by Tod Goldberg
"No," Lenore said, but he heard her clicking in the background, and in a second his phone beeped, letting him know he'd received a text. That's how the IRS worked. They said no, but they meant yes. "Before I lose my job, is there anything else you might need to know, Samuel?"
He wasn't going to do it, but… "You have anything on Brenda Holcomb?"
Lenore gave out a perceptible sigh. He heard the familiar click-clack of keys again. "She's not right for you," Lenore said. "You be good and stay with Veronica."
"You're a sweetheart," Sam said. "But it's not like that."
"It's always like that with you, Samuel," Lenore said. He had to admit that she had a point. She'd been looking into women for him for too long. It was just his policy to make sure women he slept with weren't sleeper agents for terrorist organizations, or, at the very least, didn't have husbands in the mafia. "And, Samuel? You might want to tell your friend Eddie Champagne, if you see him again, that he's now officially on the no-fly list, along with his friends at White Rose. In case you're curious."
"You caught that?"
"I catch everything," Lenore said. "Patriot Act, Samuel-you should learn to embrace it."
What Sam opted to embrace, after he hung up with Lenore, was the list of addresses she texted him. In the last year, there were three houses on Fisher Island, two office parks in North Miami, a dentist's office in Coconut Grove, a nightclub, a T-shirt shop, a strip club and an address Sam recognized immediately, since he'd spent the better part of the morning looking at it on Google Maps, trying to figure out how he was going to get his goddamned car back: the offices of Longstreet Security.
He had to hand it to Eddie Champagne. He was a scumbag, but man, he had huge balls.
Early the next morning, Sam recounted all of this to Fiona and me as we drove around Miami in Cricket's Mercedes (which I figured probably wasn't being monitored by any satellites-it at least didn't have any tracking devices on it), looking at the properties Eddie Champagne had purchased, flipped and lured investors into. We saw homes worth only a few hundred thousand dollars that he'd managed to get loans on for nearly a million dollars. We saw the remnants of the Lyric Theater in Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Miami, but which had once been the hub of what was called Little Broadway in the thirties and forties, and which Eddie had managed to get a loan of four million dollars on, when its value was more historical than nominal. And finally, we drove past Longstreet.
"The one building he actually still owns," Sam said. "Or, rather, that White Rose owns. Longstreet pays them a sizable amount of rent each month."
"Not a coincidence, I gather," I said.
"It wasn't even for sale when he bought it," Sam said.
"How much did he pay for it?"
"Double its worth," Sam said.
"I admire his spite," Fiona said.
"Hard not to," Sam said.
I admired that he hadn't just done the easy job I thought he'd done: What I'd figured from Barry's description of Eddie's work and from what Stan had said, was that it must be a low-impact, high-yield operation. In truth, Eddie Champagne was just a few steps away from being a legit businessman-the steps being the ability to stay legit in a down-turning market, a desire to do things legally, that sort of thing. But like every other organized-crime syndicate that operates in the real world, eventually, they wanted to be taken seriously when they began to make enough money to not want to risk death.
At least he wasn't another drug dealer dreaming Tony Montana.
Dixon Woods, on the other hand…
We had other reasons to be at Longstreet, of course, in that I expected the elusive Dixon Woods would be coming in to mount up before meeting with his new best friend, Hank Fitch, and I wanted to be ahead of that, too.
Sam parked the Mercedes across the street from the facility in the lot of Clifton's Chips, a potato chip company, which, at only nine in the morning, was already like a hive of bees. There were men driving forklifts into and out of the warehouses with pallets filled with bags of chips. The parking lot was filled with Hondas and Toyotas and Saturns. There were already three women and one man-all wearing security badges and khaki on some part of their bodies, because security badges and khaki are like the uniforms for the depressed middle class- standing out front smoking around a trash can.
Two school buses pulled up then, and I watched as at least sixty children piled out and headed somberly to the front door. Nine o'clock is early for everybody.
