by Tod Goldberg
Clifford looked at Norman. Norman looked at Clifford. It was actually kind of cute. Big bro and little bro trying to figure out the right answer.
“Yeah,” Clifford said.
“Five hundred large,” I said.
“Check or money order?” Clifford spat back at me. “Or can I give a credit card?”
“Maybe you haven’t figured it out,” I said, “but I’ve already done your dirty work. Bruce Grossman is dead. And now I’ve got all of this Ghoul crap. You want it, you gotta pay my cost or you let the Redeemers take over this territory. Simple as that.”
“Bullshit,” Norman said.
“He does speak,” Sam said.
“Shut up,” Clifford said. “Let me think.”
“Let’s see a body,” Norman said. “Otherwise it’s bullshit.”
“Shut up, Norm,” Clifford said. “This isn’t your call.”
“It’s not yours, either,” Norman said.
From a sociological standpoint, it was fascinating watching Clifford and Norman. Here were two brothers, maybe with different mothers, maybe with different fathers, maybe they were born in test tubes in a lab in Geneva, but whatever, they were brothers somehow and they clearly were having a power struggle. Having it in public with guns in their respective faces made it all the more interesting. At least when Nate and I had such issues in front of other people, we were usually the ones holding the guns.
Clearly, however, neither Gluck was a shot caller. One might have more rank than the other, but it would be up to Lyle Connors no matter what happened here tonight. Perhaps he gave one of them more latitude than the other-say, perhaps one was allowed to execute Bruce, the other was in charge of the acid bath- but my sense with these two was that this was more of a kidnapping than a murder. They wanted their money, drugs and paraphernalia back… and then they’d kill Bruce.
Clifford and Norman continued to argue over who could speak while the three of us just watched. It was moving to the level of performance art until Fiona made it stop.
“Mommy must hate it when you two fight,” Fiona said. “Why don’t I shoot you both and the one that can still talk can be the official spokesman?”
That quieted them down.
“Listen to me, boys,” I said. “We’re all in the same boat here. The Banshees hired Grossman to hit us both. I got that much out of him. He was actually pretty forthcoming after Duke took off his ear.”
Sam tried to act nonchalant and menacing at the same time by squinting one eye and surveying Clifford and Norman’s ears.
“The fat one,” Sam said, “he’ll take a saw. That’s a pretty thick membrane he’s got there between his ear and his head. Might need to get something electric involved.”
“See what I mean?” I said. “Grossman didn’t have a thick membrane, so he gave up pretty quick. He got lucky one time robbing you, because you’re stupid enough not to have gone digital. What the hell were you people thinking, keeping a bunch of paper around?”
“Institutional stupidity,” Sam said. “That’s my guess.”
That would have to stand as the answer, as neither Clifford nor Norman was piping up. It didn’t matter, really, since they had no say. They were just messengers. Just adrenaline. But they would take the message back, that much I knew.
“Grossman, he didn’t fare so well trying to hit our stash. I cleaned up my mess and now I’m happy to make a deal to get your mess taken care of, too, before you gotta deal with the Banshees.”
“What about you and the Banshees?” Clifford said.
“They don’t have territory we want,” I said. “They’re moving H and girls. That doesn’t interest us. Their disrespect does, but I’ll work through that. They’ll get theirs.”
“Oh, indeed, pilgrim,” Sam said. “The Redeemers will be redeemed.” He was using that John Wayne voice again. It wasn’t really working. Maybe it was the use of “pilgrim” as a pejorative. I gave Sam’s chopper a light kick just to let him know that maybe he should remain quiet if he was going to be using that particular vocal disguise.
The fact was, getting the Banshees and the Ghouls into a conflict served everyone’s purposes-everyone that was on the right side of the law, at least. People getting hustled by the Ghouls were usually in no position to go to the police, so business was conducted as usual. But when two gangs go to war, that’s something the police and the FBI have a real interest in. There’s a lot of illegal secondary activity involved with a gang war.
