by Tod Goldberg
“I came out here to ask you a question,” she said to me.
“Ask away.”
“Did Bruce do something stupid again?”
“No,” I said.
“You know I’m eighty- eight,” she said. “I can handle the truth.”
I looked at Sam, but he was attempting to appear transfixed by a leaf. “It’s a complex issue,” I said. “He had good intentions.”
“My son, always with the good intentions.” She shook her head a few times. “His father, my husband, may he rest in peace, was the same way.”
“Your husband robbed banks, too?” I asked. When you’re dealing with someone who has been alive for eighty-eight years, it’s wise to just come clean. Skirting around the corners of things is for the young and the restless.
“Buses,” she said.
“Buses?” Sam said. Now he was engaged.
“Buses?” I said.
“Those muni buses, back before everyone had a pass, carried a lot of cash on them.”
“A lot of coins,” Sam said.
“Coins are money, too.”
“What about you, Zadie?” I said. “Ever turn over a liquor store?”
“My husband and my son,” she said, a derisive tone rising in her voice. “No sense between them. Me, I understood a hard day’s work.” She explained that after her husband died in 1965 from a heart attack, she worked first as a teller at a bank, moved all the way up to assistant manager, but had to quit when her son was accused of walking out with some property.
“Property?” I said. “So that would be money?”
“Someone said he took a roll of quarters,” she said.
“Never proved. Who’s to say he didn’t have ten dollars in quarters in his pocket to start with?”
“Who is to say?” Sam agreed. “She’s got a point there, Mikey.”
Mothers want to think the best of their sons. This isn’t spycraft. It’s just common sense. No one who’s had another human living inside of them for nine months hopes to believe that human is a detestable waste of carbon.
Not Zadie.
Not my mother.
Not Fiona’s or Sam’s or anyone’s.
“Your son did what any good child would do, Mrs. Grossman,” I said. “He just tried to take care of his mother. He ran into a little problem in the process of it all, but it’s going to work out. In the meantime, you’ll stay here for a few days, my mother will order takeout, we’ll drive you to your doctor’s appointments and everyone will sleep easier when it’s over.”
“And that’s why you’re running razor wire around this house?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She reached up and squeezed my cheek. “You’re a smart boychik,” she said. And then she squeezed a little harder. “Don’t get me killed. I’m already dying, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She released me, patted me once on the chest, took a deep breath of the evening air and then smiled. “I do love Miami,” she said. “I’ll always appreciate Brucey bringing me here to retire.” She patted me again. “You be good to your mother when she retires,” she said.
“She’s never worked,” I said. “So retiring is more of a state of mind with her.”
“She raised you,” she said, “and I don’t see you out robbing banks. Someone did something right.” She went back inside then, apparently content that she’d learned what she needed to know and taught me something, too.
“Spunky lady,” Sam said.
I rubbed at my cheeks. “Her fingers were like talons,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she did some Bonnie and Clyde business back in the day,” Sam said. “Maybe she was Bonnie. We don’t know.”
“Cops killed Bonnie and Clyde,” I said. “We do know.”
“A lot of that was covered up,” Sam said. “Top secret stuff, Mikey-one day I’ll explain it all to you.”
There’s a line I try not to cross with Sam. Breaking into his delusions was top on the list. So I just moved forward and asked, “How much time does Zadie have left?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I got what medical reports I could get. They never have the expiration date on them. But not long, Mikey, not long.”
“Then we need to make sure she’s comfortable,” I said.
“And what’s the plan to make that happen?”
“I think we need to kill Bruce,” I said.
“Novel,” he said.
“Actually, first, we use him as bait,” I said, “then we kill him.”
“And then what, raise him from the dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
Sam contemplated my answer. “I don’t see how this could fail.”
