One hundred and twenty-five years ago? This was Indian land. But then the government and the railroads came and turned Palm Springs into a checkerboard, so that the Indians only got every other mile or so. Melvyn’s now sat two inches away from reservation land, and a million years in the distance.
Car after car pulled past Peaches and Lonzo toward the valet station. A Bentley. A 7 Series BMW. A Maserati. A Mercedes. Another Mercedes. Another Bentley. A couple would get out. Sometimes man and woman. Sometimes man and man. Sometimes woman and woman. Sometimes groups of women. Sometimes groups of men. The Venn diagram was plastic surgery. It was like a Tupperware party.
After a while, Peaches knocked on the passenger window with his pinky ring. “Watch the valets,” he said to Lonzo. The ring was a new thing. Black amethyst. He was trying on the idea of being a guy who wore rings. He was, as usual, dressed in all linen, tortoiseshell sunglasses, slip-on shoes, kind of like if Don Johnson never left Miami; a peach-scented skin cream on his arms, neck, and face kept him feeling fresh. Peaches liked the look. When you’re the baddest motherfucker in the room, you can wear whatever you want.
“What am I trying to see?”
“Just watch,” Peaches said.
First car, nothing, the couple loitering a bit. Plate from Washington. Valet parked the car right in front of the restaurant.
Second car, nothing, people coming out of the restaurant. Plate from Nevada. Same parking situation.
Third car, plate from California, no one around. One valet popped the glove box. Did something with his cell phone. Closed the box. Other valet watched the door. Knocked on the window when people came out of the restaurant. First valet drove off past Lonzo and Peaches, parked in a reserved lot, spent some more time in that glove box.
“The fuck he doing?” Lonzo asked.
“Took a picture of the address,” Peaches said. “Probably has a homeboy driving by it right now, seeing what’s what. If they’re staying in the hotel, they’ll be making copies of the keys.”
Lonzo whistled. “Slick.”
Peaches said, “Addict shit.”
“Still,” Lonzo said. “A lot of risk for some pills and furs. Could be housing whole mansions if they did it right. You think he kicks up to someone?”
“Maybe,” Peaches said. Made sense, if there was a big score to be had. Valet could get the drugs, the electronics, but if there was a house to roll, a bunch of cars, a safe, you needed pros with access to buyers other than pawn shops and eBay.
Palm Springs was an open city, which to the Italian families meant you could do whatever you wanted provided you didn’t kill anybody or fuck them over too badly. In either case, any revenge on that shit would happen outside the city limits. Because of that, no made guys had been killed in Palm Springs in decades. Yeah, they’d blown a motherfucker up in Evansville. Cut a guy’s dick off and shoved it in his brother’s mouth during a spa weekend in Scottsdale. And yes, absolutely, they’d put three in Dominic Fortunado’s face for some shit down at the Salton Sea, but they waited until he was back in Sicily. All of that was ancient history, storybook shit Peaches heard about growing up. These days? Hardest motherfucker from Palm Springs to die was Sonny Bono, and he got taken out by a fucking tree on a ski run.
Still. That was the rules.
You established something, it was yours; no one was stepping. Mexican Mafia had established the cocaine trade routes out of Mexico. Some minor crews built the girl business, but now that shit was all online, plus Palm Springs had a huge gay population, and there was no business in that. Italians had run the gaming before it got legit, so they still had sway on that, plus the nightclubs and golf courses and some of the older hotels that weren’t corporate. Bloods and Crips, they fought over the low-hanging fruit—marijuana, protection rackets in the poor parts of the city, car theft. Peaches could give a fuck about that street business. These days, he was a fucking CEO.
Native Mob? For years, they kept their shit to the reservation lands between Palm Springs and San Diego, running the bingo halls, the powwows, parking lot scams, Ponzi schemes, rackets, arsons, and the occasional off-reservation heist. But now that the tribes had free reign to open Vegas-style casinos, they wanted a bigger slice. Peaches was beginning to think they could have the whole pie, if they did things right.
This open-city shit made no sense to Peaches. Starbucks doesn’t give a shit if a coffee shop has been in business for a hundred years. They’d open up right next door, charge more for their coffee, and still make that cash. And if Mom and Pop whined to the news, fuck ’em, they’d build another Starbucks across the street. And yet the Mafia, actual fucking criminals, had a code of conduct that said, in certain situations, don’t be a fucking criminal?
