Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  He’d been listening to the radio for eight hours and he wanted to pretend that he was feeling fine, that he’d seen some shit in this life. That people had shot at him and he’d never been hit. That he should be fucking dead, really. That he always thought he’d end up buried in a field somewhere, if he was lucky enough to get a burial; more likely someone would chop him up into little pieces, because if you catch the Rain Man you’re not going easy on him, and that prepared him for the unexpected things the world might offer. He’d seen pictures and videos of tornados and earthquakes and war and suicide bombers and all that real-life CNN shit. Everyone had. But he’d witnessed a body go off a building. He knew what that looked like. He knew what that sounded like. Most people? They didn’t know. And a part of him thought that witnessing his father that way had turned him into this . . . thing. The Rain Man. A man who doesn’t forget.

  And maybe it did. Played some role, anyway.

  But it got him wondering today, specifically, if everyone was watching the TV, seeing all those bodies hitting the ground? Or even the people in New York. Thousands of them, all seeing that shit. Would there be, after this, thousands of people like him? Millions? Would it devalue what it meant to be a human?

  Like what he’d done today. To a woman. That wasn’t the job.

  That was Sal Cupertine, thinking he didn’t want to go to jail. That was Sal Cupertine, thinking he’d never see his wife or kid again. He’d done it for personal reasons. Not business at all. He’d killed her and he felt . . . not good. Bad, if he was being honest. It took him back to sitting in his father’s car, waiting with his mother, and then, boom, there’s a fucking puddle on the sidewalk. Thirty years he’d been dealing with that puddle of shit.

  Used to be he’d drive five miles out of the way just to avoid seeing the shadow of the IBM Building. But as time went on, the streets of Chicago filled with places he’d rather forget, so he stopped avoiding anything. Jewish custom taught that you should meet all sorrow standing up. Sal Cupertine didn’t know about that shit, but he did it anyway, tried to impart that to his son, tried to show that to Jennifer, that they’d chosen a kind of life and there was no turning back on it now. You did something? Live with it.

  “It’s a great place to live, if you’re wondering.”

  David turned to see a man in a golf cart with a standard poodle sitting beside him. The dog hopped off the seat and ran over to the greenbelt, immediately squatted and pissed. How long had David been standing there, looking at his ersatz house? A minute? Five? His head wasn’t right. He was sure of it now. Or maybe David was just getting soft. Too many days spent listening to people talk about their problems, not enough days solving them. He was getting lax. Letting shit stand that could not stand.

  That wouldn’t do.

  David put his arms across his chest, let his right hand rest on his gun. If this was going to be his day, well, he’d had worse.

  “Looks like it,” David said.

  “The HOA is a bunch of Communists, but you get used to it.” The man was in his seventies, at least. Looked like the kind of guy who was in a former life maybe an airline pilot or a Southern governor. Aviators and a zip-up sweater sporting the logo of the golf course. His golf cart looked like a miniature Bentley, leather seats, dark wood dash, fat tires with rims, the whole deal.

  “You live here full-time?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m a snowbird. Down from Manitoba. Winnipeg.”

  “That so,” David said, an idea taking root.

  “Except now,” he said, “we don’t wait for the snow. Perk of being retired. Go back and forth as I see fit.”

  “You going home soon?”

  “End of the week was the plan,” he said, “but then I saw the news today and me and Mitzy,” he nodded toward the poodle, “are probably going to pack up tomorrow and hit the road. I’ve got an RV, so we’re portable. No sense waiting around for some lunatic to drop a bomb on Reno.”

  “If it’s just the two of you,” David said, giving him a chance, “you should leave now.”

  “Confirmed bachelor,” he said. “Never did see a good reason to get tied down.” The man lifted up his glasses, put them on top of his head, so David tipped his hat down, cast a shadow over his face. “You single?”

  “Married.”

  “Too bad,” the man said. “Surprising amount of tail here. Divorcees. Widows. You fix a sink for one of them, you’re basically in the system. Young guy like you, you’d have your pick.”

