Read Online The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery - Free Book Online

he’s already lost him.
    â€œYou guys do international stuff?” Petey says. “I’m looking to go international.”
    Kosookyy frowns. “No, no. There’s plenty right here to keep us busy.”
    â€œYou been reading the paper, right?”
    Kosookyy thinks about smacking him, thinks better of it. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been reading the paper.”
    It’s February 1990 , and the Ukrainians in America are already talking about what happens when Ukraine is its own country again, at last, at last. Goodbye and good riddance, Soviet Union. Independence is still almost two years away; it doesn’t happen until December 1991 . But there are so many signs. There have been hunger strikes, the digging up of mass graves in Bykivnia, hundreds of thousands of bodies, atrocities beginning to be brought into the light. Older men crying over brown bones; they’ve always known something bad happened, always, no matter what their leaders told them. Now the first elections in a lifetime are coming in March and Rukh, the opposition, won’t go away. They organize a rally to mark Ukraine’s first independence in 1919 that draws enough people to make a chain from Kiev to Lviv. It’s happening, it’s all happening. Independence is coming. You can buy a typewriter in Kiev now that has the three characters on the keyboard that separate Ukrainian from Russian. You see the blue and yellow flags wherever you go. And so many people are so hopeful, over in Ukraine and in the United States. Though Kosookyy isn’t one of them. He can smell chaos coming. People, people and money and everything, are going to move through Ukraine, across Western Europe, to the United States and Canada, like a dam bursting. There’s a serious buck to be made in that, every time a box crosses another line on a map, every time someone takes a step, and Kosookyy knows that, for the men chasing that cash, the money’s going to matter a lot more than the people. And the law isn’t going to be able to keep up.
    So in March 1994 , when Petey asks Kosookyy if he knows who the Wolf is, Kosookyy first takes a breath. Peter and the Wolf, ha, he thinks. Then shakes his head, nice and slow, as if by doing it, he can get Petey to see what he’s thinking— don’t get involved— and just walk out the door without a word. But Petey doesn’t move.
    â€œI don’t know him,” Kosookyy says. “Maybe even better to say that I know enough not to know him.”
    â€œI hear he’s got a little racket going of some kind.”
    â€œI don’t know how little it is,” Kosookyy says.
    â€œDo you know what it is?” Petey says.
    â€œNo,” Kosookyy says.
    â€œCome on.”
    â€œI don’t, Petey.”
    â€œDon’t all you guys know each other?” Petey says. By you guys he means mobsters. Organized criminals. He’s putting way too much weight on the word organized, Kosookyy thinks. As if they’re all in one big speakeasy and everyone already knows everyone else who comes in. The kid thinks it’s a world of secret handshakes and code words, a shared history no one else knows. One big dysfunctional family. The problem, Kosookyy thinks, is that Petey’s only half right. The old crime organizations are like that, and they’ve been like that for so long that the police and the FBI know who everyone is. They know who’s a mobster and who isn’t. They know who’s in and who’s out, even have a sense of what kinds of crimes they’re committing—the gambling, the extortion, the protection rackets, the money laundering, the loan-sharking. The feds can draw a map of the United States according to the turf each syndicate covers: the United States of Crime. Kosookyy likes to think that there’s a folder with his name on it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the offices of the FBI’s Cleveland division. He