The Reformed

by Tod Goldberg

  “Not bad,” I said. I tossed the bundle to Fiona. “Go get yourself something nice.”

  “Like twenty years in prison?” she said.

  “In your hands, as a foreign national,” I said, “I’d say you’d be looking at closer to thirty.”

  “How much would you say is in here?” Sam said.

  I counted thirty stacks in the fridge—there was also a half gallon of milk, the remnants of a Caesar salad, a six-pack of Coke and five Stellas—and at least twice that many stacks in the freezer. “A couple hundred thousand,” I said.

  It was enough to pay some bills, but it wasn’t a real operating budget. No reputable dealer of anything the Latin Emperors would want—like drugs or guns or antiaircraft missiles, if they really wanted to diversify their business interests—would be fooled by the fake stuff. This was money to be spread around the bottom rungs of the ladder.

  “You two might want to look at this,” Fiona said. She’d walked down the short hallway that led from the living room and now stood in the entryway to the first of the two bedrooms. “And maybe don’t touch anything else.”

  Sam and I walked down the hall and peered over Fiona’s shoulder into the room. There was a stripped bed in the center of the room, surrounded by two night-stands, both of which had been knocked over. At the foot of the bed were the sheets and linens. They were stained with blood.

  “I don’t suppose that’s just the latest spring style,” Sam said.

  I nudged the ball of sheets with my foot, looked to see if there was something other than blood—like a head or an arm—but there was nothing solid.

  “Anyone who bled that much,” Sam said, “probably isn’t bleeding anymore.”

  “Hard to say,” I said. “It could be from more than one person.”

  “That’s a pleasant thought,” Fiona said.

  “Wait here,” I said, and stepped into the room so that I could examine the bed. If someone had been murdered on it, the mattress would be soaked, too, but that didn’t appear to be the case. The room also didn’t smell like death, which was a good sign. It doesn’t matter if you die pleasantly or die violently; if you die in a room, you’re going to leave a lasting olfactory sensation.

  I opened a door to what I assumed to be the en suite bathroom, and instead discovered the Latin Emperors’ money factory. There were several printers, lap-tops and reams and reams of paper scattered on the floor and into the exceptionally large walk-in closet, which housed an automated paper cutter.

  I looked inside the machine and found the reason why there wasn’t anyone about today and why there were a bunch of bloodstained sheets: Two fingers, cut off at the middle knuckle, sat among a stack of freshly cut five-dollar bills.

  “Sam,” I said, “did you say that Father Eduardo has Honrado creating its own newspaper?”

  “They hand it out to all the community centers,” Sam said. He and Fi were still in the hallway. “And I think once a month it comes stuffed inside the Herald. Why?”

  “I’ve got a feeling the Latin Emperors might have some printing needs.”

  I made sure the paper cutter was unplugged and then called in Sam and Fi for a look. Fi took a quick glance but didn’t seem overly interested. Sam, however, spent a good, long time staring at the mess.

  “You have a theory, Sam?”

  “I’m just curious why they didn’t have K-Dog do some of this stuff,” Sam said. “Seems like he’d at least know how to do it without losing important body parts.”

  “Maybe he actually is trying to stay straight?” I said.

  “Maybe.” It didn’t sound like Sam believed himself. “Poor guy,” Sam said eventually. “I’m gonna guess the Latin Emperors don’t offer workmen’s comp.”

  “Unlikely,” I said.

  “So I guess we’re looking for a three-fingered man now?” Fiona said.

  “No,” I said, “I think the man I need to talk to is Barry.” Things were starting to make a lot of sense. Father Eduardo wasn’t just getting blackmailed; he was also about to be the victim of a hostile corporate take-over. And I had a feeling that this wasn’t a plan originally hatched by Junior Gonzalez, since the scope of it had suddenly begun to take on a grander scale. Something maybe a “consultant” might have had some input on.

  “Will you be torturing him for information?” Fi said.

