But it’s never ever-ever-ever as easy as it looks on TV. Struggling to keep up with the pickup, the cab manages to run about a million red lights, and nearly gets creamed in a sideways mash-up on Milwaukee Avenue. And then Oswald makes a quick turn-off into a liquor store lot. The only thing that saves Gerbil from being made is the fact that Oswald is half in the bag by the time he comes out of Binny’s Beveridge Depot—he must have polished off the pint bottle stashed in his glove box by then—staggering back to his truck, glancing over his shoulder at the cab with a sheepish look.

  Eventually the taxi lets Gerbil out near the mouth of an alley off Damon at 12:30 that night.

  Gerbil spends the rest of that evening freezing her nipples off on the roof of a garment factory across the street. All she has for company is a filthy tarp she found in an ash can and a stale granola bar she found in her jacket pocket. This is another thing they never show on TV: the boring shit, the endless hours of waiting, the tedious eyeballing of Oswald’s flaccid form passed out on the greasy pavement across the street.

  She dozes off just before dawn, slipping into a momentary nightmare in which she’s getting pissed on by a giant pig at a Pink Floyd concert.

  Dawn breaks hard and harsh that next day over the mountain range of charred chimney peaks and vent stacks along Damon Avenue. Igniting the neighborhood like a flare, the daylight stirs the bats back into belfries and rousts the drunks back into their cardboard squats.

  On a nameless side street, the angry sunlight cants down into a lonely alley, hanging in the motes of whirling trash, before landing on a body.

  Slumped on its side in a puddle of piss, the big dark lump of a human being rolls over onto its back and gurgles a mucous-clogged groan of protest at the invading light. A broken bottle in an oil-spotted brown paper bag lies next to the poor soul, alongside an array of belongings—cigarettes, a few dollars in change, a cell phone—strewn across the cracked pavement where the man fell the night before.

  The big man moans the morning away, his eyes glued shut, his mouth a toxic waste dump. He doesn’t hear the sudden chirp of the cell phone next to him, nor does he register the approach of a stray dog.

  The animal—a mangy German Shepherd nosing around the base of dumpsters for scraps—approaches cautiously, eyeing the fallen drunk out of the corner of its yellow eyes. The trill of the cell phone perks the creature’s ears, which pin back at each ringing noise.

  “Can’t go to school today, I can’t, I can’t, I’m sick, and I’m gonna flunk the test, I got a fever, I’m gonna flunk, I’m gonna flunk out, I’m gonna…” In his mumbling delirium, the fallen man slowly awakens, blinking at the light, his thick neck cracking.

  Across the alley, the dog sniffs the pavement around the cell phone, which keeps ringing incessantly. Alert now, with eyes wide open, the animal gives the phone one last good sniff and then positions its hind-quarter over the device, lifts its leg, and begins to pee on it.

  Oswald sits up and grunts in agony. His body is seized up with stiffness and pain, his skull hammering like a broken church bell, his black garb damp with fever-sweat. He sees the dog pissing on his phone and just watches for a moment. The gesture seems apropos of something that Oswald cannot quite reckon.

  “Get outta here! Fucking mutt! Shoo!” Oswald’s phlegmy wheeze gooses the animal away from the phone, and Oswald manages to crawl over to the device. “What,” he says flatly into the wet cell phone after flipping it open.

  “Big Chief!”

  The voice on the other end is a slap on the face. Oswald sits up, fighting the dizziness that’s washing over him now, all his troubles flooding back at the sound of that familiar taunting yammer. “Jesus Christ, Candy, what time is it?”

  “Half past crazy.” The voice is wired and hyped up with fake glee. “Listen. Dawg. Good news.”

  Oswald is seeing double as he grips the slimy device, the odor of dog pee like smelling salts in his nostrils. The previous evening’s festivities are coming back to him now—the horrible black regret for cutting Gerbil loose, the shame and regret and self-loathing and cheap whiskey burning a hole in his guts. “I could use some,” Oswald croaks in a hoarse voice.

  “They moved the thing up.” A pause here. “You hear what I said?”

