FIFTEEN

SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 2002

LAS VEGAS, NV

SOME SHIT IS FORETOLD: THE TORAH STUDY GROUP RAN LONG BECAUSE THE Torah study group always ran long. Rita Wolfe did not understand the notion of redemption through kindness and spent the last twenty minutes talking about all the times her family “shit on her” when she was being kind—and how they still talked about her like she was a convert because she’d, briefly, had an affair with a Mormon congressman from Reno.

“Rita,” Rabbi Cohen said, as the other eight ladies in the group gathered the remaining butter cookies and mint Milanos into their Tupperware, “my advice is that perhaps if you keep doing the same thing and are unhappy with the results, stop doing that thing.”

Rita Wolfe burst into tears. “You’re telling me I’m crazy, aren’t you?”

Rabbi Cohen waited a moment to see if any of the other women would comfort her. He got the impression, after about ten seconds, which is an eternity when someone is sobbing, that the other congregants didn’t think much of her.

Rabbi Cohen said, “Rita, you misunderstand me.”

“You just told me I’m the very definition of insanity,” she shouted. “You can be a real golem, Rabbi. I thought I missed this group, but it turns out maybe I just missed the ritual. Well, you won’t need to worry about my descent into insanity any longer.”

He waited another ten seconds. Nothing from the women. Susie Helms actually peeled a Milano apart and licked the mint, eyes on the show.

“If that’s how you feel,” Rabbi Cohen said, “we’ll miss you.” Kristy Levine caught his eye, shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if to say, It’s not worth it, then sat down beside Rita.

“Rita, what the rabbi is telling you is that you’re too good for these people. You’re trying to redeem them with your kindness. He’s telling you to redeem yourself with your kindness. Do you see the difference?”

Rita dug in her purse. Came out with a Kleenex, blew her nose, dropped the Kleenex on the floor, then kicked it under the table. “I do,” Rita said. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry you’re upset,” David said.

“No you’re not,” she said. She stood up, picked up the last remaining plate of butter cookies, and dumped them all into her purse. “You should sue to get your old jawline back. You look twenty years older.”

“I APPRECIATE WHAT YOU DID BACK THERE,” DAVID TOLD KRISTY ONCE everyone else had emptied out of the community room.

“It was nothing,” Kristy said. She took off her baseball cap and set it on the table, scratched at the stubble on her head.

“Your hair is growing back nicely.”

“That’s kind of you to say,” Kristy said, “even if it’s a lie.” She cocked her head, curiously. “I like your new jaw, by the way. So don’t take what Rita said personally.”

“My mother came to see me in the hospital and burst into tears,” David said. “Said it looked like they’d removed all the Ashkenazi from me. Wanted to know if the doctors were all goyim.”

“Were they?”

“Half and half,” David said. “I’ve had a deviated septum all along, apparently. So for the first time in my life, I can actually breathe. A tiny mitzvah.”

“Your mom still staying with you?”

“No, no,” David said. “She’s back east.”

Kristy stretched her arms above her head and let out a little yelp of a yawn.

“You look tired.”

“You’re not supposed to tell women that.”

“You seem tired,” David said, “am I allowed to say that?”

“Bad week,” she said. “My lung function isn’t good, and I breathed all that shit in the air all week long.”

“Were you working . . . whatever that was?”

“I can’t tell you,” Kristy said, “that I was working on the corner of East Sahara and Maryland Parkway, no.”

“I see,” David said. David had a fondness for Kristy Levine that he couldn’t quite place. He knew she was an FBI agent, but he also knew that like Bennie, she was staring at the dead end of life, even if her road was perhaps a little longer than Bennie’s, but who could tell? “Perhaps you can also not tell me if I need to keep all of this extra security?”

“Who are you worried might show up?”

“Terrorists?”

“Rabbi,” Kristy said, “if terrorists wanted to blow up the Temple, they would. Worse than we saw at the Commerce Center.”

“Vivid,” David said.

“I just want you to know what the reality of the situation is, Rabbi. Do the armed guards stop your average Carson City skinhead who wants to kill a Jew? Yes. But does it stop a terror cell from killing all the Jews? Not even a little bit.”

“Then who should I worry about?”

“Are you running from the Russian mob?”

“Not at present.”

