by Tod Goldberg
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Praise for the Novels and Stories of Tod Goldberg
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
“A keen voice, profound insight ... devilishly entertaining.” —Los Angeles Times
“Goldberg’s prose is deceptively smooth, like a vanilla milk shake spiked with grain alcohol.”
—Chicago Tribune
“[A] creepy, strangely sardonic, definitely disturbing version of Middle America ... and that, of course, is where the fun begins.” —LA Weekly
“Perfect ... with all the sleaze and glamour of the old paperbacks of fifty years ago.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Striking and affecting.... Goldberg is a gifted writer, poetic and rigorous ... a fiction tour de force ... a haunting book.” —January Magazine
“Well plotted and deftly written.... Goldberg serves up heaps of Miami’s lush life and lowlifes while exposing its drug and arms underworld.”
—The Huffington Post
Praise for the Series
“Likably lighthearted and cool as a smart-mouthed loner ... cheerfully insouciant.” —The New York Times
“Brisk and witty.” —The Christian Science Monitor
“[A] swell new spy series ... highly enjoyable.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Violence, babes, and a cool-guy spy ... slick and funny and a lotta fun.” —New York Post
“Smart, charmingly irreverent ... pleasantly warped.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Snazzy.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Terrifically entertaining ... neat and crisp as citrus soda.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Breezy cloak-and-dagger ingenuity. [A] nicely pitched action-comedy hero: handsome, smart, neurotic, tough, funny, sensitive ... Michael Westen is Jim Rockford and MacGyver filtered through Carl Hiaasen. Entertaining, in other words.” —LA Weekly
The Burn Notice Series
The Reformed
The Giveaway
The End Game
The Fix
OBSIDIAN
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For Wendy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am, as ever, eternally thankful to Matt Nix for letting me add my two cents to his wonderful creation. As no book really gets written alone, I must also thank Lee Goldberg for his continued advice; my agent, Jennie Dunham, for her diligent and ever-mindful assurances; my fine editor, Sandra Harding, and the whole team at NAL, who manage to find all of my errors just in time; Chris Alessio for his excellent insight into paintball markers (anything that is off in this book is my fault, not his); Julia Pistell for finding a title for me; and, of course, my wonderful wife, Wendy, who must tolerate my muttering “When you’re a spy ...” for months at a time.
I’d like to think no one would read this book and then attempt to do anything they’ve read about. But, as a realist, let me remind you: Please do not attempt to blow anything up, counterfeit money, modify weapons or, well, anything else you’ve read here. It won’t work, and you’ll probably explode. You’ve been warned.
1
When you’re a spy, the amount of time you spend in a church, a temple or a mosque depends on simple local custom: If the people trying to kill you have a healthy fear of their god, going to a church, a temple or a mosque is a great way to avoid a bullet in the head. Even the most cold-blooded killer will think twice about spraying gunfire inside of a holy place, because though the idea of sanctuary may sound like something from a genteel, antiquated past, so it would reason that even the most nonreligious person might give even more consideration to shooting a gun in a holy place when given time to contemplate his particular god’s wrath—even if he doesn’t particularly believe in that god.
All of which is why I always make sure to have my gun on me whenever I’m near a church. It’s just better to be the one guy who isn’t thinking twice about things, which is precisely why I didn’t want to stop at the Church of the Gleaming Spire’s youth-group car wash, despite my mother’s sudden desire to be a good citizen.
“Michael,” my mother, Madeline, said, “when you were a boy, you played basketball there every day after school.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, you could have,” she said. “And done arts and crafts, too.” We were stopped at a red light down the street from the church, and there were three teenage girls with a sign for the car wash, waving at us on the corner. I kept my eyes forward. You never want to engage the enemy if you don’t have to.
“Ma,” I said, “I prefer to wash my o
wn car. It’s an issue of pride.”
My mother ran a finger over the Charger’s dashboard, leaving a trail in the dust. “Apparently not,” she said.