"I always wondered how they got all of those chips in those lunch-sized sandwich bags without breaking any," Sam said, also watching the kids. "Now I get it. They have the kids put them in one by one. Ingenious."
"They're going on a tour," I said. I knew this because when I was a kid, I had done the exact same thing. I hadn't thought of it in years, and at the time the Clifton's Chips factory was in an older part of Doral, but I remembered walking through the factory and being transfixed by machines processing the chips, shooting them rapid fire onto conveyer belts, the women in hairnets plucking out burned chips one by one as they passed. I remembered how loud it all was, but how easy it was for me to concentrate in the noise, how some of the kids were crying and complaining of headaches, and I was just watching the machines, thinking about how they could be modified to spit fire instead of chips.
I also remembered that day because Nate got into a fight with a kid named Justin Pluck, and they had to shut down the whole facility because Justin stabbed Nate in the leg with a sharpened pencil, and Nate's blood got all over a batch of chips.
I also remembered that two weeks later, on Halloween night, Nate and I ambushed Justin Pluck and his friends with water balloons filled with Nair as they waited in the darkened parking lot at the evangelical church a few blocks from our house hoping to steal younger kids' candy. We spent all night searching, missing an entire night of candy gathering, just for the chance to get Justin.
It was worth it.
"That's the problem with education today," Sam was saying. "When I was a kid, we toured the armory. Generations of kids never get to see an armory anymore."
"I weep for them," Fiona said from the backseat. I couldn't tell if she was being sarcastic or if she was being serious.
After the children disappeared into the factory and the buses pulled away, I turned to Fiona, who had her laptop opened beside her. "Any word?" I asked.
"Nothing yet," she said. "At least not from anyone you're interested in. But I've heard from several men who sound very enticing."
I'd anticipated that, by now, Eddie Champagne would be trolling for a new woman on one of the widow sites, as Cricket called them, where Fiona now had her very own profile. I thought that my threat to Stan the day previous and the realization that Cricket's faucet had been turned off would get him scrambling. I figured that Fiona was bait he wouldn't be able to resist.
It wasn't for lack of trying on Fiona's part. She had posted several photos, including one that was just of her stomach, another that was just the curve of her right breast another still that was just her lips, which, admittedly, were hard to resist. Half of the e-mails were from other women telling her she wasn't being tasteful. The other half were from men who didn't seem to have a problem and were offering airfare to pretty much every major American city.
"Jealous?" Fiona asked.
"Gratified," I said.
The fact was, everything was otherwise working well. I had Cricket's house set up for battle. I just had to get all the participants there, and things would take care of themselves. All that was broken would be fixed.
All I needed was for nothing to fall out of place, but already I was getting a bit of a moral tug. The money Stan was likely to get back to me was covered in the blood of others who'd been duped, too. The difference, I suppose, boiled down to choice. The investors who tunneled their money to White Rose were guilty for being stupid, for being greedy, for not recognizing that what they were buying into couldn't be legit. Money can blind. It had, th
us far, turned the investors mute, too. And soon it would all be moot. Maybe if it all closed down now, people would get some of their money back.
Maybe it was like Barry said. No one made a billion dollars by doing everything straight.
The money-or, rather, the appearance of it- would also help me out of my problem with Natalya. But Dixon Woods would have to cooperate to make that happen.
It was after ten o'clock before I realized that wasn't going to happen.
We were still parked across the street, watching the movements outside Longstreet. We saw Brenda Holcomb pull in for her day at work in a black Suburban. We saw another two dozen or so men drive onto the plant in their own Explorers and Expeditions, hop out in workout clothes and ten, fifteen minutes later come out dressed for work, which meant the same khaki pants the employees of the potato chip factory were wearing, except the Longstreet employees dressed the khaki up with navy blue sport coats and bulging necks. Office casual versus paramilitary couture. The men jumped into the company Hummers and sped off without even bothering to wave at the security guard, who, I noticed, was not the same man I'd dropped days before. Too bad. He was one of the only guys I'd gotten to do the vomiting trick.