“Good,” she said, “because half the guys patrolling your grounds are on their payroll.”

David walked over to the window. It faced the playground of the Tikvah Preschool, which the Temple kept open all weekend long, so the kids could come and play in a safe environment. There was a guard about twenty yards away, walking a slow figure eight on the lawn, another watching from his car in the parking lot. In the car, they were strapped for war: AR-15s, flash grenades, enough tactical gear to dress a battalion. On their person, two guns: a service revolver on their hip and a Glock on their ankle. “What about these two?”

Kristy stood beside David, close enough that he could feel her breath coming fast from her nose. “They’re clean,” Kristy said after a while. “But the guy standing in front of the mortuary? If he invites you out for drinks, tell him you’re busy.”

That was Officer Kiraly.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” David said.

“What’s it like,” Kristy said, “to look different?”

“What did it look like to you when you shaved your head? Lost your eyebrows? Had your eyelashes disappear?”

“I finally understood why people get cremated,” she said. “I looked like a corpse. Unrecognizable.”

“Do I look unrecognizable to you?”

Kristy said, “No, of course not.”

“Nor to me,” David said. “This work has taken away a persistent pain. I miss my chin a little, but my nose? Not so much.” He smiled. “I’m a vain man, Kristy, and I happen to think I look better now. Despite what Rita said.”

There was a knock on the open door. David turned around, found Ruben standing in the doorway. “Excuse me, Rabbi?”

“Yes, Ruben?”

“You have a funeral in thirty minutes. Just wanted to make sure you had time to meet with the family first?”

“Of course,” David said. He pointed at Kristy Levine. “Have you met Ms. Levine?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Ruben said. He walked across the room, confident as ever, and shook her hand. “I am Ruben Topaz, the executive director of the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace.”

“Please,” she said, “call me Kristy.”

“The family is waiting for you, Rabbi.”

“Thank you, Ruben,” David said.

“Makes you want to die, that one,” Kristy said, once Ruben was gone.

“You’d be surprised.” David checked his watch. “Unfortunately that means I need to leave you to clean up the rest of this. Can you stack the chairs for me, Kristy? Or just drag them into the storage closet?”

“Of course, Rabbi,” Kristy said. “Are you locking up anytime soon?”

“No, no, as long as there are kids here, we’ll keep everything open,” David said.

“So it would be okay if I stayed? I just find it very peaceful here.”

“Of course,” David said. “It is your temple.”

“Thank you, Rabbi,” Kristy said. David was almost out the door when she added, “Do you really believe kindness can redeem a person in the eyes of God?”

“I have to,” David said.

THE LAST BODY RABBI DAVID COHEN WAS SCHEDULED TO BURY THAT DAY WAS someone named Lon Levy. Sixty-three, no spouse, lived at the new Sun City Anthem in Henderson, died two days ago, so he was on a deadline to get in the ground, Jews real strict about getting into a pine box and under a shovel of dirt in three days. But since the service was scheduled for 5 p.m., David had a pretty good idea old Lon was going to be some Chinese gangster transported from San Francisco, since Jews were not big with evening funerals. Bennie told David about the business he’d been getting from the Woh Hop To lately, a Hong Kong Triad gang that was looking to colonize in Las Vegas.

Bennie’s cellie up in Carson City had been a Woh Hop To OG named Simon, and the two had hit it off. Basically, the Woh Hop To were keen to capitalize on the lack of state taxes in Nevada, the easy incorporation laws, and the opportunities to run mortgage fraud, everyone looking for a less violent future. So Bennie helped broker a land deal, even got Simon and his homies a place to live, over in the Rivers-Upon-Craig, a new European-style development going up on Craig Road, which was still the hinterlands but wouldn’t be for long. In the meantime, Bennie told him Simon had been good for three dozen bodies while David was stuck in the hospital.

“All pristine,” Bennie told David. “No blown-out eyes, no knife wounds to major organs. No one set on fire. I told him, for our purposes, best thing you can do is cut their throat and bleed them out like a deer, pack ’em in ice and head out.” And so that’s what they’d done, particularly since the active street war with the Wah Ching had escalated into high-profile kidnappings and extortions, except no one ever got anyone back, their bodies disappearing into the manicured graves of Summerlin. These fuckers didn’t give a shit about who they took, either. It was men, women, children, and pets. Bodies were bodies. All of which were profitable for Bennie, save for the bunnies and spaniels.

