TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
BEST BUY DROPPED OFF THE COMPUTER RABBI DAVID COHEN ORDERED JUST before five on Tuesday night, David paying extra for them to hook it up inside his three-car garage, in the wedge of space in front of a sailboat, the one used in the murder of his predecessor, Rabbi Gottlieb. David had turned the wedge—intended to be golf cart parking inside the three-car garage—into a working space away from the cameras inside the house, Bennie not smart enough to install cameras in the garage, or maybe he didn’t think anyone would intentionally sit inside the sweatbox. The heat wave made the garage unbearable during the day, but at night, when the sun fell behind the Red Rocks, it cooled down to mildly uncomfortable.
Poor Rabbi Gottlieb. David heard nothing but hagiography since he’d come to Temple Beth Israel, but living in his house taught David a few things about the good rabbi’s secrets. There was the porn stash behind the dresser and the monthly deliveries of Omaha Steaks, which always included at least one precooked pork chop dinner, neither meal exactly kosher. Plus the man was a bit of a hoarder. When David was gone, he’d figure out a way to get word to the Gottlieb family. They should know what really happened to their son. It was a shanda that they believed their son had been drunk when he drowned.
By 7 p.m., David built, essentially, a false wall around his new computer room, stacking coolers, his portable lathe, moving boxes, stacks of towels, and green garbage bags filled with Rabbi Gottlieb’s old paperbacks to the roof, leaving a small opening in the rear. He then locked the house, turned on all the alarms, made sure his guns were secure—he had a hidden place in every room for a firearm; he could be anywhere when the Marshals showed up—and fired up the laptop to do what he’d been doing every night that week: seeking out his wife on the internet.
Tonight, he was reading the stories about the explosion that turned his house into nothing but a charred foundation, how the fire could be seen from miles away, how it ended up destroying gas and plumbing lines down the entire block, the explosion’s power so significant the local fire department originally thought a plane crashed into the street. The Tribune ran photos that included MapQuest’s satellite view compared to the denuded new reality. It was shocking to see, but then David realized something far more interesting, which is that MapQuest had satellite photos going back over the last two years, once every few months.
In the first photos, all he could see was the roof and the general outline of the house, though he could still make out bits of himself, too: the towering blue ash tree in the front yard, where he hung a tire swing for William; the brick driveway, Jennifer’s dream, which he laid over the course of a long weekend; the backyard built-in grill, which he’d bought after his first substantial hit—Gil Lomontoli, a city councilman snitching to a cop on the take, the dumbfuck—and which he loved. But it was the third photo from space he couldn’t stop staring at.
There was a figure standing on the driveway. Even from outer space, he could recognize his wife. The closer he zoomed in, the blurrier everything got, but still he could see she had her hand to her mouth, another on her hip, and she was staring down the block.
He pulled back on the photo, and there, on the corner, by the Sandersons’ house, was William, on a bike, a blur of a boy. On either side of the street is what must have kept Jennifer’s equal attention: a police cruiser and a black Escalade, neither of which made sense, unless they were both waiting for Sal Cupertine to come home.
How he would like to walk down the middle of that block, gun in hand. Dare the cops or the feds to say one word to him.
Or anyone.
If he came back to Chicago, he’d be the king of the streets.
But . . . no.
He knew better. What was the point of revenge now? Everyone who mattered was dead or dying. What was he going to do? Peel Lemonhead’s cap back? For what? Taking orders like a dumbfuck? Same with Sugar Lopiparno, who the papers said was running half of Chicago, what with Ronnie Cupertine rarely being seen these days . . .
To be the king of his own backyard would be enough.
He clicked through the photos again, loaded the latest satellite photo, checked the date: March 1, 2002. Six weeks ago. No realtor sign. No new construction, either. No weeds. Just . . . land. Someone was taking care of it. That meant they were being paid. He supposed the FBI was used to this sort of thing . . . but why hadn’t they sold it yet?
Before David could give it much thought, the home phone rang. He looked at the clock. It was nearly 11 p.m. Had he really been sitting there staring at photos of his wife and child from outer space all night long? He got into the kitchen just as the eighth ring was echoing throughout the house.
“Rabbi Cohen. Oh, thank god.” It was Jerry Ford, the owner of LifeCore, the Temple and the mortuary’s business partner in their limbs, skin, and body-parts business, legal and otherwise. He was breathless. “I didn’t know if you were back yet. I’ve got a problem.” David clicked on his CCTV. Jerry Ford was parked on the other side of his front gate, in his butter-yellow Mercedes. He zoomed in. Was that . . . blood on his sweat suit?
“I’m here,” David said. “I can see you on my camera. I feel like you’ve encountered a problem best left to Mr. Savone.”
“He’ll kill me.”
David should have hung up, walked outside with his gun, and shot Jerry Ford in the face, tossed him in the freezer, stolen his car, and driven as fast and as far as he could.
But for fuck’s sake, he’d been the guy on the other end of this same phone call and it upended his life. Maybe he was the prophet Ezekiel. Maybe all of this was foretold. Maybe he lived this life one million times to get to this existential conundrum. A man covered in blood shows up at your home and asks for help. What do you do?
“Mr. Ford,” David said, thinking of all the possible people, agencies, and crime bureaus who might be listening in, “why don’t you come inside. Have a cup of tea. We’ll talk through whatever it is you’re feeling.”
“I don’t think you want me in your house in my condition.”
“It’s fine,” David said. He zoomed in as close as possible. Was he . . . crying? Motherfucker. “Please, come in.”
David hung up.