  Oswald swallows the taste of sulfur. “The thing?”

  “The thing I told you about yesterday.”

  “What thing?”

  “The thing, dawg. For next week. For the Mink? The thing you said was going to be too late, said it had to be in the next couple of days?”

  Oswald remembers now. He remembers the Candy Man calling him about another hit yesterday, this one for Anthony Ferri, the old shriveled shit. “Right, right, right—okay,” Oswald says, sitting up against the wall of the alley, “I remember now, yeah, sure.”

  “Listen. Big dawg. I could get my ass capped for telling you this. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Candy, my head is going to cave in if I don’t find some OxyContin and a shower. Just give me the facts.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing. You didn’t hear nothin’ from me, but this thing is going down tomorrow night. Motherfucker name of Felson.”

  Oswald searches his memory. “Freddie Felson? Freddy ‘Forty-Five’?”

  “That’s the guy.” The voice sounds suspiciously like it’s reading the words aloud. “They got big guns from Jersey to do the job tomorrow night. You got a pen?”

  Oswald pats the wrinkled seams of his black coat. “Hold on.” He notices his index finger is cracked, bleeding slightly, and he squeezes it. A pearl of blood forms. He grabs a paper sack. “Okay, go ahead.”

  “So get this: They’re gonna do it on the motherfucking Amtrak, tomorrow night, around 9 o’clock.”

  Oswald frowns at the pavement. “They’re gonna do Freddie ‘Forty-Five’ on a train?”

  “You heard me—9 o’clock Amtrak—to Kalamazoo, y’all—outta Union station—that’s all I know.”

  Oswald writes the details in blood. He gets down the words Felson, Kalamazoo, 9:00, and Union Station, and then he says into the cell phone, “You sure about this, Candy?”

  “Sure as shit, brother, sure as shit.”

  “On a train?”

  “You got it, dawg.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “This is air-tight intel, my brother, air-fucking-tight. And remember, y’all didn’t hear nothin’ from me. You know what I’m saying?”

  Oswald stares at the words written in his blood: last chance.

  On a train.

  On the night of the full moon.

  “Chief?” The voice sounds uncertain all of a sudden. “You there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “You saving people now?”

  Oswald sighs. “Yeah, Candy, I’m saving people.”

  After a pause: “Why the fuck you want to go and do something like that?”

  Oswald flips the cell phone shut and folds up the note written in blood.

  32.

  Keeping track of Oswald that next day is even trickier than the previous one.

  Before the sun has even cleared the adjacent tenements, he staggers out of the alley off Damon with a purpose, his eyes alert and bright and burning up with some kind of weird urgency, as he searches for his pickup. Does this mean he’s on the scent again? Another job? Another doomed mope he’s supposed to snatch from the jaws of death?

  He finds the truck in a no-parking zone a block down the street.

  Thankfully, Gerbil has a younger cabbie that second day—a hot-shot gum-snapping Mexican kid with a backwards ball cap—who waits and watches under a weeping willow tree a half a block away as Oswald climbs back into the S-10 and takes off in a cloud of exhaust.

  They follow the Indian across the north side, down deserted side streets, and past boarded store-fronts..

  Finally Oswald pulls up in front of a seedy little transient hotel on Wells. The place has that seamy, sun-bleached air about it—a bunch of missing letters in the sign, a series of barred windows—and when Oswald pauses for an awkward moment before entering the place, it looks as though he’s considering whether or not he has truly hit rock bottom.

  A half a block north of the hotel, sitting in the back of the idling taxi, Gerbil asks the driver to keep the meter running and wait for her, giving him one of those fake credit cards she got from Oswald’s treasure trove. The Mexican kid agrees to hold the card in hock while Gerbil goes about her business.

  At that point Gerbil attempts another stunt she learned from make-believe detectives.

  She goes into the lobby of the flophouse and lurks in the corner for a moment, pretending to read a magazine. Oswald has already vanished upstairs, checking into some unknown room, and now the lobby is silent and stewing in the soup of its own musty desolation.