  “That’s not me.”

  “That’s every man.” He whistled and Mitzy came bounding across the street, hopped back into the cart. “Anyway. Day like today just confirms the whole world is a bucket of shit,” the man said, like they were in the middle of a different conversation. “I see you work for the government.” He pointed at the license plate. “You got a busy week in front of you. You undercover? CIA or something?”

  “Bureau of Land Management,” David said.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that like?”

  “I enjoy being outside.”

  The man nodded, considering this. “Yeah, but then you got all of those militia people causing trouble to deal with, right? Grazing rights and whatnot? Sovereign nation this, sovereign nation that. We got some of that in Canada, too. French separatists and the kind.”

  “Every country has something.”

  “You won’t be seeing anyone flying planes into buildings in Canada, that’s for sure.” He patted his left hip and that’s when David saw he had a little holster and gun there. Maybe a .22. Good for shooting pheasants. Not much else.

  “You think that will stop a plane?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You should leave,” David said, “while you still can.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s getting worse. But what can you do? Not many undesirables here, even with the golf,” he said. “Anyway, look me up if you buy. I live over on Snead Place.”

  “What number?”

  “Eight two one,” he said. “Got my own block at this point. Bunch of Chinese came in and bought up the other houses. They’re just sitting empty. Prospectors, I guess. Like the Gold Rush, but the Chinese already have all the gold, right?”

  “Maybe I’ll come by later tonight,” David said. “Sure would like to get a look inside one of these before I head back.”

  “Where’s back?”

  “Las Vegas.”

  “Can’t stand the place,” he said. He reached up and scratched at his nose. The skin on his hands was pink and scaly.

  David stripped off his gloves, stuffed them in his pocket, came over to the golf cart, let Mitzy smell him, then he scratched the top of her head, along her neck, made sure she was comfortable with him. She began to lick at his wrist. Good. Passive. He rubbed inside her ears, until she made a cooing sound deep in her throat. He put his face in front of hers, held her head in his hands, let the dog sniff his face, lick his nose. The man turned in his seat, watched the whole show.

  “That dog,” the man said, “would roll over if Charles Manson showed her some attention. Indiscriminate bitch, that one.”

  David could reach over right now, grab that .22, and shoot this asshole in the face. Could tip over the golf cart, crush this old man under it. But he’d probably kill the dog, too. He didn’t want to do that.

  “Seven too late to come by?” David asked. “I need to drop my car back off at work before the boss gets on my ass.”

  “Seven’s fine,” the man said.

  David stood up, snapped his gloves back on. Took back hold of the dog, see if she’d try to wrench out of his grasp with gloves on, but she didn’t. He kissed her on the top of her nose, let her go.

  “Mind if I ask what’s with the gloves?”

  “Psoriasis,” David said.

  “Me, too,” he said, brightening. “Part of why I come down here
in the first place. Weather agrees with my skin.”

  “Nice weather,” David said.

  He patted Mitzy on the back. “You know where to find me. Happy hour starts in five minutes and goes until dawn.” He gave David a wave and pulled off, but then the cart stopped and the guy put it in reverse, rolled back up to David.

  “I’m a real asshole,” he said. “I didn’t even ask your name. I’m Roger.”

  “You can call me Sal,” David said.

  “All right,” he said. Mitzy the poodle turned in her seat and watched David intently as the cart drove off, David thinking Ruben Topaz’s kids were about to get a present and that Mitzy would finally get some unconditional love.

  •

  By five that evening, David was parked across the street from a Walmart Supercenter only a few blocks from Agent Moss’s house. It was in what looked to be a relatively gentrified part of Carson City, a new subdivision hacked into an old neighborhood and surrounded by big-box stores. It was, David thought, a vast improvement. Carson City was another in a series of shitty state capitals David had visited in his life. Springfield? Shithole. Jefferson City? Shithole. Lansing? Shithole. A few years back, he flew to Jamaica and killed five guys in one day in Kingston, and Kingston was a shithole, too. Tonight, parked in the shadow of a closed henna tattoo shop called Inkt, the storefront of a psychic reader, and a Sir Speedy Printing, the news radio scaring the living fuck out of him, David found the sight of the Walmart Supercenter oddly soothing. Civilization kept moving, even when it seemed like it was about to close up shoppe.