“Boss will want to see a body,” Norman said. “Until then, fuck off.”
“Norman, shut the hell up!” Clifford said.
“The offer is five hundred K,” I said. “That’s cash.”
“At least that much was taken from us,” Clifford said.
His numbers were a little off-or Bruce’s were-but I decided not to note the difference publicly.
“I got some of that, too,” I said. “But that money’s dirty. Probably the FBI has every other serial number written down. I want five hundred K fresh. I don’t care where you get it. Twenty-four hours from now, I want a response. Or I keep all the money, piss on your colors, and drop your paperwork off with the first Johnny Law I see.”
Clifford shook his head. “No disrespect,” he said, and I actually felt like he meant it, “but you won’t see a dime and I’ll probably be killed for not killing you. Then you’ll have Ghouls on your ass until the end of time. Every Redeemer in the country will have a target. No one wins here.”
“The Banshees do,” I said, because I hated to admit it, but it seemed like Clifford had a valid argument. “This is probably what they want. We kill each other over their job. They practically led us right to Bruce Grossman in the first place. How long did it take you? A day? Two? I’m gonna guess that house fire out in the Glades wasn’t an accident.”
“We walk out of here, we never saw you,” Clifford said.
“That what you told Nick Balsalmo?” I figured I’d play that card, particularly since it wasn’t like Nick Balsalmo was some undercover operative. He was a drug dealer, which meant that by definition, he knew people. “That guy wasn’t terrible. But I saw what you guys did to him. That didn’t look like a nice transaction.”
“I got a kid,” Clifford said. He showed me his hand. I wondered if he was also showing me his hand metaphorically, if this was how he got out of every sticky situation. Who’s going to kill someone with a tattoo of their baby daughter on their hand?
“Just let me shoot them,” Fiona said.
Well, there was one person…
“You’ll be looking for my girlfriend, anyway,” I said. “We’re already at war. You just didn’t know who you were fighting.”
Clifford considered my response. It also made sense.
“A body,” Norman said quietly. This time Clifford didn’t disagree.
“Proof of death,” Clifford said. “You give us Grossman’s body, maybe the boss will listen, work something out, save us all a lot of problems. You bring us his head, we can do business.”
“His head is gone,” I said. “He’s not in a lot of big identifiable pieces.”
Both men nodded with an odd sort of personal reflection. This was shop talk. We could have been talking about the best oil to use in our choppers for all the emotion any of us displayed.
“We heard he was missing a finger,” Norman said. “That’s how we’d know who he was, make sure we didn’t grab the wrong son of a bitch. You think you could get that hand?”
I looked at Sam. This was going to be something he’d need to be in on, for sure. “Duke, you leave one of his hands intact?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, but he didn’t sound filled with confidence. “Yeah. One of them.”
“All right,” I said. “You two go back to your boss and tell him we’ll drop the hand off at Purgatory tomorrow. Any shit goes down, I blow the building up.”
“Anything else?” Clifford said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell your boss that if he doesn’t like
my terms, or crosses me up, or tries anything shady, I got a guy who is pretty handy with a pair of bolt cutters sitting outside Cindy Connors’ house right now and wherever she goes, he goes. Forever.”
“You got a name?” Norman said. Suddenly he was Chatty Cathy.
“No,” I said. “I’m just a Redeemer.”
I rolled my chopper back about a foot and so did Sam. The Brothers Gluck now had enough room to move, but nothing to make moves with.
“She gonna shoot us if we take a step?” Clifford said.
“No,” I said. “But watch your kneecaps. And when you get outside? Try to be quiet. I don’t want one of my guys to get jumpy and accidentally cap you both.”
I watched Clifford and Norman walk back down the hall. When they got near to Fiona, she smiled at both of them. “Tell Clete he should have let me use the bathroom,” she said. “And that it’s not polite to call women names.”
Neither said anything, which was wise.
Once outside, they climbed into their Camaro and drove off slowly. No shouts. No curses. No shots.
