Yet, when David got back to the morgue, he was surprised to find not a Chinese teenager on the table but a sixty-something white guy with a giant barrel chest and prominent beer gut, his salt-and-pepper hair caked with blood from the hole in the middle of his forehead. David admired the work for a moment. One shot. Professional. A pleasure to see.
“We’ve actually got two for this burial,” Ruben said absently. He was at the sink, washing his hands. “So we might not get this going until five thirty. We’ll send Miguel to speak to the mourners if need be.” The mourners were some old fucks from Sun City brought in for these kinds of services. Each got paid fifty bucks plus dinner. Old friends of the Savone family.
“Are they able to fit in the same coffin?” David asked. The man was at least 285 pounds.
“He’ll bend.”
“You sure?”
“We’ll make it work. We’ve got a backup in the coolers. The boss says he wants us done with everything this week.”
“Yeah,” David said as he picked up the man’s right arm. “I heard.” He had a tattoo of the ace of spades on his wrist, another of Italy on his forearm. David half expected to find an eight ball on his bicep, just like David had until they carved it off when he arrived in Las Vegas, but instead he had five dots—one in the center of four—which either meant he’d done time or was an OG. Either way, old white guy with legacy tats was not a good fucking sign. He tipped the body on its side, so he could get a look at the man’s back. In five-inch Old English lettering across his shoulders it said AQUAFREDDO.
Shit.
There’d been some Aquafreddos in Chicago back in the day. Some Gambino cousins. Brothers that got sent out west to find their fortune or some shit. By the time David heard of them, they were a West Coast connect, guys you could get weed from if you needed a lot of it, like a truck’s worth, and then lately they were always talking about making their fortune in Indian bingo, some shit Ronnie was morally opposed to. You didn’t rip off grandmothers to make your nut. Gambinos saw the world differently. They’d periodically beef, but for the most part, it was what it was. McDonald’s don’t give a fuck about Taco Bell. Last David heard, there was only one Aquafreddo left; the other three had ended up in prison or dead.
“Where’d this guy come from?”
Ruben said, “Palm Springs. Picked him up on Friday.”
“Where’s number two?”
“Got some choices. Check the freezer. We’ll take the smallest guy.”
In the last two years, the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace had expanded from six freezers to eighteen to accommodate all of their business, which was good since when David began opening doors, over half held bodies, one whole row was just for the cremation services, and the last two were for guys with holes in their faces. First guy had a single shot through the right eye, blew out half of his skull all over his black Adidas sweat suit. Hollow point. Nice.
Second guy had put up a fight. Gutshot, one in the shoulder, then maybe a hatchet to the face. Still dressed in pajamas. Half of his face was somewhere else. He was a couple inches shorter than the other.
David checked them for tattoos.
Ace of spades.
Italy.
Five dots.
Hatchet face had ZANGUCCI on his back. The other guy also had ZANGUCCI. Brothers or cousins, each with the same dumbfuck artwork as their local boss.
Used to be, Five Families fucks didn’t get ink. But like everything else in the culture, that shit began to change once tattoos moved from the poor to the rich. You want to prove allegiance? Put a permanent mark on your body.
These guys? Fucking Gambino soldiers, maybe the big guy a capo, by now. Fuck. He’s a guy who would be missed. They all would be. Seventy-two hours. Maybe less.
All the time David had been in Las Vegas, laundering bodies for the mob, not once had they put someone from the Five Families in the ground, unless they’d died legitimately in Las Vegas and wanted to get buried out in Summerlin. Which happened, periodically. Lotta OGs ended up retiring out here, never returning to the old neighborhood, not even in death. Shit, there hadn’t been an unsanctioned Five Families killing in Las Vegas in twenty years. Palm Springs? Maybe fifty years. That place was an open city, just like Las Vegas, but it was treated more like a sanctuary spot. Even Ronnie used to go there for vacation, play golf all week on the same course as a bunch of Outfit twats, everyone on time-out, drinking scotch at the nineteenth hole, telling lies, all that Frank Sinatra/JFK/Sam Giancana shit they read about in history books, or told people they read about.
Bodies from Palm Springs weren’t anything new. They’d been getting Sureños and paroled Mexican Mafia, plus dudes without obvious affiliation, by the hearse-load ever since Bennie hatched some deal with the local Native Mob. If New York found out Bennie had these boys? Gulfstreams filled with mooks would be landing in Henderson and then it wouldn’t matter what Ruben wanted. The right thing to do would be to hold the bodies, have Bennie make some calls, make sure everyone was square, keep the peace, and take no cash. If he wanted to keep things straight while he was in Minnesota, they couldn’t have these fucking guys in the freezer.
“Hold up,” he told Ruben when he came back to the morgue. He had the big guy bent in half already, his body like a V, and had his electric bone saw out. “We can’t put these guys in the ground.”
“We can’t have them in the freezers looking like that much longer, Rabbi,” Ruben said. “Wrong person opens those doors, they’re gonna wonder why they didn’t read any new stories about any Jews getting a hatchet to the face.”
David considered this. “You picked these bodies up?”
“Met a guy out in the desert,” Ruben said. “Standard practice.”
“Anything weird about it?”
Ruben thought for a moment. “Same guy as it’s been for a bit,” Ruben said. “Indian dude.”
“Like from India?”
“No,” Ruben said. “Native. Name’s Mike.”
Growing up in Chicago, Native Americans weren’t thick on the ground. You had to go up to Wisconsin to see them, and even then, the ones David knew were all gang related. Native Gangster Disciples or Native Crips—reservation gangs that essentially paid franchise fees to use the iconography of prison and LA street gangs—but more likely outfits like the Four Corner Death Warriors, shitty little reservation gangs running drugs and guns for someone higher up the chain, half of them inexplicably named Junior.
“Anything weird? Strange vibe or anything?”
Ruben thought for a moment. “Had his uncle with him.”
“Some old-ass man?”
“No, maybe ten or fifteen years older,” Ruben said. “Dude seemed chill. Just watched. Mike said he wanted to see the operation, that’s all. Had another guy that drove. Big Mexican OG-looking fool.”
“And you were cool with that?”
“I got two choices,” Ruben said, “be cool, or try to kill three guys. So. I was real cool.”
“You catch the uncle’s name?”
