Going on eleven years ago now.
A heart attack on a golf course in Tampa.
No one found Black Jack for two days; the poor fucker had collapsed in a sand trap, then sat there dead during a tropical squall. Meanwhile half of Chicago descended on Florida looking for him, everyone thinking he’d been abducted, was about to be ransomed a tooth at a time, only to have him found by a groundskeeper.
Black Jack decided to hit eighteen on his own, no bodyguards, died in fucking plaid pants.
The indignity.
Cupertine men had been beating the shit out of people in Chicago for a very long time, and here was Black Jack Cupertine taking his dirt nap with a golf club in his hand, a load of death shit in his pants, bugs already eating his face when he was finally located. That transferred power to Black Jack’s brother, Dandy Tommy, and then onto his son, Ronnie, which turned Billy Cupertine into The Spare.
Maybe if Billy had been a different kind of guy, none of this would have mattered. He could have earned a living, had a nice family, been content. But the problem with being The Spare was that there was always someone thinking about making a move, and the first move would always be to take Billy out, no use killing Ronnie if there was someone else waiting in the wings, Billy also aware that the only people who called him Dark Billy were members of his own crew.
Motherfuckers in Miami and Detroit and Memphis? They called him The Spare, big fucking jokers, each.
Fact was, though? It was true. That knowledge fucked with Dark Billy Cupertine.
Billy slid the knuckles on, made a fist. They felt smooth. Comfortable. His son Sal wasn’t gonna grow up to be a pussy, but Billy would be damned if he’d be out breaking legs for a living, either. He was too smart for that. Ten years old and already reading books, getting into his grandmother’s stash of Harold Robbins, but had to act dumb around his friends, idiots like Germaio’s son Monte down the block, who couldn’t tie his shoes until he was seven, had to get his stomach pumped after swallowing a handful of nickels. Sal could probably run the whole Family’s finances right now, figure out decent investments, get everyone clean and legit. Maybe make a lawyer or a doctor or banker, help people.
What had Billy ever done? Created a network for pushing heroin. Killed maybe ten guys on his own. Twelve now. Could be more. He didn’t dwell on it, because what was the use? Heroin killed more, that was sure. Made his cousin Ronnie and before that, Dandy Tommy, rich. Yeah, he’d done fine, too. Apart from living with the fear that every single day someone was going to get the drop on him. Not that the fear bothered him—it kept him sharp—rather it was the idea that it would somehow infect his wife, his kid. He’d picked this life. He’d decided to look over his shoulder in every room he entered. But having a kid changed him. Made The Spare shit more acute. Because if Billy was The Spare, what was Sal? Every day that he came home with some motherfucker’s blood on his hands and he saw his son playing with his Army men, it was like getting stabbed with a dull knife.
Billy’s experience, you could live with a stab wound. But then eventually, infection would get you. Eaten up from the inside.
“Are you about ready, honey?”
Billy turned around and saw Arlene standing in the doorway. She had on a sundress, her shoulders bare, a little sweater in her right hand.
“One sec,” Billy said. He slipped the brass knuckles into his pocket. Once they got where they were going, he’d bury them along with every other trace of their old life. Three hundred thousand dollars wasn’t a fortune. But it was enough to put some real estate between him and the rest of The Family, the plan being to get to Arizona by the end of the week. He’d decided on Sedona after watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie called Broken Arrow one night on WTTW. Jimmy Stewart played an ex-solider named Jeffords sent to talk Cochise into peace. He spends most of the movie staring out at the landscape and trying to figure out how to keep the U.S. military and a piss-angry Geronimo—who would have made a good capo—from wrecking a fragile détente. Hotheads on both sides would get them all killed, Cochise and Jeffords knew, so everything was a fucking negotiation, good men caught up in the mire just out of association, the red rocks watching all of it, not going anywhere, proof enough that history could outlast the foolishness of men. Billy thought Jimmy Stewart was a bit of a bitch in most cases, but he liked Broken Arrow, liked the message, liked how Jeffords ended up living with Cochise until he died, how the Indians in the movie weren’t portrayed as animals, just people who had a code.
“Sal is already in the car,” Arlene said. She was under the impression that the three of them were driving out to Lake Geneva for a week. Get out of the broiling city. They had a favorite spot they liked to go to this time every year. Shuffleboard and mint drinks and magazines and dime-store thrillers.
