by Tod Goldberg
“Man,” the un-treasured asset said, “you’re in the wrong place,” but he tossed his gun into the gutter anyway.
“People keep telling me that,” I said. “And yet, here I am. I wonder why that is?”
“Do you know who you’re shooting at?” he asked. He sounded incredulous. It was the default sound of tough guys who can’t believe other people don’t think they are tough.
“If you have to ask that question,” I said, “then the answer is yes. Now, run inside and tell your boss that there are some bad men outside who’d like to talk to him.”
The Ghoul didn’t move.
“He gonna shoot me in the back?” he asked. He indicated Sam with a lift of his chin.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Duke, you gonna shoot him in the back?”
“Out here, due process is a bullet,” Sam said, which only confused the Ghoul.
“That means no,” I said, though that wasn’t true. It just meant Sam had also seen The Green Berets recently. “But walk backwards if it makes you feel more comfortable.”
The Ghoul did just that, but before he made it up the steps to the door, it opened and Lyle Connors stood in the doorway. He wore a linen summer suit with no tie. His hair was parted conservatively to one side and his face was freshly shaved.
He walked down the steps, shoved the doorman aside and stepped past both Sam and me to look at his car. He walked around it twice, checking for damage. There wasn’t any, apart from the tires. He seemed content with that.
“Feds don’t knock anymore?” Lyle said to me.
Not what I was expecting.
“Wouldn’t know,” I said. “But I figured trying to get past your man at the door would be difficult.”
Lyle laughed. “You send a woman to do your work yesterday and you’re scared of one guy? The FBI isn’t what it used to be.”
“I don’t know who you think is FBI,” I said, “but it ain’t us.”
“No?” Lyle said. “Since when are the Redeemers back in business in Florida?”
“Since Oregon stopped being profitable,” I said. “And since we got tired of having the FBI wearing our colors and riding our bikes.”
Lyle regarded me for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell if he was looking for cracks in the veneer or if he was just trying to apply some silent pressure, see if I or Sam started babbling or backtracking.
“That so?” he said. “How come we haven’t seen any soldiers? You two and your crazy woman, that’s the whole unit?”
“You don’t believe me, that’s your business. Doesn’t change the fact I got this.” I reached inside my vest and pulled out the Ziploc bag now holding Bruce Grossman’s hand—or, well, the hand portraying Bruce Grossman’s hand—and dropped it at Lyle’s feet. I’d shoved a couple of the Ghouls’ patches into the bag, too, just for effect. “I also got a bunch of maps in my saddlebag that list all the safe houses you got between Tallahassee and here. That’s gotta be worth something to someone, right, Duke?”
“You got that right,” Sam said. “Put it on eBay. Get the Banshees and the feds to bid against each other.”
Lyle’s right eye twitched. He didn’t look horribly mad, but that twitch wasn’t because he was over-caffeinated.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“You can call me Jasper.”
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me something, Jasper, what makes you think I’ll do business with you?”
“It doesn’t matter. Either you do business with me or you don’t, I’ll still get what I want. Professional courtesy, I came to you first, seeing as the Banshees tried to screw both of us. You don’t pay up, we take over this territory. I make my money either way.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Lyle said.
“You would,” I said. “Because we’d be wearing your colors. We’d go door-to-door looking for old ladies to smack up. We’d set up shop outside elementary schools to move meth. We’d pimp out thirteen-year-old girls. And when the police got close? We’d take them to your safe houses. We’d leave a trail out to your processing plant in the Glades. We’ll go out to Sturgis, Oklahoma City, Houston and we will shoot at people. And when we get tired of that? We’ll come back here to Miami and maybe we’ll kill some Cuban Mafia don and then a cop and a rabbi and a priest and maybe we’ll kidnap Dwyane Wade. All in your colors.”
That twitch? A full-blown blink.
Lyle scratched absently at his neck until a thick red line rose up from the skin just above his Adam’s apple. “Maybe you’re not feds,” he said. Lyle looked down the street, his eyes squinted into narrow slits, like he was trying to make out something very important in the distance that he knew should be there but wasn’t. “You hungry?” he asked. “I can’t negotiate on an empty stomach.”
I looked at Sam. He gave a quick shrug. “We could eat,” I said.
Lyle reached down and picked up the bag with Bruce Grossman’s hand in it. He unzipped it, pulled out the Ghouls’ patch, and then took a moment to examine the evidence before dropping it back onto the pavement with a dull thwack. “Buster,” he said to the doorman, “get rid of this. Put it in the incinerator. Chop it up. Feed it to your pit bull. Just get rid of it.”
“Got it,” Buster said.
“And tell the boys inside that I’m going down the street to McDonald’s for a business meeting,” Lyle said, “and that if I don’t come back in an hour, they should go kill everyone named Grossman in Miami. Got that?”
The McDonald’s down the street from Purgatory didn’t have a Playland. It was one of those recently renovated McDonald’s that looks like a Starbucks slathered in trans fats and encourages people to come in with their laptops and spend the day eating French fries and Oreo McFlurrys while sucking down the new McDonald’s espresso drinks.
