by Tod Goldberg
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 bullhorn.
“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.
When it occurs naturally in the body, adrenaline dilates blood vessels and air passages, which increases muscle performance and mental acuity for short periods of time.
As in, for instance, the brief period of time it took Fiona to beat the living crap out of Clete.
When you don’t use your adrenaline in an appropriate amount of time-as in what was happening to the two Ghouls pinned to the wall inside the Grossman home-you might find yourself feeling nauseous, shaky and disoriented.
You might even find yourself unable to answer simple questions, which was also the case with the two Ghouls.
The men had calmed down slightly, now that they understood they were not being attacked by wolves or lions or angry domesticated house cats, and perhaps also now that they saw what they were up against. It wasn’t the first time either of them had had a gun pointed in their direction, that much I knew. Both of them were at least thirty- five, though they each had a particular look. One was tall, maybe six-three, and his forearms rippled with veins and muscles. I couldn’t really imagine him hitting the gym all that often, so my guess was a healthy steroid diet and a couple of months in County were his standard regimen.
The other was shorter by a few inches but probably weighed sixty pounds more, all of it in his stomach. He had a long black goatee that hung down to the middle of his neck and his cheeks were pocked with acne scars. Surprisingly, he looked tattoo free, which probably meant that under his clothes he was painted head to toe.
“I hope Clete isn’t having any problems walking,” Fiona said. “Did you notice him limping?”
Still nothing.
“Answer her,” I said.
“I don’t know who you are,” the tall one said to me, “but you’re already dead.”
“That must have sounded scary the last time you said it,” I said. I turned to Sam. “You scared?”
“Petrified. I just hope I don’t lose control of my muscles and let go of the brake.”
Both Ghouls tried to take a step back, but just ended up hitting their heads against the wall. I took a quick inventory of their bodies and determined that both the big one and the fat one had guns-the big one in his waistband, the fat one shoved uncomfortably into his right front pocket.
If you want to accidentally shoot off your genitalia, the best place to put a gun is right where these two had theirs. If you want to hide your gun from plain sight, since I imagined neither of these gentlemen had permits, trying to stuff a nine into your belt makes it difficult to do things in public. Like, say, standing for any length of time.
“You still haven’t answered her,” I said to the men.
“You broke his back,” the fat one said. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yes,” Fiona said.
“What kind of club lets a woman bust up one of their own?” I said.
“Two,” Fiona said.
“Two,” I said. “I stand corrected. Who knew the Ghouls were getting so soft?”
There wasn’t much either of them could say to that. It was true. Even they knew it.
They just didn’t know Fiona.
“All right, boys,” I said, “my partner-” I looked at Sam and noticed that he had a kind of John Wayne thing going with his face, a sort of half-scowl/half-smirk thing, so I said, “Duke is gonna take both of your guns. You make any moves, my lady peels your caps back. No questions, just brains on the carpet. We clear?”
Both Ghouls nodded.
Sam dismounted his bike slowly, like maybe he thought he was John Wayne, too. And instead of a horse, he had a bike.
“Hands up,” Sam said and I thought I detected a bit of a twang.
The Ghouls raised their hands and Sam removed their guns, then patted them down and came out with two knives, a sap, a bag of meth, a needle, and two wallets bulging with cash. He handed me the wallets and tossed the rest of his haul out the screen door.
I opened up the wallets and looked at their driver’s licenses. The tall one was named Clifford Gluck, the fat one Norman Gluck. Brothers, though presumably by different fathers since no Punnett square could produce these two reliably. The pictures on their licenses were both a good ten years old and neither Gluck looked particularly threatening. Clifford, who at thirty-seven was the older of the two, had short hair and was wearing a tie in the photo. He also wore a smile so wide you’d think maybe he just won the free dinner from Chili’s at the company picnic.
Norman, who was thirty-five, was still pudgy and bearded, but he also wore a tie, though I had the sneaking suspicion his dress shirt was short-sleeved. The term “middle manager” was made for Norman.
Weird. Both of them, in the recent past, looked like guys who worked all week in a mindless corporate job and then really cut loose on the wee
kends by playing paintball and watching horror movies. How you went from that life to being in a biker gang was a mystery to me.
“Which one of you is Clifford?” I asked.
“That’s funny,” Clifford said.
“Hard to tell from these pictures,” I said. I handed the wallets back to Sam so he could have a look.
“Nice ties,” he said.
“Look,” Clifford said, “we weren’t here looking for you. Whatever your problem is, it’s not with us. You let us go, we forget the whole thing.”
“You a lawyer?” Sam asked.
“I look like a lawyer?” Clifford said.
Sam flapped the wallet in Clifford’s face. “You do here,” he said.
“What’s your story?” I said to Norman. “You only talk when he says so?”
“I ain’t got nothing to say,” Norman said. “Either shoot us or fuck off.”
“So he’s the lawyer,” Sam said to me.
Clifford had a tattoo on his hand of a little girl’s face. It was a professional job, nicely shadowed, plenty of detail. It didn’t exactly make him look tough. And not even bikers think highly of pedophiles, so my suspicion was that it was probably his kid. That told me that somewhere inside Clifford, combined with the fact that he once wore a tie for his driver’s license photo, there lurked a human being who could be reasoned with.
I decided to make our first move.
I reached into one of the saddlebags on my bike and pulled out a handful of patches belonging to the Ghouls. Both Clifford and Norman visibly stiffened with anger. It was silly, really. They were just patches. But then, I guess if I was being tortured by bad guys in some foreign land and they showed me an American flag that they were desecrating, maybe I’d feel anger, too.
“These belong to you,” I said, and stuffed them into a pocket in Clifford’s vest. “I got another three, four hundred more of them. I also got your constitution and every other piece of paper you morons created. You want ’em back?”
