by Tod Goldberg
Then she checked her appearance in the window of one of the vacant shops and fairly skipped into Purgatory.
One thing Fiona could never abide in men was their tendency to turn into pack animals when left to their own devices. The result of this tendency was that everywhere they huddled looked the same: brown. Brown furniture. Brown carpet. Brown walls. Brown television. Brown food. Brown drinks. Brown dirt under their nails. Brown jeans that were once blue. Women were far more interesting, at least in terms of their palettes.
The really weird thing, though, was that places even smelled brown when there was an excess of unfettered men about. Scientists would probably call this pheromones or something, but Fiona thought it all boiled down to the fact that men have never learned how to bathe correctly because none of them are willing to change a lightbulb.
This was abundantly clear when she walked into Purgatory and was met with a wall of blackness. It took her eyes several seconds to adjust before she could make out the dark brown bar, the five dark brown stools that sat empty in front of the bar and the skinny man wearing a brown shirt and pointing a brown sawed-off shotgun at her.
“Whoa,” Fiona said. Not because she was frightened, but because she figured that someone encountering a shotgun for the first time would be frightened.
“How’d you get in here?” Skinny said.
“Clete said I could use the bathroom,” Fiona said.
Skinny relaxed a bit, but not to the point that he lowered his gun. “You his?” he asked.
“I’m nobody’s,” Fiona said. “But I could be.” She kept her eyes on Skinny, but she was also making note of the items in her periphery. There was a door to the right of the bar that looked to head to a small kitchen area. On her left was an EXIT sign above a hallway. She could hear voices coming from that direction.
Smart. They probably had a boardroom where they conducted business, though Fiona mostly imagined a dozen grimy men sitting around a brown table, each of them emitting brown dirt from their pores.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” Skinny said. “It’ll be his ass and mine.”
“I just gotta go real quick. No one will even know I was here. And then maybe you and me and Clete can party. He said he was cool if you were cool.”
This got Skinny’s attention.
Men.
They’d risk getting killed if they thought it might end up that they got themselves a wild time in the process.
“Okay,” Skinny said. “Okay.” He still had the gun on her, but it felt less like he was doing it because he thought he’d need to shoot her and more like he was doing it because he wasn’t much of a multitasker. He needed to think and that couldn’t be done while simultaneously moving his arms. “Okay,” he said again. He blinked, then set the shotgun down on the bar. It must be nice to be so simple, Fiona thought. How little time would be wasted on things like making choices. “Go on ahead down the hall. Second door on your right. Just don’t make no noise. It’ll be my ass.”
“Oh, it’ll be your ass,” Fiona said, because she thought even the broadest innuendo would send poor Skinny into a frenzy of mental activity and that would keep him from walking outside to check on Clete. But just to be sure, she added, “We could party first, without Clete. What’s there in the back?”
“The kitchen,” he said.
“Is there a flat surface?”
“There’s two,” he said. “The floor and the counter. Both are pretty dirty.” He wasn’t acting much like a biker. No bravado. No hubris. No secondary male characteristics, really, apart from that shotgun. Ah, Fiona thought, the front. The reason the bar isn’t bugged.
“Why don’t you clean up one of them,” Fiona said, “and I’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail?”
Skinny considered this offer for a moment before coming to a decision. “All right,” he said, “but I only got five minutes, so get back out fast.”
A true romantic.
Fiona didn’t bother to respond; she just batted her eyelashes a bit, mostly in astonishment, and then headed toward the bathroom. Skinny bounded out from behind the bar and into the kitchen and immediately started whistling a tune Fiona recognized as a child’s nursery rhyme, though she wasn’t sure which one. Maybe “The Farmer in the Dell.”
Once she was in the dark hallway, she could clearly make out the loud conversation going on behind the first door on the right. She could stand right outside the door, but that might be a bit too risky. But since the entire bar was made of fiberboard-brown fiberboard, specifically-she had a pretty good idea that being inside the bathroom would be the equivalent of sitting at the same table as the assembled brain trust of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club.
She opened the second door, turned on the light and realized that, in fact, Clete wasn’t lying: They didn’t have a proper ladies’ room. Instead, what she found was a single toilet, a spartan sink and a mirror that was covered in handprints. On the floor were strewn condom wrappers, broken compacts, crushed beer cans and ants. Above the toilet, in a handsome scrawl, were the words PROPERTY OF THE GHOULS. Fiona ached for irony, but was sure there was none to be found.
She decided she just wouldn’t touch anything.
Hearing wasn’t going to be a problem, but staying invisible might. There were literally a dozen peepholes drilled into the walls of the bathroom so that the idiots in the next room could watch the girls squatting. There were so many that calling them “peepholes” seemed superfluous. There’d be more privacy if the toilet were out in the hall.
Fiona quickly turned the dim overhead light off again and the darkened bathroom filled with crisscrossing pinholes of light from the room next door. She stood in the middle of the room and listened to the conversation. They were going over the details of the break- in and what they’d learned thus far-all things that Fiona already knew, namely that the stolen drugs had been given to Nick Balsalmo and that they’d “taken care of that.”
