by Tod Goldberg
“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 girl 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 Cafe 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.
“If I were you, you know what I’d do?” Fiona said.
“Rob a bank?” Leticia actually smiled when she said that, which made Fiona happy. Somewhere was a person inside there.
“No, I’m not doing that anymore,” Fiona said. “I’d pick up your son from school tomorrow and I’d just keep driving. Don’t stop until you get to Atlanta or Charlotte or New York or Canada. And then when you get to wherever you are, you call Father Eduardo and tell him that Killa was making you do things you didn’t want to do and that he threatened to take your son and that you’re not coming back until he’s gone.”
Leticia nodded and then welled up again. “That’s my dream. But that takes money, and I don’t have enough to even get gas in my car to make it to Sarasota.”
“If I could get you money,” Fiona said, “would you go?”
“Why would you do that? You don’t even know me.”
“I was you,” Fiona said. That wasn’t strictly true, but it was for the role she was playing, and it was also what life could have been like if she’d been the type of woman who let other people rule her.
“Anyway, I got a parole officer,” she said. “I can’t just relocate like that. It would take a lot of paperwork. And you know Killa? He’s got visitation rights. It would be kidnapping, wouldn’t it?”
That someone named Killa had any rights made Fiona sick. But the reality of the situation made Fiona sicker. She needed to do something for the girl. She’d just have to tell Michael that she’d picked up another client for him.
“Let me talk to some friends I have,” Fiona told the girl.
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Someone has to be.” Fi reached into her purse and pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper and scrawled out one of her safe numbers. “This is my cell,” she said. “You find yourself in a bad position, you feel like you need help before I can get you the help you need, I want you to call me.”
“This is crazy,” Leticia said. “You don’t even know me.”
“We tough girls have to stick together,” Fiona said.
Leticia smiled faintly, and for the first time she looked to Fiona like the young girl she absolutely was. She took the piece of paper with Fiona’s number on it and slipped it into her own purse. “I better go or I’ll be late to get back to the phones,” Leticia said. “I don’t like to disappoint Father Eduardo if I can avoid it.”
10
When plotting a counterinsurgency, it’s important to recognize that not all of your decisions can be based on what would be considered, in everyday life, acceptable ethics. Breaking the law for the good of the country is practically a right of passage for American presidents, so imagine how often it happens with spies.
But if you’re leading a counterinsurgency operation, you must gauge the moral well-being of your subordinates after these activities and be prepared to act as a sounding board for them or, if needed, remove them from duty. What this means is that in a war zone, you may need to order a Black Hawk in to medevac a soldier to an appropriate mental facility. But if you’re fighting in close quarters, with a small fighting unit, a good leader may have to serve as the mental health provider.
Which is why when I called Barry-a man with exceptionally questionable ethics and usually very little guilt about it-I could tell that he needed the equivalent of two Xanax and a good nap, but that he was pondering something more along the lines of a guy with two guns showing up at his door and offering him a dirt nap. So I did the one thing I could think of: I invited him to my mother’s house for lunch. Sometimes a guy just needs a sandwich with crusts cut off to feel better about himself.
Plus, my mother’s house was a safe place. If anyone from the Latin Emperors happened down the street, the neighborhood watch commander would scuttle an F-16.
I’d been at my mother’s for only a few minutes when Barry knocked on the door. My mother opened it, saw him looking pitiful there on the front porch and did the one motherly thing she could do in this instance: She gave him hell.
“Did someone kill your dog?” she asked by way of greeting.
“No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I’ve just had a hard week. Busy time in my line of work.”
“You think you have it any harder than anyone else?”
Barry looked over my mother’s shoulder at me-she hadn’t let him in yet-and I gave him the universal sign of surrender. “No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I guess I don’t.”
“Well, then wipe off your feet, take off those ludicrous sunglasses and come inside. Michael’s been waiting for you for hours.”
It’s not that my mother had no concept of time-since I’d been there only fifteen
minutes on the outside-it’s that she’d been saying the same thing to me and my brother, Nate, for so long that it was just second nature. Someone was always waiting for hours to give us hell.
Barry did as he was told and then sat down across from me at the kitchen table. He had bags under his eyes, and his normally sculpted facial hair had a bit more scruff than usual to it. “You look good,” I said.
“I haven’t been sleeping too well.”
“Conscience bothering you, Barry?”
“Before I make my confession, would it be possible to get something to eat?”
“Ma,” I said, “can you make Barry a sandwich?”
My mother came into the kitchen and gave Barry another once-over, as if she hadn’t seen him just a few seconds earlier. “You look like hell,” she said. “When was your last proper shower?”
“Two days,” Barry said. “I’ve been staying on a boat.”
“The Atlantic Ocean out of water now?” she said.
Barry looked at me for help, but I’d been on the blunt end of this weapon before and knew to stick out. “Could I get a grilled cheese?” he said.
“Could you?” she said.
“May I?”
“That’s better,” my mother said. “I’ve got two types of cheese: American and Velveeta. Which would you like?”
“Velveeta isn’t a kind of cheese,” Barry said. “It’s a brand. Right, Michael?”
“Popular misconception,” I said.
“Then I guess I’ll have both?” Barry said, more than a hint of hesitation in his voice. He’d finally caught the drift of my mother’s tough-love approach… which usually contained a lot more tough than love. “And could I get a glass of milk? You don’t happen to have any strawberry Quik, do you?”