Yet, when David got back to the morgue, he was surprised to find not a Chinese teenager on the table but a sixty-something white guy with a giant barrel chest and prominent beer gut, his salt-and-pepper hair caked with blood from the hole in the middle of his forehead. David admired the work for a moment. One shot. Professional. A pleasure to see.

“We’ve actually got two for this burial,” Ruben said absently. He was at the sink, washing his hands. “So we might not get this going until five thirty. We’ll send Miguel to speak to the mourners if need be.” The mourners were some old fucks from Sun City brought in for these kinds of services. Each got paid fifty bucks plus dinner. Old friends of the Savone family.

“Are they able to fit in the same coffin?” David asked. The man was at least 285 pounds.

“He’ll bend.”

“You sure?”

“We’ll make it work. We’ve got a backup in the coolers. The boss says he wants us done with everything this week.”

“Yeah,” David said as he picked up the man’s right arm. “I heard.” He had a tattoo of the ace of spades on his wrist, another of Italy on his forearm. David half expected to find an eight ball on his bicep, just like David had until they carved it off when he arrived in Las Vegas, but instead he had five dots—one in the center of four—which either meant he’d done time or was an OG. Either way, old white guy with legacy tats was not a good fucking sign. He tipped the body on its side, so he could get a look at the man’s back. In five-inch Old English lettering across his shoulders it said AQUAFREDDO.

Shit.

There’d been some Aquafreddos in Chicago back in the day. Some Gambino cousins. Brothers that got sent out west to find their fortune or some shit. By the time David heard of them, they were a West Coast connect, guys you could get weed from if you needed a lot of it, like a truck’s worth, and then lately they were always talking about making their fortune in Indian bingo, some shit Ronnie was morally opposed to. You didn’t rip off grandmothers to make your nut. Gambinos saw the world differently. They’d periodically beef, but for the most part, it was what it was. McDonald’s don’t give a fuck about Taco Bell. Last David heard, there was only one Aquafreddo left; the other three had ended up in prison or dead.

“Where’d this guy come from?”

Ruben said, “Palm Springs. Picked him up on Friday.”

“Where’s number two?”

“Got some choices. Check the freezer. We’ll take the smallest guy.”

In the last two years, the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace had expanded from six freezers to eighteen to accommodate all of their business, which was good since when David began opening doors, over half held bodies, one whole row was just for the cremation services, and the last two were for guys with holes in their faces. First guy had a single shot through the right eye, blew out half of his skull all over his black Adidas sweat suit. Hollow point. Nice.

Second guy had put up a fight. Gutshot, one in the shoulder, then maybe a hatchet to the face. Still dressed in pajamas. Half of his face was somewhere else. He was a couple inches shorter than the other.

David checked them for tattoos.

Ace of spades.

Italy.

Five dots.

Hatchet face had ZANGUCCI on his back. The other guy also had ZANGUCCI. Brothers or cousins, each with the same dumbfuck artwork as their local boss.

Used to be, Five Families fucks didn’t get ink. But like everything else in the culture, that shit began to change once tattoos moved from the poor to the rich. You want to prove allegiance? Put a permanent mark on your body.

These guys? Fucking Gambino soldiers, maybe the big guy a capo, by now. Fuck. He’s a guy who would be missed. They all would be. Seventy-two hours. Maybe less.

All the time David had been in Las Vegas, laundering bodies for the mob, not once had they put someone from the Five Families in the ground, unless they’d died legitimately in Las Vegas and wanted to get buried out in Summerlin. Which happened, periodically. Lotta OGs ended up retiring out here, never returning to the old neighborhood, not even in death. Shit, there hadn’t been an unsanctioned Five Families killing in Las Vegas in twenty years. Palm Springs? Maybe fifty years. That place was an open city, just like Las Vegas, but it was treated more like a sanctuary spot. Even Ronnie used to go there for vacation, play golf all week on the same course as a bunch of Outfit twats, everyone on time-out, drinking scotch at the nineteenth hole, telling lies, all that Frank Sinatra/JFK/Sam Giancana shit they read about in history books, or told people they read about.