I explained to Sam the framework of the plan. We’d first drive out to one of the Ghouls’ clubhouses-the wonderful aspect of dealing with biker gangs is that they actually have clubhouses, which is quaint unless you stumble in looking for a bathroom and end up with a pool cue upside your head-hand them a stack of the documents Bruce took, maybe even some of the vaunted patches, and tell them we have the guy responsible and we’re ready to deal. Tell them we caught him breaking into our “business” and that we tortured him and made him talk. And when he talked, he fingered the Banshees, another national gang with a big presence in the lucrative Florida drug trade. They also had a boutique business in prostitution and loan sharking, which made them an all-around great group of guys.
At any rate, the Ghouls would like the torture part. They were big on using welding material and power saws and, apparently, acid.
A normal person driving a Chrysler Sebring would be shot during the course of this action, which is why we were going to play the part. Bikes. Colors. A subservient Fiona to sit behind me. The whole deal. We’d make them an offer on Bruce’s head. Get a good sale price to deliver him to them.
“First thing, though,” I said, “we need to find Nick Balsalmo’s girlfriend. I’ve got a feeling that if she left him and that apartment just prior to his death, she had to know something was coming.”
“You got a name on her?”
“All Bruce knows is that her name is Maria.”
“So I need to find a Cuban woman named Maria. That shouldn’t be difficult. How many could there be in Miami? Fifty, sixty thousand?”
“I figure you’ve probably got a buddy who could pull her electric bill,” I said.
“Yeah, I could call in a favor or two,” he said.
“And I’m going to assume Nick Balsalmo will have a funeral shortly,” I said. “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who had a lot of friends and family, so I’m going to say Maria turns up sooner than later. We get her to finger the Ghouls definitively in Nick’s death, we have something to bargain with.”
“And if she doesn’t do that?”
“Motorcycle gangs in Florida tend to have pretty defined turf and markets,” I said. “I’m sure once the Ghouls find out that the local chapter of the Banshees hired Bruce to knock them over, and us, that they’ll be ready to kill someone.”
Sam started to smile. “I see me wearing a leather vest at some point. You know, not to brag, but there was a time when a man could wear a leather vest and no shirt and make that work. You don’t see that too much anymore.”
Fiona hopped down from the roof then-literally, she came off the low lip of the roof above the porch and landed as gracefully as a gymnast. “This time you speak of,” she said to Sam, as if she’d been in the conversation with us the entire time, “this was when? Antiquity?”
Sam looked up at the roof. “What was that, a twelve-foot drop?”
“I’m very agile,” she said.
“You’re not wearing any shoes,” Sam said.
“And you’re talking about wearing a vest and no shirt and making it work. There are mysteries beyond what anyone can perceive, apparently.” She turned her gaze to me. “I heard a rumor about me being property. Is that accurate?”
“If you’d like,” I said
, “I’d be happy to give you a copy of the Ghouls’ constitution and you can read it for yourself.”
“No need,” she said. “I rather like the idea of being subservient to you and then springing into the face of some man with a handlebar mustache and teaching him a thing or two about how to respect a woman.”
“That’s wonderful news, Fi,” I said. “But you know that when these bikers get into a fight, it’s never one-on-one. They’ll rat-pack you.”
“Which is why you and Sam will be there to defend my honor. And why I’ll have a very powerful gun- currently being used to help a rebel cause in Cuba-in my purse.”
“I don’t think Kate Spade will go with the leather pants and bikini-top ensemble I’m sort of picturing you in there, Fiona,” Sam said.
“Is that what I get to wear?” she asked me.
“That’s the general uniform,” I said.
“Lovely,” she said. “I’ll bring two guns and a knife. Maybe a blackjack, too, just for fun.”
Sam and I both looked at Fi and tried to do the math. It wasn’t working. But I’d seen her fight plenty of times, and if she said she was going to carry two guns, a knife, a blackjack and a SCUD missile, I figured she’d put it all somewhere.
“I gotta run, Mikey,” Sam said. “I’m meeting my guy with the bikes at the Carlito, and then in the morning I’ll see what I can find on Maria. You need anything else?”
