting right in front of him.
“For tonight, maybe,” David said. “Have you seen my face?”
“You look like a young Pacino. Like Dog Day Afternoon. When he had an edge.”
“Never saw that one.”
“Sure you did,” he said. “You know. ‘Attica! Attica!’”
“Oh yes,” David said. “Bank robbers.”
“Right. Grow your hair out, you could be him. Get a full beard, you’ll be Serpico. Wouldn’t that be dry.”
David had worried that Jennifer and William wouldn’t recognize him with his first plastic surgery. What about now that he looked like a guy wearing a Sal Cupertine Halloween mask?
“I make this Kristy Levine disappear,” David said, “what happens?”
“Five hundred agents descend on Las Vegas,” Matthew said, “and we both go to prison. Plus I’d be obligated to come for you.”
“After what the FBI did to you?”
Matthew said, “Don’t see you fleeing this saltwater pool and mansion. After all the mob did to you, Rain Man.”
“Don’t fucking call me that,” David said.
Matthew put his hands up. “Point being. You can’t kill your way out of this.”
That was, in fact, David’s thinking, too. Not that he was keen to kill her. He liked her. She was part of his congregation. He helped her pick out her grave, for fuck’s sake. Since then, prior to David getting his face crushed, she’d become a regular at Temple Beth Israel. David even helped coordinate rides to her chemo appointments.
“I don’t suppose you’ve found my family.”
“No,” Matthew said. “Poremba’s given me some intel. Safe houses in Arizona and Oregon, one in Utah, all come up empty. His chain goes high, but not high enough. Can’t break any laws, you know?”
“Shit.”
“Hence.” Matthew put his arms up. “Here I am in your beautiful home.”
“Do you think this Kristy knows . . . something?”
Matthew took a sip of the scotch. “Yes,” he said. “She knows you’re here. She doesn’t know where. Or why. But she knows. What happens when she sees you?”
“She’ll see what she wants to see,” David said. “She only sees her rabbi.”
Matthew stared at David. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds. “Until she doesn’t.”
“I’ll be ready for that.”
Matthew took out a piece of paper from his clipboard, put it on the table between them. “Look who is in the neighborhood.”
It was a news release from Gold Mountain Mining announcing the hiring of Kirk Biglione as their new director of corporate security. Gold Mountain was an oil and lithium operation with offices around the world—Australia, Chile, China, Saudi Arabia, and Dallas—and Biglione’s hiring landed him in trade publications and corporate newsletters. You want to be serious about your corporate security, is there someone more qualified than the former top FBI agent from one of the nation’s busiest offices?
David kept reading through the canned quotes to get to the meat of the news: Gold Mountain’s latest venture would be on the shores of the Salton Sea, the ecological disaster forty miles east of Palm Springs. Gold Mountain was breaking ground on their latest geothermal plant, one poised to extract lithium. “The path to being free from Middle East oil interests is a future rich with electric cars, made right here with American lithium batteries,” the release proclaimed. Biglione would be based out of the Salton Sea office for the next six weeks.
The Salton Sea was only a few hours away. They could leave right now and be standing in front of Kirk Biglione before the sun went down.
“Why isn’t Biglione in prison?” David asked. “How does he have a six-figure job like this?”
“That plant goes,” Matthew said, “I’d guess it’s more like a seven-figure job.”
“He’s a gangster, all right,” David said. What all the press releases and articles left out, but which David told Matthew about one afternoon when he was still in the hospital, loaded on painkillers and anti-infection meds, was that Kirk Biglione came from a connected family, had even done an internship with The Family before going off to college, and that the rumor in The Family was that he was the very reason they were still in business and The Outfit had melted into nothing. Yeah, the local FBI was going to bust The Family when they did major shit wrong, but Biglione wasn’t going to be hauling in Ronnie Cupertine for anything short of assassinating the president, and even then, they’d probably find a patsy first. If The Family kept the ecosystem in control—street gangsters killing street gangsters was fine; mobsters killing mobsters was actually good for local tourism, so that was also fine—everyone stayed busy on both sides of the law. But if civilians started getting lit up, little kids eating drive-by strays and shit? That wasn’t going to work. Same with the Mafia. If some mobster killed a wife or a child, that ended up on national news. Kill a cop or an agent? People would start losing their jobs, which in the FBI meant Jeff Hopper and Matthew Drew hit the streets. In the mob, that meant Sal Cupertine got shipped to Las Vegas.