After three Hummers left the lot, we could see that Sam's Caddie was right where it had been left. At least Bolts thought I was good for my word, even if she hadn't called me back. Before Sam could even comment, or begin complaining, five men came out of Longstreet in what looked to be black Armani suits accented by tight black T-shirts.
"Give me your binoculars," I said to Sam. He handed them to me, and I watched the five men stride across the lot. I only recognized one of them, but that was enough. Particularly since I also recognized that they were toting Hecklers to work, which seemed just slightly unusual.
I handed the binoculars to Fiona. "I wonder who their seller is," she said.
"Remind me and I'll ask," I said.
"Where do you suppose they're off to?" Fiona said.
"Salvation Army," Sam said. "The center cannot hold. They're our last defense against the forces of evil."
"Let me see your phone, Sam," I said. I showed Fiona the photo of the tacks on South Beach Sam took when he was in Bolts' office. "See the big guy in the middle?"
"They're all big," Fiona said.
"He was guarding Natalya when I met her at the hotel," I said.
"The Michael I first met wouldn't have let him keep walking," she said.
"It wasn't like we were in a bombed-out building in Beirut," I said. "I couldn't exactly shoot him in the knees while he stood in the lobby of the hotel."
"You should have shot him for wearing that shirt with an otherwise fine suit," she said. "I don't suppose this is all a coincidence."
"Bad people find bad people," I said.
"I can agree with that," Sam said.
"You don't actually believe Longstreet is an evil organization," Fiona said. "That's absurd."
"No," I said, "I don't think they are evil. I think they are in the business of making money. They don't have an institutional moral code or some kind of religious fanaticism to work against, so they just do what they do. I think they probably hire the kind of people who don't care how that money is made, provided they get their own cut."
"Say what you will about Bolts," Sam said, "but she was going to hook me up with a decent workers' comp package."
"All we know about Dixon Woods is rumor and innuendo," Fiona said.
"When did that ever bother you?" I asked.
"It doesn't," she said. "But I thought at least Sam would require a burden of proof."
"What I've been told is enough," Sam said. "Besides, a schmuck like Eddie Champagne knows you're a bad enough guy to use your name, that's like getting a notarized document from J. Edgar Hoover. Let's stick the fucker in Camp X-Ray and be done with it."
"We closed X-Ray in 2002," I said.
"Then let's bury him under it," Sam said, "whatever gets me my car back sooner."
Fiona's point about coincidence was well taken. But I knew I wasn't just seeing things.
With money came the need for security-that much I understood about Miami. In the case of Cricket O'Connor, her position in society, her affiliation with the war, and her ability to be manipulated by a person like Eddie Champagne opened the door to exploitation. That Eddie had taken on Dixon Woods' name was no coincidence-he held a grudge against a guy who'd beaten him, caught him at his game, and he harbored it enough to be creative with it, if for nefarious purposes.
That Longstreet was protecting Natalya was a coincidence in the barest sense: The Oro was owned by Russians with a pedigree for the drug trade. It was only natural that they'd hire private security for their staff, particularly those ex-KGB agents who probably would be wise not to find themselves in dangerous situations stateside, lest someone spike their sushi with polonium 210 when they got back home. And Longstreet, with their affiliations with the drug trade in Afghanistan, were probably happy to just take the check and not ask questions.
Dixon Woods was a fulcrum, even if he wasn't aware of it. My plan was to use that against him.
Then my phone rang. The number was blocked. At least I knew it wasn't my mother.
"Talk," I said. I'd spent some time thinking about shortening my sentences to sound more menacing when the moment called for it. I figured it would make people mind the gaps in my speech; thought they'd think I was of so few words because my time was better spent planning on ways to kill them versus ruminating on tours of potato chip factories and Nair-filled Halloweens.
