Tod Goldberg

by Burn Notice 03 - The Giveaway (v5)

  “Part of the stimulus plan,” Sam said. The great thing about the stimulus plan the government had recently put into motion was that no one had any idea what was in it. You could tell people purple monkeys were part of the stimulus plan and if you said it with some conviction, they would consider it for at least a few minutes.

  But not this guy.

  “If you’re looking for my stepdaughter,” he said, “she’s gone.”

  Not a good sign.

  “Out shopping?”

  “How many times do you think you can threaten someone before they get the hint?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve lived here fifty years,” he said. “No one ever comes here and threatens me. She has her own life. I live here too long to be bothered by idiots.”

  “You the original owner of the house?” Sam said. Just keeping it light. Pretending that bit about the threat slid right past him.

  “It was built in 1929. I moved in a few days later,” the man said, a hint of a laugh in his voice. Keeping it light, too, but still not budging from his spot next to the dog.

  “When did Maria move in?”

  “You do think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  Not good again. The thing was, Sam got the sense the man was enjoying the game.

  “What did you say your name was?” Sam asked.

  “Shouldn’t you know that?”

  Sam walked back to his car and pulled out the envelope of documents. They were all in the name of Maria Cortes.

  “I’m looking for a young woman named Maria,” Sam said. “Or a big woman named Maria. You’re not either of them, right?”

  “DMV doesn’t know if I’m a man or a woman? I’ve been driving a car since before you were born.”

  The problem wasn’t with the DMV. It was with all of the government. “Yes, yes,” Sam said, “I see it here.” He didn’t, but that didn’t mean he was going to admit that. See if maybe the man would just give up his damn name, make it easy on everyone.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Chuck Finley,” Sam said.

  “Like the ballplayer?”

  “No, not like anyone. Just me. Chuck Finley.”

  “There was another Chuck Finley,” he said. “Owned baseball teams.”

  “That was Charles O. Finley,” Sam said. “That’s not me, either.”

  “Could be you,” he said. “That guy was known not to play on the level too much. He once tried to trade his manager. Who does that?”

  “Not me,” Sam said, trying to figure the guy out. It seemed clear he was smart, knew a few things about life and didn’t believe a single thing Sam was saying. Sam sort of admired him for that. These old Cuban guys. They’d seen so much crap in their lives, it almost didn’t make sense to try to con them for information.

  “One other thing you got going for you?” he said. “You’re not like the other dudes been showing up. You got a car. Not a nice car, but not some screaming motorcycle.”

  Uh-oh.

  “You said you were Maria’s stepfather?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Her mother around?”

  “No,” he said. “They left together. Fine by me.”

  “You’re a tender guy,” Sam said. He decided being straight was the only way to get what he needed. He wasn’t sure it was a two-way street, however. “Bad guys come here looking for your stepdaughter and you just boot her out?”

  “She got in with a bad crowd,” he said. “I warned her that Nick was no good, and so she came crawling back here, I told her, ‘See, I told you.’ But she’s a grown woman now. Her mother, too. What can I do?”

  “Maria is in a lot of trouble,” Sam said. “I’m not here to hurt her. I’m here to protect her.”

  “I bet.”

  “Her boyfriend Nick is dead.”

  “I told you he was a bad guy.”

  “He was cut up in pieces inside an apartment rented in your wife’s name,” Sam said. “Then he was dumped in acid. Was he that bad? Is anyone that bad?”

  The man stopped petting the dog, considered the sentence Sam said, patted the dog once and then stood up. Finally, Sam thought, a reaction.

  “You’re not with those bikers?”

  “No,” Sam said.

  “And you’re not DMV, right?”

  “Right.”

  This answer actually seemed to ease him more than the negative answer on the biker issue. Everyone hates the DMV. No wonder Rod was how he was. “I’m José,” he said. “And I drive that Ranchero all the time. Just hate to get it registered, you know? Piece of crap. Let it sit.”

  “Right,” Sam said.

  “Now, then, who are you?” José asked.

  There was the rub. Sam couldn’t quite tell him the truth and couldn’t quite lie, not if he wanted his help in getting Maria safe. “I’m just someone who wants to help her stay alive.” Sam scratched out his cell phone number on the back of the envelope and reached it over the fence toward José. He finally moved away from the dog and took the envelope. “I don’t care if she’s illegal. I don’t care about anything but keeping her safe.”

  “She’ll call you tonight,” José said and then he and the dog went inside, closing the door quietly behind them.

  9

  Before you attack a fixed enemy position, you always want to do a proper amount of reconnaissance. This is true if you intend to attack with firepower or if you intend to attack with psychological warfare. Either option requires a precise understanding of the lay of the land.

  The first order of business is to obtain as much information about the physical area as possible. This is usually done by having several different people watching the same area from different vantage points, who then obtain salient intelligence and report back. In an ideal situation, all of that intel would be gathered and then you’d grid out the area from all angles and plan your attack.

  You’d then break into seven teams: the assault team, which does the assaulting; the security team, which handles securing the area from reinforcements; the support team, which assists the assault team indirectly; the breach team, which cuts through obstacles; the demolition team, which blows stuff up; and the search team, which is sent to ferret out any remaining hostiles.