Bodies from Palm Springs weren’t anything new. They’d been getting Sureños and paroled Mexican Mafia, plus dudes without obvious affiliation, by the hearse-load ever since Bennie hatched some deal with the local Native Mob. If New York found out Bennie had these boys? Gulfstreams filled with mooks would be landing in Henderson and then it wouldn’t matter what Ruben wanted. The right thing to do would be to hold the bodies, have Bennie make some calls, make sure everyone was square, keep the peace, and take no cash. If he wanted to keep things straight while he was in Minnesota, they couldn’t have these fucking guys in the freezer.

“Hold up,” he told Ruben when he came back to the morgue. He had the big guy bent in half already, his body like a V, and had his electric bone saw out. “We can’t put these guys in the ground.”

“We can’t have them in the freezers looking like that much longer, Rabbi,” Ruben said. “Wrong person opens those doors, they’re gonna wonder why they didn’t read any new stories about any Jews getting a hatchet to the face.”

David considered this. “You picked these bodies up?”

“Met a guy out in the desert,” Ruben said. “Standard practice.”

“Anything weird about it?”

Ruben thought for a moment. “Same guy as it’s been for a bit,” Ruben said. “Indian dude.”

“Like from India?”

“No,” Ruben said. “Native. Name’s Mike.”

Growing up in Chicago, Native Americans weren’t thick on the ground. You had to go up to Wisconsin to see them, and even then, the ones David knew were all gang related. Native Gangster Disciples or Native Crips—reservation gangs that essentially paid franchise fees to use the iconography of prison and LA street gangs—but more likely outfits like the Four Corner Death Warriors, shitty little reservation gangs running drugs and guns for someone higher up the chain, half of them inexplicably named Junior.

“Anything weird? Strange vibe or anything?”

Ruben thought for a moment. “Had his uncle with him.”

“Some old-ass man?”

“No, maybe ten or fifteen years older,” Ruben said. “Dude seemed chill. Just watched. Mike said he wanted to see the operation, that’s all. Had another guy that drove. Big Mexican OG-looking fool.”

“And you were cool with that?”

“I got two choices,” Ruben said, “be cool, or try to kill three guys. So. I was real cool.”

“You catch the uncle’s name?”

“Naw,” Ruben said, “wasn’t real chatty.”

“These bodies,” David said, “will kill us both. Is what I’m trying to say.”

“We don’t got a return policy, Rabbi. So we either bury them or burn them. Which you want?”

“Who knows these bodies are here?”

“You,” Ruben said, “me, Miguel, and whoever fucking killed them.”

“You have any more pickups scheduled for this client?”

“Sunday morning,” Ruben said. “We meet in the same spot every time. Out in the Mojave.”

“What time?”

“Three thirty a.m.”

“Pack those bodies to go back.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“And I’m coming with you,” David said, “to inform them our business relationship does not include these fucking guys.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ruben said.

“I don’t pay you to think,” David said.

“You don’t pay me,” Ruben said.

The last time David saw Ruben alone was inside this very exam room, a bag of bones representing Ronnie Cupertine’s wife and children between them, David telling him to drive to Oregon, dump them there. That must have been some drive. Turned out the bodies still had bullets from Matthew Drew’s gun in them, turning the ex–FBI agent into a fugitive, which was a good thing. If he wasn’t a fugitive, David would already be dead.

“You want money? Fine. I’ll bring you money.”

“You owe me an apology,” Ruben said.

David spent his entire life in the employ of criminals. Ruben was no different. He’d been banging until Bennie installed him at the funeral home. Problems always settled the alpha-dog way. Whoever was the baddest motherfucker, you did what he said. You wanted something different? You come for the crown. But you don’t ask for an apology.

“Christmas night,” Ruben said, “having dinner with my in-laws, right? Dan fucking Rather is talking about those bags you had me drop off. Telling me the FBI and the ATF and DEA were on that shit because those bodies were fucking Ronnie Cupertine’s missing wife and children. You know who the fuck Ronnie Cupertine is?”

“I am familiar,” David said.

“There’s fucking websites devoted to how that motherfucker kills people. They did an HBO documentary and shit. Dude from The Sopranos narrated it. Last four months, I’ve been waiting for some motherfuckers with tommy guns to light my house up. Dan Rather was talking about me. On fucking Christmas.”

“Keep your voice down,” David said.

