by Tod Goldberg
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.
“That A-Rod is a bum, right, Scooter?” the bartender said. The cat turned at the sound of his name, but didn’t have a ready response.
“You know they eat those in China,” Rod said, referring to the cat.
“Really?” Sam said. He was just happy Rod was finally communicating.
“They’re a delicacy. But after the SARS outbreak, people stopped eating them as much.”
“Why is that?” Sam asked.
Rod looked at the cat kind of sideways, which reminded Sam of the way Rod used to look at the women on the streets of the Maldives. “They carried the disease,” Rod said.
This really was a dive bar, Sam thought.
“Good to know,” Sam said. “One less food I need to worry about being forced to eat.”
“They also make coffee out of their fecal matter,” Rod said.
“Who are ‘they’?”
Rod didn’t respond. He was still looking at the cat, though he actually seemed to be trying to do some sort of mind-meld with it. It wasn’t unusual for people to leave the military and then join either the post office or the DMV, as both required a slavish, military degree of subservience. Both also required people to find joy in repetition, which was just a precursor to madness as far as Sam was concerned. Doing the same thing every day and expecting to go home happy wasn’t the definit
ion of madness, but damned if Sam could figure out why it wasn’t, since Rod seemed positively loopy.
“So, Big Rod, the little errand I asked you to do,” Sam said, “what do you have for me?”
Rod handed Sam the envelope, but kept his eye on the cat. Whatever was happening there was between Rod and the cat. Sam pulled out the documents and started going over them. According to what Rod had pulled from the computer, the woman living at the address where Nick Balsalmo had met his demise was a seventy-five-year-old woman named Maria Cortes. The DMV had her going five-two and weighing in at 283 pounds. That didn’t seem right. Sam had seen stuff on the Internet, of course, but Nick Balsalmo was a thirty-five-year-old guy running drugs out of Little Havana. He didn’t seem like a granny chaser.
“Rod, you sure about this?” Sam said.
Rod finally turned his attention from the cat and regarded Sam with something like disappointment. “Of course,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe he was being questioned.
“See, the thing is, I think I’m looking for someone younger.”
“These Cuban families,” Rod said and then drifted off in his sentence, his eye back on the cat. “Is that thing getting closer to us?” he asked.
“No,” Sam said. “It’s on a chain.” He wondered if Rod had suffered some kind of mild stroke. “What were you saying about these Cuban families?”
“Maybe half of them are legal, the other half came on a boat, they all use the same names. Could be twelve Maria Corteses in that family.”
That was already something Sam had considered, which meant that the real Maria in question here was probably illegal, which would make it doubly hard to track her down.
“Did you happen to run any old car registrations for this person?”
“It’s all there, Sam,” Rod said, though he kind of spat the words out. “I took initiative.”
Guy sure was bitter, Sam thought, but after pulling through a few pages, he found a current registration for a 1991 Honda Civic to an address only a few miles from the building where Balsalmo was killed. It was a place to start.
He sifted through the rest of the papers and found a few more car registrations, along with a permit for a vehicle not currently being operated dated a few months earlier to the same address as the Civic. A 1977 Ford Ranchero. A good sign.
“What do I owe you for this stuff, Rod?”
“Nothing,” Rod said.
“No favor I can do for you?”
“No,” Rod said. He’d locked eyes with the civet, which had begun to emit a low growl. “You ever feel like you were born into the wrong species?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Sam said.
“You know of any available jobs out there in the private sector, Sam?”
“You’re in the private sector,” Sam said.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Something where I got a little action.”
If it was up to Sam, he’d prescribe a course of action for Rod that involved large sums of psychotropic drugs, followed by intensive regression therapy. And a promise that he would never be allowed to proctor a line at the DMV again.
“Can’t say that I do,” Sam said.
“Then what are you doing? Why do you need this information?”
Sam was pretty comfortable with most of his friends. They rarely asked questions, and when they did it was usually just to protect their own asses. Understandable. But Rod seemed like he just wanted a piece of the action.
“I’m doing some process serving,” Sam said. “Maria here is getting sued by Sears. Owes thirteen hundred on a Bowflex she bought on credit. It’s actually a pretty interesting case.” Sam continued to prattle on until Rod lost interest and started staring at the cat again, which caused the cat to start pacing back and forth on its leash, that low growl turning more guttural. After a good five minutes essentially describing the plot of an episode of Simon & Simon that he remembered, Sam concluded by saying, “So, if you’re interested in that, just let me know.”
