The Reformed

by Tod Goldberg

  “That’s good,” I said. I lifted up my shirt and showed him my paintball gun. “I have this.”

  “I told you,” he said, but I put my hand up.

  “It’s a toy,” I said, and handed it to him.

  He hefted it a bit and then gripped it completely in his hand. “This feels comfortable,” he said.

  “It’s perfectly legal,” I said.

  Father Eduardo looked down the barrel. “What is it loaded with?”

  “That one is loaded with paintballs filled with a fun, flesh-eating acid. The one on my ankle has pepper spray. In case I’m mugged.”

  “Mikey,” Sam said from the window, “they’re getting close. Better have the padre move to the door.”

  Father Eduardo gave me back my paintball gun and then walked over to his double doors and opened both wide. His frame filled up the open space impressively. He might have been religious, but he was still hell to look at.

  I sat down behind Father Eduardo’s desk and placed my gun between my legs. Sam stretched out across the leather sofa to my right, leaving the conference table and the other sofa open for our guests. I closed my eyes, leaned back, relaxed and waited. In a few moments, I heard the slap of Junior and Killa’s footfalls in the hallway.

  Even if you can’t see someone, you can tell a lot about them by listening to the way they walk. Put two people next to each other, and evolutionary science tells us that they will attempt to keep pace with each other. They will match speed. They will match stride. They will do all they can not to be left behind. From listening to the syncopated rhythms of the footfalls, I could tell that one of the two men was dragging a leg ever so slightly. Instead of making a definitive clop-clop sound, it made a clop-clap-clop, which meant he was dragging his foot instead of lifting it completely off the ground.

  A weak knee.

  Which probably meant a weak hip.

  Since both men were rather physical specimens, my bet was on Killa, because his bulk looked more like something that came from a needle and not a dedication to working out. And that meant he probably had tendons and ligaments stretched beyond their normal limits. Which meant they could be snapped like a twig.

  I opened my eyes in time to see the proof of my assumption. Killa was a half step behind Junior as they got to the door, all silent violence and dressed-down aggression and, it appeared, a bothersome medial collateral ligament.

  Father Eduardo stepped forward and met both Junior and Killa before they could get inside. This wasn’t part of the plan.

  “Jaime,” he said, using Junior’s real name, and then he did the damnedest thing. He hugged him. The two men embraced for just a few seconds, and I thought, Oh, no, this is a setup. This is about El Salvador. Father Eduardo then turned to Killa and said, “Adrian, my brother,” and hugged him, too.

  Sam hadn’t moved on the sofa. Or at least hadn’t moved much. Just his hand, which held his cell phone. Neither of us had real guns on us, as per Father Eduardo’s instruction, but I had a pretty good feeling that Fiona had a MAC-10 in her trunk for a very special occasion.

  The three men—all well over six feet, all well over 250 pounds—stood there in the hallway for a moment and stared at each other. They looked like triplets. “Come in,” Father Eduardo said eventually, “meet my friends.”

  Father Eduardo stepped aside, and that’s when Junior got his first look at me. He wasn’t pleased.

  “You,” he said.

  “Me,” I said.

  “You stole my BlackBerry,” he said.

  I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled it out. “You’ve got terrible coverage,” I said, and tossed it back to him.

  He saw Sam on the sofa. “Your girlfriend looks different,” he said.

  “Just a different outfit,” I said. “You want your car keys?”

  “I already got rid of that car,” he said.

  “You know these motherfuckers?” Killa said.

  “Language,” Junior said. “You’re in a church.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “This is my church now, and I allow for all kinds of language.”

  Junior looked mildly surprised. “Oh, really? Is that true, Eduardo?”

  Father Eduardo began to speak, but before he could get a word out, Sam jumped up from the sofa, took two steps and slapped him. Hard. “You don’t talk,” Sam said. “Nobody talks but the big man. You hear? He wants you to talk, he’ll tell you when.”

