David kept reading through the canned quotes to get to the meat of the news: Gold Mountain’s latest venture would be on the shores of the Salton Sea, the ecological disaster forty miles east of Palm Springs. Gold Mountain was breaking ground on their latest geothermal plant, one poised to extract lithium. “The path to being free from Middle East oil interests is a future rich with electric cars, made right here with American lithium batteries,” the release proclaimed. Biglione would be based out of the Salton Sea office for the next six weeks.
The Salton Sea was only a few hours away. They could leave right now and be standing in front of Kirk Biglione before the sun went down.
“Why isn’t Biglione in prison?” David asked. “How does he have a six-figure job like this?”
“That plant goes,” Matthew said, “I’d guess it’s more like a seven-figure job.”
“He’s a gangster, all right,” David said. What all the press releases and articles left out, but which David told Matthew about one afternoon when he was still in the hospital, loaded on painkillers and anti-infection meds, was that Kirk Biglione came from a connected family, had even done an internship with The Family before going off to college, and that the rumor in The Family was that he was the very reason they were still in business and The Outfit had melted into nothing. Yeah, the local FBI was going to bust The Family when they did major shit wrong, but Biglione wasn’t going to be hauling in Ronnie Cupertine for anything short of assassinating the president, and even then, they’d probably find a patsy first. If The Family kept the ecosystem in control—street gangsters killing street gangsters was fine; mobsters killing mobsters was actually good for local tourism, so that was also fine—everyone stayed busy on both sides of the law. But if civilians started getting lit up, little kids eating drive-by strays and shit? That wasn’t going to work. Same with the Mafia. If some mobster killed a wife or a child, that ended up on national news. Kill a cop or an agent? People would start losing their jobs, which in the FBI meant Jeff Hopper and Matthew Drew hit the streets. In the mob, that meant Sal Cupertine got shipped to Las Vegas.
David knew now that Ronnie Cupertine had been snitching on himself all these years, working essentially as an unpaid CI for the FBI since god knows when, and that had worked out fine when Kirk Biglione was the man in charge of the organized crime division. But when Biglione got bumped up and ended up overseeing the entire FBI field office, leaving Jeff Hopper in charge of the organized crime division, well, that shit wasn’t gonna fly. Sal Cupertine was supposed to die. Ronnie and Biglione could have closed the doors on their relationship. But instead . . . this shit show.
David wasn’t surprised Matthew had this new intel on Biglione. From the moment the cocksucker got charged in the corruption scandal surrounding the FBI’s handling of the Sal Cupertine incident—how Cupertine managed to kill three agents and a CI without a backup team within ten miles of the site; how and why the FBI were led to believe a body found in the Poyter landfill was Cupertine; why Jeff Hopper (and Matthew) had been fired for whistleblowing—Matthew had kept eyes on him.
After Biglione pled guilty, earning a suspended sentence, he landed a top corporate-security job outside of Detroit. Not every day an ex-FBI agent lands in Bloomfield Hills, even one with a felony on his sheet. If G. Gordon Liddy got to host his own syndicated talk radio show and own a countersurveillance firm, what was stopping a small fry like Kirk Biglione from becoming a full corporate potato?
“How does he help us?” David asked, though what he actually meant was, How does he help me?
“He needs to go down,” Matthew said, “but before that happens, he’s the one guy who’d know where your wife and kid are. Half his job was probably coordinating with the U.S. Marshals on shit like this.”
“How do you intend to get information from him?”
Matthew said, “One toe at a time.”
“You ever torture someone before?”
“No. I’ve only recently become a criminal.”
“It’s messy and it’s time-consuming.”
“You have a better idea?” Matthew said.
“Drug him,” David said. “Get whatever you can out of him, then kill him.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that,” David said. “He’s not giving up nuclear codes. He’s giving up possible safe houses to someone he believes is going to kill people he’d like to see dead. Because if my wife is in a safe house, she’s giving up information, right?”
“Right.”
“You could probably give him a Hershey bar and he’d tell you, if he’s worried my wife will have something on him.”
“Does she?”
David thought about that for a moment. By the time they were together, all she might have heard was that Kirk Biglione was crooked in a good way. She wouldn’t have a negative view of the man that had kept her husband and her friends’ husbands out of prison. She’d surely seen the news reports about the trial and how the FBI faked Sal’s death, but that was all public record. She didn’t have anything new.
“No,” David said.
Matthew nodded his head, exhaled hard, like he’d been relieved of some pressing burden. “Kirk Biglione doesn’t exist,” he said, “my sister is alive.”
“That kind of thinking will fuck you up,” David said. “Kirk Biglione dies, your sister doesn’t rematerialize. Vengeance is never as sweet as you think it will be.”
“Kirk Biglione doesn’t exist,” Matthew said, “I’m not hunting you down for the rest of your life, either.”
“Won’t happen,” David said. “Time comes, I won’t make it hard on you. I’ll let you down easy.”
“Could be sooner than you think.”
David poured himself more scotch then put the cork back into the bottle, pushed it toward Matthew. “Find my family, get your vengeance, give me a day head start, and we’re square. You end up bringing me in, you have my word I’ll exonerate you on everything.”
“And what if you won’t come alive?”
“What if you won’t?”
Matthew thought about that. “I’ll take a notarized letter. On Temple stationery.”
“You’re a crazy motherfucker,” David said, but it actually made some sense. He started to head inside.
“What about your bottle?” Matthew asked.
“All yours,” David said. “For your service.”
SIX
MONDAY, APRIL 15, 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
RABBI DAVID COHEN WOKE EARLY ON THE THIRD MONDAY IN APRIL, TWO DAYS after his meeting with Matthew; dressed in the dark; and waited for Bennie Savone, since technically he still wasn’t allowed to drive, even though he’d been discharged from the hospital a week earlier. Every anti-infection drug he was on recommended he stay away from heavy machinery, never mind that driving on Klonopin wasn’t exactly encouraged. But he was weaning himself, even against doctor’s orders, because he needed some fucking clarity of thought for the task at hand.