“Who is gonna hear?” Ruben said. “Everyone here is dead.”

“Look,” David said, “you’re protected.”

“From The Family? They been in business since the 1800s. Where exactly is safe for me? They’re in the prisons, they’re on the streets, they’re in fucking government. How am I protected?” He inclined across the body. “And then there’s the fucking private detectives looking for information about Melanie Moss. The fuck, man. Every day, someone else has a question.”

“I understand you’re mad,” David said.

“I’m not mad,” Ruben said. “Mad would be normal. Mad is you lay off Miguel and now I’m working Tuesdays. Mad is you build this new assisted living place but don’t give me a raise. This is a whole other level.” Ruben stripped off his gloves. Yanked his scrubs off. “Did you do something to Melanie’s grave?”

“What?”

“Melanie’s grave. I went out there this week, put some flowers down, and it looked fresh.”

“I had to get something.”

“What the fuck could you possibly need from her grave?” David didn’t respond. Would never respond. You could put him on the fucking rack and he wouldn’t respond. “Fine. Fine. Maybe I call the cops, let them know someone is fucking with our graves. How about that?”

Miguel walked into the exam room just as David was about to take out his knife and stab Ruben in the eye. Miguel was just coming onto his shift, so he had a backpack with him, with a change of clothes, his lunch, and probably a couple paperbacks.

“Sorry I’m late,” Miguel said, setting his stuff down on a counter. “Got stuck on the Spaghetti Bowl for like twenty minutes. Always forget that my Monday is everyone else’s Saturday . . .” He looked up, saw that David and Ruben were poised like fighters in the middle of the room, a corpse between them.

“Oh,” Miguel said, “am I interrupting? I can come back, Rabbi.”

“You work for the rabbi or you work for me, Miguel?” Ruben asked.

He paused. “I guess I work for you, Ruben.”

“That’s right,” Ruben said, “so stay right here. This evening’s funeral is canceled. I’ll let the mourners know. While I’m gone, bag up Mr. Levy, put him back in the freezer. Turn the temperature down to 20 degrees on those units that have bodies.”

“That will make them too cold to work with easily,” Miguel said.

“Miguel,” Ruben said, “just do it.”

Ruben stormed out, leaving David and Miguel alone.

“What’s going on, Rabbi?”

David liked Miguel. He did. Sensitive kid. Hard worker. Never said a cross word to David in four years. Yeah, David almost killed him once, but they managed to pretend it never happened, like a shared delusion. “Do your fucking job, Miguel,” David said, and he went to find Ruben.

SUNSET WAS STILL AN HOUR OFF WHEN DAVID SPIED RUBEN SITTING ON A stool and smoking a blunt behind the gravedigger’s shed in the Bellagio. Melanie Moss’s unmarked grave was about twenty yards away. David killed Jeff Hopper about a hundred yards from here. If he’d let that man take him into custody that day, where would the world be? Would it be better? Probably, he had to admit. All this time he spent protecting himself for the possibility of being reunited with his wife and kid, he’d done nothing but make the rest of the world a fucking cesspool. It was like the butterfly effect, if the butterfly spread doom around the world with a single flap of its wings.

Ruben took a hit then offered David the blunt.

David took a hit, let the weed fill his lungs. He hadn’t been high since the day he killed those feds. But that was heroin. Weed usually just made him want to take a nap. This was some good shit, though, and almost immediately, he started to feel it.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Sativa,” Ruben said.

David took another hit. Damn. “This isn’t the shit I smoked in high school.”

“Naw,” Ruben said. “That was probably parsley and nail clippings. I grow this shit myself.”

“In your yard?”

“Naw,” Ruben said, “I got a house. Over by Bennie’s crash pad. Out past Durango and Craig.”

“Where all the cops live?” There were articles in the Review-Journal about how cops were moving farther and farther out of the city, building plush homes on cul-de-sacs backing up to the open desert in view of Lone Mountain, where they could shoot their guns and abuse their wives in peace, David assumed.

“Turns out,” Ruben said, “they’re pretty good neighbors. Nobody calls the cops.”

It was, admittedly, some fucked-up logic that had its own reality-defying truth to it. The other point, more saliently, was that David didn’t know Bennie had a crash pad. Well, that wasn’t true—he didn’t believe Bennie had a crash pad, because that meant there really were computers filled with video and audio of him inside his own home and wherever else Bennie had placed bugs. It would take him five minutes online to find it if it was in his name.

