Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  Then there was whoever would eventually come looking for Agent Moss’s killer, plus every other person he’d killed in Chicago. It wasn’t even about law enforcement, really. It was about motherfuckers with sons. Motherfuckers with brothers. Motherfuckers, far and wide, everyone would want a piece of Sal Cupertine once they knew he was out there, on the run.

  Or maybe tomorrow the rest of America would be under attack. Tanks rolling across the prairie and shit. Everything Red Dawn.

  Fuck it.

  David hit 9, then dialed his home number. It was about seven in Chicago. Jennifer would be home. William would be home. He’d tell her he was coming, not to worry, and then he’d get off the line. By the time the FBI went through their wires, the whole family would be in the wind. He only needed a day. He had the sense the FBI was going to be busy for at least a week. Maybe a month. Maybe more. If there was one day to call home, it was today. David suspected that today, Sal Cupertine didn’t seem like such a big fucking deal.

  The phone picked up and David started talking immediately. “It’s me,” he said, but before he could continue, he was interrupted.

  “We’re sorry. You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this number in error, please check the number and try your call again.”

  He hung up, called again. Same thing. One more time. Same thing.

  Jennifer wouldn’t change the phone number. She knew he would contact her again. She knew how the game worked. You waited. When no message came, that was still a message.

  David peered outside at the smoking girl. She was on her phone now, too. Smoking and talking and pacing. She was maybe halfway through her cigarette.

  He looked through the sliding glass doors, back into the Walmart. People milled about. It could be any day of the year. It could be any day of their lives.

  He could call Jennifer’s cell phone.

  He didn’t want to, because he knew the FBI could clone those phones with no problem, you’d think you were calling one number, but you were really calling a phone bank in Quantico. There were fewer regulations on cell phones, something to do with the law not catching up to the technology, and really, for someone like Sal Cupertine’s wife, they probably weren’t terribly concerned about any violation of civil rights.

  But it was just a Walmart calling.

  They’d let that go right through.

  Take one look at the number and decide they didn’t want to get patched into a credit card call center and end up in conversation with some asshole in Pakistan speaking Pashto/English. Not today.

  Fuck it.

  One ring.

  Two.

  David imagined Jennifer fumbling through her purse, looking for her phone.

  Three.

  He’d be fast. He’d tell her to turn the bath on and just let it run all night, let it flood the house. First thing in the morning, take William to some reasonably nice hotel—Courtyard Inn in Highland Park, the Residence Inn in Evanston, somewhere like that—check in, use your real name, put down your credit card, make it obvious, call the home insurance company, make a claim and an appointment for the next day, all of it a minor horror, but that’s why you have insurance, for when your kid turns on a faucet and floods your house. Have that exact conversation, which would be recorded, because insurance companies record all their calls, because they expect everyone is trying to defraud them. Order a pizza, get it delivered. Let people see you. FBI, if they gave a shit, wouldn’t have the resources to get the Courtyard Inn tapped, wouldn’t have someone in Highland Park ready to sit on a hotel all day, since that would really be three to six guys, a car in the front, a car in the back, maybe a car watching the parking lot, all when obviously it was just your average homeowner calamity. They’d track her credit cards, maybe even use whatever construction crew was about to come fix everything to get some fiber optics inside the house, but in truth, what the fuck had Jennifer done? Nothing.

  Which meant they’d do nothing. There were actual bad guys out there, blowing up buildings and shit.

  Four rings and David was telling her that the next day, she’d go to the Chili’s in the parking lot, because there was always a Chili’s in the parking lot, get a booth, order lunch, normal day. Pay, walk out, and there’d be an RV in the parking lot. Inside would be the future. She’d have to trust him. They were going to make this work.

  Five rings.

  Six.

  Seven.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  And then . . . nothing.

  No voice mail. Just a disconnection.

  He put his finger on the hook, kept the receiver in his hand. Thought: That’s not what happens. A phone doesn’t stop ringing. If there’s no voice mail, you get a message that says the user doesn’t have voice mail set up. If the service has been disconnected, it says the number is out of service. Cell phones don’t just ring into eternity . . . and then stop.

  He could call again to be sure.

  But.

  No. He was Sal Cupertine. He wasn’t a guy who fucked up the small things.

  Oh, sure, he fucked up a couple big things, but a small thing, that’s how people ended up fucking dead. Big things you could construct a plan around. A small thing, that came apart fast.

  “Any luck?”

  David looked up. It was the smoking girl.

  “No,” he said. He wiped down the phone using his sleeve, hung it up, the girl watching him with a interested look on her face. “I’ve got a cold.”

  “It’s cool,” she said. She put her apron back on. “I hope everything is okay. With your family. My mom is freaked.”

  In the distance, David heard a siren. It wasn’t for him. There was always an emergency somewhere. He knew that. His wife and son were gone. He knew that, too.