“I don’t like people touching my stuff,” I said.
“Your father kept this car so clean,” she said.
“No, he didn’t,” I said. Of course, he also didn’t use the car as the frequent base of operations for clandestine missions with his friends, so maybe I had a decent excuse for the Charger being periodically dusty. In the past few years, since I’d received my burn notice and been sent back to Miami, minus my life, Dad’s Charger had been set on fire, shot at, slept in and, occasionally, crashed into stationary objects.
“I’m just saying, Michael,” my mother said, “that it wouldn’t kill you to help those nice kids out by giving them a few dollars of your blood money.”
“Ma,” I said, “I have an AK-47 in the trunk.”
“So don’t have them clean out your trunk,” she said. “And, anyway, it’s a good cause. Maybe it will keep these kids from becoming gun-toting mercenaries like you and Sam.”
That my mother was not fazed by the fact that I had an assault rifle in my trunk should have been disconcerting, but since I’d been back in Miami, many of the secrets of my life had been demystified. To my mother, Sam was no longer just a friend of mine from the military with questionable taste in women; these days he was also, well, essentially, a gun-toting mercenary. And my ex-girlfriend Fiona wasn’t just a nice Irish girl without a discernible job (it’s hard to tell your mother that the girl you’re dating robs banks for the IRA), but, well, essentially, a gun-toting mercenary these days, too. That both Sam and Fiona were really just out to protect me was clear to my mother, too, but something told me she didn’t think I needed protecting most of the time.
And she’s right. Most of the time.
“Fine,” I said. I’d already spent the previous three hours with my mother, running a gauntlet of errands—the podiatrist, Target, the hair salon, back to Target, back again to Target—and now, finally we were heading back home, so I wasn’t in a mood to argue much. Sometimes it’s just easier to say “Fine” and chalk the day up as a total loss.
I reached across my mother, flipped open the glove box and pulled out the SIG SAUER I kept there and the bag of blasting caps I meant to give back to Fiona. There were also about fifteen cell phones in various stages of disrepair littered on the floor in the back, but I figured those could stay in one place since I didn’t see any vacuums around, anyway. I handed the gun and the blasting caps to my mother. “Could you put all of that in your purse?”
“What are these sticks?”
“They’re like fireworks,” I said.
“Are they legal?”
“Just as legal as the AK-47 is,” I said.
“If I wasn’t here, where would you put all of this stuff?”
“If you weren’t here,” I said, “I wouldn’t be stopping.”
“Oh, fine,” she said, and stuffed it all in her bag.
The light turned green, and I made my way through the intersection and then pulled into the church lot. There were about fifteen kids lingering, but only two cars getting washed. I pulled behind a yellow station wagon—the kind that was last sold in America when Carter was president—and then both my mother and I got out. My mother immediately lit up a cigarette, which clarified why she’d wanted to stop the car so desperately.
A teenage boy walked up to the car with a bucket and a towel and his hand out. “It’s five dollars,” he said. He had all the urgency of molasses.
“What does the money go toward?” I asked.
“We’re trying to earn enough money to go to Disney World.”
“Why?”
The kid shrugged. “We go every year,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But why?”
“I dunno. It’s fun.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“Do you want a car wash or what?”
I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty. The kid reached for it and I yanked it back, ripping it in two. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to be standing right here. If you go anywhere near the trunk of the car, I’m going to keep the other half of this bill. If you manage to stay away from the trunk, I’ll give you the other half, plus five bucks. Deal?”
“Why don’t you just wash your own car?”
“My mom won’t let me,” I said.
The kid seemed to understand this universal truth and started to get to work on the Charger without another word. I stood back and watched him work for a few minutes and tried to recall the last time I’d stood in this exact spot. It was only a few miles from my mother’s house, but wasn’t in a part of Miami I tended to visit all that often, since it also happened to be just a few streets from my old high school. It was bad enough when my mother bumped into my ex-classmates—or the families of my ex-classmates—and told them I was back in town.