  “No,” I said. “Knowing Barry, I think he’s probably torturing himself as it is.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve been given the opportunity to interrogate anyone. One of my rarely utilized skill sets.”

  That gave me an idea. “Sam,” I said, “I want you to take Fiona down to Honrado, point out where our scarred friend works and then let Fiona interrogate her.”

  “Abduct and interrogate?” Fi said, ever hopeful.

  “Use your best judgment,” I said, which was probably a mistake.

  9

  Not much really annoyed Fiona. Oh, there were the little things—men who didn’t open doors anymore, bullets jamming in expensive automatic weapons, undercooked fish—but by and large she thought that the best way to live was to be mildly cynical, but not actually to the point that every small injustice became an issue. Dealing with Michael had made her aware that even the stupid things men did—and they did plenty—could be mitigated by occasional acts of nobility.

  Chivalry didn’t excuse stupidity, of course, but it went a long way toward reminding Fiona that at base, men were just slightly above chimps in terms of their emotional development, and thus needed to be rewarded when they did something vaguely human.

  Even Sam needed positive reinforcement periodically, which is why she told him, as they sat parked next to each other across from the Honrado campus, waiting for the woman with scars on her neck and face to depart for lunch, that though she was unsure of what she was about to do, she was certain she didn’t need him wasting any more of his precious time on her. She’d be fine. He should go off and do whatever it was he did when he wasn’t tracking down leads or shooting guns or drinking beer poolside or, well, whatever.

  “Fiona,” Sam said, “Michael told me to make sure that if anything went down, you had backup.”

  “What could possibly happen between me and some girl?” Fi said. “You think some girl is going to cause me a problem, Sam?”

  “Well, no, no, clearly,” Sam said, “but, uh, I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I should stick around in case, uh ...” Sam didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The problem with Sam and Michael was that they believed her when she said she wanted to shoot everyone and blow up everything. Six or seven percent of the time, she didn’t mean it literally. But she’d been placed in so many situations recently that could have been solved with a well-placed explosive charge that it just seemed so silly that now everyone was so into diplomacy.

  “I promise not to hurt her,” Fiona said.

  “I didn’t say you would,” Sam said.

  “And I promise not to put her into any kind of cage or underground fortress.”

  Sam hemmed and hawed for a bit and then finally started his engine. “You remember who the target is?”

  “The woman is cut like a spiral ham, as I recall,” Fiona said. “I can’t imagine there will be another one quite like her.”

  Sam eventually drove off, and Fiona was finally able to relax. If it was up to her, she’d be sitting poolside and negotiating a gun deal for some Peruvian revolutionaries—something she’d had to cancel from her itinerary for the week when this new job came up, and which, upon reflection, seemed like a fairly good idea. She’d never liked doing business with Peruvians. They always had such inferiority complexes. Now, that was annoying. Besides, what could be more exciting than viewing the world through a pair of high-powered binoculars while waiting for some girl to come walking out of a building?

  It took another twenty minutes, but eventually Fiona spotted her mark. She focused the binoculars on her to make sure, but Fiona could tell just by how the g
irl carried herself that she was the one. If you live inside a pressure cooker, you’re bound to have some outward signs. In the girl’s case, it was the way she immediately exhaled when she walked out of the building. Not just a release of breath, because that would be impossible to see, but one of those full-body experiences favored by sixteen-year-old girls in front of their parents. She then looked both ways, like she was crossing the street, though she was just standing in the middle of a grassy expanse, and then trudged with her head down toward Fourteenth Street.

  Fiona wondered what Junior had on the girl, because she didn’t seem like the perfect corporate spy. Too much angst, for one thing, though Fiona supposed that angst was most likely the default emotion for many of the tough kids who end up in Father Eduardo’s care—you can only pretend to be bad for so long.

