EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Do not appease your friend at the height of his anger; do not comfort him while his dead still lies before him; do not ask him about his vow the moment he makes it; and do not endeavor to see him at the time of his degradation.
—THE TALMUD
PROLOGUE
SUMMER 1973
CHICAGO, IL
IF DARK BILLY CUPERTINE HAD TO KILL A GUY, HE PREFERRED TO DO IT UP close, with his bare hands. He didn’t want to get used to it, was the thing, and if you were popping motherfuckers in the back of the head, maybe you could pretend it wasn’t real, that the bullet did the work, like how all these young guys from the neighborhood talked about greasing motherfuckers in Vietnam. Just a thing they did every day. Push a button and boom. You kill a guy with your hands, you punch his teeth into his throat, you beat his eyeballs into the back of his head, you break his windpipe and watch him choke on his own blood? Man, that’s yours.
“This would go faster if you grabbed a shovel,” Germaio Moretti said. The two of them were in a vacant lot, surrounded by a corona of semi-built homes that would eventually become three-bedroom houses, Germaio chest deep in a grave meant for a guy named Lyle Dover, who owned a car dealership in Batavia.
Mosquitos the size of fists buzzed around them. Near dawn and still in the nineties.
Billy said, “You kill a guy, you dig his grave. That’s the rules.”
“Since when?”
“Since now,” Billy said. Germaio didn’t really answer to Billy Cupertine, since he was Cousin Ronnie’s personal muscle, but Cupertines were Cupertines, and so Billy had rank. Cupertine blood ran The Family since 1896, back when it was just a crew robbing steam trains. “Plus, I’m going on vacation in the morning. I can’t be showing up covered in fucking dirt.”
“I’m lodging a complaint with the boss,” Germaio said, not even half joking. “You know my back is shit.”
Billy shook out a cigarette, lit it up, looked back across the Des Plaines River. He could see in the distance the thirty-foot-tall lights ringing Joliet Prison. His old man did three years there. Ronnie’s pop, Dandy Tommy, did eighteen months. Germaio did a five-year bid, but somehow Billy had avoided spending any time there, apart from visiting his father. Longest he’d ever been locked up was a couple months off and on in juvie, then maybe three months in county, but nothing since having a kid. Because if he got arrested for the shit he did now, he’d be staring at life sentences. He told Ronnie he needed to be more careful, couldn’t be doing this hands-on bullshit, that he could oversee, but he wasn’t gonna be on the dirty end of this business.
Which he was largely able to do . . .
. . . save for shit like this right here.
Ronnie had inherited Dandy Tommy’s used-car dealerships and was now turning them out, expanding into Detroit, thinking about maybe getting into new cars, too, hooking up with Ford, the real money in ripping people off legitimately, jacking up repair costs on Mustangs, recommending custom paint jobs on Granadas. Which meant Billy periodically had to do jobs that he found distasteful, and frankly beneath his rank, but which needed to be handled with a bit more sensitivity.
Ronnie wanted to own Lyle Dover’s Chrysler dealership, but Dover wasn’t inclined to sell, no matter how much Ronnie offered, no matter how many veiled threats were made. Dover was one of those old-school Chicago guys who thought he was tough because he watched the Bears and knew how to stay warm in the winter, could maybe handle himself in a bar fight because he knew no one was going to pull out a gun, had enough money that he was always threatening to sue people, but nothing really life-or-death. Just Business and Family and Jesus on Sundays when there wasn’t Football.
So Lyle Dover rolled into the Lamplighter, maybe not knowing it was a Family-affiliated bar, but probably not giving a fuck, because on top of everything else he was sixty-five years old, and as a general rule no one really fucked with old guys. Twenty minutes later Billy got the call to grab up Germaio and see if he could talk some sense into Dover, and if not, bring the dog fucker to Ronnie. Which would have all been fine except Dover got mouthy in the backseat of Billy’s Buick, talking about how he knew Germaio’s mother, how they went to school together, how he was going to sue her, take her house, put her on the street, which got Germaio to pistol-whipping the cocksucker, and next thing, the fucker had a stroke or a heart attack and by the time they realized it, he was limp as a dick and dark blue.
And he still hadn’t sold his dealership.
Seemed like a dumb thing to die for, and an even dumber thing to go to prison for, Billy not inclined to spend his last days on earth staring out at this very subdivision over a fucking car dealership. The subdivision, called River View Estates, was being built to coincide with an expected expansion of the prison, Joliet the kind of town that applauded increased crime numbers elsewhere in the state, because more motherfuckers in prison meant more jobs. More jobs, more houses. More houses, more cars. More cars, more traffic cops. More traffic cops, more people in county jail. More people in county jail, a bigger county jail would be needed, which meant more jobs for union carpenters and millwrights, all of whom kicked up to The Family, the whole thing a self-perpetuating cycle.
