ONE
WINTER 2002
LAS VEGAS, NV
IF SAL CUPERTINE HAD TO EAT ONE MORE BOWL OF SUMMERLIN HOSPITAL’S chicken noodle soup, he was going to strangle someone.
He had a list.
He’d start with the overnight nurse who liked to hum “Yankee Doodle” when he checked Sal’s vitals at 3 a.m. those first hazy weeks, would pinch the meat on his ribs to wake him, was not terribly gentle with the catheter or the shit pan. That fucking guy was not made for the medical industry. If Sal could figure out his name, well, when he got out of this place, he would pay him a visit at home, squeeze his head in a vise to wake him, shove a dry catheter into a sensitive hole, Sal not particular in this daydream about which one, and then crush his fucking windpipe.
He’d then move on to the orderly who liked to talk about patients he wished would “just die,” always qualifying it with, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” Sal thinking, Yeah, joke all you want when my thumbs are touching your brain stem through your neck.
He’d finish off his rounds with the hospital’s head chef. Maybe he wouldn’t snap that motherfucker’s throat. Maybe he’d drown him in his soup.
Yeah. How satisfying that would be.
Not that Sal was feeling particularly agile at the moment, slowly getting dressed in his private room, which was actually pretty nice if you liked the scenic view of dumbfucks slamming into each other on the traffic circle across the way on North Hualapai. He’d probably need a few more weeks before he could go on an adequate revenge spree. He was still on Cleocin for infection, which gave him joint pain and made him feel like puking, then Norco for pain, which Sal liked too much, so he didn’t take enough of it, because he couldn’t have the Rain Man showing up in the middle of the night on these motherfuckers, and then a low dose of Klonopin for whatever the fuck the doctors thought he was going through emotionally, as if they had any idea. Never mind the propofol and Flexforin still numbing the edges of Sal’s brain from all the surgeries. How many times had he been cut open? Five? Six? Seven? He wasn’t sure, exactly.
The first ten days, he was mostly in a drug-induced coma. Also, he wasn’t sure of the difference between surgery and dental work anymore, since half of his life seemed to involve some motherfucker in scrubs shoving shit into his mouth while he drifted through some kind of half sleep, worried all the while he’d blurt out the location of Donnie the Lip’s body, an Outfit soldier he killed in 1989 that still kinda bothered him, because he’d liked the guy, had known him since grade school, and Donnie had begged not to die, which in the moment was a little embarrassing but now tended to show up in Sal’s brain at the worst time, Sal having buried Donnie in his own backyard, the motherfucker’s wife and kids never knowing, going on twenty-five years now; all this time, they probably thought their pops ran out on them, but he was rotting where their dog shit.
Still, for the first six weeks Sal was in the hospital, fantasies like these got him through a lot of hard nights, particularly after he developed a MRSA infection in his jaw and had to be quarantined for two weeks. It was the longest he’d been alone since he’d been hustled out of Chicago in a truck of frozen meat nearly four years earlier. This quarantine actually gave Sal some time to think.
Which was good. He needed to figure some shit out.
He’d built a life for himself in Las Vegas as the Rabbi David Cohen, oversaw an empire of Jews who trusted him, because it turned out the longer he pretended to be a rabbi, the better at being a rabbi he became, until the difference was meaningless. He was a rabbi as much as he was a hit man for The Family and yet, he was trapped. Sal had access to cash, weapons, and cars but couldn’t leave the city limits of Las Vegas.
Not again, anyway. Surveillance was everywhere.
The Strip was off-limits. Same with Fremont Street. Locals’ casinos were out of the question. Palace Station like a fucking FBI outpost now, with the cop bar Pour Decisions across the street. Banks were a no-go. Sports arenas. Outlet stores. Fuck a mall. That was like trying to sneak into Tehran. The whole fucking world was covered in cameras looking for bad guys, technology putting faces together with crimes, Las Vegas about to be the absolute worst city for him to be in with his old face and the Patriot Act in full effect. Even now, looking out the window at the tree-shaded suburban streets of Summerlin, Sal counted dozens of cameras—the Noah’s Bagels in the parking lot of the hospital campus was fortified like a cartel safe house—never mind all the artfully designed cell phone towers gussied up to look like palm trees and cacti, all of which were nothing more than tools of government surveillance.
All those years, Sal Cupertine had achieved the American dream. He’d gotten away with murder. Not one body. Not two. Not twenty. Maybe a hundred. Could be more. He didn’t keep count. Whatever the number, Charles fucking Manson would be creeped out by him, that was the truth, because Manson hadn’t even pulled a trigger, and here Sal was, a guy who’d seen brains on walls and eyes on the floor and hearts through people’s backs, and just kept moving, kept living, wasn’t carving swastikas into his forehead, had himself a family, a reasonably good job, his full mental faculties . . . right up until the time he got to Las Vegas and found himself incarcerated in the suburb of Summerlin doing shit that was likely putting him on a watchlist with God. And now, he had to worry about getting caught by a camera? Not a cop, not an FBI agent, not even another button man. Nope. His undoing would be a machine.
