Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

of the job. Pretending to be someone else. Day like today, Matthew wasn’t sure if he was someone different or who he’d always been.

      Matthew got down on one knee, tipped Ronnie on his side, examined the damage.

      It wasn’t easy to tell the difference between Ronnie’s mouth and his nose, his eyes and his scalp.

      He’d live. Not happily. But he’d live.

      Matthew could put him out of his misery. Drag him into a stall, flip him onto his back, let him choke to death on his own blood. Maybe Matthew could pinch Ronnie’s nose to help death along. He’d last a minute, probably less. Even if his boys came in and found him, there was a good chance Ronnie would asphyxiate enough to get some decent brain damage, spend the rest of his life watching cartoons and eating Jell-O.

      Tough to run the Family with mush brains.

      But that was the easy way out.

      Painless, in the end, really.

      It had been three years since Sal Cupertine was disappeared. Matthew and Jeff couldn’t find him. The rest of the FBI couldn’t find him, not that they’d given it much effort. The public hadn’t spotted him, not even after all the news programs ran his photo. If Sal Cupertine was still alive, he was doing a good job of pretending he wasn’t, which was curious to Matthew. Unless he was living in a cave somewhere, he’d need a new face by this point, and it wasn’t like the movies: You could get all the plastic surgery you wanted, but your face was still your face. Maybe all this new facial-recognition software wouldn’t make an exact match, but a 50 percent match would be enough to get a warrant if everything else lined up. The FBI did a dry run at the Super Bowl a few months earlier, running 100,000 people in one day, arresting a couple dozen wanted felons. Small database searches made it easier—if Sal Cupertine showed up somewhere the government was looking for the most wanted criminals on the planet, he’d pop right up. And the technology was only getting better: The system they had at the casino updated every few months with new patches, predictive biometrics that could spot extensive makeup, nose jobs, Botox, even artificial aging, what the techs called Tanning Salon Soul Man Face.

      If it had a nickname, you were already beaten.

      So, yeah, maybe Matthew should have dragged Ronnie into a stall and tortured him for answers, but then what? Ronnie wasn’t the boss of Chicago because he was stupid. Maybe Ronnie Cupertine knew where Sal was at one time, but surely that time had passed. Sal Cupertine had spent fifteen years on the streets of Chicago killing with impunity. He knew people were looking for him. If he’d left his wife and kid alone for three long years it wasn’t because he was enjoying his life. He’d poke his head up eventually. And Matthew would be there waiting.

      Matthew picked up his Smith & Wesson pen and Ronnie’s business card, took some time to wash his hands, strands of Ronnie’s hair filling up the sink, buttoned up his jacket so the flecks of Ronnie’s blood wouldn’t be visible on his white shirt, slipped his arrowhead name tag into this pocket. Wet one of Curtis’s towels, wiped Ronnie’s blood, hair, spit, and skin from the edge of the counter, tossed it in the trash. Checked his reflection in the mirror, then had a thought, got back down on the floor, shoved his hand in Ronnie’s pants pocket, came out with his billfold. Counted the cash. Five grand. He’d give it to Nina, save for fifty bucks to get his suit and shoes cleaned, then headed out, just as Ronnie Cupertine let out a low moan and shit himself.

      There were two guys lingering outside, heads down, pacing, backs to the door, talking on their phones. They wore identical Adidas sweat suits, though one guy had on white Nikes, the other old-school black Pumas. It was odd, since the Family guys tended to dress like they were in business, at least the ones who went around with Ronnie. These two weren’t even wearing Kevlar. He scanned them for weapons, saw both were going for fashion over utility, guns stuffed in the back of their waistbands, like in the movies. Matthew could shoot both of these guys between the eyes, or simply walk up and disarm them, before either realized how stupid it was to keep their guns behind them. At Quantico, during live-action fire drills, they’d practice on guys like this, since most of the time, if you’re FBI, you’re rousing assholes from their houses, not shooting it out with bank robbers armed with AK-47s on the streets of LA. These guys hadn’t received the memo, Matthew thought, that rolling with nines shoved up your ass was no way to conduct modern warfare.

      Everything was slower in Wisconsin.

      “Excuse me, boss,” Matthew said to the one in the white Nikes, and the guy turned around, surprised to find someone standing there. He had a cross tattooed on his neck—one with the full body of Christ splayed out, though it wasn’t especially well done, shitty prison ink making Jesus look more like a melted Kris Kristofferson—and one of those pencil-thin goatees.

      “What?” he said. He wasn’t Italian, which was odd. The Family didn’t usually use their affiliates for personal security. They didn’t mind having them sell their drugs or do their scut work, like Chema and Neto Espinoza had done, but it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for a positive work environment, Chema chopped up and dumped in a landfill, Neto murdered in Stateville. But everyone had bills.

      “You with the guy in the bathroom?”

      “Why do you care?”

      “I think he fell down,” Matthew said.

      “Shit,” the man said, flipped his phone closed, pushed past Matthew, grabbed the other guy, and both disappeared into the bathroom, still not pulling their guns. Matthew could follow them into the bathroom and plug them both in the back of the head if he so wished.

      Instead, Matthew headed to his office upstairs.

      He still had another fifteen minutes on the clock, so he took a little time to run through the security footage, found the feed of himself walking in and out of the bathroom, wiped it from the system, wiped it from the backup system, too. The perk of being in charge. Tomorrow, he’d come in early, track Ronnie Cupertine’s movements through the casino, see who he played with, see if he met with anyone. Ronnie Cupertine could fly to Las Vegas if he wanted to gamble for real money, so there had to be something else to get him up to this shithole in the middle of the night.

      Matthew Drew, who’d spent six months as an FBI agent and another six months pretending to be one while searching for Sal Cupertine, locked his office and headed out through the service exit, saw that housekeeping hadn’t managed to get all of Killer’s blood out of the carpet, took a mental note to have that taken care of on Sunday, too, then made his way to the employee parking lot, where he was the only non-Chuyalla with a reserved spot. Found his Mustang, the piece of shit, got in, and called 911 from his cell, the operator telling him an ambulance was already on its way, again.