  Killa made a move toward Sam, which didn’t surprise me in the least, but it was especially telling. Junior grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back. “Stop,” he said. “You don’t do anything unless I say so, remember? Same rules.”

  “Maybe you want to chain your puppy up?” Sam said. “I’d hate for him to get hurt.”

  “Do you know me?” Killa said to Sam.

  “Yeah,” Sam said, “I know all the pretty babies. Are you a pretty baby? I like all the pretty drawings you have on your arms. Did your mommy draw those?”

  I didn’t know where Sam was getting this stuff, but I liked it. Killa thought he was tough—and by the looks of him, he probably was, at least in the conventional street sense, which is a different scale—but Sam could put him down without breaking a sweat. That’s the difference between striking fear in someone by looking tough and actually being tough. Killa was probably pretty good at shooting someone in the back of the head, but Sam didn’t even need a gun.

  “All right,” I said calmly. “Why don’t we all just sit down and then we can make threats to each other after everyone knows what the score is. Father, why don’t you put your big ass down on a chair, and maybe your buddies will follow suit.”

  Father Eduardo, whose face was still bright red from where Sam slapped it, sat down at the table covered with blueprints. Junior and Killa didn’t bother to move.

  “Please,” I said to Junior, “you’re my guests here. Have a seat before my guy Finley puts you down.”

  Sam cracked his knuckles, but they didn’t make any noise, which sort of understated the effect he was aiming for, so he cracked his neck, too, and it sounded like someone dropped a piano down a flight of stairs. “Ah,” he said, “now I’m loose.”

  Junior and Killa exchanged glances and then sat down in the two seats directly in front of the desk, not bothering with the empty sofa. At least they knew they wanted to be in front of me.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, I understand you have a proposal for me?”

  “Who are you?” Junior said.

  “I’m the person who didn’t kill you in your own home,” I said. “But you can call me Solo.”

  Junior laughed. “You have balls,” he said. “In here, you have balls. There’s two of you. And maybe you’ve got this snitching priest on your side. So you think, Okay, I got God working for me now, too, in addition to whatever you think you’re going to tell me. But I’ve got an army. You heard? I make a phone call, and I can have two thousand people here. You step outside, you won’t talk to me with such disrespect.”

  “I gave you back your phone,” I said. “Why don’t you go ahead and make that call? I’m happy to wait. And while you do that, I’ll have my man Finley here make a call, too, and by the time you’ve hung up, Julia Pistell’s throat will be slit. Nice girl, by the way. Ever met her? Sweet as can be. Yeah, we got her down at the Ace Hotel. She thinks she won a contest through her college. How long you think it will take the police—and not the ones on your measly payroll—to put her dead body and your house together?”

  “Who?” Killa said. And when Junior didn’t say anything, he said it again. “Who?”

  “Nice you brought your owl with you,” Sam said from the sofa.

  “Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said. “I’m trying to think.”

  I caught Father Eduardo’s eye. He looked ... impressed. But this wasn’t anywhere near over yet.

  “You said your name is Solo?” Junior said.

  “That’s what I said you could call me,” I said.

  “Wh
at’s the nature of your business, Solo?”

  “My business? You could say I take over distressed companies and then, when they’re profitable, I sell them. Why, you looking for an investor?”

  “I guess I’m trying to figure out why you’d align yourself with someone who has a history of selling his partners out.”

  “Align? You think this is an alignment? Father Eduardo works for me. You think you’re the only person who ever tried to blackmail someone?” I said. “I understand you want to utilize Father Eduardo’s existing infrastructure to run your business—would that be correct? I know you came in with this revenge-and-reward business, but the truth is that you see a good business model here. Right? Let’s just be honest, businessman to businessman. I’ve done pretty well here, haven’t I?”

  “Eduardo is a Latin Emperor,” Junior said. “He may think he serves someone else, but he serves us first. That’s the oath. And he owes me much more.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen the documentaries,” I said. “There was even one you were in. Did you see that one?”

