Gangsterland: A Novel by Tod Goldberg Read Free Book Online

but still somehow felt like everything was possible, including working as a special agent for the FBI. He knew it wasn’t a glamorous job, not like how the recruiters who came to campus said it was; that it, in all likelihood, was just as mundane on a day-to-day basis as any job. But at least there was some grander purpose to it, which appealed to Jeff.
    He’d been a cop in Walla Walla, Washington, for a decade prior, and while the work was steady and not terribly dangerous—he unholstered his gun once the whole time, to break up a fight between two drunk migrant farm workers—it also wasn’t the kind of heroic thing Jeff had imagined for himself while growing up in Seattle. He certainly never saw himself living in a city like Walla Walla, with its charming downtown andflowing wheat fields and . . . that was about it. He’d made a life there, even bought a house over by the country club, had managed to find a little romance with the occasional visiting professor at Whitman College (Jeff liked knowing these affairs were on a clock, since no one visiting Walla Walla dared to stay in town very long). But when the city announced it had to cut its police force in half during a particularly ugly budget crisis, Jeff readily stepped forward to take the parachute the city offered. He had a bit of money saved, the result of being single and well paid in a shitty place, and he started looking at graduate schools.
    He knew he couldn’t get into the CIA since he wasn’t ex-military and his undergrad degree from the University of Washington probably tabbed him as a tad too liberal for those guys. Age was likely a factor, too. The FBI, on the other hand, liked guys who were a bit older, more mature, happy to do investigative work from a desk if need be, and so that became Jeff’s goal. Not the desk, exactly, though Jeff figured that was where he might start out. And if the FBI didn’t pan out? Maybe the NSA. And if NSA didn’t work? Jeff had a full list of options written out on a yellow legal pad, and he even conceded that a job doing special investigative work for the IRS would be cool, maybe catching mob guys in tax evasion schemes or something. What Jeff Hopper wanted most of all was to wear a suit, a really nice suit that concealed a gun, and he wanted to stop bad guys and save America.
    More than a decade later, though, standing in his office and staring out the window at that berm he used to sit on (even during clear days in the winter), Jeff wondered just what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. Did he think the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover would walk across the street and offer hima job? Did he think he’d assimilate some divine intelligence simply by breathing the same air as the agents he saw walking in and out every day? How did he not know that it would take him so long just to get into that building, that he’d bounce from Quantico to Kansas City to Cleveland to Rochester and then, finally, to Chicago, at which point his romantic vision of being in the FBI would be trumped by the hard understanding that he hated the feel of a tie around his neck? Had he even learned anything while sitting out there, what with all the exhaust from passing cars and trucks? It didn’t seem possible.
    Few things seemed possible to Special Agent Jeff Hopper anymore. For the last six months, he’d spent more time in his therapist’s office than his own. He knew intuitively that he wasn’t responsible for the death of his three colleagues and their CI, that he hadn’t pulled the trigger on them, that legendary hit man Sal Cupertine had done it. If he knew anything about Sal Cupertine, it was this: If he wanted you dead, you were dead. And he understood that those men—Cal Hodel, Keith Baldwin, and Derek Lewis, he reminded himself that they were people and not just men —knew that working undercover came with its own unique set of dangers, including death. All that was clear to him. You deal with wild animals, you can’t be