“That was fun,” Fiona said. Her face was flushed and a little sweaty. I’d seen that look on her face before, but not from this angle.
“Yeah,” I said.
Fiona brushed past me, essentially rubbing most of her torso against my right arm in the process, and made her way to the wet bar in the living room. “I’m dying of thirst,” she said.
Once she was out of direct earshot, I turned to Sam. “You know where we can get a human hand?”
Sam exhaled through his mouth. His eyes bulged a bit, but apart from that he didn’t seem unduly bothered by the question. “I got a buddy I can call,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
“Might be hard to find one with a missing finger.”
“We can work around that,” I said.
“We?” Sam said.
“Fiona can,” I said.
I heard rustling behind me and turned to see Fiona in the middle of the living room with a bottle of rum in her hand. “Cocktails, anyone?” she asked.
14
As a rule, Sam Axe didn’t really care for the sight of dead bodies. Spend enough time in the military, particularly if you happen to be one of those people who gets called to do the jobs no one else wants to do, and the chances are you’re going to see a few bodies. There’s no good way to depersonalize the experience. A human being is a pretty unique animal and even if you don’t see a part of yourself in every person that passes you on the street, subconsciously you make that connection. It’s what keeps most people from killing: simple human empathy.
And of course Sam had killed people in the course of doing his job. He hadn’t enjoyed it. He didn’t actively seek out the experience. But he had orders and he had to trust in the chain of command. If he was to kill someone it was because someone deserved to die. That’s what makes a good soldier.
Still, being around dead bodies creeped Sam out. Yet there he was at eight thirty in the morning, just a few hours after dispensing with the Ghouls, in the parking lot in front of the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office. It was a bizarre place to be at any time of the day, but even more so in the morning, since from his car Sam could see the traffic along Northwest 10th Avenue streaming by, no one even really bothering to look frightened. Didn’t they know they were driving by a slew of dead bodies? True, they were driving through an area that was densely populated with medical buildings-Jackson Memorial, Highland Park and Cedars were all over there-but still. Just a few yards away, people were toying with dead bodies!
The other weird thing was that the ME’s office was located on a side street off of Northwest 10th called Bob Hope Road. Somewhere, Bing Crosby was laughing his ass off.
Sam was to meet his buddy Brenna Fender in fifteen minutes. She worked in the ME’s office as a nurse, but that was just a ruse: She’d been in the office for the last six months doing an undercover operation involving black-market organ sales.
Normally, Sam would steer clear of someone like Brenna, but they’d gone out for drinks on a couple of occasions and Sam honestly liked her-she knew the value of Sam Time and wasn’t all clingy about things. Truth be known, Sam was of the opinion that maybe Brenna wasn’t clingy about anything-she just liked to have a good time and then go on back to sniffing out the dark underworld of spleen sales.
Anyway, she was the one person Sam knew who could give him a hand, literally. And maybe, if things went well, they’d hook up later in the week. See about catching a movie or getting a beer or six. Provided he lived through the week. Or maybe that would be the payoff from tangling with a bunch of murderous bikers: an evening on the town (or on the sofa) with Brenna Fender.
Sam’s cell rang, breaking his reverie.
“Is this the person who came looking for me?” a woman’s voice said after Sam answered.
What an incredibly stupid question, Sam thought. This was not a person who knew much about staying alive. “That depends,” Sam said. “Is this the person I’m looking for?”
There was silence while the woman-who Sam presumed was Maria; hell, he prayed it was Maria, since the idea of more than one person making a phone call like this gave Sam vertigo-pondered her answer.
“I guess,” she said after another couple of beats. “You know Nick? Is that what this is about? Because I haven’t seen him in, like, a week. I don’t even know where he is.”
The problem with most people is that they feel like the best way to get through an interrogation is to give way too much information, as if being forthright will somehow absolve them of any guilt, even if what they are saying is an absolute lie. Hadn’t she spoken to her stepfather? Didn’t she know what Sam already knew? Was she this stupid?