He stuffed a nine in his waistband, grabbed a towel, walked outside, sprayed his hose on the towel, hit a button on his key fob, opened the gate. Let Jerry pull up his driveway. Put a hand up to stop him from driving any further. David slid into the Mercedes. Jerry was covered in blood. The soles of his shoes to his forehead. He looked like he been slaughtering cows all day. David took the nine from his waistband, since it was uncomfortable to sit that way, set it on his lap. Handed him the towel.
Jerry wiped his face, his hands, his neck. It didn’t look like Jerry had murdered someone. Rather, it looked like he’d gone for a swim in a pool of dead bodies. He also smelled like a combination of decomposition—like if lamb chops were left in the sun and a dog shit iodine on them—chlorine, and dried blood. A wave of nausea passed over David. The blood was everywhere, so David said, “Drive. We can’t stay here. You never know who is watching.”
“Which way?”
“Are we going to the police station to turn you in?”
“No. I’m not prepared to do that.”
“Then it doesn’t matter,” David said. “Just drive. And get some windows open.”
Jerry backed out, exited the Lakes at Summerlin Greens, wound around the streets until he saw the on-ramp to the Summerlin Parkway, got on going south, exited on Rainbow, turned left, drove over to the Best in the West Shopping Center, parked in front of McDonald’s, which even at this time of night was bumping. The play area filled with kids. Tweaks and bartenders and working girls eating cheeseburgers and watching them fuck around. That was the thing about Summerlin. Middle of the week, the night owls still kept to their clocks even if they weren’t working, everything in this town open twenty-four hours, David wondering if these kids ever went to school and who watched them when their parents weren’t around. Whole generation of Las Vegas kids growing up behind gates, being raised by voice mails and Domino’s and Rachael Ray cooking meals in under thirty minutes.
“Is this okay?” Jerry asked.
“If you don’t mind looking like a blood-soaked pedophile.”
Jerry pulled behind the McDonalds, next to the dumpster, a homeless guy already decamped for the night. Fuck it. Anywhere outside the lights of Las Vegas was someone trying to get some sleep.
“Rabbi,” Jerry said, “I fucked up.”
“I see that,” David said.
Jerry swallowed, hard. “I don’t know . . . what you are, exactly. But I didn’t have anyone else I trusted.”
“I’m your rabbi,” David said. “So you’re right to trust me.”
“Rabbi,” Jerry said, “what the fuck is up with the gun?”
“You’re covered in blood, Jerry,” David said. “I figured this might be a situation where a gun would make us both more comfortable.”
“It is not making me comfortable. Do you even know how to handle that thing?”
“I’ve killed a hundred men,” David said. “Maybe more.”
“I don’t know what part of the Talmud you’re quoting.” Jerry popped open the glove box. “So, for my peace of mind, please, stash it in there. You’re going to end up accidentally killing us both.” David did so. He also had a nine on his ankle and of course the knife. Jerry watched him, then said. “You look . . . not the same.”
“I’ve had extensive plastic surgery,” David said. He turned the radio on, filling the Benz with Neil Diamond, again. Everyone in this fucking town playing Neil Diamond lately. He turned the volume up, just in case either the car or Jerry was bugged.
“Whose blood are you covered in?” David asked.
“With you away, I’ve had to take on new clients in the last couple months. I went to do a pickup tonight and ran into a situation.”
“Jerry, when I came to you, asking for help when Mr. Savone was arrested, did you ask any questions?”
“I’ve never asked any questions, Rabbi. Respectfully. I would never ask you any questions. What you do, who you are, whatever, that’s your show.”
“Good,” David said. “Speak in specifics.”
“I’ve got bodies melting through the floor of a dentist’s office into a swingers club that opens again in about ten hours.”
“And you think I can help you?”
“If this becomes public,” Jerry said, “they will eventually find me. Because the smell is . . . the smell is very bad, Rabbi. And the leaking is very bad. It is . . . in the ceiling tiles and walls and I am beyond my ability to cope with that alone. And that means the media will eventually see the work I do with the Temple, and that will eventually lead to a reporter showing up at your house. And you said, from the start, no media. So. I’ve played this scenario out as far as I can, and it always ends with a reporter talking to you. Cops, for sure. FBI will eventually become involved. I’ve done the math.”
Jerry was right about one thing. Bennie would kill him. Bennie would also kill Jerry’s wife. Might kill Jerry’s kids. Might invent a time machine, kill his fucking parents. David should kill him, right now, but he didn’t yet know where the bodies were.
“Where’s your wife?” David said.
“I sent her to our beach house in Pismo.”
“When?”
“About forty-five minutes ago.”
“She can’t come back here,” David said. “Not until I tell you it’s okay. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Who owns this dental office?”
“Russians.” Jerry squirmed in his seat. “I met some fellas playing poker. They run with Boris Dmitrov. He owns Odessa, the Russian place over on Paradise. You know him?”
“No.” He did, in fact, know exactly who he was. Ran the Russian mob in Las Vegas. Had influence across the entire country. He’d been one of the first Russians to operate on a national level. Not unlike Ronnie, he was so outwardly a gangster that it was now his cover. When travel shows did specials on the most mobbed-up places to get a meal in Las Vegas, it was always Odessa, Piero’s over by the Convention Center, and the Venetian restaurant on Sahara. Buses let out in front of those fucking places, letting tourists snap photos.
David looked at Jerry and asked, “Why aren’t you at Odessa explaining your problems?”
“He’s a nice guy,” Jerry said. “But his friends scare the shit out of me.”
“You’re scared of a dentist?”
“It’s not always a dental office,” Jerry said. “Like how Temple Beth Israel and the funeral home isn’t always . . .”