  Gerbil goes over to the emaciated junkie behind the front desk and inquires as to whether she could possibly see the register. The junkie looks at her as though she just took out her false teeth and gummed his nose, so Gerbil resorts to another old TV trick—she produces her last crumpled twenty-dollar bill, sliding it across the scarred counter with all the drama of a mid-season Kojak re-run. The clerk tells her to fuck off and die.

  Vexed and a little indignant, she marches out of the hotel and returns to the idling taxi.

  Plan B: She asks the cabbie to take her to the nearest bodega or mini-mart. She rushes into the store and purchases a sack full of provisions: caffeine pills, caffeinated water, caffeine patches, caffeinated suckers, flashlight, and a crossword puzzle book. Then she comes back out and has the taxi-driver take her back to the Wells Street fleabag.

  Then she cuts the cab loose.

  Oswald’s truck is right where he left it, parked behind a drift of garbage in an adjacent alley. His doors are locked, the big road-trunk still roped down back in the cargo bay, locked up tight, nested in moldering blankets and tarps.

  Gerbil presses her face against the glass of the cab window. The duffel bag is gone. Gerbil takes a deep breath, and girds herself.

  Then she climbs into the cargo bay with her sack of amphetamines and groceries.

  For Oswald, the rest of that day passes in a mirage of jacked-up activity. He organizes his equipment, looks in the paper to make sure the lunar cycle is due to crest the following evening, and then makes one quick side-trip down to the Harold Washington Library to download news clippings of Freddie Felson’s 1999 conspiracy trial—the one from which he walked on a technicality.

  Oswald makes Xeroxes of Freddie’s mug shots and keeps them in his wallet.

  He returns to the flophouse at 6, eats a square meal of Chinese carry-out, and pops a couple of Halcions. He needs a full night’s rest. He needs his wits about him for the last save.

  After dark, right before the sleeping pills begin to kick in, he goes out onto the rust-flaked fire escape, and he has a smoke and gazes up at the sky. Thin wisps of clouds barely veil the harvest moon as it rises over the filthy spires of the north side.

  Oswald stares at the big buttery sphere, as yellow as cornmeal, and feels a sliver of panic like an ice-chip in his chest. “Goddamn thing looks full already,” he mutters to himself, wondering if he’s too late, wondering if he’s going to hell after all.

  “It’s not,” says a voice behind him. “Not yet. But it’s close.”

  Oswald doesn’t have to turn around. He recognizes the voice of Alberta Goldstein. He nods and murmurs, “Fucking thing is beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Beautiful and horrible at the same time.”

  “Yes.”

  Oswald yawns. “We’ll know tomorrow. Full moon and high tide.”

  He goes back inside and collapses onto the rickety twin bed next to the ticking radiator, and he falls asleep almost immediately, and for hours he sleeps the dreamless, soulless sleep of the dead... as the moon outside starts on its last revolution toward the sun.

  PART III:

  DEAD MAN’S SWITCH

  “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

  - Johnny Rotten

  33.

  Dawn on that last day brings a chill to the air.

  By mid-morning, the whir of human activity is already flowing through the big stone archway of the Amtrak Station off Canal Street.

  Inside the station, the great vaulted confines of dark wood and marble echo with public address announcements and shuffling shoe leather, as the escalators endlessly cycle commuters down the long decline to the ninth circle of departure gates. The air has a dense, acrid perfume to it—a mélange of grit and disinfectant, and even traces of diesel fumes—that gives Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro a headache as he strides under banks of fluorescent lights and travel posters and directional signs.

  He wears a long Burberry overcoat and carries a scuffed attaché case. At this hour, in this getup, he could easily be mistaken for a senior vice president at a LaSalle Street law firm, if it weren’t for his big square head of Brill-Creamed hair and the gold chains around his thick neck. Upon closer scrutiny, one might instead peg him as Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, circa 1963.

  “Look at this idiot,” he murmurs as he reaches the bottom of the escalator and steps off the metal riser onto the nicked parquet of the Gate Level. He has already spied the dimwit grandson of the don loitering across the promenade near the threshold of a tobacco shop, holding some elaborate coffee concoction, sucking so hard on the drinking straw he appears to be attempting to give the drink an orgasm..