  He unplugged Agent Moss’s Blackberry, opened the back panel, slid out the green battery and the SIM card, then dropped the phone on the pavement outside the car, stomped it to pieces, kicked the remnants into the street. He wiped down everything he’d touched inside the car with handy wipes, even though he’d worn gloves the entire time, rolled down all the windows, left the keys in the ignition, put Agent Moss’s suitcase on the front passenger seat, got out, yanked his hat down.

  David walked up the street a few blocks, which had him in an older neighborhood of mismatched houses on pockmarked streets. There was a stop sign covered in gang graffiti a block from a model-home development called Winter River Creek Estates—“estates” apparently now houses on a quarter-acre parcel of scrub, but with parking for a boat or RV that would never materialize—and David had to pause to decipher the codes, figure out just who might be coming around the corner. Not that he was worried. He had his gun. He had his knife. He had more than half of a fucking brain. Street gangsters would spend ten minutes talking shit to you, asking where you were from, who you were with, before deciding if they were gonna jack you, stomp you, shoot you, whatever. David saw someone who even looked vaguely threatening on his walk? He’d put one between their eyes. It wasn’t even a thing. Not today.

  No one seemed to notice David, the sun still out, air hot and sticky, at least eighty, and still, no breeze. Fall was coming up, but in this neighborhood, with the heat pushing up from the concrete, it still felt like a summer.

  Couple more blocks, he was in an area of mixed-use housing, which just meant shitty apartments on top of vintage clothing stores and coffee shops—a new name for living in a fucking tenement above the Goodwill and the greasy spoon—and then a few minutes later, he was back in the glow of the Supercenter, entering the shopping plaza from the opposite direction to where he’d left the Cutlass. The car wouldn’t last an hour by David’s estimation, not with the lot lizards he spied wandering around, the twenty-four-hour Supercenter like a regional hub for trucker speed, runaways, and tweaks of all measures, plus there was a shitload of minivans, Ford trucks, and eight different kinds of cars that looked like Honda Accords, which meant bored teenagers stuck with their parents, who might wander off, see the car, call a friend. Everyone was a potential thief these days.

  David tugged his hat lower. Put a hand to his mouth. Rubbed at his cheeks. His whole face covered, nothing facial recognition would be able to make out, at least not according to what David had learned reading up on the technology, which had become one of his favorite hobbies, second only to figuring out the decomposition rate of the human body and how it could be hastened. A camera might catch him—he was a six-foot-tall white man with a beard, wearing a hat, a big coat. He adjusted his gait, gave himself a slight limp, like a pulled muscle in his hip.

  He was as unmemorable as a hangnail. Perfect.

  There was a greeter standing just inside the door of the store. He was old, white, and had eight hundred stickers and buttons on his blue vest, David thinking about the humps retired out in Sun City, Mob guys from all over the country who’d settled in a master-planned senior citizen community in Las Vegas that had a private movie theater, book clubs, bunco tournaments, pancake breakfasts, even put out a sexy beefcake calendar touting the hotness of men who hadn’t pissed in a single stream in twenty years. Fucks who’d made their bones on shakedowns and loan sharking now cheating at canasta for kicks.

  David craned his head to the right of the greeter, found what he was looking for—the battery disposal bin—next to a display touting discounts on all Hostess items. Walmart getting three and a half bucks to slowly kill small children. Not a job David would take, but everyone had a price.

  There were four cameras pointed at the door.

  Angle was poor, nothing straight on, because the footage was probably being fed into some massive database in Kansas, run through by market researchers once a week, looking for trends, not criminals. Walmart didn’t care if you stole something from their stores. They didn’t want some kind of takeover bullshit, but anything short of that? They half expected it. It made the whole enterprise safe.

