Just as he was about to leave, a bald woman sat down next to him. Matthew checked her out with a glance. She had a gun on her hip. Another on her ankle. Wouldn’t be surprised if she had brass knuckles in her purse. Matthew made her for Homeland Security, one of the humps stuck in town still looking for connections to Bin Laden, months after the 9/11 bombers left planet Earth. Like maybe no one had realized OBL was chilling at Del Webb, playing shuffleboard and fucking old Jewish ladies. Typical government shit. A year behind, interrogating strippers and cocktail waitresses in Mojave Desert black sites, as if whatever evidence gleaned here might bring back the thousands of dead. It was fruitless. Bin Laden was across the world and the United States was dry-humping strip clubs in Vegas for intel about dead pilots.
Still, the bald head was a good look for the agent, Matthew thinking maybe she’d been a marine in her previous life. It went well with the guns, anyway, if you were into that. Which he was.
“I’ve never been here before,” the bald woman said, like she felt Matthew’s eyes on her. “What’s good?”
“I like the liver,” Matthew said.
“No organ meats for me,” she said. She scanned the menu and when the bartender came by, she ordered bacon and eggs, over easy.
“Over easy,” Matthew said. “Never knew a cop to order eggs anything but over hard.”
“Not a cop,” she said.
“Just like the look?”
“Only so many ways to wear a gun,” she said. That was the other thing about dining in openly criminal operations: They were filled with cops and law-enforcement figures. No one bothered them, everyone in the game, so fuck it, have a meal, get back out on the street and do your work. Matthew had to act like he didn’t give a shit, like he belonged, and then he’d become invisible, too. Maybe no one gave a fuck in the first place. “You Metro?”
“Private security,” he said.
“Local?”
“No,” he said. “In town on a job.”
“Oh yeah?” She tapped the ad in the newspaper. “Well, that’s a crazy story. Turned up missing on 9/11, her belongings scattered across the state. No body. No sign of a struggle. Car is found half a mile from her home. A real-ass mystery.” The bald woman kept staring at the ad. “She was pretty.”
“Maybe she still is,” Matthew said.
“My experience, women don’t disappear and then turn up. What happens is someone finds their DNA.”
“I lost my sister,” he said, “but she turned up. Part of me wishes she hadn’t.” Why did he say that? What was he doing telling true stories about himself to this stranger with guns? All he did these days was tell lies. But there it was, the truth, unfettered. And this woman was right. His sister didn’t disappear. She was murdered by The Family or the Native Mob, or both, working together. Still, whenever he thought of her—which was often—he didn’t think of her dead. He thought of her as out there, somewhere, floating in the distance, just beyond his reach. She was lost to him, and everything he’d done since the day he found her in the trunk of her car had been him trying to set the world right. Vengeance wasn’t enough. He wanted someone to bring order to the chaos in his mind. He wasn’t the man he used to be; he knew that.
“What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Met the wrong people,” Matthew said.
The bald woman put her hands up. “You don’t need to tell me,” she said. “This Melanie Moss, though. Imagine going missing on 9/11. What are the odds?”
“Same as any other day,” Matthew said. “Bad shit happens 24-7.”
“True. Absolutely true.” The bald woman gave Matthew a wan smile. “Nothing prepares you for this life, right?” She picked up the newspaper, read the fine print, set it back down. “Temple I belong to gave the family some money for it. See?” She pointed to the bottom of the ad.
There it was, along the bottom, barely large enough to read: “The Moss family thanks Temple Beth Israel, the National Association of Funeral Home Directors, and the City of Carson City for their generous contributions, which has made this ad possible.”
The bald woman didn’t look Jewish to Matthew, but then in the permanent midnight of Odessa it was hard to divine anyone’s countenance. But also, did this woman not know Temple Beth Israel was a criminal operation? Maybe it didn’t matter. Everything was criminal. Countrywide was running a Ponzi scheme and calling them ARM loans. Starbucks was busting unions in the United States and exploiting farm workers in Ethiopia. Nike was running Chinese sweatshops. But this bald lady would likely be surprised to know her rabbi was a mob button man.
“It was the last place she was seen alive,” the woman said. “And the Talmud says a lot about collective grief, I’m learning. She wasn’t Jewish, but the place she was last seen, it was our home, so we pay homage to that.”
“It’s a nice gesture.”
“It’s what the culture demands,” the bald lady said. “She doesn’t belong to her family anymore. She’s now a symbol for all the unresolved shit everyone has in their lives. The culture demands resolution. It’s why people put up those missing posters in New York after the towers came down. No one really believed their loved ones had concussions and were wandering SoHo. Collective grief makes you do crazy shit that, when looked at obliquely, seems outside what you’d rationally think yourself capable of doing.”
“Like this ad,” Matthew said. Like trying to murder Ronnie Cupertine. Like not killing Sal Cupertine when you discovered him in a hospital bed. Like hiding from the law when you know you’re doomed.