Ruben took another hit, offered the blunt back to David, but he turned it down. Two hits and he was already feeling capable of making some big fucking mistakes. “Look,” Ruben said, “I know who Bennie Savone is. Okay? I know. And I’m going to be loyal to him until the end; you can bet on that.”

“Good.”

“But I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he said. “You don’t even look like the motherfucker who got me tossed up anymore. I know you ain’t a rabbi. Not for real.”

“What’s real, Ruben?” David said.

“Dan Rather,” Ruben said, again. “Talking about how this was the start of some shit the likes of which was only in the movies. Homie, I ain’t fucking seen The Godfather before that. I rented it from Blockbuster. I do not need that shit. What we did to Melanie, that’s real.” He paused. “When Miguel walked in, you were going to kill me, weren’t you?”

“I was,” David said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Honestly? I didn’t want to kill Miguel, too.”

“Guess I’ll give him that raise, then,” Ruben said. He hit his blunt again. Exhaled. “You don’t have much of a problem with killing, do you?”

“None at all.”

“How’d you get that way?”

“Practice,” David said. “Repetition.”

“I killed someone once,” Ruben said. “I was fifteen. Walked right up on the motherfucker in the food court of the Meadows Mall and stabbed him like, twenty, thirty times, blood all over the glass at Sbarro, families screaming. Blood in the lemonade at Hot Dog on a Stick. A fucking scene, man.”

“Who was it?”

“Some dude wearing the wrong shit,” Ruben said. “He was Twenty-Eighth Street, I was Naked City. That’s all that mattered. I don’t even remember his name.”

“You’re lying,” David said.

“Alejandro Espinoza.”

“You get caught?”

“Naw,” Ruben said, “his family was illegal. Twenty-Eighth got them out of the country, back to Mexico, no one said shit to the cops. But I ended up in juvie a month later anyway on a B and E beef. That’s where Mr. Savone found me. Killing that dude, that fucked me up. But this job? I feel like, in a way, it evens the scales.”

Ruben took another hit. David took one also.

“If I could grant you three wishes,” David said, “what would they be?”

“Homeboy, you are high.”

“I am,” David said.

Ruben pinched off his blunt, carefully wrapped it up in a plastic bag he pulled from his pocket, dropped what was left in a small Tupperware container, then dug a hole underneath the stool, buried the Tupperware, covered it up with dirt. “To be legit,” he said after a while. “To run this place the way I want to run it. Kales and Topaz Home of Peace. No more of this gangster shit. Be out from under Bennie. See you out the door. Deal with real Jews. They’re good people. They deserve better than this shit you’re running.” When David didn’t say anything, Ruben went on: “One day, maybe me and my sons do it together. One day, make it Kales and Topaz and Sons. Or just Topaz and Sons.”

“I deliver that,” David said, “we’re square?”

“It’s a job you gotta respect,” Ruben said. “Right now, I’m just employed. All this shit I’m not proud of? That’s following orders. That’s providing for my family. But when it’s my name on the door? I won’t abide no fucking around. So yeah, you come through? Me and you are flat. But I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”

Ruben stuck out his hand. David shook it. A deal. “You owe me a wish,” Ruben said.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” David said. “I need one more favor.”

“Every time you ask for a favor,” Ruben said, “my potential sentence gets another ten years.”

“I need a body,” David said.

“Whose?”

“Male,” David said. “Natural causes. You got one in the freezer marked for cremation that seemed fine.”

“That’s Mr. Bodi. He’d already been in his house a week when they found him.”

Which is why David wanted him. “Everything goes according to plan, you’ll get him back.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“You’re in luck,” David said, “because I’m not going to tell you. And I already had him picked up. You’ll get me at midnight?”

“This shit,” Ruben said, “is going to turn sideways.”

“It won’t,” David said. “Something might happen, but it won’t happen to us.”

He started back to the Temple. He had calls to make. A plan to execute. Plus, he’d told Rabbi Kales he’d bring dinner to the nursing home.

“Rabbi,” Ruben said, “I did think of something else. About the uncle from the pickup.”

“What’s that?”

“He smelled like a stripper. Like he’d been bathing in peach body wash.”