“You’ve had some questions about me over the years. Would that be a correct statement?” He twisted the knife maybe a centimeter, enough to draw blood. “Have you voiced your questions to anyone? You wife, maybe?”
Blink. Blink.
“Your wife is a smart woman. I bet she told you that you’ve chosen a certain life and if you want to stay in that life, you’re going to be in business with people who don’t always seem to be who they are. Would that be true?”
Blink. Blink.
“I mean, you are aware that Bennie Savone is a fucking gangster, right?”
Jerry didn’t move a muscle. Kept his eyes as wide as possible.
“You can answer that question honestly, Jerry, because the Talmud tells us that we need not let the past destroy our future. You know Bennie is a gangster. You know I am not what I seem. That is all past. What happens next is the future. So. Two blinks if you understand where we are at this point on our journey together.”
Blink. Blink.
“Tonight is likely to be the end of our association,” David said. “So I’m going to speak in specifics. Before we go any further, I want you to understand that if I help you with this problem, whatever it might be, and if you then ever say anything that isn’t complimentary about your working relationship with the Kales Home of Peace or Temple Beth Israel, I will kill you.” He dug the knife in. A millimeter. Maybe two. Jerry cried out in a pure atavistic response. Also, it probably hurt.
Jerry blinked about six times.
“However this shakes out,” David said, “tomorrow, you’re going to put your house on the market. You will take the first offer that comes your way. You’re going to lay off all of your employees this week. Give them severance. Continue their health care for three months. Be a fucking mensch, Jerry, do you understand?”
More blinking.
“Good. And if the FBI should ever contact you about anything, even if it’s because they think you assassinated JFK, I want you to consider killing yourself before answering them. Because if you ever speak to the FBI, even if you lie to them, you are a dead man. Learn the words ‘I take the fifth.’ Understand?”
Blinking.
David let go of his throat, because it was starting to seem like maybe Jerry wasn’t getting enough oxygen, what with the way his lips were turning blue, but kept the knife in his ear.
“Now, be real still while I pull the knife out of your ear. Because if I perceive you moving in an offensive manner, I might accidentally sever your auditory nerve, and I don’t want to do that.” David slid the knife out, wiped it on his thigh, not that it was all that dirty, but it seemed like a hard-core thing to do, and David wanted to make sure Jerry had something concrete to take from this. “Now either take me home or take me to this dentist’s office.”
Jerry spent a few seconds thinking about his particular set of problems, which to be generous had just quadrupled, and opted for the dentist’s office, since they pulled out of the Best of the West and headed south.
“May I speak?” Jerry said, after they’d been back on the road for a few minutes.
“Of course.”
“I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” David said, leaving the salient part unsaid: Which is why you’re still alive.
THE DENTAL OFFICES OF YURI “JACK” BELSKY WERE LOCATED ON THE SECOND floor of a sprawling warehouse that had been carved up into store fronts on the east side of the Commercial Center between Sahara and Maryland Parkway, just above the Red Lantern Swingers Club, a gun-and-ammo shop, and a recording studio called Hollywood Starz. The Red Lantern was open Thursday through Sunday, according to the pulsing sign out front, which also advertised the pricing guide for entrance: $85 for single men Thursday and Sunday night, $125 Friday and Saturday. Couples $100 every night! Single ladies free! A fucking racket, but David saw the wisdom. Without the single ladies, it was just a bathhouse, and there were three of those in the Commercial Center already. This was a part of town David didn’t spend a lot of time in, because he was not looking for group sex or a recording contract and he had enough guns and ammo to take on a decent militia.
Back in the day, however, the Commercial Center was going to be the epicenter of Las Vegas, a huge outdoor shopping center set to revolutionize retail with its sheer size and walkability. That was in the 1960s and ’70s. The story was that Elvis and Frank and then later Lefty Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro would come in with their girlfriends and buy jewelry, grab a meal at one of the steakhouses, and then race their cars around the massive parking lot—three thousand marked spaces!—and maybe part of it was true—he was pretty sure Spilotro’s Hole in the Wall gang had robbed a jewelry store in the center—but David figured it was mostly bullshit like everything else, another story about why shit was better when the mob ran the town.