“When is sunrise?” Germaio asked.
Billy looked at his watch. It was close to four a.m. He told Arlene to be ready to go by ten. “Another ninety minutes,” Billy said. He kneeled down, gave the grave a good once-over. “That motherfucker in the trunk isn’t a dwarf either, so get some length on this.”
“He’ll bend,” Germaio said. He was soaking in his own sweat.
“Into thirds?” Billy said. Germaio was about a hundred pounds overweight, so behind his back everyone called him either Fats or Tits, but to his face, they kept quiet owing to the fact that Germaio Moretti was a fucking lunatic, the kind of guy who kicked women and pulled out snitches’ tongues and pissed on hookers just for fun, or at least that was the legend. Billy didn’t think Germaio did much of anything these days but pant out of his mouth, given how fat his neck was, air wheezing out of him even when he was perfectly still. Billy tried to imagine strangling him, tried to figure out how he’d get his hands around Germaio’s throat, but couldn’t work out the geometry, nor could he accurately calculate the amount of force needed for the job. “Another foot deep, too.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Germaio said, but he got back to digging.
After another five minutes, Billy took a final drag from his cigarette, squeezed it out between his thumb and forefinger, stuck the butt in his pocket, took out his car keys, jingled them so Germaio would turn around. “I’m gonna back the car up,” Billy said. “Keep digging.”
“Eat a dick,” Germaio wheezed out. Or at least that’s what Billy thought he heard. It was hard to make out much of anything since Germaio was almost six feet underground and the only part of him above the dirt was the back of his fat fucking head.
The level of disrespect was higher than usual, but Billy recognized they were in a heightened situation, that Germaio was dealing with the complexities of a situation beyond his limited intellectual capabilities.
Not that it really mattered.
Dark Billy Cupertine was about five hours from getting out.
For the last year, he’d pinched where he could: skimmed fourteen grand from a heroin deal with the Windsor clan up north; collected on a fifty-G debt from a mark named Victor Noe, crushed his throat using only one hand, Victor so coke sick he probably did him a favor, drove his body all the way out to Devil’s Kitchen Lake, way off Route 57, dumped him out, told everyone the motherfucker had skipped then took his damn house, too; shook down some old folks in Little Ukraine, basic shit, thug shit, but whatever. He had a number in mind and after last week, he finally made it: $300K in cash, plus five guns, enough ammo to outlast most cops, stuffed in the trunk of his convertible DeVille in the garage at home, built into a contraption underneath the spare tire. He wouldn’t be able to get to the guns fast, so he had one in the dash, too. If the cops pulled him over, they’d need to pile through his wife Arlene’s suitcases and his son Sal’s toys, dump everything out on the side of the road to find anything incriminating.
No one was going to do that, not to someone with the last name Cupertine.
No. They’d just shoot him in the face. So if someone pulled him over, well, it wouldn’t get to that point. Dark Billy Cupertine was a dead man already; killing a cop on the way to his new life wouldn’t matter in the long run.
But . . . well, it would be a complication, and Billy was in a place where complications would not do, like being party to senseless murder on his last day out, which is why when he got into the front seat of his ’68 Buick Riviera, given to him right off the lot from one of Ronnie’s dealerships, he rolled slowly back to the lip of the grave, made sure Germaio was right where he left him, and then slammed the gas pedal to the floor and chopped the motherfucker’s head off.
BILLY DIDN’T GET BACK TO HIS HOUSE UNTIL ALMOST SEVEN. AFTER HE located Germaio’s head—it had landed where the living room would eventually be—he dumped it into the hole, followed by Lyle Dover’s body, then refilled the grave. By the end of the week, the grave would be covered by a foundation pour and then, eventually, an attached garage. Everyone getting attached garages these days, no one willing to walk ten feet out into the cold if they didn’t have to.
He drove up 355, stopped behind a shopping center being built out in Bolingbrook, threw his shoes and jacket in a dumpster, then set it on fire, watched it for a couple minutes, made sure everything burned, headed back to his place in Alta Vista Terrace, slid into bed as Arlene was winking awake. “Give me twenty minutes,” he told her, even wound his alarm clock, but she let him sleep until nine.
He pulled himself from bed, took a shower, got the last of the dirt and blood from under his nails, packed the rest of his vacation-wear, then had a thought. He opened the top drawer of his dresser, reached behind the socks he’d left behind, found what he was looking for: brass knuckles. They were fifty years old. Maybe seventy-five. Belonged to his grandfather, Anthony Cupertine, then handed down to Billy’s father, Black Jack Cupertine, and then Billy took them out of Black Jack’s pocket before they put him in the ground.
