The Reformed

by Tod Goldberg

  “I see your point,” I said. “But no.” I finally popped the joint, and a slow drip of water came out. I reached into the pipe and pulled out what looked to be clogging her drain: an eight-inch knife that could gut Big-foot. “Have you been looking for this?”

  “I knew I left it somewhere,” she said.

  “Were you expecting ninjas to come after your stamp collection?”

  “Michael, you can never have enough sharp objects in your home. You know that.” She took the knife from my hand and admired it a bit. “I bought this in Switzerland. It can cut meat, vegetables or human flesh with equal acuity.”

  “That’s wonderful.” I rescrewed the joints together and then stood up.

  “Anyway,” she said. “My point here, Michael, is it would be nice not to play these games. You’re always saying you want your job back. Yet you never exactly used due process when you were a spy.”

  “Which is precisely why I can’t go put a bullet in Junior’s head,” I said.

  “But it was so much sexier when you could,” she said.

  “I guess we all lose, then,” I said. I went into Fi’s fridge and pulled out two beers and a blueberry yogurt I’d left a few days previous. It’s always smart to store rations in a safe place. I opened Fi’s sliding door and stepped out onto her patio and sat down at her picnic table. It was just after seven in the evening, and there were a few people out on the water in small boats, oblivious to the plots and scenarios of the bad people. That wouldn’t be such a horrible thing, I suppose.

  A few minutes later, Fiona came out with a plate of fruit and some cheese.

  “I thought you were making dinner,” I said. “I thought that was why I had to fix your sink.”

  “No, you had to fix my sink because I asked you and you’re unable to say no to me.” She pushed the plate toward me. “Eat some solid food. It will be a shock to your system.”

  I took a piece of cheese and gnawed on one corner.

  “Something the matter, Michael?”

  “I’m a little concerned about the fact Junior has cops on the take. That’s not good for Eduardo, but it really isn’t good for us, either. Last thing we need is some crooked cop deciding to make a name for himself by arresting someone like you.”

  “They’d never take me alive,” she said.

  “Fi, that’s noble, but let’s not get crazy here,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean that I’d die,” she said. “I meant that they’d never be able to take me and live.”

  “Great.”

  “Does Sam know anyone on the police force?”

  “Not really,” I said. “At least not since that trouble we ran into.” A rather adept Miami officer, Detective Paxon, thought she might find something of interest in my life a few months earlier—turns out that if you blow up half the city and leave a few bodies on the streets of Miami, eventually people tend to notice—and since then, Sam was a bit worried about his contacts there. But it’s not as if a bad cop sits around the locker room, telling everyone about the great gig he has working for a prison gang. “If Junior has cops working for him,” I continued, “I’m going to guess that it’s not as easy as paying someone off to deliver messages or look the other way when crimes are being committed.”

  “You think the Latin Emperors have a mole in the police?”

  “Moles. That’s what I’d do. Hell, that’s what I do. It would make sense for the long-term survival of the gang—get some boys loyal to the gang to go in to the police.”

  Fiona took an orange from the plate and sucked the juice out of it. It had been a while since we’d been intimate with each other—we go through cycles where we want to love each other and where we want to kill each other, and where we just want to be near one another but not put that huge emotional investment at risk by actually having any real emotion—but that doesn’t mean I didn’t think about the possibility on a fairly regular basis.

  “What would be the benefit for the bad cop?” Fi asked.

  “Same as for anyone. Money. Power. Influence. A little street fame, maybe. And if they’re loyal to the gang, it’s either do what’s asked of them or take a permanent vacation from this life. At least this way they get health benefits and get to carry a gun legally.”

  “That’s a long distance to go just for something childish like a gang.”

  “You robbed banks for the IRA,” I said.

  “That’s been slightly misrepresented. I just helped some fellow countrymen who needed money for a charity event.”

  “Fiona, I know your file,” I said.

  “And I know your file,” she said. “And as I recall that’s what cost you your job. A few discreet lies.”

  “It might be what costs Father Eduardo,” I said.

  “Do you believe he’s a hundred percent clean?”

  “I do,” I said. “He reformed, and he’s doing good things, Fi. Better things than we are. That’s for sure. But I also know that there are probably a lot of people who look at him and can’t separate who he is now from who he was then. My mother, she took him at face value, but I had to get a full tour of his facility, sit down and talk with him and pull out a dreadful secret in order to believe that he’s not doing it all for some lower purpose. What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’ve seen a few things that might cause you to question other people’s motives,” she said. “And you have inherent father issues.” That was the great thing about Fiona: She always knew the right thing to say. “And,” Fiona continued, “your mother sees very deeply into people.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” I said.

  “You don’t give her enough credit. Maybe she’s a psychic.”

  “If she were psychic, she’d know when her car was going to run out of oil, and I wouldn’t need to pick her up from the Lube and Tune tomorrow morning.” Sometimes my mother can be a little frustrating. But, then, whose parents aren’t frustrating? “The mayor certainly didn’t have a problem with him. He’s doing all the right things, and then something like this shows up. I just can’t let him fail now.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Fi asked.