  To do this effectively, a team of about fifty men would be best. A dozen claymore mines would help, some tank support wouldn’t offend anyone and an extraction team with a gassed-up Black Hawk would make it a nice, polite party

  If you have less than fifty men, no claymores, no tanks and only a DVD of Black Hawk Down, you’re going to need to make adjustments. When you’re a spy, you’re often asked to do the work of fifty men simply by being better at everything.

  Being better doesn’t really matter when a dozen violent bikers are beating you to death with lead pipes because you’ve cornered yourself due to poor planning, which is why Fiona and I were down the street from the Ghouls’ clubhouse just west of the airport watching who was coming and who was going, and attempting to figure out what the odds were that we could bust in and start making outlandish demands. I was keeping watch with binoculars and a camera with a telephoto lens. Fiona was keeping watch by reading InStyle magazine and periodically taking cell phone calls

  “Why are the police able to pester Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan every ten minutes but can’t arrest these men at their own clubhouse?” Fiona asked.

  “Because they aren’t doing anything wrong,” I said. It was true: Their clubhouse was technically a bar and they were technically patrons, which is perfectly legal. And since you could refuse service to anyone as a shop owner, they didn’t have a problem with not serving a person who might wander in off the street. Though the monster sitting in front of the door absently twirling a baseball bat probably dissuaded most casual onlookers. In the last hour, we’d watched about a dozen men who looked essentially just like Baseball Bat roll up on their bikes and enter the bar. Usually these guys had a few women with them—you cou
ld tell who they were since they wore jackets that said PROPERTY OF THE GHOULS on the back, because the Ghouls aren’t exactly known for their grand subtlety—but not today. It had been been a bad week for the company and it looked like they were doing some official business. Trying to place a legal bug into what is ostensibly a public place is a significant legal issue, which made the Ghouls’ use of a de facto clubhouse right out in the open a pretty savvy bit of criminality.

  “This article says Britney is an excellent mother,” Fi said.

  “I don’t think anyone thinks these guys are excellent mothers,” I said. “It’s going to be a challenge getting to the front door without hurting someone.”

  That got Fi’s attention, so I handed her the binoculars. “That’s a cute bat he has,” she said. “Looks like he also has a cute gun under his gut.”

  “I saw that, too.”

  “If you’re that fat,” Fi said, “isn’t it hard to ride a motorcycle?”

  “Maybe he just stands around looking tough,” I said. That was part of the Ghouls’ game: Scare the crap out of you just by looking frightening. Baseball Bat fit that description. He was over six feet tall, had long, shaggy hair that reached past his shoulders, a handlebar mustache, a classy tattoo on his throat of a gun barrel pointed into his chin, which was sort of imposing until you considered that it probably just meant he was suicidal or incredibly stupid. Probably both. He also ran at least three bills. Maybe three-fifty.

  “How long would it take for you to take him down?” I asked.

  “I could do it right now,” she said. “I’d just walk by with a bag of donuts and some crystal meth and he’d follow me like a dog.”

  “I mean if push came to shove and Sam and I were fighting the other ten guys.”

  Fiona focused the binoculars. “I could have him down in ten seconds. One punch to the throat. Maybe a kick to the knee first. He must be in terrible knee pain holding up all that weight.” She handed me the binoculars and went back to reading her magazine.

  “That’s my girl,” I said.

  “And if neither of those moves worked, I’d just shoot him.”

  A gold Lincoln Continental pulled up in front of the clubhouse—which was actually a bar called Purgatory, which made it about as inconspicuous as the Baseball Bat out front—and three men got out, two from the front seat, one from the back. The man from the backseat was huge, too, but wore a suit, nice shoes, a big watch, like he was a pit boss in Las Vegas. The two other men wore jeans and boots, had long hair, handlebar mustaches and lots of neck ink.

  “What do we have here?” I said.

  Fi looked up from her magazine but didn’t bother taking the binoculars. “Do Lincolns come stock in gold?”

  “Not usually,” I said. I set down the binoculars and picked up the camera and took a couple of pictures through the zoom lens.

  Baseball Bat greeted the man in the suit with a fist pump, the other two men the same way, and let them into the clubhouse and then quickly closed the door. He took several steps down the street and looked around, though not very well. He didn’t bother to notice me and Fi in the Charger less than a block away. But then, maybe the people he was worried about weren’t the kind to sit in a car a block away with binoculars.

  Baseball Bat moseyed back to his post, which took him some time and effort. Fi was right: Kicking him in the knee would probably take him out of commission for the foreseeable future.

  Motorcycle gangs have tried to diversify their business practices. The Hells Angels have a very popular fund-raiser for sick kids, for instance, and sell stickers and buttons and T-shirts. The Outlaws have tattoo parlors where sorority girls get dolphins inked onto their hips. The Ghouls, however, were trying to keep it real by selling drugs and hurting people for fun and profit, but the appearance of the man in the Lincoln had me interested. Clearly he was of some serious importance, because no one else driving a gold Lincoln would be treated as well by old Baseball Bat. And also the man in the Lincoln was the last person to arrive. All of the other bikers got there plenty early.