These days, the center was half empty, most of the storefronts obvious money-laundering operations—Korean nail salons, wig stores, pet shops that sold ferrets and snakes but had never seen a golden retriever, rub-and-tug massage joints, delis and Chinese restaurants, all the kinds of places that could operate without real employees, just the owner and some cousins. They all had signs that said, SINCE 1971! or whatever year they decided to make up to give the people shopping some confidence. Personally, David didn’t think the fact that the Golden Sunset Bath House had been in business since 1973 was a good selling point.
The parking lot was mostly empty tonight, save for two rows of F-150s and Silverados lined up like soldiers out front of The Ponderosa, a faux Western saloon a floor and two doors down from the dental office, which wouldn’t be anything to note, except everyone knew The Ponderosa was a cop bar, the kind with a mechanical bull and a reputation for late-night shootings that went uninvestigated. Jerry was smart enough to pull around the back of the building, a narrow alley off of Market Street, and when he got out, he immediately removed his license plates, tossed them in his trunk.
David could hear the thumping of music coming from The Ponderosa; Lee Greenwood was going on at some length about how he knows he’s free, followed by whooping and chants of “U.S.A. motherfucker! U.S.A. motherfucker! U.S.A. motherfucker!” It sounded like the mixture of a Klan rally and bachelor party.
“You’ve been doing business next to a cop bar?” David said.
“Boris owns The Ponderosa, too,” Jerry said. He was in the trunk, looking for something. Meanwhile, things began to click into place. What was the difference between owning The Ponderosa and employing a dozen cops to do personal security? David supposed it was easier to blackmail cops when you had them on video getting blow jobs from the working girls—because there was indeed a subset of working girls who only frequented cop bars, Las Vegas unique for their niche prostitutes—or had the ability to spike their drinks, get them pissing dirty and off the job.
“Here.” Jerry tossed David a sealed plastic bag covered in the LifeCore logo. “Put these on.” Inside were plastic booties, an N95 mask, and surgical gloves. “You’re going to need them, Rabbi.”
Jerry unlocked a back door and directed them into a narrow hallway that led to the locked rear exit of the swingers club and to a stairwell which ushered them upstairs to the dental office. The stairwell smelled like a combination of piss, sweat, chlorine, and like the walls were filled with dead rats. The stairs themselves were either sticky or damp, David thankful to be in near darkness, except for the half-light put off by a single tube of fluorescent light on the ceiling. When they hit the second floor, however, they were in complete darkness, Jerry taking out a flashlight, but David could have figured out their path by following his nose: Those weren’t rats in the wall. Once you smell rotting human flesh, it never quite leaves you, and working for four years in a funeral home, plus his previous forty years putting people into the dirt, David knew what was what. David snapped on his gloves, then strapped on his N95.
“The fuck happened up here?” David said, except he was aware he’d left David back in the garage at home. Sal Cupertine was on the job.
“Power went out,” Jerry said.
“When?” It was also sweltering up here on the second floor. It had been over 100 degrees all day and was still in the high 80s, at least. Felt like it was about 120 in the building.
“Sometime after Sunday,” Jerry said. “Power company said it should be back on after midnight.” It was 12:12 a.m. “They’re late.”
There was a security-system keypad beside the door to the dental office, but with the power out it was useless, so Jerry unlocked the door with a key, and they were inside the waiting room of the dental office, six chairs in a U, a table covered in old issues of People, a frosted window opening into the administrative office. Jerry unlocked another door, and they were into the clinic, the smell getting worse as they moved through the wide expanse of the floor—past the X-ray bay, past the hygienist station, past six separate treatment rooms, the lab, the accounting office, and the dentist’s personal office—to eight-foot pneumatic double doors marked STORAGE/PERSONNEL ONLY/ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING. Jerry found another key, unlocked those doors, said to Sal, “This is where it gets problematic.”
The doors opened into a warehouse that ran the length of the second floor. It was lit with a few trembling emergency lights that revealed eight-foot shelving units stacked with medical coolers between two and six feet long, the kind the Kales Home of Peace used to store body parts they were shipping out to LifeCore. The difference was that Kales kept their containers in a freezer unit cooled to between 32 and 39 degrees at all times. Anything lower or higher would render the tissue and bones unusable.
It was about 100 degrees inside the warehouse. It was like sitting in the schvitz at a Russian spa in Chicago.
Sal popped open a cooler at knee level, looked in.
There were six human heads inside. They’d been professionally removed, looked like, not cut off by someone like Fat Monte, who used to like doing that shit.
Sal opened the next cooler. More heads.
