The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  Which he was largely able to do . . .

  . . . save for shit like this right here.

  Ronnie had inherited Dandy Tommy’s used-car dealerships and was now turning them out, expanding into Detroit, thinking about maybe getting into new cars, too, hooking up with Ford, the real money in ripping people off legitimately, jacking up repair costs on Mustangs, recommending custom paint jobs on Granadas. Which meant Billy periodically had to do jobs that he found distasteful, and frankly beneath his rank, but which needed to be handled with a bit more sensitivity.

  Ronnie wanted to own Randall Dover’s Chrysler dealership, but Dover wasn’t inclined to sell, no matter how much Ronnie offered, no matter how many veiled threats were made. Dover was one of those old-school Chicago guys who thought he was tough because he watched the Bears and knew how to stay warm in the winter, could maybe handle himself in a bar fight because he knew no one was going to pull out a gun and put one in his head, had enough money that he was always threatening to sue people, but nothing was really life-or-death to people like this asshole, it was just Business and Family and Jesus on Sundays when there wasn’t Football.

  So Randall Dover rolled into the Lamplighter for a drink, maybe not knowing it was a Family-affiliated bar, but probably not giving a fuck, because on top of everything else he was sixty-five years old, and no one really fucked with old guys, as a general rule. Twenty minutes later Billy got the call to grab up Germaio and see if he could talk some sense into Dover, and if not, bring the dog fucker to Ronnie. Which would have all been fine except Dover got mouthy in the backseat of Billy’s Buick, talking about how he knew Germaio’s mother, how they went to school together, how he was going to sue her, take her house, put her on the street, which got Germaio to pistol-whipping the cocksucker, and next thing, the fucker had a stroke or a heart attack and by the time they realized what was happening, he was limp as a dick and dark blue.

  And he still hadn’t sold his dealership.

  Seemed like a dumb thing to die for, and an even dumber thing to go to prison for, Billy not inclined to spend his last days on earth staring out at this very subdivision for a fucking car dealership Ronnie coveted. The subdivision, called River View Estates, was being built to coincide with an expected expansion of the prison, Joliet the kind of town that applauded increased crime numbers elsewhere in the state, because more motherfuckers in prison meant more jobs. More jobs, more houses. More houses, more cars. More cars, more traffic cops. More traffic cops, more people in county jail. More people in county jail, a bigger county jail would be needed, which meant more jobs for union carpenters and millwrights, all of whom kicked up to The Family, the whole thing a self-perpetuating cycle.

  “When is sunrise?” Germaio asked.

  Billy looked at his watch. It was close to four in the morning. He told Arlene to be ready to go by ten. Everything went as planned, it would be fine. “Another ninety minutes,” Billy said. He kneeled down, gave the grave a good once-over. “That motherfucker in the trunk isn’t a midget, either, so get some length on this.”

  “He’ll bend,” Germaio said. He was soaking wet in his own sweat.

  “Into thirds?” Billy said. Germaio was about a hundred pounds overweight, so behind his back everyone called him either Fats or Tits, but to his face, they kept quiet owing to the fact that Germaio Moretti was a fucking lunatic, the kind of guy who kicked women and pulled out snitches’ tongues and pissed on hookers just for fun, or at least that was the legend. Billy didn’t think Germaio did much of anything these days but pant out of his mouth like a dog, given how fat his neck was, air wheezing out of him even when he was perfectly still. Billy tried to imagine strangling him, tried to figure out how he’d get his hands around Germaio’s throat, but couldn’t work out the geometry, nor could he accurately calculate the amount of force needed for the job. “Another foot deep, too.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Germaio said, but he got back to digging.

  After another five minutes, Billy took a final drag from his cigarette, squeezed it out between his thumb and forefinger, stuck the butt in his pocket, took out his car keys, jingled them so Germaio would turn around. “I’m gonna back the car up,” Billy said. “Keep digging.”

  “Eat a dick,” Germaio wheezed out. Or at least that’s what Billy thought he heard. It was hard to make out much of anything since Germaio was almost six feet underground and the only part of him above the dirt was the back of his fat fucking head.