  If people thought they could lift some razors or cold medicine without catching a bullet, it built community trust, so crooks would come back when they had money to buy a blender or microwave or a Mr. Coffee. But to Walmart, it was all just a ploy to stop neighborhood assholes from doing a strong-arm robbery. Make the store an important part of the ecosystem, a place you could do a little petty theft and buy your mother a card on her birthday? That made it sanctuary.

  In Chicago, the Family had bars and strip clubs spread out across the region, made sure if the boys wanted to go out and fuck shit up, they’d do it in a friendly establishment, no cops, no unvetted girls. Not that the boys knew that, but Cousin Ronnie understood the omerta didn’t mean shit once most people got loaded or fell in love, most humps not exactly CIA, so they’d end up giving classified intel up for a bit of pussy or a bit of H, so Ronnie, he made sure no one was getting into shit by controlling the flow of people, drugs, and liquor. If you rolled up into Miller’s in Andersonville and weren’t in the Family, they’d let you in, might even let you stay a bit, but the bouncer would have run your driver’s license number, the bartender would have your Visa, and if you stepped out of line, your fucking house would burn down and your credit would be ruined.

  He grabbed a cart. He had a kit to put together. He went through his list. Ax. Bleach. Tarp. Rain pants. He’d get dog food. That would be a nice detail and one he could use. In his mind, Roger was already dead and David was already in his RV driving back to Las Vegas, but he still had to handle that shit. He’d bring the body with him. So he’d need some ice. Best to maybe get that in Dayton afterward. Hard to explain to a cab driver why he needed to put fifty pounds of ice in his trunk, in addition to the ax and whatnot. But that was the only reasonable way to do this, that way David could sell Roger’s parts to LifeCore, make a profit on the deal, give the money—and the dog—to Ruben. See if Gray Beard could use another RV. Or just torch it.

  He dropped Agent Moss’s battery and SIM in the recycle bin, wheeled past the pharmacy, past the display of Halloween costumes and candy, not even the middle of September and everything was orange and black. Past the party supplies, past the office supplies, and into the electronics section, where he thought he’d pick up
a black light before he headed to the garden section, which is where the bulk of his murder kit was housed, David having bought enough kits in Walmart over the years to have a system down. Except this time there was a wall of TVs all tuned to the news, the sound low, New York City exploding over and over again. People were huddled there, their carts overflowing with bottles of water, shotgun shells, lanterns, all manner of camping supplies, more Spam than David had ever seen in one place, the end of the world apparently meaning you had to eat potted meats.

  “What are we waiting for?” a teenager in a backwards red UNLV hat asked the crowd. He was a white kid whose jeans were belted too high, and he was chewing on a straw.

  “President is coming on,” a man in a fake-fur lined denim jacket said. “Everyone else is in an undisclosed location, I guess.”

  The teenager nodded. Flipped his hat around. Bent the bill nervously, turned the hat back around. Gnawed on his straw.

  A few seconds later, when the president appeared on the screen looking like a guy who wasn’t even supposed to come in that day, a young black guy in a blue vest walked up with a remote control, turned up the volume on the biggest TV—a 50-inch LCD—and everyone pushed a little closer.

  David hadn’t voted, of course. Never had. He wasn’t real fond of this guy, wasn’t real fond of the last guy . . . or the guy before that . . . or the guy before that, but he wasn’t real fond of anyone who worked in the government.

  He had operated under the belief that you could walk up and shoot a guy in the back of the head in public because people couldn’t make sense of it. And if they could—if they were an off-duty cop or had been in Desert Storm or Vietnam or Korea or some covert ops shit—no one was inclined to get involved with a motherfucker who’d kill a person in broad daylight. It wasn’t the order of things. Maybe the whole world was becoming like that.

  David, though, was always watching, because Cousin Ronnie had taught him that calamity was an opportunity. Extortion and rackets worked only when people felt like there was no one to enforce the laws. This shit in New York would have Chicago going bananas.