Before Jerry was done speaking, David had the tip of his knife inside Jerry’s right ear and one of his giant hands around Jerry’s throat. “Say one more word,” David said, “and I will shove this knife into your brain. But I’ll do it slow, so you have some time to reflect on how many mistakes have led you to this moment. If you understand what I’m saying, blink twice.”
Jerry blinked twice.
“You’ve had some questions about me over the years. Would that be a correct statement?” He twisted the knife maybe a centimeter, enough to draw blood. “Have you voiced your questions to anyone? You wife, maybe?”
Blink. Blink.
“Your wife is a smart woman. I bet she told you that you’ve chosen a certain life and if you want to stay in that life, you’re going to be in business with people who don’t always seem to be who they are. Would that be true?”
Blink. Blink.
“I mean, you are aware that Bennie Savone is a fucking gangster, right?”
Jerry didn’t move a muscle. Kept his eyes as wide as possible.
“You can answer that question honestly, Jerry, because the Talmud tells us that we need not let the past destroy our future. You know Bennie is a gangster. You know I am not what I seem. That is all past. What happens next is the future. So. Two blinks if you understand where we are at this point on our journey together.”
Blink. Blink.
“Tonight is likely to be the end of our association,” David said. “So I’m going to speak in specifics. Before we go any further, I want you to understand that if I help you with this problem, whatever it might be, and if you then ever say anything that isn’t complimentary about your working relationship with the Kales Home of Peace or Temple Beth Israel, I will kill you.” He dug the knife in. A millimeter. Maybe two. Jerry cried out in a pure atavistic response. Also, it probably hurt.
Jerry blinked about six times.
“However this shakes out,” David said, “tomorrow, you’re going to put your house on the market. You will take the first offer that comes your way. You’re going to lay off all of your employees this week. Give them severance. Continue their health care for three months. Be a fucking mensch, Jerry, do you understand?”
More blinking.
“Good. And if the FBI should ever contact you about anything, even if it’s because they think you assassinated JFK, I want you to consider killing yourself before answering them. Because if you ever speak to the FBI, even if you lie to them, you are a dead man. Learn the words ‘I take the fifth.’ Understand?”
Blinking.
David let go of his throat, because it was starting to seem like maybe Jerry wasn’t getting enough oxygen, what with the way his lips were turning blue, but kept the knife in his ear.
“Now, be real still while I pull the knife out of your ear. Because if I perceive you moving in an offensive manner, I might accidentally sever your auditory nerve, and I don’t want to do that.” David slid the knife out, wiped it on his thigh, not that it was all that dirty, but it seemed like a hard-core thing to do, and David wanted to make sure Jerry had something concrete to take from this. “Now either take me home or take me to this dentist’s office.”
Jerry spent a few seconds thinking about his particular set of problems, which to be generous had just quadrupled, and opted for the dentist’s office, since they pulled out of the Best of the West and headed south.
“May I speak?” Jerry said, after they’d been back on the road for a few minutes.
“Of course.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” David said, leaving the salient part unsaid: Which is why you’re still alive.
THE DENTAL OFFICES OF YURI “JACK” BELSKY WERE LOCATED ON THE SECOND floor of a sprawling warehouse that had been carved up into store fronts on the east side of the Commercial Center between Sahara and Maryland Parkway, just above the Red Lantern Swingers Club, a gun-and-ammo shop, and a recording studio called Hollywood Starz. The Red Lantern was open Thursday through Sunday, according to the pulsing sign out front, which also advertised the pricing guide for entrance: $85 for single men Thursday and Sunday night, $125 Friday and Saturday. Couples $100 every night! Single ladies free! A fucking racket, but David saw the wisdom. Without the single ladies, it was just a bathhouse, and there were three of those in the Commercial Center already. This was a part of town David didn’t spend a lot of time in, because he was not looking for group sex or a recording contract and he had enough guns and ammo to take on a decent militia.
Back in the day, however, the Commercial Center was going to be the epicenter of Las Vegas, a huge outdoor shopping center set to revolutionize retail with its sheer size and walkability. That was in the 1960s and ’70s. The story was that Elvis and Frank and then later Lefty Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro would come in with their girlfriends and buy jewelry, grab a meal at one of the steakhouses, and then race their cars around the massive parking lot—three thousand marked spaces!—and maybe part of it was true—he was pretty sure Spilotro’s Hole in the Wall gang had robbed a jewelry store in the center—but David figured it was mostly bullshit like everything else, another story about why shit was better when the mob ran the town.
These days, the center was half empty, most of the storefronts obvious money-laundering operations—Korean nail salons, wig stores, pet shops that sold ferrets and snakes but had never seen a golden retriever, rub-and-tug massage joints, delis and Chinese restaurants, all the kinds of places that could operate without real employees, just the owner and some cousins. They all had signs that said, SINCE 1971! or whatever year they decided to make up to give the people shopping some confidence. Personally, David didn’t think the fact that the Golden Sunset Bath House had been in business since 1973 was a good selling point.
The parking lot was mostly empty tonight, save for two rows of F-150s and Silverados lined up like soldiers out front of The Ponderosa, a faux Western saloon a floor and two doors down from the dental office, which wouldn’t be anything to note, except everyone knew The Ponderosa was a cop bar, the kind with a mechanical bull and a reputation for late-night shootings that went uninvestigated. Jerry was smart enough to pull around the back of the building, a narrow alley off of Market Street, and when he got out, he immediately removed his license plates, tossed them in his trunk.
David could hear the thumping of music coming from The Ponderosa; Lee Greenwood was going on at some length about how he knows he’s free, followed by whooping and chants of “U.S.A. motherfucker! U.S.A. motherfucker! U.S.A. motherfucker!” It sounded like the mixture of a Klan rally and bachelor party.