  13

  Matthew Drew unloaded his Glock into the motherfucker in front of him. Fifteen shots, center mass, filling the same hole over and over again. He popped out the clip, reloaded. Fifteen more into the forehead, the eyes, through the mouth. Set the Glock aside. Went to his case, got out his .300 Winchester Magnum. Pushed his targets back thirty feet. Worked on single-shot accuracy for fifteen minutes. Head shot. Body shot. Head shot. This motherfucker dies. That motherfucker is paralyzed. This other motherfucker never eats solid food again. Getting that repetition down, snapping off shots. Loose now. Went for his AR-15. Sprayed those motherfuckers. Took them all out. Everyone was dead. Men, women, and children. Matthew Drew did not give a fuck. You were in the Family? You were fucking dead.

  Back to the Glock.

  Back to the Win Mag.

  Back to the AR-15.

  When his hour was up, Matthew took off his safety glasses and earplugs, packed up his guns and his ammo, zipped everything into the slate-gray travel case the FBI gave all new agents when they completed training. The seal was right there on the side: Fidelity. Integrity. Bravery. He wasn’t FBI anymore. Which was fine. That shit never did apply.

  Matthew looked down the line. The shooting range at Second Amendment Sports Club, all the way out in an industrial park in Des Plaines, was doing big business today. Twenty people setting it off. Nines. ARs. .357s. Men. Women. All ages, other than children. White. Black. Asian. Latino. Behind him, lingering in the teak-and-leather waiting area nestled behind the triple-paned safety glass, were another dozen, waiting their turns. Flat-screen TVs ran ESPN and FOX News. Middle of a Monday afternoon and it was like a sports bar on Sunday.

  He hefted the bag of guns up over his shoulder, made his way out, exiting through the retail space, past the glassed-in racks of guns for sale, past the leather jackets, past the target-practice posters—clowns with hatchets in their hands, zombies, white men, black men, Asian men—past ammo displays, past the T-shirts, past posters of women in bikinis holding AKs. He look
ed every single person he crossed paths with in the eye, made them look away. Everyone was a suspect. Everyone would always be a suspect.

  A few months ago, in that casino bathroom, Matthew thought he was looking infinity in the eye. But now he knew the difference. Infinity wasn’t boredom. Infinity wasn’t ennui. Infinity was grief. He was always opening that trunk. He was always seeing his sister’s severed head. He was always in that moment right after, Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba pulling him away, telling him not to look, to close his eyes. The German shepherd howling, the bomb tech throwing up, Agent Wilmore’s radius bone popped through his flesh. All of it, over and over again.

  If only he’d listened.

  He’d been back in Chicago for a week, after the police finally unsealed Nina’s apartment. Nearly two months of fruitless investigation later and Matthew was able to clean her stuff out, get his shit out, too, including the rest of his guns, though they never did find the Glock he’d given Nina. The coroner released what they’d found of Nina’s body a few days later, so she could be buried back home in Maryland. Matthew and his mother flew back with her body in the luggage compartment of a Delta flight into Dulles; then, the next day, they laid her down beside Matthew’s father. Dad had purchased the family plot years ago, and the day they put Nina in the ground, Matthew couldn’t stop staring at his own tombstone, already in place, his name and birthdate right there. The only thing missing was his body and date of expiration, though he felt like the cemetery could save some time and just finish the job now, make it the same as Nina’s: September 8, 2001. Though, fact was, that date was probably wrong.

  Cops had figured out a basic timeline of her death. She’d made it to class that Friday morning; cameras in the parking lot tracked her walking onto campus at 9:26, back out at 11:17, her classmates corroborated seeing her, her professor reported that she’d waited after class to ask a question about a paper that was due in a few weeks. Nothing out of the ordinary. Her last electronic trace was at 12:39 p.m. when she used her debit card at Lou Mitchell’s Diner, where she paid for a Royal Burger Delight, a Diet Coke, and an oatmeal raisin cookie for lunch. Her waitress reported that she ate alone, as she often did, Lou Mitchell’s the kind of place where eating alone was normal. Her next class was at 2:30. She never made it. A day later, a woman walking her dog noticed tire tracks going into a retention pond below a frontage road, walked down to the shore, and saw the car submerged in about twenty feet of water. The inside of the car had been blasted with bleach and hydrogen peroxide in heavy doses, probably through a hose, which meant whoever had the car wasn’t in a place where they felt comfortable torching it, even though they set fire to his sister. The coroner estimated that Nina had been dead for at least a day before she was put into Matthew’s trunk sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, the eighth, while he slept. He’d driven from his shitty studio apartment all the way to the casino and hadn’t even noticed anything was amiss. But why would he? The perpetrators didn’t even need to break into the car: Nina kept Matthew’s spare keys and alarm fob on her keyring. And since Matthew didn’t have underground parking, all they had to do was walk up, pop the trunk, and dump a duffel bag filled with pieces of his kid sister inside. It would have taken fifteen seconds. Maybe less. She was only five foot two. Weighed 110 pounds. They hadn’t even managed to get her whole body in the trunk. Final inventory said she was missing a leg.

  Matthew’s mom didn’t need to know. No one did. And the feds wouldn’t put that out into the world. The story everyone got was that Nina had been carjacked, that her body had been found in her own car. A tragedy. But in Chicago? It was a local news tragedy, if it made the news at all.