  “No,” Junior said.

  “Yeah, showed your picture, and then someone with a blurred-out face spent about twenty minutes talking about how you were the toughest SOB in the world and how you ran this and that and the other thing. But, shit, I just thought you looked like a guy who needed some nice Pottery Barn furniture and some chenille rugs.”

  I winked at Junior, because when you wink at people, it’s a sign that either you’re insane or you know they’re insane and it’s cool, really.

  “Thing is,” I said, “Eduardo has a new boss now. You have a problem with him, you take it up with me, and we’ll see what can be worked out without you getting killed.”

  This made Killa laugh. He had an odd sense of humor. But Junior wasn’t amused. “I. Am. Owed.” Each word Junior said was its own sentence.

  This day was not going as he had planned, I suspected, and I also suspected he wasn’t used to being challenged. I also had a pretty good idea that if pushed hard enough, he’d try to do something stupid. We hadn’t checked them for guns, but I was sure they were strapped. Or at least Killa was. In a moment, however, Fiona would be here to defuse that problem, if need be.

  “You’ve got an outdated business model that needs some tweaking,” I said. “That counterfeiting business you were trying to pull is example A, Your Honor. And this idea that Father Eduardo owes you something? You wipe that clean from your mind. You go to that happy place you live in, with those nice sofas and pieces of art and that gazebo. I really liked that gazebo, Junior. You ever seen his gazebo, Killa?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Killa said. “Who the fuck are these guys, Junior?”

  “Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said. Junior inhaled deeply and then tried to relax. “Eduardo belongs to me,” he said to me. “You must understand that.”

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “You think I haven’t been in a prison or two? So he snitched you out. Big deal. He fell in love with the Lord—what did you expect? Let’s just get beyond revenge and deal with the tangible, okay? Everything you see here? That’s me. Father Eduardo and I made a deal. He had dreams, and I had means.”

  “You are not involved!” Junior said. It was as if I wasn’t even speaking. Junior had his own script, and here I was interrupting it. He thought this was going to go down one way, and here it was, an all-new set of circumstances.

  A rational man would change his tack.

  A rational man might excuse himself and set up a new meeting at a later date.

  A rational man might even just have his muscle pull out his gun and kill everyone. And Killa did have a gun. He walked like a guy with a bad knee and a gun shoved into his tailbone. Sam had noticed this, too, and was keeping a laser focus on Killa’s every move.

  I’d spoken rationally thus far to Junior, and it frankly hadn’t done much to defuse the situation. Junior was quick to boil. The problem with speaking rationally to criminally insane people is that at some point, no matter how much sense you’ve made, they just won’t be able to process what you’re saying.

  We’d already reached that point and had been talking for only about three minutes. So, when that point of stasis arrives, you need to get down to the level of your opponent, ponder what his next move might be and then make it before he did ... which is why, during the second or two it took Junior to process what I’d just told him, I decided to shoot Killa in the knee with my big shiny gun.

  Except it wasn’t a gun, of course. It was a paintball marker. But instead of paintballs, I’d filled this gun with rounds of a mixture containing primarily lortropic acid, which is a particularly voluble acid when it hits things containing water, since it actively repels the substance, which is why it works so well when you’re refinishing your deck. There wasn’t enough acid in the round to do much damage, apart from eat away a patch or two of skin, but when combined with the force of the shot, I knew in all likelihood the round would go right through Killa’s pulled-up sock and into his skin, where it would burn and sizzle and be plenty dreadful to look at, which is part of why I decided to do it.

  The advantage was that the acid would actually cauterize the wound so, on balance, I was really doing Killa a favor.

  Plus, my real plan was to sever his medial collateral ligament, or at least crack his patella. It would depend on how accurate the gun was. And that would help him in the long run, too. You can’t be much of a gangster if you can’t run after or away from people.