“Her family knows she’s dead. But a couple days ago, I see the ad, and I start thinking, Well, maybe there’s something the cops missed, so I go online down the rabbit hole of her life. Next thing I’m reading a message board,” she said, “that says she was probably abducted by aliens who’d escaped Area 51. That’s why they found her car and all her effects but not her body.” She pointed up into the darkness of Odessa’s ceiling. “She’s now in the cosmos, somewhere. With her captors. There’s an entire community of people who believe that.”
“People just want something to make sense,” Matthew said, “even if it doesn’t.”
“To me,” the bald woman said, “that’s as dangerous as the people blowing up buildings or beheading journalists. Because it’s more insidious. They know it’s not true, right? Somewhere, deep inside, these people know she wasn’t abducted, but it’s easier to make up a conspiracy than to deal with the hard reality that most shit just happens and it’s totally beyond our control. There isn’t always a why. At least these religious nuts have some god to take the blame.”
The waitress came by, dropped off the woman’s bacon and eggs. She tore a piece of toast, dipped it into the egg yolk. “I bring this all up, Agent Drew, to let you know I’m a person who deals in objective reality.” She dug into her purse, came out with a business card, slid it over to him. Special Agent Kristy Levine, FBI Organized Crime & Terrorism Task Force. “Which tells me there’s no fucking way someone on the FBI’s Most Wanted list would be hanging out in a place run by the Russian mob, so it must not be you.”
Matthew stood up. He had about a foot on Kristy. He could snap her like a twig and then pick his teeth with her arms. But he wasn’t going to fight a bald woman. And, sure, he had a nine on his ankle, but he wasn’t about to murder a federal agent.
Matthew hazarded a look over his shoulder, sure there’d be five guys with their guns pulled . . . but it was just a couple of strippers coming off the late-late shift, a table of five men in matching sweat suits inexplicably eating a cake, an Asian couple with a baby in the wrong fucking restaurant, and then a couple Russian working girls and their muscle. It was quiet, no one really talking, just eating or looking at their menus. Seven a.m., a block off the Strip, inside a mobbed-up Russian restaurant, you gotta want to be here.
Still, if the FBI didn’t have a team inside Odessa, that probably meant there was an assault squad outside, another team over at Gray Beard’s RV, and then a full blackout team storming wherever the fuck Sal Cupertine was pretending to be Rabbi David Cohen.
“Have a seat before I have to shoot you,” Kristy said, not looking up from her meal. “Lee sent me.”
Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba. Matthew sat down. Pondered the situation. If she was going to arrest him, she would have done so already. If Senior Special Agent Poremba sent her, he needed to trust that Poremba hadn’t fucked him.
The only person—apart from Sal Cupertine—who knew Matthew Drew was in Las Vegas was Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba, since Poremba had sent him out this way in the first place. When Matthew got tabbed as a serial-killing lunatic, after those bodies were discovered in Portland, he contacted Poremba straightaway, to tell him he’d been framed, that it wasn’t true, even if all the evidence pointed directly at him. The police reports for his stalking of the Cupertine family. His attempted murder of Ronnie Cupertine. And, of course, the motive: to avenge the murder of his sister. And then there was the fact that the gun used in all of the killings was his, no attempt to hide it. Matthew had no idea how many more bodies had been added to his sheet, but he imagined whoever was framing him was doing so in a prolific, if measured, manner. Killing only those who didn’t have anyone to speak for them.
It was a long-ass list.
What Poremba told him, three months ago, chilled him through and through: “You’re safer on the streets. If you turn yourself in, The Family will murder you in prison. Get your own evidence, build your own case, and when you’re ready, come to me only. In the meantime, don’t get caught.” So he’d set him up with a drop—a mailbox at the Postal Express in Summerlin—and sent him cash, burner phones, even a card on his birthday. Matthew wasn’t dumb. He knew Poremba was keeping him as a trump card on something larger.
Which is why Matthew went to the only wild card he had: Sal Cupertine, who he found in the hospital in Summerlin, living as Rabbi David Cohen. Sal knew Matthew hadn’t killed Ronnie’s family. Sal knew how the bodies ended up in Portland, because they came through the funeral home he operated for Bennie Savone first. The one person on the planet who could clear his name was the one person on the planet who couldn’t clear his name. It wasn’t a catch-22; it was a fucking bear trap. Sal wouldn’t move until he found his wife and kid. Matthew couldn’t move until he could figure out a way to get Sal safe passage . . . to somewhere. Safe enough to clear Matthew. After that? Cupertine could fuck himself. He’d started all of this, by murdering those three FBI agents and the CI at the Parker. He had to do his time. Either someone volunteered where Cupertine’s wife and kid were or Matthew found out himself. Until then, his options were limited. So he’d spent the last months doing what he knew how to do: trying to track down a woman and a child in protective custody. They could be anywhere in America, theoretically, but Matthew knew the truth of the matter—a child like William Cupertine would require a different level of attention, which would include proximity to a university that might have the proper kind of mental health professionals. The threat level meant they couldn’t be isolated from a major FBI field office. There would need to be either an organized crime division nearby or a team capable of handling a major assault. Access to a major airport. And having worked organized crime, he had a general idea of where they’d stashed witnesses before. It was just a matter of being methodical and then hoping Poremba might gain intel along the way.