  It didn’t matter to Fiona what the girl had done in the past, only what she was doing now. That was another way to keep from getting annoyed: focus on the present. Fi got out of her car and walked a safe distance away from the girl. Fi was maybe fifty yards behind her, which was fine, since both were walking at a normal pace down a straight road. The girl had reason to believe she was being followed—clearly, her nerves told her this much—but didn’t have any reason to believe she was being followed by an Irish woman wearing a Betsey Johnson dress and still smelling of suntan lotion.

  At the corner, the girl ducked into a beauty shop. Perfect. Fiona liked beauty shops for all of the promises they offered—blemishes hidden, sexier lips, new hair colors—none of which seemed to materialize in quite the manner you’d expect once you got the products home.

  Fi lingered in front of the store for a moment and pretended to talk on her cell phone. Inside, she could see that the girl was regarding a long wall of lotions and creams. She’d set her purse down at her feet, a sure sign that she was in for a long haul and, more importantly, comfortable in her surroundings.

  The store wasn’t one of those well-lit chains staffed by matching women in matching black outfits and matching attitudes. Fiona hated those places. The women who worked in those places truly were annoying. You can’t have airs and work retail. It simply wasn’t allowed. No, Fiona could tell even from the street that this was a small business, the kind built out of someone’s savings, low rents in a neighborhood that wasn’t exactly considered prime property and stock aimed at the very people who lived and worked in walking distance. There were also two hair stations in the back that, Fiona assumed, were staffed by women who regularly dyed people’s hair a color they’d regret sometime later in life.

  She pushed open the doors and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of hairspray, enough that she began to cough almost immediately, which made the girl look up with a frown.

  A good opening. Fiona continued to cough until the girl had to say something.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Fiona said. “Just swallowed wrong.”

  “Oh, I hate that. Makes me feel stupid.”

  “Me, too,” Fiona said. “Like, what, I can’t even swallow right?” The girl laughed. Pleasant. Just two girls talking about saliva.

  Fiona realized she had an avenue and had to keep it up. It was so silly sometimes, the lengths we have to go to get information from people, Fiona thought. Bugs, breaking and entering, torture ... sometimes just talking to a person can yield so much more than any covert operation. Now, granted, it wasn’t as if Fiona intended to portray herself as precisely who she was, but it was her intention on this day to be as normal as possible, because Fiona believed most people responded to normal.

  “What are you looking for?” Fiona asked.

  “I don’t really know,” the girl said. “My skin, you know, it gets so scaly sometimes. Around these scars on my neck especially.”

  Fiona pulled a bottle of Neutrogena off the shelf. “I use this,” she said, and handed it to her. “It keeps me feeling silky smooth.”

  “Oh, that’s too expensive for me,” the girl said. “And I can’t have anything with too much scent in it. I’m allergic.”

  It was odd how much the girl was willing to divulge of herself to a complete stranger in a beauty supply store, but, invariably, that was what people holding on to other big secrets ended up being like. Every alcoholic or drug addict Fiona had known was, during the course of his life, always quick to admit some other damning piece of information at a moment’s notice. And then the ones who were clean always wanted to tell you about how they got clean, or how much they’d used, or how many people they’d slept with to get to this new enlightened version of themselves. It wore Fiona out most of the time, but in this case, with this poor girl, Fiona couldn’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for her. She’d clearly been through a lot, and now she was going through something else, too. She was probably lit to pop with guilt.

  “Have you ever just put vitamin E oil on your scars?” Fiona asked.

  “That doesn’t really work,” the girl said. “I’ve tried everything. But I’m going to get surgery one day. So, yeah, it’s all good.”

  It’s all good. If there was ever a sentence young women uttered that meant the direct opposite, it was that one. No one said it when things actually were all good, only to deflect what was clearly a bad situation.

  Fiona thought that if she abducted this girl, tied her up and began questioning her, within minutes she’d get every secret she’d ever been told or ever uttered.

  “Are you saving up for it?” Fiona said.

  “No. I work at Honrado. Down the street. And they’ve got doctors who volunteer to remove tattoos and fix things. So I’m just waiting on that to come through. It’s a good job, right?”