  Sun-tzu may have said, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” more than fifteen hundred years ago, but that notion still applies when forming a strong counterinsurgency plan. If you really want to defeat a terrorist organization, which a gang certainly is, you need to understand their methodology, their aims and just how far they are willing to go to get what they want.

  The best way to deal with a terrorist is to dictate the terms of the fight. If there are rules of engagement, it’s not all that terrifying to face an adversary. You know what kind of guns they have, you know what parcel of land they are after and you know just how much they are willing to lose. So to fight someone who leans on your fear, you need to bring him to a place where you have no fear at all.

  “We give Junior what he wants,” I said. “We give him every single thing he demands. And then we make him wish he’d never stepped foot back in Miami again.”

  “Oh, Michael,” Fiona said, her glee barely contained. “That sounds like a potentially violent and dangerous thing to do. Would you like me to get some armor-piercing rounds out of storage?”

  Before I could answer, my cell rang. It was Sam.

  “What do you have?” I asked.

  “A hangover,” Sam said. “Or what do you call that feeling before a hangover when you’re not happy anymore?”

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said to Fiona, “Brew some coffee. And do you have any bread?”

  “I think I have some English muffins,” she said.

  “Maybe run over to the store and get a loaf of something. Oh, and some Mylanta. Get some Mylanta for sure.”

  “Will we be entertaining later, darling?”

  “Sam’s been drinking pruno,” I said. “He sounds ... off.”

  That’s all Fiona needed to hear. “Say no more,” she said, and disappeared back into her house.

  “Where ar
e you?” I asked Sam.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Oh, hell, Mike, I think the cab left me at the wrong place. I told him to take me to your mom’s place, thinking maybe I’d get a bowl of oatmeal inside me, maybe some soup, maybe something made of lard, and then I sort of thought about that sofa in the living room, which always is very soft in the small of my back, and ...”

  “Sam,” I said. “Focus. Where are you?”

  “In front of that strip club Mom’s Place. Over by the airport. Some very nice ladies seem to work here. Have you ever noticed how loud airplanes are, Mikey? It’s like they are filled with jet fuel or something. Just one big roaring noise.” Sam stopped speaking for a moment, which concerned me, until I heard him say, “Hello to you, sweetheart. What’s that say on your back? Oh? Oh, I’m a bad boy? You’re a bad girl. ...”

  “Sam!” I shouted.

  “Oh, sorry, Mike. You know what I like? Those tattoos women get on the small of their back. Never stops being sexy.”

  “Sam,” I said, “I want you to step away from the strip club. Is there a gas station nearby? Something with a mini-mart?”

  “Let me tell you something, Mikey. Those mini-marts are ruining the mom-and-pop stores. I won’t go into them anymore.”

  “Sam,” I said, “you go into them every single day.”

  “I’m having epiphanies tonight, Mikey. Things are changing, for sure.”

  “How much did you drink, Sam?”

  “It’s not about how much. It’s about how long. And I don’t know that answer, either.”

  The reason people in prison drink pruno is so they can forget—for just a little while—why they are in prison. The downside, however, is that alcohol in pruno is so abusive, it can make you forget the day after you drank it, too, and maybe the next week or two if you’re not careful. And, of course, if it’s made incorrectly, it can just shut down your kidneys and then forever isn’t a very long time. Fortunately, K-Dog sounded like the kind of guy who had good recipes, and Sam didn’t sound like he was in renal failure, just regular failure.

  “I want you to stand at least ten feet from the road,” I said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. While you’re waiting for me, don’t go inside the strip club and don’t give anyone any money. And, Sam, please don’t drink any more.”

  “Nothing to worry about, Mikey, because I’m never drinking again,” Sam said, which made me think this was much more serious than I ever could have imagined.

  6

  A properly trained operative understands that immediate tactical questioning of a detainee is the best way to get desired information. Wait until a person has been imprisoned for a few days, and you’re more than likely going to get useless patter. The reason is simple: If you’ve been taken into custody by U.S. officials, there’s good reason to believe that they aren’t going to kill you. It’s all about having the moral high ground, and enemy combatants have a pretty good idea what Americans will and will not do. However, if you detain someone on a roadside, put a gun to their head and demand information, fear tends to override rationality.

  Unless, of course, the person you’re questioning is drunk on pruno. After I picked up Sam from the strip club, I brought him back to Fiona’s, stood him up in her front yard and hosed him down. This wasn’t in order to sober him up. Rather, Sam demanded he be hosed down because he was covered in dog hair and smelled of ethanol and peppers. Sam just wanted the hair off of him, but once Fi caught a whiff of him, she thought it best to give him a thorough cleaning outdoors versus inside her home.

  Wash-down complete, I tossed Sam a towel, and Fi came out with a cup of coffee and an entire baguette.

  “You have a nice evening?” I asked him once he was sufficiently dried and was happily chomping on the bread.

  “Let me tell you something, Mikey: There’s nothing right about a drink you can make in your toilet, even if you’re not making it in a toilet anymore.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  Sam riffled through his pockets and came out with his recorder. “I wired myself,” he said, and handed me the device. It was a digital device, which meant it could hold up to twelve hours of conversation. I checked the remaining time—there were only a few hours left.