  Real power is the ability to arrive late and without an excuse while knowing that not a single person will question you. If you want to prove to yourself just how important you are, waste other people’s time.

  I reached into the backseat and grabbed the Ghouls’ constitution and flipped to the section on leadership structure. The odd thing about the Ghouls’ constitution was that it was actually quite well constructed, even in how it meted out payments on drug sales, shy-lock business and prostitution and a nebulous other category called “incidental accruing accounts,” which I suppose could mean just about anything from stealing wallets to knocking over a Brinks truck. It made sense, really, since the first members of the Ghouls were ex-military coming back from Vietnam, guys who lived by a code and were shit on for it and came back with drug problems and a desire to flip off the government they worked for.

  And it looked like they’d succeeded. Not that any of the current members were likely ex-Delta Force, but the militaristic formation of the group added layers of bureaucracy to their business dealings, which meant you needed one guy who wasn’t always driving around on a chopper to make decisions and order punitive damages.

  A guy in a gold Lincoln, for instance.

  “I’m going to say the gentleman in the bad suit and pinkie ring is the local president,” I said. There was also a vice president, a recording secretary, a sergeant-at-arms and even a road captain, who was in charge of booking hotel reservations and such when they went on long rides. Sort of sweet, really, like a cruise director who will beat you to death for looking at him wrong.

  “What kind of man becomes the president of a motorcycle gang and then consents to drive that car?”

  It was a good question.

  “Why don’t you go find out?”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Why don’t you go see if you can use the restroom in Purgatory. See what they’re talking about. If you can’t hear them, leave some ears behind.”

  Fi closed her magazine, leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “The day is not a total waste,” she said.

  She reached into the backseat and started rummaging through her purse, dumping out various weapons. She probably wanted to travel light.

  When you’re planning an assault, occasionally the best use of intelligence is to throw it all out the window and send in your best person to shoot the man in charge in the head.

  That’s usually been my job.

  When you have a weapon like Fiona, who looks as if she’d blow away in a brisk breeze but who relishes violence like most women covet new shoes, you have to learn to use her wisely. Sending her into the Ghouls’ clubhouse would assure two things:

  That when I went back the next day, I’d know all the avenues of escape, precisely what might be used as a weapon and all of the soft spots in the men.

  That when I went back the next day with Fiona by my side, they’d know I already had the upper hand, that they’d been gamed, and, maybe, they’d start wondering if someone in their midst was talking to the wrong people.

  All of that was working on the assumption that Fiona didn’t end up permanently disfiguring anyone.

  I took her by the wrist. “Take as many guns as you like,” I said, “but please try not to kill anyone. It won’t help Bruce in the least.”

  “I will try not to kill anyone. Kneecapping is allowed if need be, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “If I’m not out in ten minutes,” she said, “please come and get me.”

  “If you’re not out in ten minutes,” I said, “I’ll already be inside.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said.

  “Be careful.”

  “Michael, I must say that I like this new sensitivity. Where did you learn it?”

  “Something I’m trying out,” I said.

  “It doesn’t really suit you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “But keep tryi
ng, will you?”

  She popped out of the car then and began sashaying up the sidewalk toward the bar.

  The Ghouls didn’t stand a chance.

  10

  When you’re hot, you don’t need to know a bunch of spy tricks to get information. Men, women, small children and the occasional pet all tend to respond to a pretty girl. This made being Fiona a rather pleasurable experience. She didn’t like to think that things had been handed to her on a silver platter simply because she was attractive—and really, if you’re going to have something on a platter, would it be a life of crime? No, Fiona tended to believe that she was given good looks to combat the other, less desirable aspects of her personality.

  Like the tendency she’d had since childhood to punch people in the neck when they bothered her. Or her general desire to watch things blow up. And then there was her attraction to unavailable men, who, if they had even a smidgen more moral turpitude than she did, would turn her in for what were likely hefty rewards offered on her worldwide. You sell guns to revolutionaries and just common scumbags and people tend to take it the wrong way, but that was okay by Fiona.

  A girl has to earn a living. Particularly if she doesn’t want to depend on a man for a living. That was the one thing she just couldn’t resolve in her mind as she walked up to Purgatory. How could women consent to being the property of not just one drug-dealing biker but an entire gang? Oh, maybe a certain brand of woman found that exciting for a few days, but eventually didn’t you wake up in bed next to the sweating beast and realize you were being treated worse than a whore? Didn’t that bother those women? InStyle tended not to cover that side of life, but Fiona wondered if maybe Oprah could talk some sense into those women. Or maybe that nice Michelle Obama. Now there was a person Fiona thought could handle herself in any situation.

  If there was one thing Fiona was certain of, it was that she could handle herself and if you got in her way, well, she’d step right over you. After knocking you down, of course.

  She was only a few yards from Purgatory and was overwhelmed by the smell of urine coming from an alley between the bar and the empty shop she was passing. It was odd. All of the stores in this strip of shops were vacant, even though they faced a busy intersection. But then biker piss had a way of driving away business.