  “Right,” Fiona said. She kept trying to get a feel for the girl, get some insight into why she’d be in business with Junior when she had such a good deal with a person like Father Eduardo. Fi decided the best way to bridge that gap would be to set that bridge on fire. “How’d you get a job there? When I got out, I would have killed to get to work with someone like Father Eduardo.”

  The girl looked shocked. “You did time?”

  “Five years,” she said.

  “For what?”

  Fiona decided to keep it as real as possible. “I robbed a bank,” she said.

  “And you only did five?”

  Fi leaned in to the girl, close enough that she could smell the girl’s cheap perfume and an underpinning of sweat. The girl leaned, too, sensing that they were about to tell some secrets. “I gave up my ex. He was the one who got me into it. No sense letting him off easy if I was doing real years.”

  “You didn’t feel any guilt about that?”

  “No,” Fiona said.

  The girl bit down on her bottom lip and seemed to be thinking about something. “You wanna get some coffee or something?”

  The honest truth was that Fiona really did not like hanging out with other women. They were usually so ... girlish. Always concerned about who was talking about them, what they were wearing, who had the bigger whatever. Now, certainly, Fi liked wearing nice things, and she didn’t like people talking about her and could appreciate big things; she just didn’t require the requisite estrogen-fueled drama that went along with those desires when women got together to discuss them.

  But sitting with this girl—whose name was Leticia, she’d learned—wasn’t so bad. Leticia was twenty-three and had a seven-year-old boy that she still called a baby. And, unfortunately, the father of the baby was a Latin Emperor whose nickname was Killa.

  “Killa?” Fiona said.

  “He got it on the street,” Leticia said, “and it just stuck. Now whenever someone gets killed anywhere near him, they bring his ass in. It’s stupid.”

  “You call yourself Killa,” Fiona said, “it’s bound to cause suspicion.”

  Leticia took a sip of coffee. They were sitting outside at Café Flordita, a Cuban coffee shop just a few blocks from the Orange Bowl. They’d been there twenty minutes, and in that time Fiona had learned everything she
really needed to know to understand why Leticia was snooping for the LE: Either she did their bidding, or Killa told her he’d take their son and she’d never see him again. This wasn’t a custody battle, just the basics of street life, which Leticia understood even if Fiona couldn’t wrap her mind around it entirely. Different rules for different streets, she supposed.

  “I wanna get away from him, from this whole life, you know? I did time. I got this shit all over my face and you know, for what? It’s stupid. I just want to take my baby and get out of Miami.”

  “Then you should do that,” Fiona said.

  “Father Eduardo? He’s got me training to be a dental assistant starting in the fall. Paying for it and everything. So I need to be here for that. I couldn’t pay for that out of my own pocket.” Leticia sighed, and Fiona saw that her eyes had welled up. “I just, you know, I got this thing to deal with first, and then I can do whatever I want. It’s not even illegal, and, you know, Father Eduardo is LE from back in the day, so I think that, you know, it’s all good.”

  If anything was patently not all good, it was certainly this situation. Fiona wanted to tell Leticia that she was going to help her out of this situation, that there was a way out of it all that wouldn’t involve her working with the Latin Emperors. But Fiona also knew that the poor girl was unsteady on her feet right now, giving up all of this information to a perfect stranger, which meant she’d give up even more to people who really had hooks into her.

  Women. Fiona just didn’t get most of them. She was, she had to admit, annoyed by many women. Leticia wasn’t weak—she had those scars, after all, and was out in public doing her thing, even if her thing was filled with regret, and that took a spine and a will and Fi respected that, God knows—but she compromised emotionally. She probably loved Killa, too, even if she said she didn’t. Or loved him enough not to run to the police and tell them she was being blackmailed by him. Though for a girl who’d done time, just being around ... Killa ... probably constituted a violation of some kind. The poor girl had made a series of bad choices in her life, or made a series of no choices whatsoever, and now here she was, about to be in the thick of a criminal conspiracy, too.