by Tod Goldberg
“What’s that?”
“A fatty acid found in your skin,” I said. “Old people make more of it. Their skin sloughs off and suddenly everything smells like a wet book.”
“In this context, what’s old?”
“Over forty-five.”
We set the sofa down outside, next to where Fiona was working on her arts and crafts. She had several small sheets of plywood that she’d cut into the shape of cat’s heads. Beneath the head of the cat, the plywood descended into a spike. The plywood was painted black and glass beads, inlaid into tinfoil, were placed along the face to form reflective eyes. She’d made ten of these cat heads. The plan was to plant them throughout the house—in the living room, the entry hall, and since the kitchen was inexplicably carpeted, the kitchen, too. In the dark, they would reflect any ambient light and give the impression that the house was filled with wild, or, preferably, feral, animals.
If you want to scare someone, anyone, make them think they are surrounded by animals. The mammalian brain does not like this. The mammalian brain will ask you to flee. The mammalian brain doesn’t care if you’re a biker or a priest or Britney Spears.
I picked one up and caught the fading sun with the eyes. “Nice work,” I said.
“I know,” Fiona said.
Sam sniffed his arm. “I’m good, right?”
“I think alcohol and suntan lotion probably help neutralize the odor,” I said. “Or I’m just used to the way you smell. So I guess you really can’t be sure, Sam.”
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Then you’re fine.”
“Fiona?” Sam said.
“You smell like mothballs and sweat-soaked back hair,” she said.
Sam’s cell rang before he could respond to Fi, which was good news. Anything to reboot him was always good news. He stepped inside to take the call, so I took a moment to survey our work. We’d moved all of Zadie’s living room furniture into the backyard. Fiona was putting the finishing touches on our slight bit of diversion. Oh . . . and there were two huge custom choppers with engines that sounded like F-16s parked just a few yards from the open sliding glass doors that led back into the house.
Our plan was simple enough: We turned off the power to the inside of the house at the fuse box, but left the outside lights on, brought the garage door down and parked Zadie’s station wagon in the driveway. I even went outside and put some magazines and junk mail into the mailbox. The Ghouls were likely to hit at night, particularly in this neighborhood, so we’d wait for them. When they broke in, they’d find a house filled with animals . . . and then they’d get the real animals.
Sam came back outside a few moments later holding a tube of Jergens hand lotion. He squirted out a large dollop of it and began working it into his hands, forearms, elbows and up under his shirt.
“It’s too late,” Fiona said.
“It’s never too late,” Sam said. He put his arm under Fiona’s nose. “How’s that smell? Huh? Like pure, blue air, that’s how.”
“Where’d you find that?” I asked.
“Guest bathroom,” Sam said, “along with five hundred rolls of toilet paper and a tube of Bengay.”
“I’d check the expiration date,” Fiona said. “I found sour cream in the refrigerator that went bad in 2002.”
Sam smelled his hands. “Fresh and clean doesn’t have an expiration date, my friend. Good is still good. Still real good.”
Fiona picked up one of the cat heads and poked Sam in the gut with the pointed end. “Why don’t you apply some of that lotion to those fatty acids?”
I could watch Sam and Fiona fight all day, except that eventually Fiona would stop playing around and Sam would get hurt, so I put a stop to it by asking Sam who was on the phone.
“That was my guy Philly in the FBI,” Sam said. “I decided to step over the DMV and just go straight for the crime database, you know? Besides, Bruce dropped off their roll. I thought maybe they’d have worked through it by now and could just deliver all the information we could ever need.”
“Your guy at the DMV is that bad?”
“You have no idea,” Sam said. “Anyway, Philly says the Lincoln is registered to Cindy Connors.”
“None of the three guys in the Lincoln looked like a Cindy.”
“Yeah, that didn’t sound right to me, either,” Sam said. “So I had Philly run Cindy’s name. Turns out she’s the sister of one Lyle Connors. Also one Jeb Connors, one Kirk Connors and one Victor Connors, all of whom have resided in federal custody at least once.”
“Lovely family,” Fiona said. “It’s like you and Nate, Michael.”
“Funny,” I said.
“Anyway, Lyle seems to be the big guy,” Sam said.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“He’s the only one not in prison currently.”
“Your deductive powers are amazing,” I said.
“That’s Uncle Sam’s intelligence training right there,” he said.
“Can you get a sheet on him?”
“My guy is gonna e-mail it to me as soon as he can sidestep all of his superiors and the electronic filters,” Sam said. “So, probably first thing tomorrow.”
“And people wonder how terrorists slip into the country,” Fiona said. She gathered up all of her cat heads and went inside.
“Any word on Maria?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Sam said. “I had my guy run her, her mother, her stepfather, gave him everything I had from the DMV, but you might be surprised to learn that the number of Maria Corteses in the world prevents a thorough accounting. But look, José said she’d call. I believe him.”
“Why?”
“He’s lived in the same house for fifty years. If you can’t trust someone who has lived in the same place for fifty years,” Sam said, “who can you trust?”