  So, just as Junior was opening his mouth to respond, I slid my gun beneath the desk and with a single pop that didn’t sound like a gunshot (which is good, because a gunshot is pretty distinctive and loud and tends to bring in uninvited guests) dropped Killa to the ground in a screaming mess.

  “My knee!” he bellowed.

  Sam walked over to where Killa was writhing, knelt down, put a hand on Killa’s head to keep him still, and proceeded to pull a nice, little snub-nosed .357 from his belt, which he handed to me.

  Junior didn’t move. He just looked at Killa with something less than amusement. Killa’s knee was cut open in a two-inch gash that was, as predicted, bubbling but not really bleeding. A clean shot. Mostly, Junior seemed confused.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Junior, “but I don’t allow guns in here. It’s a church, you know? And I found his tone very disrespectful.”

  “You shot me!” Killa said.

  “Shut up, Adrian,” Junior said.

  “Does that burn?” Sam asked.

  “It’s eating my skin!” he said.

  Junior kept his eyes on Killa, but said to me, “It is eating his skin.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s got five minutes until it hits bone, so he should be fine provided we reach some kind of accord in, oh, four minutes and thirty seconds. He’ll want some time for the antidote to work its way into his system.”

  “What did you shoot him with?”

  “Trade secret,” I said.

  Junior finally pulled his eyes from Killa and looked over his shoulder at Father Eduardo, who, amazingly, seemed pretty content with everything. It was all working out perfectly, and perhaps he saw that.

  The only problem thus far was that Killa’s burning flesh smelled. The acid really wasn’t going to eat away at him until it hit bone—it would only burn off a few layers of skin, and, mixing with blood and the oil in his skin, would cause a lot of visual fireworks, but no real permanent damage. His destroyed ligaments were more his own fault than mine. They would have popped at some point. I just brought the future forward for him.

  “Here’s what I want,” Junior said. “I need the printing plant. I will pay no fee for it. It will be mine. Eduardo can still print his newspapers and his flyers and no-drug pamphlets and everything else he wants. But I need the operation from midnight to six daily. There is no negotiation.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Really,” Junior said. “Or else I kill Father Eduardo’s nephew.”

  14r />
  The element of surprise is really an issue of controlling morale. Shock your enemy, and you can expect that a feeling of hopelessness will descend upon him. He will begin to feel vulnerable both mentally and physically. His training, both mental and physical, will come into question. He might even turn on his leaders, thinking they are incompetent for not knowing what to expect in the heat of battle.

  Not killing all of your enemies is actually an advantage, since the myth of your power will ripple throughout the ranks of your enemy and then you have the mental advantage. A spy feeds off this advantage, because once you’ve defeated an enemy from the inside, it’s much easier to defeat him from the outside.

  The problem for Junior was that he probably wasn’t aware of this maxim. Or maybe he thought he was surprising me.

  He wasn’t.

  Maybe he’d surprised Father Eduardo, but since he was the one who used to control the Latin Emperors’ message, maybe it was an old tactic brought back for a good cause.

  The one person who was surprised was Killa, since Junior had just put a death sentence on his son with Leticia.

  “What?” Killa said. He didn’t quite have the language skills of his brother, but in this case there really wasn’t much to say. His boss had just said he was going to kill his son. And then there was the issue that the skin on his knee was bubbling away.

  “You heard me,” Junior said to Killa. “Your son belongs to the Latin Emperors, and if I decide he dies, he dies. That’s just how it is. You have a problem with that?”

  Killa didn’t know what to say. That was clear. He looked from Junior to Eduardo and even to me. He looked afraid, helpless—all the things you’d want your enemy to look like after launching a surprise attack. That Killa worked for Junior showed the level of depravity in the situation. Everyone was expendable. “He’s just a kid, Junior,” Killa said. “He’s not part of this.”

  “Are you part of this?” Junior said.

  “You know I am,” Killa said.

  “Then he’s part of it,” Junior said. “You ready to have him die for this? Aren’t you ready to die? Because I know I spent a lifetime in prison willing to die for this, so you better be willing.”