Being home wasn’t much different.
If someone strange showed up in your Summerlin or Henderson or Green Valley neighborhood, didn’t go to your church or your temple, didn’t wave hello in the morning, never got Nevada plates on their car, let their pit bull shit on your lawn, watered their own lawn with a hose instead of sprinklers, never finished their backyard, then you could bet the Mormons on the street would make a fuss, put in a call to the HOA. If you kept fucking up, the HOA would eventually call the cops, the cops would bring in the sheriff, sheriff would bring in the marshals, next thing, there would be a standoff, shots fired, and a body being wheeled out of your community draped with a white sheet, and it turns out you’ve got a grow house on the block, not Cartel level, but enough to fill Centennial High School and Bishop Gorman High School with narcotic-quality weed.
Thus, David recognized the need to be prepared. He wasn’t going to be caught slipping again, like when that agent showed up. The national news had already rolled into Las Vegas just to talk shit in light of the Panthers debacle, and eventually some enterprising reporter would realize Panthers was only two blocks from the Wild Horse, whose owner, they’d learn, was Bennie Savone, also a reputed wiseguy, who was arrested on some RICO shit that didn’t stick . . . was currently doing time on the beating of a Nebraska-based dentist . . . and then that reporter and a cameraman would be knocking on the door of the temple to get some background color for their story . . . and, well, that would not do.
Even on a night like tonight, behind the walls of the Vineyards, whose security was tight—Bennie couldn’t live in a place where anyone could walk up to him on the golf course and kill him—David had his butterfly knife in his pocket. If the FBI showed up with an assault team tonight, he recognized he couldn’t kill them all. But if it was just one or two guys, well, he could knife one guy, take his gun, and kill the other guy. He’d done that before. Average room filled with average people, there weren’t many who’d stick around after seeing someone bleed out through the neck or get a knife in the ear—which was a bad way to kill a person, since it was hard to get a knife out of someone’s head—or hear someone screaming when they got their eyes slit in two, which wasn’t fatal, but it was some horror movie shit, the kind of thing David was prepared to do if he needed to get out of a crowded room, fast.
He kept a Glock cut into the passenger seat of his Range Rover, easy enough to get to when he was driving, since he never rode with anyone, and not easily found in a cursory flashlight search if he got pulled over, not that Rabbi David Cohen ever got pulled over in Summerlin, but he didn’t keep it on his person out in public. Couldn’t very well be golfing with a city councilman and have his Glock fall out of his bag. Even if everyone in Nevada pretended to have a gun, that whole Wild West ethos a thing in Nevada, David was of the opinion that rabbis couldn’t be Wyatt Earping motherfuckers on the street. Anyway, David knew that most people had no real idea how to use a gun—even cops were scared of killing somebody—unless they were on a shooting range, fitted with noise-suppressing headgear, protective goggles, and ceramic vests. It wasn’t like TV, where everyone was a trained assassin waiting for the right moment to show their disregard for human life.
But David was. That was a difference that mattered.
“I saw that the weathergirl from Channel Thirteen made the show,” Bennie said now. “Jordan still sleeping with her?”
“I don’t know,” David said. “He doesn’t confess to me.”
“Any other notables I gotta worry about?”
“The guy from Channel Eight who believes in aliens was in the back, drinking White Russians.”
“That Kenny Rogers–looking guy?”
“Yeah,” David said.
“Like there’s not enough bad shit in the real world? You gotta go searching for worse things in space? Makes no sense to me.”
“It’s entertainment,” David said.
“That’s what worries me.”
David never worried about the local media surprising him, since they came out to the temple somewhat regularly for events—the Kugel Bake Off for Social Justice, the Jewish Book Festival, the annual Hanukkah Carnival and Menorah Lighting event—and besides, they never seemed to be sure whose side they were on when it came to organized crime, only that Mob business was good for everyone’s bottom line.
One day, Harvey B. Curran, the Review-Journal’s Mob gossip columnist, would be insinuating that more trouble was about to come down on local wiseguys, that the feds were massed outside the gates of the Vineyards, had put recording devices into the neighborhood cats, were buying houses in the Scotch 80s, had moles in the gaming board, were running anthropologists around Lake Mead as the water receded, pulling out dead bodies, running DNA, capturing plates out front of Piero’s, strong-arming UPS drivers, bribing maids, everyone about a week away from a major indictment, the whole city about to be tossed up. Nothing anyone could confirm or deny.
The next day, Curran would be going on about what assholes the corporate casino billionaires were, how life was better when the Mob ran the Strip, since at least you knew where you stood with those guys.
The day after that, there’d be a half-page ad for happy hour at the Wild Horse, some nineteen-year-old blond jerking off a bottle of champagne. By Sunday, there’d be a color photo of Mayor Oscar Goodman in the same space, pimping at a fund-raiser for the Mob museum he wanted the city to build smack on the spot where Estes Kefauver held hearings on Cosa Nostra back in the day, David wondering if they’d be building museums for the Crips and Bloods and Mexican Mafia, too. Maybe toss one up for the Skinheads. Come with a prison tattoo, get a free tour. He thought maybe he’d write a letter to the editor, get on the record about how stupid this idea was, that the Jews didn’t support celebrating the Mob, any mob.
But before he could put pen to paper, the Mercury, one of those shit-rag weekly papers, would do an investigative piece, send a girl into a strip club and have her report back on the dark shit she’d witnessed, the local Mob so fucking stupid that they didn’t even run background checks on their dancers. The Mercury would get photos of known felons counting stacks of cash in the break room, guns out, like they were waiting for someone to tell them to go to the fucking mattresses, and David would think: Build a museum and bury these dumb fucks in the foundation. Start fresh.
It wasn’t, David understood, the right frame of mind to have in this situation.
“You get a copy of the guest list?” Bennie asked.
“I will,” David said.
“Get the photos, too,” Bennie said, like this was David’s first gig.
“I will,” David said. The temple had provided the wedding planner and the photographer, which made procuring these things no problem. David was the middleman on everything these days, which meant paperwork and spreadsheets and calls on Saturday nights with questions about chevron vs. amphitheater seating arrangements for the ceremony and did he have a preference in terms of a wireless mic or a handheld? David was most comfortable not speaking at all, though you couldn’t be a rabbi and stay silent. He couldn’t avoid people taking his picture, but he could mitigate, when possible, how clear he looked. Lately he’d become one of those guys who could wear a hat. Initially he’d adopted the look so he wouldn’t have to worry about cameras catching his face, but now he sort of liked it, though you couldn’t exactly rock a fedora while officiating a wedding.
“Let Rachel pick out the nice ones to give to