  “I thought you said K-Dog was your friend?”

  “Mikey, I don’t remember my own name right now. I taped the conversation as a precaution. It was a good thing, wouldn’t you say?”

  I hit PLAY on the recorder and spent about three minutes listening to Sam and K-Dog talking about how great it would be if they were a team on The Amazing Race. “You remember that?” I said.

  “Mikey, you ever seen that show? We could win a million dollars.”

  “Looks like you already have a partner,” I said. “You have an idea at what point you and K-Dog talked about Junior?”

  “It was early,” Sam said. “And then it was late. I’m sorry, Mikey. I just didn’t want him to be offended, so I kept drinking with him.”

  “When in Attica,” I said.

  We went inside, and while Fiona tended to Sam—which is to say, while Fiona made Sam eat Tums and bread and forced him to drink a gallon of Gatorade—I tried making my way through Sam’s tape of himself. It turns out there’s nothing less entertaining than listening to drunks, particularly drunks who think they are being insightful. Eventually, I caught the thread of the conversation about Junior and even managed to make out the address Sam slurred into the recorder.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked Fiona.

  “I’d say he’s about fifty-fifty,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Alcohol and animal fats. There’s nothing human about him yet. Might not be for another ten hours or so.”

  “Is he safe to leave?”

  “Only if you don’t mind him choking to death on his own vomit.”

  “There’s a field trip I’d like to take tonight,” I said. I handed her the address I scrawled down from Sam’s slurred words. “This is where Junior Gonzalez has paperwork dropped off. I’d like to take a look at what he’s planning.”

  “Shall we just drop Sam off back at that strip club? Pay a nice girl named Star twenty dollars to babysit him?”

  “A good idea. But, no.” I picked up my cell phone and made a call. “Ma,” I said when my mother answered (on the first half ring), “I need a favor.”

  The address K-Dog gave Sam wasn’t in the projects where the Latin Emperors have operated for years with impunity, or even in Miami proper, but in a new development of family-style houses in Homestead, about forty minutes south of downtown Miami and only a few miles north of the southern Everglades, and a few miles west of the air force base. And only a few miles away from the women’s prison my new friend the scarred receptionist spent her idle time in before getting a job with Eduardo.

  “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked Fiona. We were parked on the side of a road that headed into a planned community called Cheyenne Lakes. The blacktop we’d been driving on previously had turned into cobblestone pavers, and there was a not-very-discreet up-lit sign that proclaimed THE KIND OF LIFE YOU DESERVE IS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER perched on a low berm of green grass that rolled ... right around the corner.

  “These are the directions you printed out,” Fi said. “It would help if you had GPS in this car instead of an eight-track deck.”

  “GPS didn’t come standard in Chargers until 1975,” I said. “Let me see the directions.” Fiona handed me the paper. Everything was correct. This didn’t smell right. “What is a Latin Emperor doing living out here?”

  “Golfing?” Fiona said.

  I checked my watch. It was near 10:00 P.M. I rolled down my window and listened for a moment. You could almost hear people snoring already. A golf cart came from around the corner, where my better life presumably lived, and I could make out the form of a security guard, even in the dark, behind the wheel. Security guards tend to sit with a supererect posture, as if they’ve been taught
at rent-a-cop school that good posture equals authority.

  “Company,” I said.

  “Do you want me to shoot him?”

  “Let’s talk to him first,” I said.

  The cart pulled up next to my driver’s-side window so the guard would be face-to-face with me. This is something they probably also teach at rent-a-cop school: Park your golf cart like cops park their cars when they’re talking in the Denny’s parking lot. “Lost?” the guard said. He didn’t even bother to say hello, which I found rude.

  “Sure am,” I said. “I was stationed at the base out here, oh, gosh, ten years ago? Eighty-second Airborne. And I wanted to show my girlfriend the old lover’s lane. We’re down from Atlanta for the week. Guess it’s been paved over?”

  The guard nodded gravely. He had a short haircut and the square jaw of a military man, but also possessed the unmistakable body of a civilian: a perfectly round gut, arms that showed the care and confidence of a man who spent his time at the gym doing only curls and a watch too gaudy to be real. He also had a name tag that said his name was Lieutenant Frank, which I took to mean his first name was Frank, because he certainly wasn’t an actual lieutenant in any real service. Being a lieutenant for a rent-a-cop firm is like being a chef at McDonald’s.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Frank said. “Been a couple years now.” He didn’t betray any emotion, which either meant he thought I was suspicious or he didn’t have any actual emotion. Or maybe he just hated his job, which was a distinct possibility, too. He did have a police scanner on the dash of his golf cart, which seemed odd, too.

  “You get much action out here?” I asked.

  “That’s a bit personal,” Frank said.

  “No,” I said. “I mean criminal action.” I pointed to the scanner. “Seems like an expensive accessory on your cart.”

  “It’s important to our residents that we be able to let them know if there’s any activity outside the development that might require their attention, in terms of police actions or military activity.”