  The level of disrespect was higher than usual, but Billy recognized they were in a heightened situation, that Germaio was dealing with the complexities of a situation possibly beyond his limited fucking intellectual capabilities.

  Not that it really mattered.

  Dark Billy Cupertine was about five hours from getting out.

  For the last year, he’d pinched where he could: skimmed fourteen grand from a heroin deal with the Windsor clan up north; collected on a fifty-G debt from a mark named Victor Noe, crushed his throat using only one hand, Victor so coke sick he probably did him a favor, drove his body all the way out to Devil’s Kitchen Lake, way off Route 57, dumped him out, told everyone the motherfucker had skipped, then took his damn house, too; shook down some old folks in Little Ukraine, basic shit, thug shit, but whatever. He had a number in mind and after last week, he finally made it: $300K in cash, plus five guns, enough ammo to outlast most cops, stuffed in the trunk of his convertible DeVille in the garage at home, built into a contraption underneath the spare tire. He wouldn’t be able to get to the guns fast, so he had one in the dash, too, but if the cops pulled him over, they’d need to pile through his wife Arlene’s suitcases and his son Sal’s toys, dump everything out on the side of the road to find anything incriminating.

  No one was going to do that, not to someone with the last name Cupertine.

  No. They’d just shoot him the face. So if someone pulled him over, well, it wouldn’t get to that point. Dark Billy Cupertine was a dead man already; killing a cop on the way to his new life wouldn’t matter in the long run.

  But . . . well, it would be a complication, and Billy was in a place where complications would not do, like being party to senseless murder on his last day out, which is why when he got into the front seat of his ’68 Buick Riviera, given to him right off the lot from one of Ronnie’s dealerships, he rolled slowly back to the lip of the grave, made sure Germaio was right where he left him, and then slammed the gas pedal to the floor and chopped the motherfucker’s head off.

  BILLY DIDN’T GET back to his house until almost seven. After he located Germaio’s head—it had landed where the living room would eventually be—he dumped it into the hole, followed by Randall Dover’s body, then refilled the grave. By the end of the week, the grave would be covered by a foundation pour and then, eventually, an attached garage. Everyone getting attached garages these days, no one willing to walk ten feet out into the cold if they didn’t have to.

  He drove up 355, stopped behind a shopping center being built out in Bolingbrook, threw his shoes and jacket in a dumpster, then set it on fire, watched it for a couple minutes, made sure everything burned, headed back to his place in Alta Vista Terrace, slid into bed as Arlene was winking awake. “Give me twenty minutes,” he told her, but she let him sleep until nine.

  He pulled himself from bed, took a shower, got the last of the dirt and blood from under his nails, got busy packing the rest of his vacation-wear, then had a thought. He opened the top drawer of his dresser, reached behind the socks he’d left behind, found what he was looking for: brass knuckles. They were fifty years old. Maybe seventy-five. Belonged to his grandfather, Anthony Cupertine, then handed down to Billy’s father, Black Jack Cupertine, and then Billy took them out of Black Jack’s pocket before they put him in the ground.

  Going on eleven years ago now.

  A heart attack on a golf course in Tampa.

  No one found Black Jack for two days; the poor fucker had collapsed in a sand trap, then sat there dead dur
ing a tropical squall. Meanwhile half of Chicago descended on Florida looking for him, everyone thinking he’d been abducted, was about to be ransomed a tooth at a time, only to have him found by a groundskeeper.

  Black Jack decided to hit eighteen on his own, no bodyguards, died in fucking plaid pants.

  The indignity.

  Cupertine men had been beating the shit out of people in Chicago for a very long time, and here was Black Jack Cupertine taking his dirt nap with a golf club in his hand, a load of death shit in his plaid pants, bugs already eating his face when he was finally located. That transferred power to Black Jack’s brother, Dandy Tommy, and then onto his son, Ronnie, which turned Billy Cupertine into The Spare.

  Maybe if Billy had been a different kind of guy, none of this would have mattered. He could have earned a living, had a nice family, been content. But the problem with being The Spare was that there was always someone thinking about making a move, and the first move would always be to take Billy out, no use killing Ronnie if there was someone else waiting in the wings, Billy also aware that the only people who called him Dark Billy were members of his own crew.