That sounded reasonable and I said so. If she didn’t call, there was still a good chance she’d show up at Nick Balsalmo’s funeral and we could talk to her then, whenever that might be. The Ghouls were smart enough not to say anything directly about Balsalmo’s death even when they thought they were safe at their clubhouse, but I still felt like Maria knew something. Enough, anyway, that between her and the information we were compiling, plus what we intended to do that night, we might be able to keep the Ghouls away from Bruce Grossman.
I had to hope, at least.
The key to a successful operation is patience. If you’re going to work in intelligence, you must be willing to survive boredom. You must become the king of the mundane.
As a kid, if I got bored I’d go into the garage and find something to blow up. I was particularly fond of using Aqua Net as an accelerant, particularly while using Nate’s bicycle to reenact Evel Knievel’s failed jump over the Snake River Canyon. The best way to defeat boredom, I learned, was to create conflict. Even if I got in trouble, at least it was better than having nothing to do at all.
That course of action wasn’t available to the three of us while we waited for the Ghouls to arrive at the Grossman house. Sam and Fiona took turns providing a lookout, which involved crouching in the juniper bushes along the side of the house for twenty minutes at a time, which, after nine hours, caused the two of them to start bickering.
For a while, their bickering was actually entertaining. And then the fifth hour slipped by. And then the sixth. And the eighth. At 2:30 A.M., Sam started actively complaining.
“You know what would be good right now?” he asked.
“A muzzle,” I said.
“Steak ’n Shake,” he said. “I’m starving.”
“If you’re still hungry in the morning,” I said, remembering one of my mother’s favorite sayings, “you can have breakfast.”
“What time is morning, technically?”
“After we deal with the Ghouls,” I said.
“And why are you so sure they’ll get here before I die from hunger?”
“These guys aren’t dumb,” I said. “They’ll pull Bruce’s name off of
the Web site and if they have to hit every Grossman in Miami, they will.”
This quieted Sam for a moment.
That moment came to an end.
“What I don’t get,” he said, “is how these guys can wear these outfits every day.”
We were both dressed in jeans, black T-shirts and denim vests that had our colors on the back. We were part of a gang called the Redeemers. Sam told me they were big in Oregon. That they used to be part of a Bikers for Christ pack but they splintered off and decided to be Bikers for Meth instead, but kept their name because it sounded badass. They’d tried to colonize in Florida and the FBI had quashed them and then took over their identity for undercover use. They were now Bikers for J. Edgar Hoover.
“I’m comfortable,” I said. And I was. We were both sitting on chaise lounges beside the choppers in the backyard, so that when the Ghouls came, we’d be able to kick-start them and barrel into the living room on cue.
“How many vests do they have? Don’t they begin to stink? I mean, hypothetically, how old are these guys? Forties, right? They’re gonna get that smell, Mikey, that’s all I’m saying. I just don’t see these guys doing a lot of laundry.”
Just as I was about to tell Sam that everyone eventually had to do their laundry, that that was the one thing that made us all equal, I heard the growl of a muscle car on the street. Drive a Charger long enough, you begin to know how every decent American muscle car sounds from about fifty yards away. My guess was Camaro. 1976.
Fiona texted a confirmation: Bad men in a bad car. She scurried into the yard seconds later.
“They’re here,” she said. “They just rode once around the block.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Two,” she said. “In an old Camaro. Quite lovely, actually.”
“How are you sure it’s them?” Sam asked.
“It was fairly easy,” she said. “They were the only people on the street in a yellow and black Camaro with racing stripes on the hood casing out the old woman’s house.”
“For now,” Sam said. “They figure out this is the right place, they’ll call in reinforcements.”
“Then we’ll just have to be effective in our job,” I said. “Let’s mount up.”
Fiona selected her weapons. She was determined to use Skinny’s shotgun, if only for ironic purposes, so she had that as her primary and one of those nice guns she sold the Cubans on her leg.
“Fi,” I said, “let’s try not to light up the entire neighborhood.”
“You have no faith in me,” she said.
“Untrue. I have absolute faith in you. Which is why we don’t need to send hollow-points into the Chabad house down the street.”
“I know my role, Michael,” she said and then slipped back out into the juniper bushes.
When you’re planning an ambush, it’s also important to know where everyone is going to be shooting from, should the situation demand such action, so that the ambush doesn’t turn into a friendly-fire incident. As soon as the Ghouls busted into the house, Fiona would come in behind them while we roared in from the backyard.
Inside the house, we had set up a few obstacles— large pieces of furniture—and surprises—the feral cats—to ensure that we would find ourselves in an L formation and that the Ghouls would be disoriented. We’d funnel the Ghouls into the long leg of the L, directly in front of Sam and me, and up against a make-shift wall we’d built with furniture, so that instead of being able to slip into the kitchen, they would instead be pinned. Fiona would be on the short leg of the L, at a right angle to us. We’d be shooting the Ghouls head-on, Fiona would be shooting them in the side of the head or the back.
It was a brutal thing to consider, but then ambushing someone isn’t about rose petals and whale songs. We had two core advantages working in our favor: We were trained and our goal was not to kill anyone, much to Fiona’s disappointment.
Sam and I rolled up to the open sliding door, our front wheels just an inch from the thick shag carpeting that must have been fashionable at some point in the past, but not a past I readily recalled.