She’d invariably tell them I was free to do odd jobs for them, or she’d just give them my number and encourage them to ask me for help. This sort of help typically involved me saving them from human traffickers, drug kingpins and particularly violent gangster rappers. Frankly, it was easier dealing with the various rogue governments and jilted assassins sent to kill me than it was with people who knew me when I was fifteen.
The kids working the car wash all looked liked kids in Florida always have—which is to say that they were all wearing flip-flops, shorts and T-shirts and had a slight sunburn on their cheeks. Their hair was slightly shaggy and they had the air of nonchalance people possess before they start paying taxes or taking palpable risk.
I can’t imagine I had ever looked anything like them.
“Why didn’t I ever take part in any charity car washes as a kid?” I asked my mother.
“I always wanted you to,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, you and your brother, Nate, were always so industrious. I just thought it would be wonderful if you were engaged in some of the philanthropic events I was interested in.”
“What were you interested in?”
“Well, Michael, that doesn’t matter,” she said.
“No. Now I’m curious.”
“Well, I always wanted to be involved with that thing where you went to another country and did things.”
“The Peace Corps? You were interested in joining the Peace Corps?”
“Yes,” she said. She exhaled a huge plume of smoke and stared at me. “Don’t give me that look, Michael. I was a very active person when you were a child. You don’t remember, obviously. You didn’t just develop your sense of wanderlust on your own.”
“I didn’t have wanderlust, Ma. I had a desire to escape.”
“And look where that got you,” she said. “Right back where you started from.”
“Ironic,” I said. For a moment we both watched the kid working on the Charger. He kept trying to buff a spot out of the hood that, if memory served, was from a bullet deflection. The week previous I’d been involved in a small shooting incident involving an ex- KGB agent who’d come to town to settle a few scores, which, as it happened, had ended up involving me. “You can let that spot go,” I told him.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll touch that up myself.”
The kid nodded and moved around to the passenger’s door and stopped. “You’ve got a couple of similar-looking spots over here,” he said.
“You can leave those, too,” I said. I turned to my mother. “This was an excellent idea.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to reach out to some at-risk kids like these,” she said.
“These aren’t at-risk kids,” I said. “They’re going to Disney World.”
“Michael, do you remember how nice it was when adults took a special interest in you?”
“Ma, the only adults who took a special interest in me were in the Special Forces.”
The
kid moved toward the rear of the Charger and then paused. The problem with telling a teenager to avoid something is that it only makes him more interested in doing precisely what you’ve advised him against. It probably would have been wiser of me to tell the kid that I wanted the trunk area to be pristine.
I held up my half of the twenty-dollar bill and waved it. “You remember this?”
“It’s just that you’ve got a lot of, uh, dirt, I think, on this part of your car.”
The kid pointed at the bumper and also indicated a spatter pattern on the back window. The car was indeed dirty, but it wasn’t covered in dirt, so I thought it best not to have the kid investigate the matter any further.
“Yeah,” I said and handed the kid the rest of the twenty and then handed him another twenty. “Let’s just call it even, okay?”
“I haven’t done the driver’s side yet,” he said.
“Your lucky day,” I said.
I tried to remember what might have happened recently for the back of the Charger to have blood on it, and then recalled that Fiona and the ex-KGB agent had tussled a bit over the trunk. It had been that type of week. I patted the kid on the shoulder and then pushed him away from the trunk, lest he notice anything he might need therapy for later.
“Ma,” I said, “let’s go. This was a terrible idea.”
My mother reached into her purse, managed not to fumble my SIG and the blasting caps out onto the pavement in front of the church, and came out with another five bucks, which she handed the boy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “My son isn’t very good with people.”
The kid nodded—again, something he could readily understand. “Do you want a receipt? This is all tax deductible, I guess.”