The Giveaway

by Tod Goldberg

  The presence of Baseball Bat probably wasn’t helping commerce, either. Fiona could see his shadow on the sidewalk, and even that was huge. She also had the sneaking suspicion that some of that smell was coming off him. Nevertheless, when she skipped past the alley and found herself in front of the bar (which was rather daintily designed out front, with a low retaining wall lined with big decorative planters), she gave Baseball Bat a smile that could have melted lead.

  “Well, hello to you,” she said and that big, scary-looking thug actually blushed.

  This was going to be fun.

  “Hello to you,” he said. His voice was surprisingly sweet-sounding. Somewhere under all of that menace was a boy, Fiona thought. Not much of a boy was left, granted, and probably what was left was a boy who liked to kill animals and melt things, but a boy no less. On his left hand, across the knuckles, was the name CLETE. On his right hand, over his fingers, were the words WILL KILL YOU.

  Subtle.

  “That’s a nice bat,” Fi said.

  “It gets the job done.”

  “Cricket?”

  “Not quite. You lost, sweetheart?”

  “My car broke down,” she said. She pointed back toward the Charger, but there were several beaters parked on the street near it and Fiona didn’t think Baseball Bat’s vision was that great. She could see that even though he had that rather foul- looking tattoo on his neck he also had the darkened rings around his neck that indicated diabetes. Poor bastard, Fi thought. Too tough to get his blood sugar looked at. No wonder he limped around. He probably didn’t have any feeling beneath his knees. “And wouldn’t you know I have to use the powder room, too? Isn’t that how it always is? Just one problem after another.”

  Fiona started to make her way toward the bar’s door and Clete lifted the tip of his bat off the ground and tapped it on Fi’s shin. Not hard. Just enough to stop her momentum. “No ladies’ room inside,” Clete said. Ah, there was the gruff voice.

  “I don’t need to have a pretty place to sit,” she said, moving forward again. “A little boys’ room will be fine.”

  And there was that bat again. This time two taps on her shin. Not a very polite way to treat a lady having a bad day.

  “Use the alley,” he said

  Fiona admired Clete’s code. She really did. He had a job to do and he wasn’t going to be swayed by a pretty woman with a small bladder and a broken-down car.

  “Are you sure?” Fiona said. She stepped closer to him this time, let him get a whiff of her scent, let him really see her up close.

  “Beat it, skank,” he said and this time brought the bat down onto her foot. Not hard enough to break anything, nor even cause much pain, but with the clear intent to show Fiona that he could, and would, break her foot if she didn’t vacate the premises. Even less polite than poking her in the shins, really. In Fiona’s opinion, he’d shown a gross lack of chivalry with her when all she needed to do was use the restroom of the establishment.

  Or, well, she believed that if she’d actually been someone in that actual position, his lack of chivalry would have been gross. As it was, calling her a skank was not the right thing to do, no matter the situation.

  Fiona kicked the barrel of the bat from the top of her right foot, sending it out of Clete’s hand and straight into the air. She caught it in midair with her right hand and in the same motion brought it down across Clete’s right knee. As he tumbled forward, she grabbed him by the back of his collar and tossed him down the three short steps in front of Purgatory.

  He landed with a dull-sounding thud and Fiona could already tell that she’d fairly ruined his knee, because people’s legs really aren’t supposed to bend inward, are they? It also seemed like the fall had caused him to break his left wrist and nose, since his face was bleeding profusely and his wrist was bent at a nauseating angle.

  She’d done a nice amount of damage to his knee, but Fiona reasoned that other injuries were Clete’s own fault. His mass multiplied by the acceleration of his fall did the real work. If he’d bothered to take care of himself, he would only have a broken knee now. Alas, people just didn’t take care of themselves as well anymore. Fiona thought that was a personal choice that said legions about a person’s self-confidence.

  Despite all of this, Clete was trying to get up to go after Fiona, but was clearly having a pretty hard time of it.