So even though there was no area dedicated to screaming children, there were plenty of postcollegiate men with messenger bags and wire-rim glasses working on their novels or résumés or letters to Parade magazine about the state of Jennifer Aniston’s romantic relationships.
Lyle insisted on buying us lunch, so Sam and I found a circular table with a good view of the door and of Lyle. Sam watched the door. I watched Lyle. Not that we didn’t trust him, aside from him being a murderous biker gang leader, but it just made good sense to watch the hard target and pay mind to any soft ones coming through the door.
It probably made sense to Lyle, too. We’d already proved that we weren’t afraid of taking him on in what would otherwise be the sacred ground of Purgatory, and that we could predict his moves enough so that we were waiting on his men at Zadie’s. Going to McDonald’s? That wasn’t something I could have honestly assumed.
He walked back to the table and set down a tray loaded with food and for a couple of minutes the three of us ate in silence, Lyle protecting his meal prison-style, with one arm wrapped around the entire tray. He was a Big-Mac-large-fries-and-an-orange-drink kind of guy.
No apple pie.
No McFlurry.
No salad.
He was Old School.
Time for recess.
“Since when do Ghouls wear suits?” I said.
“It’s about diversification,” Lyle said. “New business models. I can’t walk into a business meeting dressed like you two. You’ll find that out soon enough, Jasper. You wear a suit, you’re untouchable.”
“And yet you leave all of your most important stuff in a stash house somewhere?” I said. “You ever hear of a computer? You ever see Bruce Grossman? Man was almost seventy. You got jobbed by a guy collecting Social Security.”
“He got you, too,” Lyle said.
“Correction,” I said. “He tried to get us. You know what he stole from me? Shoe boxes. You know what was in those shoe boxes? Shoes. He stole my shoes. Little bit of money. Little bit of drugs. Not like how he took you down. He bullied you. Treated you like his stepson. Us? He got what we left out. Plain and simple. And he paid for it. Boy, did he pay for it. Oh, it took us some time
to find him, but we didn’t have to go torture and kill someone else to get to him. Didn’t have to put no bounty out in Little Havana. We handled our business. While you were busy making house calls in Little Havana, Bruce Grossman was already in the dirt. We had to sit and wait on your asses. So you got taken by an old-ass man and by us and by the Banshees. You’re 0-for-3, hoss.”
Lyle took a long drink from his orange soda. Here was a man not used to being talked back to, getting talked back to.
The twitch was coming back.
“You can change an environment overnight, but you can’t change the people inside of the environment immediately,” he said, his voice careful, measured. “Lessons have been learned.” He talked like someone who’d been reading manuals on corporate leadership.
“Expensive lessons,” I said.
“You think you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do for the rest of your life?” he asked. “Me? I’m fifty years old. My brothers are all doing time. You think I want to spend the next thirty years doing fed time? So I’m changing the way the Ghouls handle their business. Keep us protected and keep us in business. I’m clean. I intend to stay that way. Maybe I’ve got some dirty friends. Even Obama has a few of those, right?”
It was nice talk, but they’d killed Nick Balsalmo. They’d killed the men working the stash house. And they would have killed Bruce. But now I understood why, even though we’d threatened Clifford and Norman, we weren’t met by a dozen men with guns when we approached the bar.
“So, what,” Sam said, “you want some kind of corporate alliance with us? That what we’re talking here?”
Lyle laughed. “No. No, I do not. What I want is for you to stop embarrassing my people. Your arrival in town is a good object lesson. The ranks are bloated with idiots and cowards. Ten years ago? You’d already be dead. But you move fast. You’re nimble. I like that. You probably have my whole operation rigged, right? Know where all my weak points are. That’s how the Ghouls should operate, but no one here has any idea how to run a business. None of these guys ever worked in the military, so they’ve got no sense of structured command. All of them were raised on The Godfather but didn’t have sense enough to get mobbed up. So here they are with the Ghouls, happy to rally, happy to run meth. Living and dying over their colors. Me? I’m thinking internationally. I’m thinking about the brand. You understand?”
If I had to make an informed guess, it would be that Lyle Connors had not only read a few books on management structure but was also taking classes in the University of Miami’s continuing education program.
Maybe it was a condition of his parole.
Maybe he really wanted to change the way the Ghouls did business.
Maybe he just had nothing to do on Wednesday nights.
“You talking about action figures and lunch boxes?” I asked. “A Ghoul under every Christmas tree?”
“I’m talking about a binary approach to business,” he said and then I was sure he was taking night classes. “We do the drug game and then we have a legit side that isn’t just to keep the RICO off our asses. Not just kids’ charities once a year or bumper stickers like the Angels do. I’m talking about fantasy camps, video games, reality television shows. Taking this game to the next level.”
“You realize you’ll need to stop killing people,” I said. “No one wants to go to fantasy murder camp.”
“You’d be surprised,” Lyle said.
“I’m never surprised,” I said.
“Point is, men,” Lyle said, “there’s a role in this for you if you want it.”
“For us?” Sam said. “I thought you said you weren’t looking for alliances.”