  Which it hadn’t. Nina had the ignominy of being murdered three days before the biggest terrorist attack ever on American soil. Even more, the FBI didn’t want to acknowledge the murder lest they tip off the Family or the Gangster 2-6 or the Chuyalla or the Native Mob or the tweak that had been hired for the job, if they were able to pull some quick evidence. Instead, that day, they busted up the illegal sports book, took fifteen Native Mob guys into custody for a variety of minor offenses, but with the maximum number of press photos of them being cuffed and dragged out of the hotel. Matthew’s car was loaded onto a wrecker, and the whole investigation happened off-site. A bullet point showed up about Nina’s car being pulled out of the pond in the local paper with a request for anyone with information to contact CrimeStoppers, but Nina Drew’s murder was never reported. Her obituary ran in Chicago and Maryland, but none of her Chicago friends made it out. No one was getting on a plane these days.

  Matthew pushed through the gun shop’s double doors and into the afternoon light. It was the last week of October. He was due to fly back to Chevy Chase in a few days. He wasn’t sure that was going to happen. Ronnie Cupertine was still in a Chicago hospital. Alive. Matthew could finish that job. Then he’d start moving through the Family systematically. Then the Native Mob. Then the Gangster 2-6. Then maybe he’d fly to Detroit, put one in Kirk Biglione. That fat fuck had to know something . . .

  By the time he got to the parking lot, Matthew had killed two hundred men, which was too bad, since Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba was standing beside the rental, reading the newspaper. Matthew hit the key to unlock the car, which got Poremba’s attention.

  “You’re a little far from home,” Matthew said.

  “So are you,” Poremba said.

  “Yeah, well,” Matthew said, “I didn’t want to go anywhere I might run into someone I know. End up shooting them.”

  “Then you should look in your rearview mirror more often,” Poremba said.

  “You here to give me some good news?” Matthew asked.

  “No,” Poremba said. “I’m not even here.” He put down the paper, moved aside so Matthew could open the back passenger door. Matthew had rented a red Cadillac Seville STS, like his father used to drive. The feds still had his Mustang. They could keep it. Matthew tossed his bag in the backseat. “There somewhere we can talk?” Poremba asked.

  “I’m pretty busy,” Matthew said. He closed the door and leaned against it, arms crossed.

  “I see that,” Poremba said. “You practicing or gearing up?”

  “Little bit of both, I guess,” Matthew said.

  Poremba watched Matthew for a moment. “You have anyone to talk to, Matthew? Priest or therapist or something?”

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “It’s confidential,” Poremba said. “I’ve seen someone in the past.”

  “I go in and tell a priest my problems, he’ll end up in a cornfield somewhere. No thanks.”

  “You on anything?”

  “I got some Ambien to help me sleep,” Matthew said. “But I haven’t been taking it.” After a while, he asked, “What are you doing out here? I thought you’d be long gone.”

  “Tying up some things,” Poremba said. “I’ve been back and forth between Quantico and New York. Hopefully back here before too long, but I don’t know. They’re moving everyone from Organized Crime to Terrorism, at least for the time being. We need to get these guys trained up on some of the observational measures we’ve been using, see if it transfers over. Domestically, at any rate.”

  “Wilmore, too?”

  “Already gone. All the section heads are getting called back to base. See where we can best be utilized. Personally, I’m hoping to get on a crew looking at the movement of the hijackers and the money, something I’m good at, but we’ll see.”

  “How’s his wrist?”

  “He’s got another month before they take the pins out,” Poremba said.

  “Sorry about that,” Matthew said. He was. Kind of.

  “I’ll tell him that.” Poremba waved the newspaper in his hand, rolled it up into a cylinder. “It’s all political now. End result is Chicago will be gutted for a while.”

  Matthew wasn’t surprised.

  �
��You even read the Patriot Act?” Matthew asked.

  “No,” Poremba said. “I doubt anyone has.”

  “I read it,” Matthew said.

  Poremba raised his eyebrows. “It’s three hundred and fifty pages of small print.”

  “I told you I’m not sleeping,” Matthew said.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “It’s a taxpayer-funded protection scheme,” Matthew said. “Give up all your liberties, we’ll keep you safe.”

  “Maybe that’s what we’ve needed all along.”

  “Would my sister still be alive?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “We get access to more cameras? Get on more phones? It wouldn’t hurt. Track money with less difficulty, without a warrant? That wouldn’t hurt either. Be less chance some clerk in a courthouse is on the Family dime if they knew their every keystroke was being tracked. That’s what we’re dealing with now. It’s not dons and capos and all that. It’s file clerks getting a grand to slip information on cases to some white collar, don’t know the white collar is kicking it out to the gangs and the crime families. We’re not talking street hustlers. We’re talking educated, employed, career civil servants who can’t make their rent, or their kid wants a Playstation, so they sell out information on what one shitheel is doing to another shitheel. The blowback never touches them.”

  “So the solution is to be the Stasi? We’re either patsies or we’re East Germany?”