“You’ve been doing business next to a cop bar?” David said.
“Boris owns The Ponderosa, too,” Jerry said. He was in the trunk, looking for something. Meanwhile, things began to click into place. What was the difference between owning The Ponderosa and employing a dozen cops to do personal security? David supposed it was easier to blackmail cops when you had them on video getting blow jobs from the working girls—because there was indeed a subset of working girls who only frequented cop bars, Las Vegas unique for their niche prostitutes—or had the ability to spike their drinks, get them pissing dirty and off the job.
“Here.” Jerry tossed David a sealed plastic bag covered in the LifeCore logo. “Put these on.” Inside were plastic booties, an N95 mask, and surgical gloves. “You’re going to need them, Rabbi.”
Jerry unlocked a back door and directed them into a narrow hallway that led to the locked rear exit of the swingers club and to a stairwell which ushered them upstairs to the dental office. The stairwell smelled like a combination of piss, sweat, chlorine, and like the walls were filled with dead rats. The stairs themselves were either sticky or damp, David thankful to be in near darkness, except for the half-light put off by a single tube of fluorescent light on the ceiling. When they hit the second floor, however, they were in complete darkness, Jerry taking out a flashlight, but David could have figured out their path by following his nose: Those weren’t rats in the wall. Once you smell rotting human flesh, it never quite leaves you, and working for four years in a funeral home, plus his previous forty years putting people into the dirt, David knew what was what. David snapped on his gloves, then strapped on his N95.
“The fuck happened up here?” David said, except he was aware he’d left David back in the garage at home. Sal Cupertine was on the job.
“Power went out,” Jerry said.
“When?” It was also sweltering up here on the second floor. It had been over 100 degrees all day and was still in the high 80s, at least. Felt like it was about 120 in the building.
“Sometime after Sunday,” Jerry said. “Power company said it should be back on after midnight.” It was 12:12 a.m. “They’re late.”
There was a security-system keypad beside the door to the dental office, but with the power out it was useless, so Jerry unlocked the door with a key, and they were inside the waiting room of the dental office, six chairs in a U, a table covered in old issues of People, a frosted window opening into the administrative office. Jerry unlocked another door, and they were into the clinic, the smell getting worse as they moved through the wide expanse of the floor—past the X-ray bay, past the hygienist station, past six separate treatment rooms, the lab, the accounting office, and the dentist’s personal office—to eight-foot pneumatic double doors marked STORAGE/PERSONNEL ONLY/ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING. Jerry found another key, unlocked those doors, said to Sal, “This is where it gets problematic.”
The doors opened into a warehouse that ran the length of the second floor. It was lit with a few trembling emergency lights that revealed eight-foot shelving units stacked with medical coolers between two and six feet long, the kind the Kales Home of Peace used to store body parts they were shipping out to LifeCore. The difference was that Kales kept their containers in a freezer unit cooled to between 32 and 39 degrees at all times. Anything lower or higher would render the tissue and bones unusable.
It was about 100 degrees inside the warehouse. It was like sitting in the schvitz at a Russian spa in Chicago.
Sal popped open a cooler at knee level, looked in.
There were six human heads inside. They’d been professionally removed, looked like, not cut off by someone like Fat Monte, who used to like doing that shit.
Sal opened the next cooler. More heads.
The next.
The next.
The next.
He counted fifty heads total. This would be a horror show, but the heads were all sealed inside medical-grade coolers and were jacked full of formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde, which made their skin turn a familiar if otherworldly greenish gray: When LifeCore was going to move product for medical research or university study, the clients would sometimes ask Ruben and Miguel to preserve them in this way, so Sal had seen a row of heads like this in the past. With regular injections, they could sit on these shelves for years, probably, if the cooling hadn’t gone out.
What Sal couldn’t figure out was how or why this dentist had all of this cadaver stock. Kales kept nothing. What didn’t go to LifeCore was either buried with the bodies or disposed of in the legal way, Ruben running a clean operation to stay kosher with Melanie Moss and the rest of the state investigators. Surely the dentist wasn’t licensed for this shit. How could he be? How the fuck was he going to get rid of fifty human heads?
That was, it turned out, the least of the problems. Sal closed the cooler and stepped through the maze of shelves until he found Jerry standing in front of double doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY/FLAMMABLE/NO SMOKING. The floor—concrete throughout the warehouse—was covered in a sheen of pink liquid that ran from beneath the doors and drained toward the southern wall, where it disappeared into the drywall.
“The fuck is that?” Sal asked.
“Nothing you want to get on your skin,” Jerry said. He pushed the doors open and inside were twenty industrial freezer units used to store materials at or below zero. There was an inch of fluid on the floor, each freezer dripping more every moment, the room broiling hot. On the shelves surrounding the freezer units were buckets and open coolers filled haphazardly with body parts, mostly hands and feet and sheets of skin. Sal gave them a glance. The word that came to mind was molting.
“I think before the power went out,” Jerry said, “the cooling system must have busted because when I got here, the fan was blowing hot air. I mean, it was maybe 90 degrees in here. I think that caused the defrost, and that knocked the power out. We’d need to get someone out here to look to be sure. I’m not confident this place is even on the grid, to be honest, Rabbi.”
“Don’t bring anyone in this fucking place,” Sal said.
“I wasn’t going to call Nevada Power,” Jerry said. “Boris, he’s got guys. KGB fuckers. All leather coats and hand-rolled cigarettes, I mean, not Jews. The opposite of Jews. What is that word for those fuckers who ran us out of Europe? Not Nazis. The other thing.”
