Gangsterland: A Novel (43 page)

“Oh, excuse me, Rabbi Cohen, I didn’t know you were here.”

David whipped around in his seat, the phone clattering from his hand, and found Miguel, the tech who’d worked on Paul Bruno, standing in the doorway dressed in a suit, holding one of the saws they used to cut open the bodies.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” David said before he could catch himself.

“It’s my night,” Miguel said, but the look on his face said something entirely different. That didn’t explain the fucking giant saw.

“Your night?” David was still rattled, things weren’t computing right, and there was about to be a fucking headless, footless, handless torso delivered to the funeral home in an RV. Not exactly standard practice. When the bodies came in from the other families, it was always Ruben who checked them in. He’d let Miguel or the other techs work on them, but shipping and handling was his area of expertise.

“Super Bowl Sunday,” Miguel said, “can be a busy night. People lose a lot of money.” David just stared at Miguel, trying to figure out what the fuck he was saying. “You know, people have heart attacks, or they jump off something. It’s an emotional night. So we always have someone on that night, in case of emergencies.”

“What are you doing with that saw?”

Miguel looked down at his hands and seemed surprised to find he was still holding the saw. “I thought someone had broken in,” Miguel said.

“And you were going to cut them in two?”

“I guess I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Miguel said. He gave David a sheepish grin.

David smiled back. Just two guys in a mortuary, one with a saw, the other with a gun stuffed in his waistband.

“How long have you been here?”

“Bus dropped me off around ten,” Miguel said. “I might have fallen asleep in the back, so I didn’t hear you come in.”

“No, I mean, how long have you worked here?” Though, actually, he meant both things.

“Oh, three years in June.”

“You like your job?”

“It’s cool,” Miguel said with a shrug. “I like the responsibility.”

“Did you hear my phone conversation?”

Miguel looked confused. “I’m sorry?”

“I was on the phone,” David said. “Did you hear me talking?”

“I heard voices,” Miguel said carefully. “That’s what woke me up.”

David examined Miguel closely. His suit was olive green and cheap—probably bought from one of those places in the Meadows Mall called Suitz or Stylez or Fashionz. His watch
had a leather band. No rings on his hands. His shoes were brown and didn’t really match his suit, and he wasn’t wearing a belt. In his whole life, he’d probably never made over fifteen bucks an hour. What did this Miguel know about him? Probably nothing. What did Miguel know about Bennie Savone? Probably an awful lot.

There was a single bead of sweat on Miguel’s upper lip.

David could see Miguel’s pulse beating in his neck.

He kept swallowing.

“So, yes or no,” David said, testing Miguel, because he knew the answer just from looking at him.

“I guess,” he said. “Yes. I guess.”

“You have a wife?”

“No,” Miguel said.

“Kids? You got some shorties running around? Is that what you call them now?
Shorties
?”

Miguel shook his head. “No, that means
girlfriends
. Actually, it means both things. Depends how you say it. Like the context of the word.”

“You got either one of those?”

“No, not right now.”

“So, no wife. No kids. No girlfriend. What the fuck do you have, Miguel?”

“Rabbi?”

“What the fuck do you have?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re asking,” Miguel said.

“It’s a simple question, Miguel: What the fuck do you have?”

David knew that what was throwing Miguel off was that one word—
fuck
—that he’d dropped early into their conversation and now felt married to using a few more times, just because it
felt good saying the word out loud after having it run through his mind pretty much constantly, in different derivations, for the last nine months.

“I guess nothing big,” Miguel said.

“Nothing worth losing your life over then, right?”

Miguel swallowed hard. “No, nothing worth dying over.”

“Then if you think this place is ever getting robbed,” David said, “run out the back door. Because
nothing
is worth dying over . . . particularly not something you might have
thought
you heard.”

“Yes, Rabbi,” Miguel said. He now had a good seven beads of sweat on his upper lip, and David was somewhat concerned that if his pulse didn’t slow down a tick, Miguel would stroke out.

“Go home,” David said.

“I’m on until six.”

“Put that saw down, and go home,” David said, and this time Miguel didn’t bother to disagree. He set the saw down on the desk, nodded once at David, and then left.

David picked up the phone, which had begun to bleat from the incomplete call, and examined it for a moment. He’d been so close. One number away. But nothing here was worth dying over. That much was absolutely true.

At 12:57, Gray Beard and Marvin pulled up to the receiving bay of the funeral home in a white cargo van that said lincoln medical supply & uniform on both sides. At first David thought he’d failed to account for something important, but then he saw Marvin behind the wheel and realized that Gray Beard wasn’t shitting him: They did everything professional.

The van backed up to the building, and Marvin came around to the rear of the vehicle. He held a clipboard and wore a crisp white uniform with the Lincoln Medical logo on the back of his shirt. He even had a name tag, except it said Alex.

“We have a delivery,” Marvin said.

“Okay,” David said.

Marvin opened up the van’s rear double doors and pulled down a short metal ramp. He then climbed into the cargo hold and pushed down a large cart topped with freshly laundered towels. “Everything you ordered should be in the cart,” Marvin said.