The Mexican Mafia and the Native Mob didn’t adhere to those rules with each other but had never stepped to the Five Families, until recently. The whole reason Peaches was here was to help smooth over some turf shit between the Native Mob, who had an interest in a casino going up twenty miles east of Palm Springs, and the Mexican Mafia, who ran hard drugs and didn’t like the notion that the Native Mob would likely be cutting into their business by building a thirty-story palace right in the middle of their distribution highway, with a captive audience to deal to inside.
The result was that the soldiers on both sides were killing each other at a rapid rate, with the Italians in town siding with the Native Mob. Cops didn’t give a shit until some beef at the Fuddruckers in Palm Springs ended up with three Mexican Mafia members bleeding out on top of the salad bar and two from the Native Mob missing their faces in the upstairs bathroom, which could have been swept up as another no-human-involved incident, but they found a seventy-five-year-old man named Paul down from Medicine Hat with one in the gut, bleeding out in the shitter.
Even made the news in Chicago. Kill an old man in the shitter, you get two inches in the Sun-Times, no matter where you live. Most people saw that and made different vacation plans.
Peaches only saw opportunity. The Native Mob in Wisconsin and Illinois was amazed by how Peaches had muscled into The Family, and while they weren’t cutting him bigger shares of their game, there was talk from the Council of Elders that he might get a nice bump up in class, get a couple more guys working for him, in addition to his cousin Mike and The Family soldiers and associates he had running with him now, like Lonzo. Which was just fear on their part. They knew now that Peaches had the juice.
He could run any of them out of the game. And if he could get the Native Mob more involved in the Palm Springs tribes’ casino operations, well, then they were steps away from golf courses, and where there were golf courses, there were houses, and the Native Mob was all about the mortgage business these days, moving home loans at variable rates, seizing defaulted properties, moving them again, all of it kind of legal. No one was buying million-dollar homes on reservation land in Indiana . . . but Palm Springs, well, Countrywide didn’t have shit on the Native Mob. Peaches Pocotillo could be the resort king of the Chuyalla, running game from the West Coast to the Gold Coast.
Or: Get out from under the Native Mob. Be his own thing. Sovereign Nation of Peaches. Use his power running The Family to make a lasting move. Because being lead dog just meant more ass hounds nipping behind you. The Family was making money, for now. But that would change. And they’d come for him. Or Sal Cupertine would show up and want what was his. Or revenge.
“You ever have a real job?” Peaches asked. It was 12:47. They’d need to get moving if they didn’t see Mike soon. Already, this place was making Peaches nervous. All this Indian land, not a fucking Indian to be found.
“One summer,” Lonzo said. “I worked at a video store. Made $4.25 an hour.”
“How long you last?”
“Until I robbed it,” Lonzo said.
“What was your take?”
“Hundred and forty-seven dollars,” Lonzo said.
“Big balling,” Peaches said. “How much they give you?”
“Six months in juvie,” he said, “on account I also assaulted the cop who came to question me.” Lonzo shook his head. “Truth? It was the best thing that happened to me. If I’d lived out that summer with my stepdad, I’d have put that fool in the dirt.”
“That bad?”
“That bad,” Lonzo said. “Got out, he’d already skipped out on my moms. Never saw him again. Good for both of us.”
“Look at these fucks,” Peaches said. A group of silver-haired golfer types got out of a Range Rover. Red pants. Yellow pants. Checkered pants. They looked like retired clowns. California plate. Good. They’d come home and find all their Viagra gone. Maybe then they’d know suffering.
“If these valets had even a single set of balls,” Lonzo said, “they’d be doing home invasions, taking hostages, ransoming anesthesiologists and heart surgeons and shrinks for millions. Cut one finger off of one guy, early on, you’d make ten million before the cops even caught a whiff.”
It was an idea, Peaches had to admit.
These people didn’t have to hustle to feel safe. They had money. Health insurance paid for the Oxycodone and Klonopin and Dilaudid. No one getting shot at CVS. Many of the tribes up in Wisconsin had their own clinics, their own doctors, so Peaches had a bit in that game, but it was a limited marketplace; they could move pills around the reservations, could seep out into the cities, but it was always to piss-poor motherfuckers. The next level was selling pills to people with money, pills their insurance would typically pay for if they just knew the right words to say to their doctors.
Maybe it was about owning the doctors. Because then there was surgery. In-home care. Hospice services. If you had a doctor telling you something was true, it was true. You’re gonna die. You need a live-in nurse. Worst-case scenario, miracle, you lived. Live or die, the doctor gets Blue Cross to pay the vig. Yeah. Why was he giving a shit about casinos when health care always had one winner at the end? He only had to look at Ronnie Cupertine in his private room, with his private nurses, with his private doctors, with his twenty-four-hour drip of the best shit, legally, forever.