  Fiona walked gingerly down the steps—after seeing how Clete took them, she was sure she’d didn’t want to slip and land on him, even though with her weight, she’d probably bounce harmlessly off—and stood a few feet from Clete.

  “It’s not polite to call a girl a skank,” she said.

  “I’ll kill you,” Clete managed, but there wasn’t much in the way of honest-to-goodness malice in his voice, seeing as he was choking back tears. It’s hard to sound really tough when a girl has busted out your kneecap and tossed you to the pavement, though Fiona admired him for trying.

  Then she remembered that gun she’d noticed in his belt earlier. Unfortunately for Clete, she remembered it at the very moment he remembered it, too. So as he tried to extract it from beneath his sizable girth, she brought the bat down into the small of his back. Not hard enough to separate his spine, or paralyze him, but certainly hard enough to shatter his tailbone.

  Fiona had been taught early on in her life that if you really want to disable someone, you need not run the risk of killing them as well. Breaking someone’s tailbone isn’t a pleasant experience for anyone, especially since if you do it the right way, it will temporarily make the person feel paralyzed, and if you do it the wrong way, it will make the person think they’re paralyzed and knock them out.

  So Fiona made sure she did it the wrong way, and then, when it was clear that Clete would not be getting up in the near future, she reached into his pants and removed his gun. It was by far the most disgusting thing she’d done all day. Fiona didn’t understand how someone could have that much hair coming up out of their pants. Quite vile.

  But the gun was nice. A Star Model D .380. Beautiful finger grooves. Platinum plated. A perfect all-purpose killing machine. She slipped it into her purse and then took another look at Clete. She almost felt bad for him, splayed out there on the sidewalk as he was, until she realized she needed to move him, lest someone notice the enormous biker beached in front of Purgatory. Or at least she needed to hide him. She tried to pull him by his leg, but he was just too damn heavy and the dragging would simply take too long. She opted instead to tip him over against the low retaining wall in front of the bar and then drag a few of the handsome planters around him so that he was effectively boxed in from view.

  Then she checked her appearance in the window of one of the vacant shops and fairly skipped into Purgatory.

  One thing Fiona could never abide in men was their tendency to turn into pack animals when left to their own devices. The result of this tendency was that everywhere they huddled looked the same: brown. Brown furniture. Brown carpet. Brown walls. Brown television. Brown food. Brown drinks. Brown dirt under their nails. Brown jeans that were once blue. Women were far more interesting, at least in terms of their palettes.

  The really weird thing, though, was that places even smelled brown when there was an excess of unfettered men about. Scientists would probably call this pheromones or something, but Fiona thought it all boiled down to the fact that men have never learned how to bathe correctly because none of them are willing to change a lightbulb.

  This was abundantly clear when she walked into Purgatory and was met with a wall of blackness. It took her eyes several seconds to adjust before she could make out the dark brown bar, the five dark brown stools that sat empty in front of the bar and the skinny man wearing a brown shirt and pointing a brown sawed-off shotgun at her.

  “Whoa,” Fiona said. Not because she was frightened, but because she figured that someone encountering a shotgun for the first time would be frightened.

  “How’d you get in here?” Skinny said.

&n
bsp; “Clete said I could use the bathroom,” Fiona said.

  Skinny relaxed a bit, but not to the point that he lowered his gun. “You his?” he asked.

  “I’m nobody’s,” Fiona said. “But I could be.” She kept her eyes on Skinny, but she was also making note of the items in her periphery. There was a door to the right of the bar that looked to head to a small kitchen area. On her left was an EXIT sign above a hallway. She could hear voices coming from that direction.

  Smart. They probably had a boardroom where they conducted business, though Fiona mostly imagined a dozen grimy men sitting around a brown table, each of them emitting brown dirt from their pores.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” Skinny said. “It’ll be his ass and mine.”

  “I just gotta go real quick. No one will even know I was here. And then maybe you and me and Clete can party. He said he was cool if you were cool.”

  This got Skinny’s attention.

  Men.