David knew now that Ronnie Cupertine had been snitching on himself all these years, working essentially as an unpaid CI for the FBI since god knows when, and that had worked out fine when Kirk Biglione was the man in charge of the organized crime division. But when Biglione got bumped up and ended up overseeing the entire FBI field office, leaving Jeff Hopper in charge of the organized crime division, well, that shit wasn’t gonna fly. Sal Cupertine was supposed to die. Ronnie and Biglione could have closed the doors on their relationship. But instead . . . this shit show.
David wasn’t surprised Matthew had this new intel on Biglione. From the moment the cocksucker got charged in the corruption scandal surrounding the FBI’s handling of the Sal Cupertine incident—how Cupertine managed to kill three agents and a CI without a backup team within ten miles of the site; how and why the FBI were led to believe a body found in the Poyter landfill was Cupertine; why Jeff Hopper (and Matthew) had been fired for whistleblowing—Matthew had kept eyes on him.
After Biglione pled guilty, earning a suspended sentence, he landed a top corporate-security job outside of Detroit. Not every day an ex-FBI agent lands in Bloomfield Hills, even one with a felony on his sheet. If G. Gordon Liddy got to host his own syndicated talk radio show and own a countersurveillance firm, what was stopping a small fry like Kirk Biglione from becoming a full corporate potato?
“How does he help us?” David asked, though what he actually meant was, How does he help me?
“He needs to go down,” Matthew said, “but before that happens, he’s the one guy who’d know where your wife and kid are. Half his job was probably coordinating with the U.S. Marshals on shit like this.”
“How do you intend to get information from him?”
Matthew said, “One toe at a time.”
“You ever torture someone before?”
“No. I’ve only recently become a criminal.”
“It’s messy and it’s time-consuming.”
“You have a better idea?” Matthew said.
“Drug him,” David said. “Get whatever you can out of him, then kill him.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that,” David said. “He’s not giving up nuclear codes. He’s giving up possible safe houses to someone he believes is going to kill people he’d like to see dead. Because if my wife is in a safe house, she’s giving up information, right?”
“Right.”
“You could probably give him a Hershey bar and he’d tell you, if he’s worried my wife will have something on him.”
“Does she?”
David thought about that for a moment. By the time they were together, all she might have heard was that Kirk Biglione was crooked in a good way. She wouldn’t have a negative view of the man that had kept her husband and her friends’ husbands out of prison. She’d surely seen the news reports about the trial and how the FBI faked Sal’s death, but that was all public record. She didn’t have anything new.
“No,” David said.
Matthew nodded his head, exhaled hard, like he’d been relieved of some pressing burden. “Kirk Biglione doesn’t exist,” he said, “my sister is alive.”
“That kind of thinking will fuck you up,” David said. “Kirk Biglione dies, your sister doesn’t rematerialize. Vengeance is never as sweet as you think it will be.”
“Kirk Biglione doesn’t exist,” Matthew said, “I’m not hunting you down for the rest of your life, either.”
“Won’t happen,” David said. “Time comes, I won’t make it hard on you. I’ll let you down easy.”
“Could be sooner than you think.”
David poured himself more scotch then put the cork back into the bottle, pushed it toward Matthew. “Find my family, get your vengeance, give me a day head start, and we’re square. You end up bringing me in, you have my word I’ll exonerate you on everything.”
“And what if you won’t come alive?”
“What if you won’t?”
Matthew thought about that. “I’ll take a notarized letter. On Temple stationery.”
“You’re a crazy motherfucker,” David said, but it actually made some sense. He started to head inside.
“What about your bottle?” Matthew asked.
“All yours,” David said. “For your service.”