  “You’re late, Cucumber,” Marky-Mark Ferri says to Dalessandro with a curt nod, chewing the cud of the straw as the big capo approaches with a glower on his face.

  “Get rid of this.” Dalessandro grabs the Frappuccino from the kid and tosses it into a nearby receptacle, spattering the stucco wall with chocolate ejaculate. “And don’t call me that. C’mon.”

  Dalessandro turns on his heels, and heads toward a steel door marked TEAM AMTRAK—PERSONNEL ONLY.

  The Ferri kid has to jog to keep up with the gunsel’s big strides. “Little sensitive this morning?” the kid cracks out of the side of his mouth.

  “Get your mind in the game, kid,” Dalessandro mutters without breaking stride.

  The fact is, Jimmy Dalessandro is kind of defensive about the nickname. In Mob World, nicknames are part of the deal, part of the patois, part of the rakish subculture that dates back to the Italian middle-ages. But the problem with Dalessandro’s nickname is the way it originated—the embarrassing irony of the word cucumber. He got tagged with the moniker three years ago, when he was coming out of the steam bath at the Chicago Athletic Club and a couple of Riccardo boys saw the size of his penis. Or, more accurately—and not to put too fine a point on it—the lack of size.

  From the moment he entered puberty, Jimmy Dalessandro has suffered the stigma and self-loathing that plagues the possessor of an inordinately tiny prick. At one point, in fact, his pediatrician back in Gary, Indiana, worried that young Jimmy had a rare form of micropenis—the clinical term for an extremely small johnson. Jimmy’s father, a coarse but loving stevedore employed by U.S. Steel, had refused to believe that any son of his would be afflicted with such a humiliating disorder, and ultimately decided, late one stifling hot summer night, to carefully measure the length of his boy’s penis, while Jimmy’s mom cluelessly ironed work clothes in the other room, absently singing “Yes! We Have No Bananas.” Nick Dalessandro was relieved to find that his kid’s dick was a couple of centimeters over the minimum length that would be considered normal. But it was cold comfort for a boy growing up on the mean streets of Gary, and over subsequent years, Jimmy Dalessandro learned to compensate for his genital shortcomings by beating people up a lot.

  “This way.” Dalessandro slams through the Amtrak personnel-only door and enters a narrow hall of private offices tucked behind glass doors. “And let me do the talking.”

  Looking insolent, the kid trudges along behind the capo with his head slumped. Clad in his hip-hop hoodie and torn jeans, Mark Ferri looks like he’d rather be playing video games than doing pretty much anything else. Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, he’s the perfect candidate to be yanked by the scruff of the neck into greatness—he’s got nowhere to go but up. “I’m comin’, Jesus Christ, slow down.”

  They find the head of engineering behind the last door on the left.

  “Hey, fellas, how you doing this morning?” says the little man in the olive drab work shirt, rising up behind his cluttered desk to greet his visitors. He wears little round eyeglasses and an Amtrak cap, the bill pushed cheerfully back. He has a warm smile and jovial manner, and he looks like a man at peace with his corruption and graft. Somebody’s got to do it. Might as well be this guy.

  “Doin’ great, thanks.” Dalessandro shakes hands with the administrator. “I’m Jimmy Dalessandro, and this is Mark. The one I told you about. Say hello to the nice man, Mark.”

  “Hey.” Mark Ferri leans his back against the doorjamb, the door still ajar. He pulls a small blue plastic device from his pocket—a Game Boy—and starts fiddling with it with a zombie-like stare.

  The administrator gives them a smile. “Have a seat, fellas. You mind if I close the door?” He goes over to the door and gently pushes it shut. “Okay. So. I got a call from Mr. Ferri this morning.” He comes back around his desk and sits down. “I understand you’re doing this thing for the Make-A-Wish Foundation?”

  “Something like that,” Dalessandro says, settling into one of the metal armchairs in front of the desk. “Mr. Ferri doesn’t like to make a big deal out of anything. Likes to make wishes come true for people. You know. Whenever possible. That’s just the kinda guy he is.”