By this time, the other patrons in the bar had noticed the cat’s change in personality and were scooting to the other side of the bar, which reminded Sam of how people used to sit in the nonsmoking section on airplanes, as if the metal tube they were locked in could somehow discern where the smoke went. If that weird-ass cat thing decided to rip away from the wall and attack Rod and start eating faces, it was Sam’s impression that being on the other side of the bar would only increase the fun for the beast. The only person who didn’t move was the drag queen—or who Sam had decided was a drag queen, since very few women that he knew had a growth of beard and a tattoo of a naked woman riding a dragon inked on their forearms. It was a good disguise, anyway, and suggested that an aggressive Asian cat was the least of his (her?) concerns.
Unfortunately, the bartender was not so encumbered, as he noticed the change. “Easy, Scooter, easy,” he said, and then started to make his way over to the table with a bat in his hand. Sam didn’t know what he was planning with the bat, and anyway it was all a little too late, really, since Sam had wanted a beer about fifteen minutes earlier, but now just wanted to get psycho Rod back to the DMV before he did even more damage in public. Sam yanked Rod out of the booth by his sleeve and got him out the door before they had to fight their way out. Used to be you could go into a bar without encountering civet cats and drag queens, but Sam thought maybe it was the person he was hanging out with that brought on these odd circumstances. Sam made a mental note to find a better DMV source, perhaps someone who hadn’t been mentally neutered at some point in the recent past.
An hour later, Sam parked in front of a house on the eastern edge of Little Havana. It was an old house, probably built before 1930, conveniently located next to a coin-wash Laundromat and Kwik Stop on Northwest 8th. Across the street was the Olancho Café and a dollar store. It was one of those weird neighborhoods where these classic old houses were now wedged between commercial properties, which for Sam was a good thing. It meant that you could park in front of a house and no one would assume you were casing it, even when that’s precisely what you were doing.
The house looked to be no more than a thousand square feet, but there were enough cars parked behind the chain-link fence separating the property from the sidewalk to suggest that those thousand square feet were being occupied by quite a few people. The Honda Civic was there, as was an old Ford truck, its hood a rusted red, a lowered Camaro, a primer-colored Karmann Ghia on blocks and, parked all the way in the back, the Ranchero. It had a camper shell on it, which looked absurd, but then Sam didn’t exactly consider the Ranchero a practical car as it was.
From the exterior, the house looked to be in good shape. It had a fresh coat of yellow paint, the front porch was trimmed in white, there was a rocking chair just beside the front door—which was open—and an Adirondack-style chair on the other side. Whoever lived here, Sam thought, actually lived here.
The chain-link fence was joined in the center by two swinging gates padlocked together. Sam never understood why people somehow thought padlocks would keep them safe or keep their possessions from being stolen. All anyone needed to do was climb over the fence, hot-wire the car and drive it right through the fence. Or, with two paper clips, they could pop the padlock open in under twenty seconds. Sure, if you shoot a lock it might not open, but if you actually just disengage the locking system, it’ll pop right open.
Running around inside the fencing was a big Labrador. Another good sign.
Sam got out of his car and walked up to the fence. He could hear the drone of a television coming from the inside. The television was turned to either the news or an action film, as all he could hear was explosions and screams and sirens. Hard to tell the difference these days. The Labrador was rolling around with a stuffed penguin on the mostly dirt front lawn, paying Sam absolutely no attention in the least. Sam had a brief vision of what it would be like with that weird-ass civet in there, too. The Lab would probably lick it to death.
“Hello
?” Sam shouted. He did it a couple more times until an older gentleman wearing Bermuda shorts and no shirt came out onto the front porch.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Real pleasant.
“Chuck Finley,” Sam said. “From the Department of Motor Vehicles.”
“You got a warrant?”
“No, sir,” Sam said. “Not a criminal matter. Just here about the registration on your Ranchero there in the back.”
The man walked down the front steps, stopped next to the dog and just stared at the animal, like he was trying to will it into action. “Some guard dog,” the man said. “My stepdaughter, she tells me this dog will help keep us safe. Two years, it’s never barked once. I don’t even know if it has vocal cords. Just chases that stuffed penguin around the yard all day.”
The man knelt down and scratched the dog’s head. The man was older, but Sam couldn’t figure out just how old. He had ruddy brown skin and his eyes carried deep bags, but his shirtless torso was lean and muscular. No tats, no notable scars, not even really any hair to speak of. He could be fifty. He could be seventy.
“Man’s best friend,” Sam said. “He’d probably bark if a penguin walked up.” The man snorted out a laugh, but didn’t move any closer to the gate or make a move to let Sam in. “So, about the Ranchero. I just need to check to make sure you’ve not been driving it.”
“I look stupid to you?” the man said. He looked at Sam without any sense of aggression, maybe because he was still petting his dog. Studies said dogs made people more placid. Maybe they were right. “Since when does the DMV make house calls?”