He peeled back several layers of towels to reveal that the cart was filled with ice and, in two body bags, what was left of Dr. Kirsch. David had thought getting shipped across the country in a freezing cold meat truck was a bad lot, but he supposed there was, in fact, worse ways to get from point A to point B.

“If you just want to sign off here,” Marvin handed David the official-looking clipboard, “we’ll be on our way.”

According to the paperwork, they’d been making deliveries all over town for the last few hours, including a stop at the Marshall Brothers mortuary a few miles away, where the
goyim
seemed to gather for the afterlife, and which made David ponder just what the future might hold in terms of revenue streams if he had to stay in Las Vegas for the long term. David signed his initials where indicated, figuring that if they were going to go this far with putting on a show, he’d keep it up, too. He gave the clipboard back to Marvin, who silently nodded his ascent and headed back to the front of the van.

David walked around to the passenger side, and Gray Beard rolled down his window. He was also wearing a Lincoln Medical uniform. “Everything okay?” Gray Beard said.

“Looks like it,” David said.

“You left a real mess there,” Grey Beard said. “But we managed pretty well. Took care of some hair we found, some fibers, that sort of thing. No charge.” Gray Beard smiled. “On account of you maybe giving me an early retirement.”

“Be discreet,” David said.

“Always am,” Gray Beard said.

“You got a ballpark figure for me?”

“Why don’t we go a flat twenty thousand now, more later once I’m able to move some machinery and that Jaguar. Don’t know who might want an X-ray machine and bunch of surgical equipment, but I’m gonna find out.”

“That works,” David said, making calculations in his mind. Twenty thousand dollars was the kind of money that could make a difference for a little while. Maybe another eight or ten from Jerry Ford, that would make an even bigger difference. Fifty thousand, now that would be the kind of money that a person and a child could maybe live a year on, particularly if they didn’t have a lot of other bills. “But if you can get me fifty in the next day or two, we’ll call it square for the whole job.”

“Give me until Wednesday,” Gray Beard said. “Tuesday night if you’re in a rush.”

“I trust you,” David said.

“After what I’ve seen,” Grey Beard said, “I’m glad that’s true.”

Thirty minutes later, right on time, Jerry Ford showed up in the refrigerated LifeCore truck.

David already had Dr. Kirsch’s head and extremities set for burial tomorrow, and the rest of Dr. Kirsch was on a gurney
and ready to go, so when he saw Jerry pull up, he met him outside with the body.

“Just you tonight, Rabbi?” Jerry said.

“It’s Super Bowl Sunday,” David said.

“Better than Christmas,” Jerry said. He unzipped the body bag and examined Dr. Kirsch. “He’s been kept cool?”

“Yes,” David said.

“The whole time?”

“As soon as his body was discovered, yes,” David said.

“The major organs, those are probably shot, but we’ll see,” Jerry said. He pinched the skin on Dr. Kirsch’s bicep. “Everything else looks good.” He zipped the bag back up and then loaded Dr. Kirsch into the back of his truck and closed the doors back up.

David handed Jerry a thick manila envelope filled with all the needed paperwork for the transfer of one Gabe Krantz to the good people at LifeCore, which Jerry didn’t even give a cursory glance to. He just reached into his pocket, took out a banded, half-inch stack of hundreds, and handed them to David.

“Everything look in order?” Jerry asked.

David flipped through the cash, just to be sure it wasn’t filled with singles, and suddenly it was like the old days, back when he did collections, back when this all seemed pretty glamorous, back when he thought his cousin Ronnie was the coolest man alive, back when he and Fat Monte were friends, hanging out, going on double dates. Back when none of this seemed even remotely plausible. Way back when.

“Yes,” David said.

“
L’chaim
,” Jerry said, and then he got back in his truck and was gone. It occurred to David then that there was a pretty good chance Jerry Ford wasn’t really a Jew. Not that it mattered.

Rabbi David Cohen locked up the funeral home and mortuary and then, for a long time, he stood in front of the entrance to the cemetery and stared up at the sky. Most of the time, it was impossible to see any stars, the light pollution from the Strip giving everything a strange green glow at night. In Summerlin, though, there were still ordinances about that sort of thing, and this close to the Red Rocks, if you faced away from the Strip, you could actually imagine you were somewhere else.

It wouldn’t always be this way, David knew. The newspaper had stories every other day about new casino developments getting approved on this end of town, along with huge shopping centers, to satisfy the needs of the one hundred thousand people who were supposed to eventually inhabit Summerlin.

It wasn’t a bad place to live. In the last nine months, David had grown warm to the convenience of the villages of Summerlin. He had his coffee place. He had a pizza joint he liked—a Detroit pizza, of all things—called Northside Nathan’s. He’d come to depend on the Bagel Café for decent corned beef and a pretty fair bagel. He even had a few places he liked to knock around in: a pub called the Outside Inn that had cheap whiskey and salty prime rib and no Jews (owing primarily to their hunting motif, David thought); a shopping center called Best in the West a few streets down, off of Rainbow, that had an ice cream shop where some angry kid mixed flavors on a slab of marble. He’d go into that store sometimes and imagine what flavors Jennifer and William would choose.