I opened the door into the house and listened for screaming. All I heard was the TV. Wheel of Fortune was on and someone had just lost everything, which was evident by my mother’s loud proclamation “They rig the game, Zadie, that’s why,” which I could only imagine answered some very important question as to the strategy of spinning a wheel covered in money.
I closed the door. “We need to get Bruce and Zadie and my mother apart as soon as possible,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam said, “I thought I saw your mom making eyes at Bruce. Frankly she could do a lot worse. Though I have to say that whole missing-finger business would be a serious distraction. But that’s just me.”
“Sam,” I said.
“Anyway,” Sam said, “the house is safe and this will all seem like a bad dream to everyone really soon. Eventually you’ll even start to miss old Bruce, at least until we’re all back together for the wedding in the final episode.”
“That will be sweet,” Fi said.
A series of bad decisions by Bruce had left me, once again, in the middle of something beyond my control. It was a great day to be Michael Westen. No doubt. “Let’s see if we can get this taken care of as quickly as possible,” I said to both Fi and Sam, “before we have to move everyone into one of your homes.”
Not surprisingly, this time they both agreed without question.
8
For Sam Axe, tracking down leads was a rather enjoyable process. He frequently got to do it from home, which meant pants were optional, or from the bar, which meant umbrella drinks were optional, or poolside, which meant other people’s shirts and pants were optional as well but umbrella drinks were prevalent. Occasionally he had to track someone down by foot, and that was okay in the larger scheme of things, too, since tracking someone through the streets of Miami was a far better option than through the dunes of Kabul.
Still, the one thing he was absolutely certain about was that if a person feared for their life, they were much more difficult to actually find. Oh, you could figure out who they were, but where they were was an entirely different set of circumstances.
The easiest way to figure out Maria’s full name and likely whereabouts would be to simply go back to the apartment where she had lived with Nick Balsalmo and poke around, maybe see if there was some mail with her name on it sitting about, talk to the neighbors. But since the news the previous night had been full of grisly reporting about Balsalmo’s death, it didn’t seem prudent. Homicide cops tend to ask a lot of questions that Sam really had no prepared set of answers for, beginning with the inevitable “What are you doing here?”
And then when Sam picked up the morning’s Miami Herald and flipped to the local news section and saw that the media had already been through the building and found the inhabitants strangely quiet-no one, it seemed, had heard anyone being brutally murdered, which was odd since Sam could hear his neighbors doing all sorts of things, none of which included dismemberment-he decided that pounding on doors and skulking around might lead to him getting into more trouble than was needed. How hard could it possibly be to find someone named Maria, especially someone with a previous address?
Hard, it turns out, which was why Sam was sitting in the driving test bay at the DMV waiting for his buddy Rod Lott to come out. Of all the people Sam could call on, he really preferred staying away from people in the DMV. They just weren’t like normal human beings. Sam chalked it up to dealing with the lowest common denominator of society each and every moment of each and every day.
It’s not as if fighting wars for a living was a great way to make new supersmart friends, nor, really, was this current way of life he was leading, where he spent most of his time helping other people out of their problems by, well, fighting miniature wars. But at least the people he worked for had interesting problems, even if they weren’t active members of Mensa. Sam had no idea just how many mobsters, drug dealers, crazy gun-toting boyfriends and assassination plots he’d foiled in the last year or so, but his life was different each day, and there was value in that. The night before, after putting tactical razor wire around Madeline’s house, he’d met up with an ex-undercover DEA agent who gave him the address of the Ghouls’ hangout and hooked him up with two very nice choppers. Not everyone got to do that every day, right?
Sometimes Sam wondered how much longer he could do this running- around blowing-stuff-up business and then he saw people like Rod Lott and knew that he would keep doing it until, well, until the beer was free and paid for entirely by his pension, because when Rod stepped out of the office and into the bright sun of the Miami morning, Sam had to stifle a laugh. Sam had first met Rod back in 1993 at the Navy base on Diego Garcia. Sam was there preparing for a mission that would eventually take him to Bosnia, and Rod was assigned to the base to push paper from one side of his desk to the other. Guys like that, Sam knew, were always up for a little covert activity with the locals. Problem was, Rod turned out to be a good Catholic, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t care to go to Sri Lanka to check out the local talent.