It took a few more minutes, but we finally heard the Ghouls approaching. The Camaro they drove had an engine that sounded like someone choking to death on a bag of glass. Fiona texted: They’ve parked behind the wagon. Examining the car. Just cut the tires.
“Look alive,” I said to Sam and then texted Fiona: Guns?
Fiona texted three words back: Bats, hammers, knives.
All that meant was that they hadn’t yet pulled out their guns. You don’t go to kill someone without a gun, usually. Beating someone to death, or stabbing them, leaves a lot of evidence around. But then, of course, if they actually needed the stuff Bruce had taken, perhaps their goal was not to kill him now, only to torture him until he gave them back their money and property.
Coming up the walk now.
We’d locked the front door, but I knew that wasn’t a deterrent, especially since the front door was equipped with a lovely, decorative, frosted tempered-glass inlay, which to criminals is like leaving a plate of cookies and a note that says, “Come on in!” on the front porch. Unlike regular glass, tempered glass won’t break into huge, artery-cutting shards when it’s smashed. Instead, it shatters into oval-shaped pebbles. It’s also five time harder than regular glass, which is great if you’re worried about grandchildren running into and slicing their heads off but doesn’t really take into account bikers with bats, hammers and knives.
Fiona texted: They’re duct-taping the glass.
Duct tape usually makes you smart. And while no one could reasonably compare anyone in a biker gang to one of the generation’s guiding intellectual lights, they knew crime.
Or at least they knew how to break glass quietly.
Taping off the section of glass you’re interested in breaking will dull the sound of the breaking glass. Instead of a shatter break, the glass will receive a concussion break, so that the glass will spider out from the center point, but only the center point will be broken straight through. When executed correctly, the broken glass will stick to the duct tape and all your cosmopolitan criminal will need to do is remove the tape and there, as if by the magic of criminal ingenuity, will appear a hole.
Unless, of course, you’re an idiot and you duct-tape the glass and instead of hitting it just enough to break the small section, you hit it so hard that you put your entire bat through the window and crush the whole plate, thus completely counteracting the intelligence of using duct tape in the first place. There was a loud crash of breaking glass, followed by another text from Fiona: Idiots.
A dog began barking a few doors down. But since most of the people in the neighborhood had been asleep since about eight fifteen—if you eat dinner at four thirty, you tend to go to bed pretty early—and most of them probably took their hearing aids out at night, no one even bothered to yell at the dog to be quiet, never mind popping outside to find out why two bikers were breaking into the Grossman house.
Fiona texted one last time: They’re going in.
I counted to fifteen and then heard the sound I was hoping for: “Ah!” A minor shriek of fear and surprise. Followed by: “Uh!” The sound of fear and surprise is an evolutionary caution for humans—it’s the easiest sound for us to discern, even in a crowded room. Frighten a human and other humans will know immediately. When you’re about to ambush someone, it’s the first thing you hope to hear, as it puts you at an immediate—and involuntary—advantage. You’re not afraid. They are.
“Did you see that?” one of the men managed to get out. He was trying to whisper, but whispering when you’re afraid is nearly impossible. Unless you are speaking directly into someone’s ear and can thus modulate your voice down below the normal decibel level we can easily perceive, whispering tends not to work.
A normal whisper, in a controlled environment, where your emotions aren’t heightened, is thirty decibels.
A whisper of fear?
You might as well use a bullhor
n.
“What the hell is that? A dog?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a big rat.”
“Man, no one said anything about animals.”
I heard the sounds of cracking glass as the men traversed the entry hall looking for the switch, heading directly in the path of the living room.
As soon as their shadows fell into the living room, Sam and I kicked into gear, thundering the choppers into the house, filling the small home with light and violent noise. The two men screamed—or at least they appeared to scream, since we couldn’t hear them over the engine noise—and dropped their bats as they attempted to jump away and cover up.
It’s only natural.
If you suddenly see a motorcycle charging toward you, particularly inside an enclosed space, after already being frightened by wild animals, you’re going to forget just how tough you are.
Sam and I pinned the two Ghouls up against the wall of the kitchen, our front wheels coming to a stop right above their knees. If we’d wanted to, we could’ve gunned our engines at any point and broken their legs.
But that was probably the least of the men’s worries, since Sam and I both had our guns pointed directly at their heads, too. Fi came walking up with her shotgun.
“Hello, boys,” she said. She was about ten feet from the two men. From that distance, if she shot one of them in the head, it was likely the bullet would sail straight through and hit the other guy, too.
They didn’t say anything.
“How is Clete doing?” she asked.
13
When you’re in the business of information, it’s important to be able to identify messengers. In the spy world, this means that you can spot the one person in the crowd who is waiting for you to walk up and say, “The eagle has landed.”
In the human body, those messengers are hormones. Just like spies, they are dispersed into the community—in this case, the bloodstream—to be funneled toward the appropriate targets in order to provide necessary information. The first hormone ever identified was adrenaline. This happened in 1901. By 1904, adrenaline was being synthesized in the laboratory for medical use, as in counteracting anaphylactic shock.