“Cossacks.”
“Right. Cossack motherfuckers. I mean. They built the warehouse.”
“They did a great job,” Sal said.
“The dental office was already here. The warehouse was just sitting empty. Dental office is on legit power, of course, but everything else, god knows who is getting juiced for it.”
Sal looked down at his feet. “This shit is eating through the booties,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “We shouldn’t be breathing this. You get light-headed, it’s time to move.” Sal had been light-headed since getting out of the truck of frozen meat four years ago. “I made the mistake of opening the freezers, hoping I could save some of the product, but I couldn’t. And then that made everything worse.” He shined his flashlight behind one of the freezer units. “The fluids are leaking through the floors. And there’s no way the smell isn’t filling up the club downstairs. I’m worried these fuckers might have attached the cooling system to the main plumbing of the building, which might then cause problems if someone flushes a toilet.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “Maybe the streets run with blood and golems rise from the gutters. Who knows at this point.”
Sal was surprised there weren’t coyotes circling the building. He opened a freezer. There were plastic containers filled with eyes. The sheer volume had Sal confused. How was this possible?
“You do business with these people?”
“You’ve been gone,” Jerry said. “I got bills to pay.”
“Where do they get the parts?”
Jerry shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“These fucking Russians,” Jerry said. “They’re not like us.”
Sal opened another freezer. There were hearts and lungs and kidneys and livers stacked like at a butcher shop, each bleeding into the next.
“Jesus,” Sal said. He slammed the door shut. He’d seen all these body parts before. He just hadn’t seen them smorgasbord-style.
“I told you.”
“No, you didn’t. You said they’re not like us. You didn’t say they had fucking liver cutlets.” The next freezer: Long bones. Spines. “Who are you selling this shit to?”
“Mostly overseas,” Jerry said. “I go through a guy in New Jersey. I think they ship primarily to Afghanistan and Brazil. Wherever there’s a war or elective plastic surgery and they need cadaver bones.”
The next freezer: more heads.
“What do they need all these fucking heads for?”
“Scientific study,” Jerry said. “Testing new lotions and oils and drugs and such. It’s either human heads or cocker spaniels, and people don’t like burning cocker spaniels. It’s a burgeoning business. All these new FDA regulations about testing on animals, no one wants fucking PETA walking in circles in front of their offices. So they’ve got sites in Mexico and off-book sites in the United States. It’s a real problem.”
“They use human heads?”
He shrugged. “People donate their bodies to science. It’s science, I guess.”
Sal looked at the heads closely. A woman with earrings. A man with a cross on a tight gold chain seemingly melted into the flesh under his chin. A teenage girl with a diamond in her nose.
“Give me your flashlight,” Sal said. Was that . . . dirt? The decapitation cuts looked ragged, having just done some similar work of his own, in the dark, and with much more precision. “Are these Russians robbing graves?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said.
“Yes you do.”
“Rabbi,” Jerry said, “I ask them the same number of questions I ask you.”
Fair enough. They hadn’t robbed the Home of Peace, so it wasn’t Sal’s problem. This Boris character surely knew that Bennie was involved out in Summerlin and kept his shit to this side of town, on the other side of the tracks.
“How is any of this your problem?” Sal asked.
Jerry said, “I was supposed to do a pickup on Sunday. But I didn’t end up getting here until today.”
“It’s not your fault the power went off.” Jerry didn’t respond, just kept his eyes on his feet. “Is it?” Sal said. “Is it your fault?”
“I own this entire floor. I rent the space to Dr. Belsky. He’s been complaining about power surges shutting him down for weeks. I was supposed to get someone out here while he was on vacation. So. Yeah. Maybe it’s my fault. Power isn’t out anywhere else in the center. Not even downstairs.”
Sal stared at Jerry for a moment. He looked scared. He should. “How long have you owned this place?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Sal said. “Don’t lie. Did you suggest this line of business to the Russian mob like you suggested it to me?”
“My wife,” Jerry said, “I knew she was unhappy in our marriage. I figured if I had just a bit more capital, I could get us the beach house, we could retire, have that good life.”
“The question,” Sal said. “Answer it.”
“I did, in fact, bring them this business opportunity.”
“Is there any way to connect this place to the Temple?”
“I keep paperwork on everything, to be legit,” Jerry said. “I get audited like everybody else. So yes. The Temple is on my books. Dr. Belsky is on my books. It’s all aboveboard.”
“This,” Sal said, “is not aboveboard.”
“In my books,” Jerry said. “It has the appearance of being aboveboard, okay? You think I’m going to memorialize a criminal operation? Everything I put on paper is the real. You have nothing to be worried about.”
How much scrutiny could Temple Beth Israel and the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace take? Cops come sniffing around, that wasn’t much of a problem. Half the force worked for the Temple as it was, but more importantly, Las Vegas Metro didn’t care about white-collar shit. They certainly weren’t looking into financial crimes at synagogues, churches, and mosques. If someone showed up dead on the ground, yeah, they were going to investigate, but short of that, you had to be one dubious institution to draw their attention when every gangster, cartel boss, Russian oligarch, and Al-Qaeda soldier on the planet was landing at McCarran four times a day in G-200s.
But if the FBI showed up again? With subpoenas? And forensic accountants? Men offering deals? How long before Ruben went state’s? How long before Miguel told a man in a black suit about that summer when he buried twenty Chinese men missing their pinkies in graves named for Jewish women?
Oh, he had something to worry about, all right.
Sal walked out of the freezer without another word, back through the warehouse, and into the dentist’s office, Jerry a few steps behind him. The power was back on, cool air blowing through the vents, the electric hum of machinery ticking back to life. It was close to 12:30 a.m. now.