  Motherfuckers in Miami and Detroit and Memphis? They called him The Spare, big fucking jokers, each.

  Fact was, though? It was true. That knowledge fucked with Billy Cupertine.

  Billy slid the knuckles on, made a fist. They felt smooth. Comfortable. His son, Sal, wasn’t gonna grow up to be a pussy, but Billy would be damned if he’d be out breaking legs for a living, either. He was too smart for that. Ten years old and already reading adult books, getting into his grandmother’s stash of Harold Robbins, but had to act dumb around his friends, retards like Germaio’s son Monte down the block, who couldn’t tie his shoes until he was seven, had to get his stomach pumped after swallowing a handful of nickels. Sal could probably run the whole Family’s finances right now, figure out decent investments, get everyone clean and legit. Maybe make a lawyer or a doctor or banker, help people.

  What had Billy ever done? Created a network for pushing heroin. Killed maybe ten guys on his own. Twelve now. Could be more. He didn’t dwell on it, because what was the use? Heroin killed more, that was sure. Made his cousin Ronnie and before that, Ronnie’s father Dandy Tommy, rich. Yeah, he’d done fine, too. Had a good life, apart from living with the fear that every single day someone was going to get the drop on him. Not that the fear bothered him—it kept him sharp—rather it was the idea that it would somehow infect his wife, his kid. He’d picked this life. He’d decided to look over his shoulder in every room he entered. But having a kid changed him. Made The Spare shit more acute. Because if Billy was The Spare, what was Sal? Every day that he came home with some motherfucker’s blood on his hands and he saw his son playing with his Army men, it was like getting stabbed with a dull knife.

  Billy’s experience, you could live with a stab wound. But then eventually, infection would get you. Eaten up from the inside.

  “Are you about ready, honey?”

  Billy turned around and saw Arlene standing in the doorway. She had on a sundress, her shoulders bare, a little sweater in her right hand.

  “One sec,” Billy said. He slipped the brass knuckles into his pocket. Once they got where they were going, he’d bury them along with every other trace of their old life. Three hundred thousand dollars wasn’t a fortune. But it was enough to put some real estate between him and the rest of the Family, the plan being to get to Arizona by the end of the week. He’d decided on Sedona after watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie called Broken Arrow one night on WTTW. Jimmy Stewart played an ex-solider named Jeffords sent to talk Cochise into peace. He spends most of the movie staring out at the Sedona landscape and trying to figure out how to keep the U.S. military and a piss-angry Geronimo—who would have made a good capo—from wrecking a fragile détente. Hotheads on both sides would get them all killed, Cochise and Jeffords knew, so everything was a fucking negotiation, good men caught up in the mire just out of association, the red rocks watching all of it, not going anywhere, proof enough that history could outlast the foolishness of men. Billy thought Jimmy Stewart was a bit of a bitch in most cases, but he liked Broken Arrow, liked the message, liked how Jeffords ended up living with Cochise until he died, how the Indians in the movie weren’t portrayed as animals, just people who had a code.

  “Sal is already in the car,” Arlene said. She was under the impression that the three of them were driving out to Lake Geneva for a week. Get out of the broiling city. They had a favorite spot they liked to go to around this time every year. Shuffleboard and mint drinks and magazines and dime-store thrillers.

  First they’d drive south, all the way to Texas. Eighteen hours. He had a guy in Austin with fresh identification for them all. Billy would take care of him, get rid of his body, no witnesses, and then they’d keep moving, get to Flagstaff, another fifteen hours, put the family up in a hotel for a few days, then prospect out to Sedona, find a house.

  “For how long?”

  Arlene looked at her watch. “Fifteen, twenty minutes,” she said. “He tried to sleep in the backseat last night. Went in to kiss him goodnight and couldn’t find him. Nearly had a stroke, Billy. I thought someone took him, you know?”

  This got Billy to laugh. That kid. He was like a dog. You couldn’t say certain words around him or else he’d start jumping around. Once he knew there was a car trip, every day he’d ask when they were leaving, and it didn’t matter the answer because he had no sense of time. Everything was right now for Sal.