  They’d risk getting killed if they thought it might end up that they got themselves a wild time in the process.

  “Okay,” Skinny said. “Okay.” He still had the gun on her, but it felt less like he was doing it because he thought he’d need to shoot her and more like he was doing it because he wasn’t much of a multitasker. He needed to think and that couldn’t be done while simultaneously moving his arms. “Okay,” he said again. He blinked, then set the shotgun down on the bar. It must be nice to be so simple, Fiona thought. How little time would be wasted on things like making choices. “Go on ahead down the hall. Second door on your right. Just don’t make no noise. It’ll be my ass.”

  “Oh, it’ll be your ass,” Fiona said, because she thought even the broadest innuendo would send poor Skinny into a frenzy of mental activity and that would keep him from walking outside to check on Clete. But just to be sure, she added, “We could party first, without Clete. What’s there in the back?”

  “The kitchen,” he said.

  “Is there a flat surface?”

  “There’s two,” he said. “The floor and the counter. Both are pretty dirty.” He wasn’t acting much like a biker. No bravado. No hubris. No secondary male characteristics, really, apart from that shotgun. Ah, Fiona thought, the front. The reason the bar isn’t bugged.

  “Why don’t you clean up one of them,” Fiona said, “and I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail?”

  Skinny considered this offer for a moment before coming to a decision. “All right,” he said, “but I only got five minutes, so get back out fast.”

  A true romantic.

  Fiona didn’t bother to respond; she just batted her eyelashes a bit, mostly in astonishment, and then headed toward the bathroom. Skinny bounded out from behind the bar and into the kitchen and immediately started whistling a tune Fiona recognized as a child’s nursery rhyme, though she wasn’t sure which one. Maybe “The Farmer in the Dell.”

  Once she was in the dark hallway, she could clearly make out the loud conversation going on behind the first door on the right. She could stand right outside the door, but that might be a bit too risky. But since the entire bar was made of fiberboard—brown fiberboard, specifically—she had a pretty good idea that being inside the bathroom would be the equivalent of sitting at the same table as the assembled brain trust of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club.

  She opened the second door, turned on the light and realized that, in fact, Clete wasn’t lying: They didn’t have a proper ladies’ room. Instead, what she found was a single toilet, a spartan sink and a mirror that was covered in handprints. On the floor were strewn condom wrappers, broken compacts, crushed beer cans and ants. Above the toilet, in a handsome scrawl, were the words PROPERTY OF THE GHOULS. Fiona ached for irony, but was sure there was none to be found.

  She decided she just wouldn’t touch anything.

  Hearing wasn’t going to be a problem, but staying invisible might. There were literally a dozen peepholes drilled into the walls of the bathroom so that the idiots in the next room could watch the girls squatting. There were so many that calling them “peepholes” seemed superfluous. There’d be more privacy if the toilet were out in the hall.

  Fiona quickly turned the dim overhead light off again and the darkened bathroom filled with crisscrossing pinholes of light from the room next door. She stood in the middle of the room and listened to the conversation. They were going over the details of the break- in and what they’d learned thus far—all things that Fiona already knew, namely that the stolen drugs had been given to Nick Balsalmo and that they’d “taken care of that.”

  “Do you have a fucking name yet on the crook?” a man said. His voice sounded like sandpaper. Fiona tried to imagine him driving a gold Lincoln.

  “All I got is a last name from Nicky,” another man said. There was a pause in the room and it sounded like someone was shuffling papers. “Grossman,” he said.

  “You know how many Grossmans there are in Miami?” Sandpaper said.

  “Not too many who’ve done time,” the other said. “Nicky was with him at Glades. He gave us a bunch of different first names, but none of them worked. And now he’s not talking.”

  A laugh erupted and the man with the sandpaper voice said, “Everyone shut up. You think this is funny? This bastard has our shit. All of it. All of you gonna be laughing in prison? You know how hard I’ve worked to keep your asses on the street? You screw up, you go like those two last night. You want that? Keep laughing. Find this fucker’s first name. Find his family. Find everything about him and get me our shit back!”