Sal pulled down his mask, gulped in the fresher air.
“When is Dr. Belsky due back?”
“A week.” Jerry yanked his mask off, used it to wipe sweat from his face.
“Ponderosa closes when?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“This is Las Vegas, Rabbi.”
Shit. He had to think on this for a moment. Jerry Ford was a dead man. Boris Dmitrov was going to have him killed for this. Bennie Savone was going to kill him, too. It would be a race to see who could get to him first.
Truth was, nothing said Jerry couldn’t work with as many crime families as he wanted, but this situation was going to put him in a position to save his ass by going to the FBI and flipping on everyone. It was the only way out. That he’d come to Rabbi David Cohen for help was desperate. Surely it was a thing that seemed like a good idea at the time, because at some level, of course, Jerry knew Rabbi David Cohen was not who he said he was, figured that if he got him involved in this situation, he could possibly save both their asses by, in fact, indicting both their asses.
If he worked on the equation long enough, Jerry would eventually land on the answer to all of this, and it ended with him fucked for life. Jerry would not have an opportunity to get ghost. Jerry was already dead. Now, it was strictly about buying time, for everyone.
Sal should have known this would be his downfall. He could never control this part of the Temple’s business. It was greedy and stupid of them to ever get involved with LifeCore. But Rabbi Kales wanted an empire. And Bennie Savone was going to give it to him. That was their plan. That plan took cash.
“What do they use to sterilize everything?” Sal asked.
“An autoclave,” Jerry said.
“Show me,” Sal said.
Jerry walked him over to the lab, across from the administrative office. The autoclave was a top-of-the-line horizonal Sonz unit, out of China. Four feet tall. Three feet deep. You could sterilize a man in here if you cut him in half. Back in Chicago, in his workshop on West Fulton, he had an old-school industrial autoclave that you could walk into, which was nice, whereas this looked like a particularly nice washer-dryer combo that could communicate to NORAD, judging by the four different digital displays and the sound of the whirring hard drive. He opened the door, looked in. He could pour at least two feet of fluid straight into the machine. Pressure steam everything with gasoline if he wanted.
Yeah. This would work.
“Get me every volatile chemical in this office,” Sal said.
“I don’t understand . . .” Jerry began, but Sal put up a hand to stop him.
“You asked for my help. If you don’t want my help, the time to tell me is right now. Otherwise? No fucking questions.”
“This is not a question. Well. It is. But it’s the prelude to something else. Don’t stab me in the ear, okay?”
Sal set the digital timer on the autoclave. “We have one minute to have this conversation,” Sal said, and he hit start.
Jerry Ford said, “You know I went to med school?”
“No.”
“Yeah. I was going to be a surgeon. That was my plan.”
Forty-five seconds.
“Failed out my second year,” Jerry said. “Thing was, I didn’t tell my parents for another year. And then I told them I dropped out. That I just didn’t think I was passionate about the field. My mother, she was Chicago through and through. She thought I didn’t work hard enough, that anything could be accomplished with putting your head down. My father, he’s Jersey; all he thinks about is the money wasted on me, four years at Rutgers, another year at Harvard, all that cash for nothing, particularly when he realized I basically stole a year of tuition money from him. That pissed him off. Neither ever asked me what I was going through that made this happen. They didn’t just want a son who was a doctor; they needed a son who was a doctor. Part of the big grand plan.”
“It was a different time.”
“Hmm. Maybe. Rabbi, here’s the rub: It wasn’t hard to me at all. I went to school every day feeling like I knew more than anyone else. The problem, and I recognized this just in time, I think, was that I didn’t care about the people. If someone lived or died? I didn’t care. Meant nothing to me. That began to work on my brain. You can’t be a sociopath and be a doctor.”
“I disagree.”
“Not a good doctor,” Jerry said. “Maybe I should have been a veterinarian, because then you gotta be both the doctor and the patient, you know? Maybe that would have taught me something important.”
“That you’ve thought all this through,” Sal said, “and have feelings about it, means you’re not a sociopath.”
“Huh. Well. Where were you thirty-five years ago?” He clapped his hands together, then flipped them over for the eye in the sky, like a poker dealer. “Anyway. I bring this all up because it’s come to me that this? I can’t just quit this, can I?”
The timer beeped. All done.
“No.”
Jerry said, “Can I get one more minute? I feel like, since this is about the rest of my life, two minutes should about handle it.”
Sal added another minute. Hit start.
“That was true before this problem, I guess? This is a job you don’t quit.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been fucked since the day you agreed to help me?” Sal met his gaze but didn’t respond. “I guess I knew I was,” Jerry said. He seemed suddenly resigned. Of course he knew who Bennie Savone was all this time. And that’s really what this was about. Who represented who. And Rabbi David Cohen represented Bennie Savone. “If you help me, am I going to get out of this alive?”
“For a time. Time comes, time comes.”
“How long, do you wager?”
“We do this right,” Sal said, “I can get you two weeks.”
Jerry shivered. “Can I talk to my rabbi during this minute?”
“Yes,” David said.
“What does the Talmud say about this?”
“Everything dies,” Rabbi David Cohen said. “That’s a fact. But everything that dies one day comes back.”
Jerry actually chuckled. “You dumb shit,” Jerry said, “I’m from Jersey. You’re singing the national anthem.” There was a flicker of amusement in his voice. “It was always bullshit, wasn’t it, because no one knows anything anymore, do they?”
“If it ever helped you, it wasn’t bullshit,” Rabbi David Cohen said.