“No,” Sam said, “but I know a friend of his. Bruce Grossman. That name mean anything to you?”
There was a silence again as Maria tried to work through the equation. Bruce Grossman probably wasn’t the most important name for her to remember, especially if Nick kept his business and personal life separate, but they had dined together. That meant something, didn’t it? Didn’t breaking bread count for anything anymore?
“Yeah,” she said. “They did time together, right?”
“Right.” He decided to stay consistent and said, “Bruce’s dead now, is the thing. Bikers got him. Did him ugly. Any idea why?”
Another long pause, which didn’t engender a lot of faith in the answer when it came. “No,” she said.
Something Sam learned in the military is that if you’re not happy with an answer, give it back to the person in the form of a question. The weak- minded were incapable of dealing with this technique and invariably ended up giving you the very information they were attempting to conceal.
So Sam said, “No?”
“Not really,” Maria said.
“Not really?”
“Who are you again?” Maria said.
“Chuck Finley.”
“And how did you get my name?”
“Nick was one of the last people Bruce called before he got done in,” Sam said, figuring the girl had seen enough of those cold case and forensics programs to put the rest of it together. She was scared, clearly, and had some story she’d practiced, since nothing was coming from her in any sort of natural way.
“Nick said they were doing some business together,” Maria said.
“They were doing some business together?”
“Bruce sold him some drugs.”
“Bruce sold him some drugs?”
“Okay, fine,” she said. “Bruce just gave them to him. Okay? Is that what you were looking for?”
Maria made Sam worry about the future of America. If everyone was as easy to pull information from as Maria was, what chance did the country have of beating back terrorism? Didn’t anyone lie convincingly anymore? Didn’t anyone just hang up the damn phone? It’s not that he was upset with Maria, only that he recognized in her a failure: People just didn’t know how to shut the hell u
p. Which maybe would create jobs in the future, actually, Sam came to reason. People like himself wouldn’t become obsolete because people like Maria would need to be protected.
“Where’s Nick? I need to talk to him,” Sam said, deciding to just keep moving forward, irrespective of what he thought Maria should know already, since if she was going to play stupid, he was going to play stupid, too. Just to even the playing field.
“He’s dead, too, okay? For like a few days. You talked to my stepdad, you know this, right?”
“Oh,” Sam said, “right. I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“You sound like my stepdad,” she said, which made Sam kind of proud.
He liked Jose, especially since it turned out he was true to his word, even if Maria’s call was a few hours overdue. He wasn’t sure Maria was the same type of person, so he said, “What made you tell the Ghouls Nick had their stuff?”
There was another of those grating pauses, but this time Sam thought he heard sniffling. “Nick, you know,” Maria said quietly, “he wasn’t a good person.”
“He wasn’t a good person?” Sam was annoying himself with the repeated phrases, but it was a system that seemed to work with Maria, so he just kept tossing the lines out there, figuring when she stopped biting, he’d change the bait.
“He liked to hit me,” she said. “Broke my collarbone. Messed up my shoulder. One time, I told him I was pregnant, just to get him to leave, right? Instead, he tried to kick me in the back. So when I heard there were people looking for a big haul of drugs, you know, stuff that wasn’t normal in our neighborhood, and that they were offering a reward, I might have said something.”
“You set him up to be killed?”
“No!” she said, her voice rising. “No. No. I just thought, you know, these guys would mess him up. Get their drugs, mess him up, I’d get some money and, you know, get a new life. Get out of Little Havana.”
Sam saw Brenna Fender come out of the front of the ME’s office. She had a plain brown bag in one hand and her purse in the other. She wore a cute pair of scrubs-Sam thought all scrubs were cute, really, a lasting impression from being in a secret military hospital in Bucharest and meeting a very friendly nurse while pumped full of Dilaudid-and didn’t seem to bother with looking inconspicuous. Brenna stopped next to the garbage can and chatted with the three other people in scrubs who stood there smoking. Sam never understood how you could work at a hospital and still smoke.