  Fiona decided right then that staying around any longer would be fruitless and dangerous. She’d been gone only a few minutes, so Skinny would be ready for action and probably wouldn’t notice her leaving. She reached into her purse and pulled out a cell phone, dialed an eVoice Mail box number she had that delivered a digital voice file directly to an e- mail address, and then wedged the phone between the toilet and the Swiss cheese wall.

  The recording wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, but Fiona didn’t mind that. If they needed to give it to the police, she was sure they’d figure out a use for it. How she could have used this simple bit of technology when she was a teenager . . .

  Fiona stepped out of the bathroom at the same time a squat man with a major- league—and, like everything else in the bar, brown and greasy—mullet came out of the meeting. She thought he looked like a hobbit with a handlebar mustache, really. Sadly, he wasn’t looking in Fiona’s direction, which was really too bad for him, since Fiona was able to grab the back of his hair and slam his head into the wall, dropping him to the floor in a heap.

  Generally, Fiona wasn’t big on saying menacing things to passed-out people—what was the use?—but as she stepped over the hobbit and made her way to the front door, she said, “That was for the peepholes.”

  She paused once to check on Skinny. He’d left the door to the kitchen open, so she could see his shirtless form sweeping up the floor. His class knew no bounds. He’d left his shotgun on the bar, so Fiona picked that up, too. Along with Clete’s .380, she’d made a nice profit from this endeavor and also got to beat the crap out of two members of that fine underclass known as biker scum.

  A good day.

  11

  If you get a job working for the CIA directly out of college, you’ll most likely spend the duration of your career sitting behind a government-issued metal desk reading mundane government-issued reports on agricultural concerns in Yemen. You’ll work from nine to five. You’ll have excellent health benefits.

  You’ll earn slightly less than people in the private sector. You won’t get a gun.

  You might travel overseas, but most likely you won’t.

  You won’t be asked to kill anyone.

  You won’t be asked to impersonate anyone.

  You won’t be asked to do anything, usually. Most of the time, you’ll just show up to your office and there will be a stack of papers waiting for you that you certainly didn’t ask
to receive.

  This will be your life.

  If you want to travel the world covertly gathering information for the government, the best thing to do is go to college and then join the military, show your superiors a certain aptitude with intelligence and then, one day, you might just get a phone call from an agency that doesn’t exist in any formal government books asking you to leave behind the camouflage for a nice suit and a pair of sunglasses.

  And even then you probably won’t get a gun.

  You’ll be an analyst or an interrogator or you’ll be in charge of analysts and interrogators.

  If you want the gun and the charge to use it (or any other weapon, including your own hands) regardless of the Geneva Conventions, it’s important to have a slippery moral center that the government views as potentially beneficial. Spreading democracy is the end goal, of course, but it’s nice if you’re willing to achieve that goal by using any means necessary.

  When you’re no longer a spy—or waiting to become one again, presuming at some point the axis that tilts your world finally rights itself and the people who’ve burned you are willing to rescind the lies they’ve told about you—that slippery moral center (and understanding that you could be doing paperwork in a basement, too, if not for something as random as luck, or chance, or unique dexterity with a firearm) really only comes in handy if you spend your free time with someone like Fiona Glenanne, helping bank robbers with their problems.

  “So,” I said, “just so we’re clear. You kneecapped Clete, cracked his coccyx and broke his wrist all in under ten seconds?”

  “It’s about being graceful,” Fiona said.

  “You didn’t think that was excessive?”

  “Excessive? No. He called me a skank, Michael,” she said. “He’s lucky to be respirating.”

  We were parked in front of a medical center in Coconut Grove waiting for Nate to come out with Bruce and Zadie. After hearing the general thrust of the conversation the Ghouls were having—that they were only one step behind Bruce Grossman and it was a short one—I figured providing security on top of Nate’s certainly excellent, totally coherent bodyguarding was wise counsel.