Gangsters Don't Die by Tod Goldberg

Author:Tod Goldberg [Goldberg, Tod]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640093058
Published: 2023-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2002

LOON LAKE, WA

JENNIFER CUPERTINE DIDN’T DREAM ANYMORE. AT FIRST SHE THOUGHT IT was the Ambien, but then she weaned herself off the prescription and her nights became bouts of intermittent blackness broken up by sitting straight up, gasping for breath, a metallic taste in the back of her mouth, her heart beating so hard she could feel every vein in her face. After a few weeks, she was convinced she’d die like this, stuck in blackness forever, vaguely aware that she should be somewhere else, content to be quiet for just a few hours, but even in the blackness always the feeling of something lurking, waiting, and she knew, in some way, that it was every man her husband had ever killed. You love a monster; you are a monster. She couldn’t hear it, but in the blackness, it was the message. And so she’d pull herself out from it, clawing for lucidity, only to find herself back in the real world. Where was this sense of peace everyone felt when they were slipping off this mortal coil, only to be yanked back to life? Every documentary she saw, it was the one universal: this feeling of remarkable peace and joy followed by the message—usually from a mother figure—that said your job in this realm was not done yet, that your child needed his mother. And then the imagery of a rock garden or a flowing river or the gentle sounds of a summer rain.

All Jennifer got was her terrified gasping, gulping air like water.

Every doctor she’d visited in the last year had told her she was in—surprisingly!—excellent health. These were government doctors, though, so Jennifer never knew what to believe. Would they tell her if she were in congestive heart failure? They told her to track the experiences, see if there was a pattern. For two weeks, she kept a notebook and a pen beside her alarm clock.

Bed: 11:12 p.m.

Wake: 1:41 a.m.

Wake: 3:33 a.m.

Wake: 4:46 a.m.

Out of bed: 6:34 a.m.

Was the house waking her up? Was something going off at that same time every night? The carbon monoxide detector? The neighbor’s dog? An agent’s alarm?

Bed: 12:33 a.m.

Wake: 1:13 a.m.

Wake: 2:19 a.m.

Wake: 4:02 a.m.

Out of bed: 7:02 a.m.

Nothing. No pattern. At least the Ambien kept her asleep.

What she missed about dreaming was easy to pinpoint. It was the only time she was allowed to be with Sal without feeling the pressing walls of the world’s judgment. The FBI agents and U.S. Marshals were unfailingly kind to her—and they tried with William, they really did—but she knew that if Sal knocked on the door tomorrow, they’d put one between his eyes. They were the only adults in her life and yet she could never talk to them about the pain she felt, every single day, the void in her life that was her husband, because she knew they’d have to fake compassion. Her husband had killed at least four FBI agents. Her husband had probably killed another hundred men.

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