But he didn’t mind driving. Or looking. So for two months, Sam corrupted the poor fellow as much as he could, though Rod never did break.
That happened a day after Sam left.
Sam tried not to beat himself up about it, figuring, you know, eventually a boy will be a boy. Now, here Rod was, wearing pressed khaki pants, a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a plain red tie. But it was the black horn-rimmed glasses matched up with his ever-present Navy-issue high-and-tight haircut that got Sam thinking Rod must be back on the Book. You’d need to be on something to work at the DMV and look like Ward Cleaver and Buddy Holly’s love child.
Rod looked carefully in both directions before entering Sam’s car, as if maybe he thought he was being filmed. And then Sam looked up and saw the cameras above the doors to the DMV and realized that, in fact, he was.
“Sam,” Rod said. His voice was monotone, but then the guy never was much on octave change, but the sad thing was that he also stared straight ahead, unblinking. The DMV had turned the poor kid into a robot.
“How you doing, Big Rod?” Sam said.
Nothing.
Oh, hell, Sam thought, and turned straight forward, too. Whatever game he had to play to protect this job of Rod’s, he’d play. “Rod,” Sam said.
“Drive,” Rod said.
It was going to be difficult to get the information he needed if Rod spoke only one word at a time, but Sam was under the impression that maybe once they got out of the direct range of the DMV Rod would loosen up.
“You got a direction for me?”
Sam asked.
“East,” Rod said.
“That left or right here at the street?”
Rod reached into his pocket and pulled out a compass. He was still Navy, that was for sure. You gotta trust a person who carries a compass around. “Right and then your first left,” he said.
Ah, finally, more than one word. Progress.
Sam drove and Rod kept giving him directions and Sam kept following them. He noticed that on Rod’s lap was an envelope filled with documents. A good sign.
After twenty minutes of meandering around the streets of Miami, Sam was starting to get both frustrated and bored, so when they got to a stoplight he said, “You got a destination in mind, Big Rod?”
“We need to find a vector not commonly used by DMVstaff,” he said.
Christ. Anyone who used the word “vector” on a regular basis and wasn’t still behind a gun needed help.
Sam looked around the area, tried to reconnect himself with the city a bit, see if he could find a place nearby that might suffice before he strangled the life out of Rod. Kitty-corner to them was a nice-looking bar called the Blue Yonder, which is to say it looked like the kind of place you went right before you skipped town on a warrant.
“You hear about a lot of DMV guys drinking at the Blue Yonder?” Sam asked.
Rod shifted in his seat. Maybe he didn’t drink anymore. Sam couldn’t imagine how that might be, considering how buttoned-up the guy was. If it was Sam, he’d need a drink just to put that damn tie on. “Fine,” Rod said when the light turned green. “But you won’t mind if I don’t imbibe.”
“Roger that,” Sam said, just trying to make Rod feel comfortable, and as an experiment, maybe if he simulated the sounds of radio talk, he’d get Rod to respond like a carbon-based life-form. Sam was actually feeling worried. He wasn’t sure if Rod was still in this body or if he’d been sucked out by the alien queen.
The parking lot of the Blue Yonder was filled with late-model American cars, always a good sign that the clientele was only in town long enough to cash the check they’d kited, and even still Rod looked cautious getting out. They made their way into the bar and took a seat in a dark booth. Sam made out five guys drinking alone, one woman who might have been a man in drag and, curiously, a civet cat hooked to a chain leash sitting placidly next to the bar. A TV over the bar was tuned to highlights on ESPN, but no one seemed to be watching, except for the bartender, who kept a running conversation with the anchors and, Sam decided, the cat. The other patrons didn’t seem to pay any mind to the cat, but whenever something interesting showed up on the television, the bartender would turn to the cat and say a sentence or two.