"It's Woods."
"Welcome to Miami," I said.
"We've got a problem," Woods said.
"We don't. You might. We don't."
"You don't seem to exist," Woods said. "I don't like to do business with people who don't exist."
"Hank Fitch doesn't exist," I said. "But his money does."
"You got any proof of that?"
I didn't. Not yet. I'd need Stanley Rosencrantz to come through. "This afternoon," I said. "My friend from the East is staying at the Hotel Oro. Are you familiar with that hotel?" Woods said nothing. I'd tried to play my hand too early, but now I had to keep bluffing. "We could meet there this evening, handle all of our business, and by morning you could be back on a plane for Afghanistan tending to your fields."
"It's off," he said and hung up.
I'd had conversations like that in the past. They were never good news.
"What was that?" Sam said. I told him. "Did it sound like he was in town?"
I thought about it. "Hard to tell," I said. "He wasn't bouncing. There was no delay. Phone sounded like a cell. He could be in the PR for all that's worth."
"What now?"
"We make him show," I said.
I called Nate, whom we'd left at my mother's so he could watch over everything, in case any Communists showed up again, and to keep an eye on Cricket, who, for whatever reason, perhaps the same poor judgment that got her in this problem to start with, confided to Fiona that she felt safe around Nate whereas I scared her. "What time is it?" Nate asked when he finally answered his cell.
"It's after ten," I said. "Listen. Plans have changed. I need you to go to Cricket's and get the tear gas from the garage."
"I don't do business until noon," he said.
"It's already tomorrow in Australia," I said.
"So it's ten a.m. tomorrow," he said.
Nate's socialization process ended right around his sixteenth birthday. I had to constantly remind myself of this so that I didn't end up shooting him. "Nate," I said, "go to Cricket's. Now."
"Can I shower?"
"I don't know, Nate, can you?" Problem was, my socialization process as it related to dealing with Nate had stopped at around twelve. That was when we decided it would be easier to just fight over everything.
"Fine, fine," he said.
I gave him some specific instruction on how to handle the tear gas. And upon reflection, told him to dig up the Malibu light
s Sam had installed, too, which made Sam grunt with displeasure. I'd hear about that. But I thought we'd be able to use them in a more guerrilla-style soon. I should have known things were too perfect.
"You clear on everything?" I asked Nate. Asking Nate to do something came with a particular hazard: His involvement always made things worse. I was trying to learn to trust him, but I also knew that the definition of madness is repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result.
"How much am I getting for this job?" Nate asked.
"Nothing," I said.
"You have to be kidding," Nate said. "Cricket gets her money back, she could float us a couple Gs no problem. You want me to talk to her about that?"
"No," I said. "I just want you to do what I've asked."
"If there's some back end, I expect to be remunerated," Nate said.
"Consider that truck of suits your salary," I said.
"You're not nice," Nate said.
"Call me when you're back on the road," I said and hung up.
Next, I called Barry, who unlike Nate was awake and alert, if still Barry. "I need you to set up two bank accounts for me," I said. "But put them somewhere close. Nothing Swiss."
"How does the Dominican sound? I'm getting great rates there."
"Fine," I said. "I need one for Cricket O'Connor, one for Hank Fitch."
"Real ones or fake ones?" he said.
"Real for Cricket, fake for Hank," I said. I gave Barry Cricket's social security number, driver's license number, everything he might need.
"This Hank Fitch is a bad guy," Barry said.
"Yeah, I know," I said.
"He shot a guy I've done some business with in the past," Barry said.
"You don't say," I said.
"Heard things went down on the Fish," Barry said.
"Where'd you hear that, Barry?"
"Around," he said. "This might surprise you, but you aren't the only person who talks to me."
"Nothing surprises me," I said.
"People are moving money around on account of this Hank Fitch," he said. "Lots of it."
"Maybe the Fed is cutting the interest rate next week," I said. "How long to get this done?"
