“Alcohol will kill the germs.” Kristy didn’t think that was true, strictly speaking, but Jacob clearly looked like he was going through some shit. “That story, about the boy, is that true?”
It wasn’t. “Probably see it on 20/20 next week,” she said.
“Me? I don’t get down with that shit, you know that.” Not anymore, anyway, Kristy did know that much. Jacob’s girlfriend disappeared under mysterious circumstances a year before. Since then, he’d been off of Kristy’s radar entirely, save for when she went to Odessa for a meal. “My father, that’s his business. I’m trying to live a better life now.”
“I’m not asking you to flip on your father,” Kristy said.
“I give you a name, you work it around a bit, you’ll get what you need, but you and me, we’re done. No more free lunches. Someone will blow up Odessa and then that will be war. Anonymous tip.”
“Fine,” Kristy said.
He took her notepad and pen, flipped to a blank page, wrote something, closed it, downed his scotch, stood up. “This place was a dump,” he said. “I’ll miss it.”
Once he was gone, Kristy found Jacob’s chicken scratch: Jerry Ford.
LIFECORE WAS LOCATED ON THE CORNER OF BONANZA AND LAS VEGAS Boulevard in the husk of an abandoned Safeway, only half a mile from Las Vegas Metro headquarters. Kristy could see the ghost of the grocery store’s logo embedded in the terra-cotta beneath the organ bank’s blinking blue neon sign, even medical facilities needing that hint of bling these days. The parking lot was stone empty, except for a tilting palm tree planted in a concrete island, a box marked “FREE Clean Needles!” on the ground beside a towering streetlight, and Jerry Ford’s Mercedes, parked diagonally across three spaces in front of the clinic. It was nearly midnight. Kristy had called Ford’s home number, but when there was no answer, she took a gamble and came to his office.
Kristy hadn’t spent much time in this part of town, which was surprising since it was only three miles from the FBI field office, but she didn’t have much of a reason to hang out in the city’s old graveyard district, miles of dead Las Vegans interred on what used to be the edge of town but was now smack in the middle. Once, though, she stopped to check out the grave of Sonny Liston, her father’s favorite boxer. Kristy thought it would be some ornate affair, but it was just a flat gravestone carrying Liston’s given name—Charles “Sonny” Liston—his dates—1932 to 1970—and a simple statement: A Man. There were fresh flowers and an American flag resting on the grave.
The Jews held prime property in the old joints, Moe Dalitz made sure of that, but now, instead of rolling sand dunes, they stared at the Neon Graveyard and a skate park covered in North Town Gangster Crips and East Side 13 Killers tags, the two gangs fighting for streets they’d never own, streets that in a few years would probably be condos and townhouses and Quiznos franchises. Could be Las Vegas would do like San Francisco and move all the graves out of official city limits, or at least the headstones, pave this shit over and build a stadium.
Shitty as it was, this area was only five miles from the fountains of the Bellagio, ten miles to Temple Beth Israel, thirteen miles and you were swimming in the deep end of the pool at Kristy’s condo, but right here? You could be in any city in any state. Chicago. Rochester. Detroit. Didn’t matter. They all ended up taking on the same veneer. Kristy used to not care about such things, but now it seemed like another symptom of the world’s bigger problems. She spent years in military intelligence battling drug cartels around the world, ended up in the FBI taking on organized crime in all its guises, and now . . . they were giving away clean needles in a parking lot in Las Vegas. There was no drug war. Not really. It was just people trying to earn a living, earn a dying, or earn an imprisonment. It was useless. It would always be useless.
Kristy got out of her car, walked over to Jerry’s Benz, half expecting to see Jerry slumped over with a bullet through the back of his head, but all she found was a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the holder, and Jerry’s cell phone charger sitting on the dash.
Kristy put a hand on the hood.
Cold.
“You with the Jews?”
Kristy looked up. Next door to the old Safeway was a five-story apartment building called the Silver Suites, which wasn’t silver, and Kristy doubted the suites part, too. A young man stood out front wearing a puffy white-and-red UNLV jacket, even though it wasn’t cold. He walked across the parking lot, stood on the other side of the Mercedes.
“You could say that,” Kristy said.
“Mr. Ford said you might be by. This is for you,” UNLV said. He had a slight accent, like maybe he’d come over from Russia as a kid and still hadn’t lost the lilt of the language. He slid a manilla envelope across the hood, Kristy catching it before it hit the ground. Kristy opened it up. It was filled with cash. Maybe fifty grand. “Said it was a bonus for February.”
“When was this?”
“Couple days ago. Friday.”
Shit. It was Sunday morning now.
Kristy stared at this kid. He was maybe twenty-two. So not a kid. A young man. When Kristy was twenty-two, how many bodies did she have on her sheet? A dozen? Twenty? Four years of service at that point. All of it legal, of course, but it didn’t stop her from thinking she’d done some horrible things for the government, if not by her own hand then by saying, “Kill this man.” “Kill this woman.” “The subject can be found here. He should be neutralized.” She’d do that and then get dinner afterward, and it was just a day at the office.
She imagined killing this kid. Of having the easy compunction to take a life, even now.
It was impossible. And yet, Matthew Drew was dead. A man she talked to days ago. Sal Cupertine was out there, somewhere, still putting bodies in the ground. There were ten thousand bodies in a cemetery that should only have a few hundred, maybe a thousand. Where was the value of a human life?
Now this kid. Who thought she was a bagwoman for flesh.
“Anyone else show up?” Kristy asked.
“Nope.”
“You’ve been sitting here watching, 24-7?”
“I got spotters,” he said. “Someone showed up, they’d get me.”
Kristy looked past the kid. A window on the third floor was open. A little girl, maybe eight, watched, a camera in her hands.
“That your kid?”
“Niece.”
“She takes a photo of me,” Kristy said, “I’m going to have everyone in that building under arrest before breakfast.”
The kid put two fingers in his mouth, eyes still on Kristy, and whistled. The window closed. The blinds went down.
“You a cop?” he asked.
“You a UNLV student?” When the kid didn’t answer, Kristy said, “How do you know Jerry?”
“I do favors for him.”
“How long?”
“Couple years.”