“Do you have a fucking name yet on the crook?” a man said. His voice sounded like sandpaper. Fiona tried to imagine him driving a gold Lincoln.
“All I got is a last name from Nicky,” another man said. There was a pause in the room and it sounded like someone was shuffling papers. “Grossman,” he said.
“You know how many Grossmans there are in Miami?” Sandpaper said.
“Not too many who’ve done time,” the other said. “Nicky was with him at Glades. He gave us a bunch of different first names, but none of them worked. And now he’s not talking.”
A laugh erupted and the man with the sandpaper voice said, “Everyone shut up. You think this is funny? This bastard has our shit. All of it. All of you gonna be laughing in prison? You know how hard I’ve worked to keep your asses on the street? You screw up, you go like those two last night. You want that? Keep laughing. Find this fucker’s first name. Find his family. Find everything about him and get me our shit back!”
Fiona decided right then that staying around any longer would be fruitless and dangerous. She’d been gone only a few minutes, so Skinny would be ready for action and probably wouldn’t notice her leaving. She reached into her purse and pulled out a cell phone, dialed an eVoice Mail box number she had that delivered a digital voice file directly to an e- mail address, and then wedged the phone between the toilet and the Swiss cheese wall.
The recording wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, but Fiona didn’t mind that. If they needed to give it to the police, she was sure they’d figure out a use for it. How she could have used this simple bit of technology when she was a teenager…
Fiona stepped out of the bathroom at the same time a squat man with a major- league-and, like everything else in the bar, brown and greasy-mullet came out of the meeting. She thought he looked like a hobbit with a handlebar mustache, really. Sadly, he wasn’t looking in Fiona’s direction, which was really too bad for him, since Fiona was able to grab the back of his hair and slam his head into the wall, dropping him to the floor in a heap.
G
enerally, Fiona wasn’t big on saying menacing things to passed-out people-what was the use? — but as she stepped over the hobbit and made her way to the front door, she said, “That was for the peepholes.”
She paused once to check on Skinny. He’d left the door to the kitchen open, so she could see his shirtless form sweeping up the floor. His class knew no bounds. He’d left his shotgun on the bar, so Fiona picked that up, too. Along with Clete’s. 380, she’d made a nice profit from this endeavor and also got to beat the crap out of two members of that fine underclass known as biker scum.
A good day.
11
If you get a job working for the CIA directly out of college, you’ll most likely spend the duration of your career sitting behind a government-issued metal desk reading mundane government-issued reports on agricultural concerns in Yemen. You’ll work from nine to five. You’ll have excellent health benefits.
You’ll earn slightly less than people in the private sector. You won’t get a gun.
You might travel overseas, but most likely you won’t.
You won’t be asked to kill anyone.
You won’t be asked to impersonate anyone.
You won’t be asked to do anything, usually. Most of the time, you’ll just show up to your office and there will be a stack of papers waiting for you that you certainly didn’t ask to receive.
This will be your life.
If you want to travel the world covertly gathering information for the government, the best thing to do is go to college and then join the military, show your superiors a certain aptitude with intelligence and then, one day, you might just get a phone call from an agency that doesn’t exist in any formal government books asking you to leave behind the camouflage for a nice suit and a pair of sunglasses.
And even then you probably won’t get a gun.
You’ll be an analyst or an interrogator or you’ll be in charge of analysts and interrogators.
If you want the gun and the charge to use it (or any other weapon, including your own hands) regardless of the Geneva Conventions, it’s important to have a slippery moral center that the government views as potentially beneficial. Spreading democracy is the end goal, of course, but it’s nice if you’re willing to achieve that goal by using any means necessary.
When you’re no longer a spy-or waiting to become one again, presuming at some point the axis that tilts your world finally rights itself and the people who’ve burned you are willing to rescind the lies they’ve told about you-that slippery moral center (and understanding that you could be doing paperwork in a basement, too, if not for something as random as luck, or chance, or unique dexterity with a firearm) really only comes in handy if you spend your free time with someone like Fiona Glenanne, helping bank robbers with their problems.
“So,” I said, “just so we’re clear. You kneecapped Clete, cracked his coccyx and broke his wrist all in under ten seconds?”
“It’s about being graceful,” Fiona said.
“You didn’t think that was excessive?”
“Excessive? No. He called me a skank, Michael,” she said. “He’s lucky to be respirating.”
We were parked in front of a medical center in Coconut Grove waiting for Nate to come out with Bruce and Zadie. After hearing the general thrust of the conversation the Ghouls were having-that they were only one step behind Bruce Grossman and it was a short one-I figured providing security on top of Nate’s certainly excellent, totally coherent bodyguarding was wise counsel.
“And how long to dispose of the man in the hall? What did you call him?”
“The Hobbit was less than five seconds. One motion and then to the ground he went.”
“Less than five seconds, really?”
“It happened so quickly it couldn’t even really be measured in time,” Fiona said.