“Turns out, it never did.” He yanked off his booties, tossed them in the trash. “Like Moses said, it’s a suicide rap; get out while you’re young.” Jerry Ford could have run then, got into his car and driven off into the night, but instead he turned heel and went about gathering up everything Sal needed to blow up a building.
FORTY MINUTES LATER, SAL AND JERRY WERE SEATED IN A BOOTH AT THE Marie Callender’s just down the block. Sal only realized after they sat down that they were across the parking lot from the Tony Roma’s where The Outfit fire bombed Lefty Rosenthal’s Eldorado, only to have him inexplicably survive. The Outfit always was dogshit with explosives, even back in the day. If you’re gonna blow something up, it’s egregious to miss your target, which is why Sal and Jerry were here in the first place. Make sure what was done was done.
“Give me a phone,” Sal said. They’d stopped at the Chevron across the street and bought two burners. Jerry slid one across the table. Sal dialed 911, watched out the window. From his vantage point, he could see the exit and entrance into the Commercial Center perfectly, along with the intersection of Sahara and Maryland Parkway, a major artery for the city.
The operator picked up on the third ring, asked his emergency. He shoved his pinky into his mouth, bit down on it, then said, “I’m on the corner of Rainbow and Charleston and I just saw a motorist shoot a cop that had pulled him over,” Sal said, his voice calm, measured. Not loud. The only way you can speak when you’re biting down on your pinky. “Yeah, a blue Honda Accord, California plate, all I made out was the last three numbers, 812. Yes, ma’am, the cop is down. Rainbow and Charleston, east side of the street. You better get an ambulance quick. I can’t stay,” Sal said, “I’m late for my shift, but you need me, my number is . . .” and then he turned the power off, pried the phone apart with his butter knife, yanked out the SIM card, and crushed it with the ketchup bottle.
Rainbow and Charleston was about ten miles from where they were sitting. Way Sal figured it, every cop in the city would be flooding that direction in about two minutes. Including every single one inside The Ponderosa. There’s an officer-down alert, every motherfucker with a badge gets on the scene. That it wasn’t the same for every dead body was how Sal had managed to work in the shadows for so long.
“This going to work?” Jerry said.
“We’ll see,” Sal said. He waved over a waitress. “How’s your New York Strip?”
“Better than you’d think,” she said.
“Great,” Sal said. “Bring me one of those. Medium rare. And some blueberry pancakes. You want something, Doctor?”
Jerry shook his head.
“He’ll have ham and eggs, scrambled together. Four pieces of link sausage. And a short stack,” Sal said.
When the waitress left, Jerry said, “How can you eat?”
“Number one, don’t be memorable,” Sal said. “When you’re in a restaurant, order food or else you look like a fucking cop. Number two, shit like this always leaves me starved. Plus, this side of town, I can eat whatever I want without fear of keeping kosher.”
A cop car came screaming along Sahara, sirens blaring.
Then another.
Then another.
Then another turned off Maryland Parkway at a high rate of speed, nearly getting loose trying to make the turn onto Sahara.
“Shit,” Jerry said under his breath.
“Watch,” Sal said. “One, two, three . . .”
Before he reached four, trucks began to pour out of the Commercial Center and directly onto Sahara, only pausing at a red light before pushing through the intersection. “Here we go,” Sal said. He stopped counting at fifteen trucks. By the time their meals arrived a few minutes later, the street was quiet again, all the off-duty cops at The Ponderosa capable of driving taking off for Rainbow and Charleston.
“Give me the other phone,” Sal said between bites of his steak. Jerry did. Sal called 411 for the number of The Ponderosa, then dialed the bar. “Yeah, this is Mark Ulin from the gas company? We’ve got a leak reported in the Commercial Center, and we’re advising all tenants to get out within the next ten minutes. Just taking as much precaution as possible. Thanks so much.”
Butter knife.
SIM card.
Ketchup bottle.
Back to his pancakes.
“What are you?” Jerry said.
“Pardon me?”
“If you’re not . . .” He stopped, recalibrated. “Are you like Bennie?” he said.
“No,” Sal said. “I’m not a businessman.”
“Hmm,” Jerry said. “I think you undersell yourself.”
“Put it this way,” Sal said. “I’ve never made a dollar that I paid tax on.” He speared two sausages. “You said your mother was from Chicago?”
“Yeah, grew up out there. Moved east when she was eighteen for college. Met my father. Married and knocked up by twenty-one.”
“Still have family out there?”
“Probably,” he said. “Once my parents died, that part of my life disappeared. They left me enough money to start this business. I found some investors. But family to me now is Stephanie’s family. You know how that is? You find a nicer family sometimes through marriage. They love you for who you are now versus hating you for the fuckup you were.” He looked out the window. “How much longer?”
Sal looked at his watch. “Maybe fifteen minutes.” They’d encircled the lab with canisters of oxygen and nitrous oxide, poured gallons of formaldehyde on every surface, and filled the autoclave with enough volatile chemicals to leave a hole in the earth. Sal didn’t want to kill anyone needlessly, so he was hopeful The Ponderosa was empty now, hoped the bartender smoking out back was a good hundred yards away, that the janitor catching a nap in his car before his shift had the windows up, that the working girls had gone home for the night.
“Do you have a name?” Jerry asked.
Sal shook his head. “Not for you.” He pointed at Jerry’s food. “Eat. It’s getting cold.”
“Is this my last meal?”
“Probably not.”
Jerry took a few bites of his ham and eggs. Watched the other people in the restaurant, like he was in a zoo. “You know,” he said, working on his short stack now, “I’ve lived in this town for thirty years and have never even stepped foot in this place. What else haven’t I seen?” He took a sip of water. Rearranged the salt and pepper shakers. “I’ve got a lot of money, Rabbi. It will take me a few days to get it all together, but whatever it is you need, I could help you.”