Which is why the safest place at this moment was, in fact, the hospital. His problems were outside the door, lined up like dominoes.
He had former FBI agent Matthew Drew, who’d shown up at his bedside in the ICU a few weeks ago . . . and then kept coming back . . . a problem he had not yet let his boss, Bennie Savone, know about . . .
Back in Chicago, he had some Native Mob motherfucker calling himself Peaches killing his friends and family, all while trying to take over The Family itself, which was rightfully Sal’s, now that Cousin Ronnie was a fucking carrot . . .
And then he had . . . everything else. Temple Beth Israel. The funeral home. The selling of body parts. The need to avoid having U.S. Marshals kick down his door, tase him in the balls, and drag him back to prison for the murders he’d been sanctioned to do over the years, plus his freelance jobs, plus everything that had gone down in Las Vegas . . .
None of that really worried Sal. He wouldn’t be taken alive. He’d made that determination years ago. Or, at the very least, he’d take a couple motherfuckers with him. It wouldn’t be one of those pleasant Sammy the Bull photoshoots, walking down a street with his hands shackled, suit immaculate, hair blown dry. There’d be body bags and red streets. But he could turn his back on each of those things if he could just figure out where his wife, Jennifer, and his son, William, were or, at the least, get word to them. They’d disappeared from Chicago six months earlier and into Witness Protection. He’d learned that much from his new friend Agent Drew. Not that Agent Drew knew where they were, or what Jennifer had given the FBI to get them into protective custody.
At least that was Agent Drew’s story. He had to believe him for now.
Could be Jennifer had given Sal up, as much as she knew. Which was probably enough.
Could be that was the right move. He couldn’t fault her that choice.
Could be she decided going straight was the only way to make sure William had the life she wanted for him. The life Sal wanted for him. The life Sal never got for himself. When he looked at his life objectively, Sal saw a long, flat thread separating What Had Been Good and What Had Been Shit, and if he tugged on it hard enough, he imagined he’d end up bringing down the IBM building, all fifty-two stories, and that still wouldn’t stop him from hearing his father’s screams. What if they’d just kept driving that day? How many times had he asked himself that question over the years, the wondering about a different life a kind of unhealthy infinity.
He knew now that Cousin Ronnie had ordered his father’s hit. Had always sort of figured it, even if he hadn’t wanted to face the knowledge directly, and then spent the next twenty-five years turning Sal into the Rain Man, made violence Sal’s nature, and then used that nature against him in that hotel room in Chicago, when he killed those FBI agents and touched off this whole charade, culminating with Sal Cupertine in a hospital in Las Vegas, the cut-rate plastic surgery that had turned him into Rabbi David Cohen having gone to seed, replaced with some top-shelf shit that turned his face into . . . well, Sal Cupertine.
The Talmud said there was nothing heavier than an empty pocket, but Sal wasn’t sure that was true. He was beginning to believe that the weight of his own reflection was what might eventually put him in the dirt. The government would never stop looking for him. That’s what happens when you kill their agents. He understood that. He’d broken the rules. He would have to pay. Even though he’d been frozen in Las Vegas, building his empire of Jews, he now understood that it was all just playacting at safety. Something bad was always coming for him, and he had to make his move.
Sal understood that what he’d dreamed of before—bringing Jennifer and William to Las Vegas, to Temple Beth Israel—was foolish. The Talmud said that a dream not interpreted is like a letter unread, and Sal had spent much of his time in quarantine pondering just what that particular dream meant, but it was all the same in the end: this shit was worthless without the two people he loved. He didn’t need fucking Freud to come along to figure that out. So that was gone. He would either get away, permanently, or give up. And that last part was not in his nature. It was like asking a shark to go easy on a seal.
Sal Cupertine would handle what he could control. How Rabbi David Cohen managed through this, that would take some work. They were the same man now, Sal had to concede, at least on the face of things.
Anyway, first thing Sal and David and anyone else who popped up inside his crowded head was going to do was go to the cafeteria and get a fucking cheeseburger.
Cheeseburgers weren’t kosher, so if Sal ran into someone from Temple Beth Israel, he’d either quote some made-up portion of the Midrash or stab them in the eye with a fucking spork.
Wanting to avoid spectacularly bad outcomes, he instead put a hooded sweatshirt on over his hospital gown, threw on some sweatpants, and walked out of his room, past the nurses’ station, past a crew installing new lighting and another crew painting over the institutional white walls, turning them into a pleasing butter color, like everything else in the fucking city, and waited for the elevator.
When the doors opened, Bennie Savone was standing there in a suit and tie, like he was coming back from a funeral or a court date.
“Going somewhere?” Bennie asked.
“Yeah,” Sal said. “I’m getting a cheeseburger before everyone on this floor ends up in a body bag. You got a problem with it?”
Bennie stepped to one side. “Floor?” he asked.
“Wherever the cafeteria is.”
Bennie hit a button and the car began to descend.
“I don’t suppose it’s just dumb luck you were on the elevator,” Sal said.
