“What about those cameras?” Matthew pointed to two security cameras mounted on the house. “And those?” Four security cameras pointed over David’s back wall.
“I cut the power. Go look, Marvin.”
Gray Beard said, “Check it.”
Marvin did, pulling out the sliced power cables from each. “Couldn’t have just unplugged them?”
“Never liked them, anyway,” David said.
“It’s fine,” Matthew said. He unbuttoned his Cox Cable uniform shirt, spun around on the patio. Lifted up his pants, showed his ankles. “I’m clean.” He pointed at David. “How about Marvin retrieves your gun and then we can have a brief conversation.”
David didn’t love this idea. But he did have a butterfly knife in his pocket. But if it came to that, David knew which team Gray Beard and Marvin would play for. “Fine,” David said. He flipped his gun around in his hand, so he was holding the barrel. Marvin came over, snapped on a pair of medical gloves, took the gun.
“We leave you alone,” Gray Beard said, “you boys going to play nice?”
Matthew shrugged. “If he can find another glass for that nice scotch,” he said.
When David came back with a glass, Matthew Drew had his eyes closed and face turned up to the sun. “Feels good,” he said. “Not spending a lot of time outdoors, as you might imagine.”
“All this shit to avoid jail,” David said. He poured two fingers of scotch into Matthew’s glass. “What’s the emergency?”
“FBI agent rolled up on me while I was eating lunch,” Matthew said. “Funny thing, you know her.” He told David about his conversation with Kristy Levine, took down most of his scotch in the process. David gave him a refill. Topped himself off, too. It was going to be a long night and it wasn’t even noon.
“She’s not dumb,” David said. “If she looks at your evidence, she’ll come to the same conclusions you did.”
“I haven’t given her anything,” Matthew said. “The FBI won’t make a move until they have enough for an indictment. Poremba has anything on you, right now? It’s inadmissible. He needs to back his way into you. No one is flipping; you have nothing to worry about.”
David wasn’t so sure about that. All he had keeping him safe with Matthew was that he knew the truth about the murder of Ronnie Cupertine’s wife and kids, which had been pinned on Matthew. Namely, that they’d been dug up and sent to Las Vegas for burial, which meant someone in the Mafia—namely Peaches Pocotillo—didn’t want them found. And David knew that it was Ruben Topaz who dropped the bodies off in Portland, because he’d ordered it. The only alibi Drew had for those bodies, filled with bullets from his gun, was sitting right in front of him.
“For tonight, maybe,” David said. “Have you seen my face?”
“You look like a young Pacino. Like Dog Day Afternoon. When he had an edge.”
“Never saw that one.”
“Sure you did,” he said. “You know. ‘Attica! Attica!’”
“Oh yes,” David said. “Bank robbers.”
“Right. Grow your hair out, you could be him. Get a full beard, you’ll be Serpico. Wouldn’t that be dry.”
David had worried that Jennifer and William wouldn’t recognize him with his first plastic surgery. What about now that he looked like a guy wearing a Sal Cupertine Halloween mask?
“I make this Kristy Levine disappear,” David said, “what happens?”
“Five hundred agents descend on Las Vegas,” Matthew said, “and we both go to prison. Plus I’d be obligated to come for you.”
“After what the FBI did to you?”
Matthew said, “Don’t see you fleeing this saltwater pool and mansion. After all the mob did to you, Rain Man.”
“Don’t fucking call me that,” David said.
Matthew put his hands up. “Point being. You can’t kill your way out of this.”
That was, in fact, David’s thinking, too. Not that he was keen to kill her. He liked her. She was part of his congregation. He helped her pick out her grave, for fuck’s sake. Since then, prior to David getting his face crushed, she’d become a regular at Temple Beth Israel. David even helped coordinate rides to her chemo appointments.
“I don’t suppose you’ve found my family.”
“No,” Matthew said. “Poremba’s given me some intel. Safe houses in Arizona and Oregon, one in Utah, all come up empty. His chain goes high, but not high enough. Can’t break any laws, you know?”
“Shit.”
“Hence.” Matthew put his arms up. “Here I am in your beautiful home.”
“Do you think this Kristy knows . . . something?”
Matthew took a sip of the scotch. “Yes,” he said. “She knows you’re here. She doesn’t know where. Or why. But she knows. What happens when she sees you?”
“She’ll see what she wants to see,” David said. “She only sees her rabbi.”
Matthew stared at David. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds. “Until she doesn’t.”
“I’ll be ready for that.”
Matthew took out a piece of paper from his clipboard, put it on the table between them. “Look who is in the neighborhood.”
It was a news release from Gold Mountain Mining announcing the hiring of Kirk Biglione as their new director of corporate security. Gold Mountain was an oil and lithium operation with offices around the world—Australia, Chile, China, Saudi Arabia, and Dallas—and Biglione’s hiring landed him in trade publications and corporate newsletters. You want to be serious about your corporate security, is there someone more qualified than the former top FBI agent from one of the nation’s busiest offices?
