Ruben stormed out, leaving David and Miguel alone.
“What’s going on, Rabbi?”
David liked Miguel. He did. Sensitive kid. Hard worker. Never said a cross word to David in four years. Yeah, David almost killed him once, but they managed to pretend it never happened, like a shared delusion. “Do your fucking job, Miguel,” David said, and he went to find Ruben.
SUNSET WAS STILL AN HOUR OFF WHEN DAVID SPIED RUBEN SITTING ON A stool and smoking a blunt behind the gravedigger’s shed in the Bellagio. Melanie Moss’s unmarked grave was about twenty yards away. David killed Jeff Hopper about a hundred yards from here. If he’d let that man take him into custody that day, where would the world be? Would it be better? Probably, he had to admit. All this time he spent protecting himself for the possibility of being reunited with his wife and kid, he’d done nothing but make the rest of the world a fucking cesspool. It was like the butterfly effect, if the butterfly spread doom around the world with a single flap of its wings.
Ruben took a hit then offered David the blunt.
David took a hit, let the weed fill his lungs. He hadn’t been high since the day he killed those feds. But that was heroin. Weed usually just made him want to take a nap. This was some good shit, though, and almost immediately, he started to feel it.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Sativa,” Ruben said.
David took another hit. Damn. “This isn’t the shit I smoked in high school.”
“Naw,” Ruben said. “That was probably parsley and nail clippings. I grow this shit myself.”
“In your yard?”
“Naw,” Ruben said, “I got a house. Over by Bennie’s crash pad. Out past Durango and Craig.”
“Where all the cops live?” There were articles in the Review-Journal about how cops were moving farther and farther out of the city, building plush homes on cul-de-sacs backing up to the open desert in view of Lone Mountain, where they could shoot their guns and abuse their wives in peace, David assumed.
“Turns out,” Ruben said, “they’re pretty good neighbors. Nobody calls the cops.”
It was, admittedly, some fucked-up logic that had its own reality-defying truth to it. The other point, more saliently, was that David didn’t know Bennie had a crash pad. Well, that wasn’t true—he didn’t believe Bennie had a crash pad, because that meant there really were computers filled with video and audio of him inside his own home and wherever else Bennie had placed bugs. It would take him five minutes online to find it if it was in his name.
Ruben took another hit, offered the blunt back to David, but he turned it down. Two hits and he was already feeling capable of making some big fucking mistakes. “Look,” Ruben said, “I know who Bennie Savone is. Okay? I know. And I’m going to be loyal to him until the end; you can bet on that.”
“Good.”
“But I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he said. “You don’t even look like the motherfucker who got me tossed up anymore. I know you ain’t a rabbi. Not for real.”
“What’s real, Ruben?” David said.
“Dan Rather,” Ruben said, again. “Talking about how this was the start of some shit the likes of which was only in the movies. Homie, I ain’t fucking seen The Godfather before that. I rented it from Blockbuster. I do not need that shit. What we did to Melanie, that’s real.” He paused. “When Miguel walked in, you were going to kill me, weren’t you?”
“I was,” David said.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Honestly? I didn’t want to kill Miguel, too.”
“Guess I’ll give him that raise, then,” Ruben said. He hit his blunt again. Exhaled. “You don’t have much of a problem with killing, do you?”
“None at all.”
“How’d you get that way?”
“Practice,” David said. “Repetition.”
“I killed someone once,” Ruben said. “I was fifteen. Walked right up on the motherfucker in the food court of the Meadows Mall and stabbed him like, twenty, thirty times, blood all over the glass at Sbarro, families screaming. Blood in the lemonade at Hot Dog on a Stick. A fucking scene, man.”
“Who was it?”
“Some dude wearing the wrong shit,” Ruben said. “He was Twenty-Eighth Street, I was Naked City. That’s all that mattered. I don’t even remember his name.”
“You’re lying,” David said.
“Alejandro Espinoza.”
“You get caught?”
“Naw,” Ruben said, “his family was illegal. Twenty-Eighth got them out of the country, back to Mexico, no one said shit to the cops. But I ended up in juvie a month later anyway on a B and E beef. That’s where Mr. Savone found me. Killing that dude, that fucked me up. But this job? I feel like, in a way, it evens the scales.”
Ruben took another hit. David took one also.
“If I could grant you three wishes,” David said, “what would they be?”
“Homeboy, you are high.”
“I am,” David said.
Ruben pinched off his blunt, carefully wrapped it up in a plastic bag he pulled from his pocket, dropped what was left in a small Tupperware container, then dug a hole underneath the stool, buried the Tupperware, covered it up with dirt. “To be legit,” he said after a while. “To run this place the way I want to run it. Kales and Topaz Home of Peace. No more of this gangster shit. Be out from under Bennie. See you out the door. Deal with real Jews. They’re good people. They deserve better than this shit you’re running.” When David didn’t say anything, Ruben went on: “One day, maybe me and my sons do it together. One day, make it Kales and Topaz and Sons. Or just Topaz and Sons.”
“I deliver that,” David said, “we’re square?”