“I’m not. I’m looking for someone to teach my people how to ride right. You two—and that woman—you got your roll down. I don’t know how many people you got backing you every time you go out, but the three of you come out like an army, like the army. You want this territory? You buy in. No war. No bloodshed. We make a deal, we make the Redeemers legit again, no one thinking you’re FBI. Everybody wins. Or you give up that Redeemer shit and those colors you’ve been holding, they become yours.”
Lyle Connors was smart. I had to give him credit for that. He recognized a situation that was undermining his ability to govern and he acted. Did he mean anything he said? It was hard to tell. There was nothing stopping him from letting us buy in and then killing us five seconds later. There was nothing stopping us from buying in and killing him five seconds later. But by making this offer, he forced our hand. What he wanted to know was if we were opportunists or if we were just in it for the quick score.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“No, thanks?” Lyle said. He sounded pretty sincere. I hated to let him down.
“We don’t go into business with Ghouls. Never have. Never will. I’d sooner mount up with bin Laden. And anyone coward enough to invite us in is no one I want to be associated with.” I stood up, which got Sam to stand up, too, though somewhat reluctantly. He was still working on his Quarter Pounder. “You got until midnight tonight,” I said. “Five hundred thousand, cash, or it’s a war you can’t win.”
“Show up at midnight,” he said, “you’ll have your answer.”
Real cool.
No pressure.
A man who has spilled blood on the street before acting like: What’s another couple bodies?
Before we walked out, Sam grabbed up his burger and a handful of fries. “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “Good luck with that video game. Let me know when you book the Ghoul-themed cruise, too, okay?”
17
When you’re out for revenge, you tend to lose the ability to think beyond the act of retribution, the fleeting emotion of righting a real or perceived wrong. While I didn’t care for the existence of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club, the fact was they hadn’t actually tried to come at me. They’d only come at Bruce Grossman because he made the error of robbing the wrong damn stash house. That he wanted to give back what he couldn’t use, while admirable, didn’t make him any less guilty of a crime, nor did the fact that he robbed them in order to provide medical care to his dying mother.
When you live in a civil society, you must adhere to the rules. Without rules, only the toughest, most aggressive of the pack will survive.
Bruce Grossman wasn’t tough.
Bruce Grossman wasn’t particularly aggressive.
Bruce Grossman wasn’t even a great bank robber. He was just a lucky one, whose adventures had become romanticized lore, such that even Fiona had heard of him and the FBI wanted to employ him.
And now I had to protect him, which meant two things.
I needed to dispose of the Ghouls and everything of theirs that Bruce possessed. If I could sell it all to the Ghouls, that would make for a perfect order of life, but I knew well enough that come midnight, there would be war.
Bruce Grossman had to stay dead. If he managed to get arrested again, the Ghouls would know, and then he would be dead again, but with a headstone and appropriate services.
I sat in my mother’s living room and explained both of these things to Bruce. He nodded his head once but then didn’t say anything at first. Sam and Fi were in the kitchen working on a laptop to get some pertinent information and pretending not to listen to our conversation, though every few seconds I heard Fiona sigh or mutter something like, “Oh, just put him on the rack, for God’s sake!” Luckily, Bruce’s hearing wasn’t so swift.
Zadie, my mother and Maria kept themselves busy at the kitchen table trading People magazines back and forth. I could tell my mother was getting jittery from the lack of tar in her body but she was somehow managing to not smoke inside her own home. My bout of childhood bronchitis cursed her.
“So,” Bruce said, as though he’d downloaded my thoughts, “you grew up in this house?”
“I did,” I said. “Nate, too.”
“And your dad, where’s he?”
“Dead,” I said. “But he haunts the linoleum in the laundry room.”
/> “And you liked it here?”
“Can’t say that I did.”
“Your brother? Did he?”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t always the happy place it is now. We only put the razor wire in for you.”
“But this is home, right?”
“For better or worse, Bruce, this is home.”
“I go and work for the FBI,” Bruce said, “I never see home again. I lose everything that’s me. What if they stick me in Phoenix or something? Me and Sammy the Bull get to hang out together? Is that what my life would be? I’d rather be in prison.”
“Sammy the Bull is in prison,” I said.
“See what I mean?” Bruce said.
“Listen to me,” I said, “you go to prison, you’ll be dead in twenty- four hours. There are Ghouls in every prison in the country. You turn to the feds, they’ll put you up somewhere where your mother can get help and maybe you have to sit around talking about robbing banks all day, or maybe you don’t do anything, because what you have here of the Ghouls, all of this information, that’s one deep cover the feds don’t have to run. You’d be saving lives. Most notably your own and, for a while, your mother’s.”
That seemed to resonate with Bruce. “Okay,” he said, “okay. I get that.”
“One thing,” I said. “If Sam can swing this, you have to recognize that your life of crime is over.”
“What about, say, I see a pack of gum at the CVS and no one is around?”
“You wait at the counter with your fifty cents.”
“What about running red lights? I still get to run red lights every now and then? What about cheating at cards? Is that against the law?”
Bruce was getting agitated, just as I figured he would, which is why I left out one key ingredient to this conversation. One dangling carrot that I knew Bruce could not resist if offered.