by Tod Goldberg
“That’s the nice thing about smoking,” I said. “Do it long enough and you won’t have to worry about it anymore. You’ll just be dead.”
“Michael, you don’t need to give me your speech. I see those public service announcements.”
I stepped away from my mother and strung wire about a foot off of the ground from the side of the garage to the bougainvillea climbing up the fence that separated Mom’s house from the neighbor’s. Technically, the backyard was a friendly zone, meaning that if you happened to be sitting in the kitchen and saw someone trying to climb the back fence and break into the house through the backyard, the advantage was yours. The only actual exit to open safety was through the house or back over the fence. With the wire only twenty feet from the house, anyone coming that close would fall and likely slice themselves up in the process, which would be painful, but only until they were shot by the sniper watching them from inside.
Or my brother, Nate, with a shotgun. He was in town, visiting from Las Vegas for the week, and was coming over that night to help out. All I’d had to tell him was that his job was protecting a bank robber from a vicious biker gang and he signed on immediately.
When I finished stringing the wire, I walked back to where my mother stood. She was already on her second cigarette.
“Have you seen Zadie, Ma? Is that how you want to end up?”
“Michael, I need tar. It’s actually very helpful for my fibromyalgia.”
“You don’t have fibromyalgia,” I said.
“How do you know? People don’t just hurt. Something must be wrong with me.”
“Where do you hurt, Ma?”
She waved her hand over an area roughly the equivalent of her entire torso. “It’s worse in the morning,” she said.
“Maybe you should buy a new mattress,” I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with the one I have,” she said. “I’ve slept on it since the week you were born.”
Luckily, before I could respond, Sam came through the gate into the yard. He stepped over the wire lines adroitly. If you know what to look for, it’s easy not to get tripped up.
“Mikey, you want razors on the wire in the bushes?” Sam said.
I actually heard my mother gasp.
“Yes,” I said. It’s an instinctual thing. My mother disapproves, I immediately approve.
“Michael, what about the gardeners?” my mother said.
“When do they come?” Sam asked.
“Well, I don’t know, Sam,” she said.
“Do you have gardeners, Ma?”
“There’s a neighbor boy,” she said. “He reminds me so much of you and Nate when you were his age.”
“He’s forced labor, too?” I said. My mother stuck her cigarette back into her mouth and fixed her jaw in the way she does when she wants to convey anger, hurt, disappointment and incredulity.
“So that’s a yes, Mikey?”
“That’s a yes,” I said. “Anyone gets close enough to the house that they’re in the bushes, they’re in the wrong place.”
Sam nodded. But then, because he’s Sam, and maybe a better person than me as it relates to my mother, he said, “Are you all right with that, Madeline?”
“Whatever James Bond says,” she said and then tossed her cigarette down, ground it out with the tip of her shoe and stormed back inside. She slammed the door and everything. I stood there for a moment staring at the door. The sound of it slamming in my face was oddly reminiscent of a period of my life I like to call “childhood.”
“Awkward,” Sam said.
“You have now seen my entire youth in a split second,” I said. “Any news on the bikes?”
Sam checked his watch. “Yeah, I have to meet a guy in about an hour. Did some Donnie Brasco work with the Ghouls back in the nineties, owes me a favor or two, so he’s hooking me up with a couple choppers. What’s Fiona gonna ride?”
I looked up at the roof. Fiona was busy stretching a wire around all of the vents and across the chimney. I’d need to remind myself of this when Christmas rolled around, lest I chop off a foot putting Santa and Rudolph up.
“Yes,” I said. “About that. I spent some time reading their constitution. Women are, technically, property, according to the Ghouls. We bring her with us, I’m going to need to convince her that for this job, she’ll need to pretend like I’m her master.”
“Sounds difficult,” Sam said.
“Yes. But I think I can put a life-or-death spin on it and Fi will react well.”
Sam just nodded. And nodded. And nodded some more. “I’d work through that whole scenario in your head a few more times before you bring it up to Fi.”
“I will. But, uh, she’ll be riding on the back of my bike. No sidecars, right?”
“Mikey, it’s a chance of a lifetime we’re missing here.”
“We roll up on the Ghouls, we have to do it right. Way I’ve read it, there’s only one way of attacking this problem.”
“Lots of pyrotechnics?”
“You need to spend less time with Fiona,” I said.
“I’ve warmed up to some of her views on conflict resolution,” he said.
“She’d have us burn down the Everglades to root out an alligator.”
“That’s what we did to Saddam,” Sam said.
“And look how that turned out, Sam,” I said. “In the meantime, find out from your friend where the Ghouls congregate. Not just their public clubhouse, but maybe where they make their meth, hold their area meetings and design their next Boy Scout badge. If my plan works, we’ll need both.”
“Got it,” Sam said.
The back door opened then and Bruce’s mother, Zadie, stepped out before I could continue with the plan. She hadn’t said much since I’d picked her up a few hours ago, but then she didn’t look like she had the energy to do much complaining about anything. She was completely bald and kept her head covered with a turban. Her skin had a translucent quality to it.
“How are we doing, Zadie?” I said.
“I’m not deaf,” she said.
“Of course you aren’t,” I said.
“Then why are you shouting at me?”
“Am I shouting?” I turned to Sam and then back to her. Both were just staring at me. Apparently I was being loud. “Sorry,” I said. “Habit. Tough to get through to my mother, you see.”
“Your mother is trying to kill me,” she said.
“The smoke?” I said.
“The dinner.”
“Just take a jog,” Sam said. “Work all those complex fats right out of you.”
Zadie was wearing a sweat suit, but didn’t look much like the jogging type.
“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 th
en 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?”