“Jerry,” Sal said, “take care of your family. That’s what matters.”
“What I’m saying is,” Jerry said, “does it need to be all or nothing here?”
“Let me tell you the future,” Sal said. “First thing, cops are going to round up every Muslim in the city. It’s going to be a fucking nightmare. I feel terrible about that. Second thing, maybe two days from now, after they realize Bin Laden isn’t inside Circus Circus, the cops are going to arrest the dentist, if your pal Boris doesn’t get him off the continent first. Then they’re going to start working backward, which is going to lead them to you. By the end of the week, they’ll have you in an interrogation room. Now, if Boris is any good, he’ll have you out of there quickly, but who knows? What you’re going to tell these cops is that you just rent the place to the dentist, you have no idea what he’s using the storage facility for, he’s a great tenant, pays on time, never expected anything strange, and of course, you’re here to help. They’ll let you go. You have no reason to bomb your own building, after all, but isn’t it odd that a guy who runs a tissue bank has a building he owns inexplicably filled with black market corpses? I mean, what are the odds? By then, Bennie will know all about this, will know that if you owned that warehouse and it was filled with cadavers, well, that’s coming back to the Temple at some point, and so now he’s gotta worry about that. And Bennie, he doesn’t like to worry, so he’s going to figure out a way for you to die in such a way that looks like an accident. Probably in your swimming pool. I mean, that’s what I’d do. Show up in the middle of the night, knock you out by pressing on your carotid for a few seconds, put you in a bathing suit, carry you outside, hold you by your feet underwater in the deep end, you’ll fight a bit but not much, which is good, you need to inhale as much water as possible, and then you’re dead. Tragedy. Or, I get to your house and Boris already had his boys gut you like a fucking fish, because Russians don’t care about subtlety. You’ve ruined their business and brought the light of the FBI on them. No sense treating you with dignity. End result, either way, you’re dead. Like I said, probably two weeks, beginning to end, which would give you time to make sure your wife is taken care of, at least, but like I said earlier, you’re gonna be a mensch and pay all your staff, too.”
Jerry was covered in sweat.
Sal took a bite of his ham and eggs. They were getting a little cold. But the ham was surprisingly good.
“Or,” Sal said and took another bite.
“Or?” Jerry said.
“If for some reason an explosion doesn’t happen in, let’s see, seven minutes, there’s another path. Five hours from now, janitor shows up to work at the swingers club, finds the walls bleeding, calls 911, cops kick down the door, walk through just like we did, start collecting human heads, and everything happens just like I said, but in addition, every family that’s had their graves robbed sues your estate, your name becomes synonymous with some of the darkest shit in human history, and your wife dies poor and alone. If Bennie or Boris don’t kill her first. My sense is the Russians would probably ace her out in this situation. Because you didn’t have the good conscience to burn the fucking place down, destroying any salient evidence that might be left behind.”
“Is there another or?”
Sal waved over the waitress. “A chocolate shake, please,” he said. “You want one, too, Doctor?”
“I’m lactose intolerant,” Jerry said.
“Live a little,” Sal said.
“Vanilla,” Jerry said to the waitress.
After she cleared off the plates, Sal said, “Last or. You call the FBI. Admit everything. Turn yourself in.”
“Then what?”
“Bail will be in the millions. They’ll segregate you in county, but it won’t matter. You’ll be dead by nightfall. Between Boris and Bennie, you’d need to be on the fucking moon to be beyond their reach.”
“You were me,” Jerry said. “What would you do?”
“Ambien,” Sal said, “and a bag over my head.”
“Yeah?”
“Take Xanax first,” Sal said. “Like, ten of them. Chase it with the Ambien. Then put the bag on.”
“Okay.” Jerry inhaled deeply, placed his fingers lightly on the table. “What if I told you that the FBI has already been in contact with me?”
“About what?”
“I got a subpoena.”
“When?”
“Last week,” Jerry said. “It’s not about the Temple. It’s about a firm I do business with out of Florida. A real chop shop. I’m supposed to speak to a grand jury in a few weeks. My lawyer says it’s nothing. Just providing some background. I’ve only ever done legit business with them. This sort of thing happens in this business. If I told you about every subpoena I got, you’d be constantly looking over your shoulder.”
“Then why are we talking about it?”
“I don’t show up,” Jerry said, “it’s going to be a real problem. For you. And maybe there’s a deal for us, both.”
David had to give it up to Jerry Ford. Motherfucker had some moves. “This money you mentioned,” David said. “How much we talking about?”
“How much you need?”
“Two million. Cash. No fucking around.”
“Not even a pause? You just had that number ready?”
“I’ve done my math.”
“I’d need some time,” Jerry said.
“How much?”
“A week?”
“I can get you five days.”
“You just had that number, too?”
The waitress set down the milkshakes. “Anything else?” she asked, or at least that’s what Sal thought she said when the fireball exploded from the back of the Commercial Center. The concussion swept up the block, dust and debris immediately turning the night sky thick and ashy, the air acrid with chemicals. Sal was aware that people inside the restaurant were already screaming and scrambling under their tables, which was good; they’d learned what to do from the news in the case of a terror attack, and in truth, of course, this was terror inducing, eyeballs spattering against the restaurant’s windows, loose arms and legs falling from the sky now, bouncing off the hoods of cars, human heads crashing through windshields.
Sal took all the money from his wallet and set it on the table under the saltshaker, then grabbed Jerry by the collar, yanked him out of the booth. “Time to go,” he said.