The medical plaza teemed with activity, but thus far no one who looked like they manufactured crystal meth for fun and profit. Most likely, those people were trying to figure out how one tiny woman was able to get by three different men without a peep being made. There was a good chance that at least Clete would claim there was more than one person involved, as his pride was likely so high that admitting the truth was worse than the pain of the truth itself.
That is, if they didn’t kill him for letting someone in. The phone recorded fifteen minutes of conversation, ending with the sounds of a person picking up the phone and slamming it into something, most likely the toilet. Maybe the wall, but certainly something solid enough to destroy it.
If they were smart, they would have checked to see the last number dialed by the phone and then maybe they’d try to get that traced and then maybe they’d show up at a server somewhere in Lawrence, Kansas, or wherever eVoice was based. And maybe, if they were really smart, smarter than I or anyone might justifiably give them credit for, they’d muscle out the e-mail address where the recorded messages were sent, which would be good investigative work indeed, except that e-mail address doesn’t exist anymore.
Plus, judging from the recording, the phone was destroyed.
There’s a reason some people are in biker gangs and some people are spies.
“How long do you think it will take them to find Bruce’s name?” Fiona asked.
“Not long,” I said. The truth was that all they had to do was go to the Florida Department of Corrections Web site and type in the last name “Grossman” and work their way through the list of released inmates, something I did about five minutes after Fiona delivered her news.
It was a short list.
Only twelve men with the last name Grossman had been released from Florida prisons in the previous ten years. There were only five men named Grossman actually doing time.
If the Ghouls tended toward the alphabetically inclined, they’d hit Bruce Grossman second on the list of released inmates, right after Abe Grossman. Abe was seventy-seven at the time of his release nine years ago, he’d been incarcerated for twenty- five years and would now be eighty-six.
If they were methodical, maybe they’d look at each person’s sentence and crime and decide who would be the likely candidate to rob their stash house. Abe and Bruce seemed least likely, since at sixty- five Bruce probably seemed just as dangerous as old Abe. So maybe they’d try out Kelly Grossman, a twenty- eight-year-old who did time for assault. Or Pierce Grossman, aka Thomas Pierce, aka Pat Gross, forty-three, and released after six years on a fraud charge.
It didn’t matter how they conducted their business, really. After what went down that afternoon, the Ghouls would hit Bruce’s house soon.
Maybe that night.
The advantage working in Bruce’s favor was that he was living at his mother’s. It would take the Ghouls more time to locate that record, since it wasn’t public. But that’s the nice thing about having leverage against common workaday civilians-like, say, the knowledge that they’ve purchased illegal drugs-if you need information, there is a good chance someone you know can supply it.
That might buy us ten hours. No more than twenty-four.
There was a lifetime of information inside Zadie’s house, which meant we needed to change our plan.
I called Sam. “We’re going to need those bikes tonight,” I said.
“No problem,” Sam said. “My guy delivered them both to your place today. Let me tell you, Mike. You’ve not lived until you’ve taken one of these choppers through South Beach. Now, I get my fair share of ladies looking my way, there’s no question about that, but it’s a whole different level of attraction when you’ve got all that horsepower between your legs.”
“That’s great, Sam.”
“You ever see Easy Rider?”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“Different time, different place, that could have been us, Mikey, just taking the trails, the lone road, all that. You and me, Mikey, heading to Florida, looking for America.”
“Didn’t everyone die at the end of that movie, Sam?”
“Well, I’d get a r
ewrite on that part,” Sam said. “I’m just saying, the wind in your hair, smell of coconut oil, ladies in bikinis hopping on the back for rides. It’s a little addictive, Mikey.”
“That’s just great,” I said. “What did you learn about Maria?”
Sam told me about his experience with Jose and the dog. “She hasn’t called yet,” he said. “But her old man, he wasn’t the kind that seemed to scare easy, so I’m going to guess that he probably sent his daughter away. Or his stepdaughter. Whatever she is. Maybe she isn’t even family. Who knows? He might have played tough with me, but I can’t see him just letting her run off.”
“She calls you,” I said, “you need to lean on her to come in, get her to Ma’s house. That’s one more person who knows Bruce, that’s one more person who could be dead by tomorrow. These guys don’t play around.”
“Got it,” Sam said.
“And I need you to call your friend at the DMV again,” I said. “I need to know who owns this car.” I gave him the license number of the gold Lincoln.
“Yeah,” Sam said, “about that friend. He’s gone rogue. I might need to get this from someone else.”
“Get it from Captain Crunch,” I said, “it doesn’t matter to me. Then let’s meet at Grossman’s in an hour. We’ll need to see about finding some clothes appropriate for a mission.”
“Body armor?”
“More like a vest with a nice logo on it, something that says ‘dangerous biker gang member.’”
“I’m ahead of you,” Sam said. “My guy gave me a nice stash of vests to choose from.”
“Who is this guy?”
“Top secret.”
“They’re all top secret, Sam.”
“You ever see Billy Jack?”
“Once or twice.”
“He’s like that guy. Deep cover, though. He said they still use his cover method as a teaching tool in the Czech Republic to this day.”