First they’d drive south, all the way to Texas. Eighteen hours. He had a guy in Austin with fresh identification for them. Billy would take care of him, get rid of his body, no witnesses, and then they’d keep moving, get to Flagstaff, another fifteen hours, put the family up in a hotel for a few days, then prospect out to Sedona, find a house.
“Sorry,” Billy said. “I didn’t expect to be out all night. One thing led to another.”
Arlene waved him off. She knew who he was. “You’re here now,” she said. “And I get you to myself for the next week.”
He stepped across the bedroom and kissed her lightly. She tasted like cigarettes, but not in a bad way. “The car all packed?”
“Only thing missing is you,” she said.
He’d tell her once they were on the highway. Maybe she’d fight him at first—she had a sister, her mother was still alive, she had friends, a life—but the reality was that Arlene would do what Billy said. Because she didn’t want to wash blood off his clothes. Not anymore.
“We gotta make one stop,” Billy said.
FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS, DARK BILLY CUPERTINE AND HIS COUSIN, AND DE facto boss, Ronnie Cupertine, had a standing date on the top floor of the IBM building being constructed on the corner of Wabash and State. At first that just meant going up a couple rickety floors to where Family-connected contractors were pouring concrete, but now it meant making a trip up fifty-two stories of anodized black aluminum to the last bit of open construction. The building was set to open by fall and already the city was hailing it as an architectural wonder, a monolith of power and money, like Wall Street had been cut and pasted right in the middle of the broad shoulders of Chicago, the city never content to just be Chicago, always needing to compare itself to New York. A perpetual small-dick problem was how Billy thought of it, but it infected how The Family did business, too, constantly worried that some Gambino fuck was going to show up and muscle them out of their territory. His father and grandfather had built The Family into its own thing, beholden to no one, but Ronnie, he had different ideas.
He was connecting to LA and to Memphis, had some Florida shit going on, plus their continued interests in Las Vegas, maybe even some offshore shit in the future, Ronnie always going on about how if The Family was going to survive Nixon, half of their muscle in a fucking jungle in Vietnam, the other half in prison, it had to treat its business like McDonald’s, put up shop wherever there wasn’t somebody else. It was some shit he’d read in a book somewhere. So Ronnie had The Family going into small towns and blowing up mom-and-pop shops, digging graves in Omaha to get into the meat business, which was really just a way to get access to big rigs for moving product across state lines, greasing small-town cops to look the other way on gambling setups around college football season, which was how they were getting into the extortion game with wealthy farmers, Billy thinking it was all too much, that McDonald’s got fries and burgers right, which is why they didn’t fuck with hot dogs.
All this other stuff? It was hot dog business. It was how they were going to get caught, Billy thought. Or how Ronnie was, anyway.
“What an eyesore,” Arlene said when they pulled up beside the construction entrance to 333 Wabash. Workers milled around a roach coach, sipping coffee, eating sweet rolls, bullshitting. It was just after ten thirty in the morning, but due to the heat, workers had been pounding nails since five a.m. Billy had the top down on their convertible and Arlene had her head craned back to see the top of the building.
“Yeah,” Billy said. In his view, the IBM building looked like a big, black thumb.
“Why does Ronnie like to meet here?”
“Only place he knows where no one is listening,” Billy said.
Arlene sighed. “He thinks Eliot Ness is waiting on top of the Sears Tower with a stenographer?”
“The Sears Tower is 110 stories,” Sal said from the backseat.
“That right?” Billy said. He looked at him in the rearview mirror, Sal busy with a coloring book. The Sears Tower had just opened a few months earlier, but already Sal was obsessed with it.
“That’s eight stories taller than the Empire State Building,” Sal said. “And fifty-eight stories taller than this will be.”
Arlene gave Sal a book called Great Skyscrapers! for Christmas and every night since he read the damn thing before falling asleep. The only thing Sal didn’t know was who was buried under every building. Maybe he’d become an architect? The guy who designed the IBM building had died before they even started putting rebar down and yet this fucking thumb would be here another, what? Hundred years? Two hundred? How long did skyscrapers last these days? Wouldn’t that be something. A Cupertine who came to Chicago and built something that lasted for a hundred years and no one got killed because of it.
“Maybe one day we’ll go to the Empire State Building,” Billy said. “Would you like that?”
Sal shrugged. “I guess so.”
Billy reached across Arlene and into the glove box, came out with an envelope filled with cash. It was payday, Ronnie getting his cut from the H business. Twenty-five grand that went straight into his pocket, just for being Ronnie Cupertine.
“Don’t be long,” Arlene said.
“I won’t,” he said.