  “Sorry,” Billy said. “I didn’t expect to be out all night. One thing led to another and it was dawn.”

  Arlene waved him off. She knew who he was. “You’re here now,” she said. “And I get you to myself for the next week.”

  He stepped across the bedroom and kissed her lightly. She tasted like cigarettes, but not in a bad way. “The car all packed?”

  “Only thing missing is you,” she said.

  He’d tell her once they were on the highway. Maybe she’d fight him at first—she had a sister, her mother was still alive, she had friends, a life—but the reality was that Arlene would do what Billy said. Because she didn’t want to wash someone’s blood off his clothes any more than he did. Not anymore.

  “We gotta make one stop,” Billy said.

  FOR THE LAST four years, Dark Billy Cupertine and his cousin, and de facto boss, Ronnie Cupertine, had a standing date on the top floor of the IBM building being constructed between Wabash and State. At first that just meant going up a couple rickety floors to where Family-connected contractors were pouring concrete, but now it meant making a trip up fifty-two stories of anodized black aluminum to the last bit of open construction. The building was set to open by fall and already the city was hailing it as an architectural wonder, a monolith of power and money, as if Wall Street had been cut and pasted right in the middle of the broad shoulders of Chicago, the city never content to just be Chicago, always needing to compare itself to New York. A perpetual small-dick problem was how Billy thought of it, but the fact was it infected how The Family did business, too, constantly worried that some Gambino fuck was going to show up and muscle them out of their territory. His father and grandfather had built The Family into its own thing, beholden to no one, but Ronnie, he had different ideas.

  He was connecting to LA and Memphis, had some Florida shit going on, plus their continued interests in Las Vegas, maybe even some offshore shit in the future, Ronnie always going on about how if The Family was going to survive Nixon, half of their muscle in a fucking jungle in Vietnam, the other half in prison, it had to treat its business like McDonald’s, put up shop wherever there wasn’t somebody else. It was some shit he’d read in a book somewhere. So Ronnie had The Family going into small towns and blowing up what were effectively mom-and-pop shops, digging graves in Omaha to get into the meat business, which was really just a way to get access to big rigs for moving product across state lines, greasing small-town cops to look the other way on
gambling setups around college football season, which was how they were getting into the extortion game with wealthy farmers, Billy thinking it was all too much, that McDonald’s got fries and burgers right, which is why they didn’t fuck with hot dogs.

  All this other stuff? It was hot-dog business. It was how they were going to get caught, Billy thought. Or how Ronnie was, anyway.

  “What an eyesore,” Arlene said when they pulled up beside the construction entrance to 330 Wabash. Workers milled around a roach coach, sipping coffee, eating sweet rolls, bullshitting. It was just after ten thirty in the morning, but due to the heat, workers had been pounding nails since five a.m. Billy had the top down on their convertible and Arlene had her head craned back to see the top of the building.

  “Yeah,” Billy said. In his view, the IBM building looked like a big black thumb.

  “Why does Ronnie like to meet here?”

  “Only place he knows where no one is listening,” Billy said.

  Arlene sighed. “He thinks Eliot Ness is waiting on top of the Sears Tower with a stenographer?”

  “The Sears Tower is 110 stories,” Sal said from the backseat.

  “That right?” Billy said. He looked at him in the rearview mirror, Sal busy with a coloring book. The Sears Tower had just opened a few months earlier, but already Sal was obsessed with it.

  “That’s eight stories taller than the Empire State Building,” Sal said. “And fifty-eight stories taller than this will be.”

  Arlene had given Sal a book called Great Skyscrapers for Christmas and every night for the last six months, he’d read the damn thing before falling asleep. The only thing Sal didn’t know was who was buried under every building. Maybe he’d become an architect? The guy who designed the IBM building had died before they even started putting rebar down and yet this fucking thumb would be here another, what? Hundred years? Two hundred? How long did skyscrapers last these days? Wouldn’t that be something. A Cupertine who came to Chicago and built something that lasted for a hundred years and no one got killed because of it.