by Tod Goldberg
He walked back to the table and set down a tray loaded with food and for a couple of minutes the three of us ate in silence, Lyle protecting his meal prison-style, with one arm wrapped around the entire tray. He was a Big-Mac-large-fries-and-an-orange-drink kind of guy.
No apple pie.
No McFlurry.
No salad.
He was Old School.
Time for recess.
“Since when do Ghouls wear suits?” I said.
“It’s about diversification,” Lyle said. “New business models. I can’t walk into a business meeting dressed like you two. You’ll find that out soon enough, Jasper. You wear a suit, you’re untouchable.”
“And yet you leave all of your most important stuff in a stash house somewhere?” I said. “You ever hear of a computer? You ever see Bruce Grossman? Man was almost seventy. You got jobbed by a guy collecting Social Security.”
“He got you, too,” Lyle said.
“Correction,” I said. “He tried to get us. You know what he stole from me? Shoe boxes. You know what was in those shoe boxes? Shoes. He stole my shoes. Little bit of money. Little bit of drugs. Not like how he took you down. He bullied you. Treated you like his stepson. Us? He got what we left out. Plain and simple. And he paid for it. Boy, did he pay for it. Oh, it took us some time to find him, but we didn’t have to go torture and kill someone else to get to him. Didn’t have to put no bounty out in Little Havana. We handled our business. While you were busy making house calls in Little Havana, Bruce Grossman was already in the dirt. We had to sit and wait on your asses. So you got taken by an old-ass man and by us and by the Banshees. You’re 0-for-3, hoss.”
Lyle took a long drink from his orange soda. Here was a man not used to being talked back to, getting talked back to.
The twitch was coming back.
“You can change an environment overnight, but you can’t change the people inside of the environment immediately,” he said, his voice careful, measured. “Lessons have been learned.” He talked like someone who’d been reading manuals on corporate leadership.
“Expensive lessons,” I said.
“You think you’ll be able to do whatever you want to do for the rest of your life?” he asked. “Me? I’m fifty years old. My brothers are all doing time. You think I want to spend the next thirty years doing fed time? So I’m changing the way the Ghouls handle their business. Keep us protected and keep us in business. I’m clean. I intend to stay that way. Maybe I’ve got some dirty friends. Even Obama has a few of those, right?”
It was nice talk, but they’d killed Nick Balsalmo. They’d killed the men working the stash house. And they would have killed Bruce. But now I understood why, even though we’d threatened Clifford and Norman, we weren’t met by a dozen men with guns when we approached the bar.
“So, what,” Sam said, “you want some kind of corporate alliance with us? That what we’re talking here?”
Lyle laughed. “No. No, I do not. What I want is for you to stop embarrassing my people. Your arrival in town is a good object lesson. The ranks are bloated with idiots and cowards. Ten years ago? You’d already be dead. But you move fast. You’re nimble. I like that. You probably have my whole operation rigged, right? Know where all my weak points are. That’s how the Ghouls should operate, but no one here has any idea how to run a business. None of these guys ever worked in the military, so they’ve got no sense of structured command. All of them were raised on The Godfather but didn’t have sense enough to get mobbed up. So here they are with the Ghouls, happy to rally, happy to run meth. Living and dying over their colors. Me? I’m thinking internationally. I’m thinking about the brand. You understand?”
If I had to make an informed guess, it would be that Lyle Connors had not only read a few books on management structure but was also taking classes in the University of Miami’s continuing education program.
Maybe it was a condition of his parole.
Maybe he really wanted to change the way the Ghouls did business.
Maybe he just had nothing to do on Wednesday nights.
“You talking about action figures and lunch boxes?” I asked. “A Ghoul under every Christmas tree?”
“I’m talking about a binary approach to business,” he said and then I was sure he was taking night classes. “We do the drug game and then we have a legit side that isn’t just to keep the RICO off our asses. Not just kids’ charities once a year or bumper stickers like the Angels do. I’m talking about fantasy camps, video games, reality television shows. Taking this game to the next level.”
“You realize you’ll need to stop killing people,” I said. “No one wants to go to fantasy murder camp.”
“You’d be surprised,” Lyle said.
“I’m never surprised,” I said.
“Point is, men,” Lyle said, “there’s a role in this for you if you want it.”
“For us?” Sam said. “I thought you said you weren’t looking for alliances.”
“I’m not. I’m looking for someone to teach my people how to ride right. You two-and that woman-you got your roll down. I don’t know how many people you got backing you every time you go out, but the three of you come out like an army, like the army. You want this territory? You buy in. No war. No bloodshed. We make a deal, we make the Redeemers legit again, no one thinking you’re FBI. Everybody wins. Or you give up that Redeemer shit and those colors you’ve been holding, they become yours.”
Lyle Connors was smart. I had to give him credit for that. He recognized a situation that was undermining his ability to govern and he acted. Did he mean anything he said? It was hard to tell. There was nothing stopping him from letting us buy in and then killing us five seconds later. There was nothing stopping us from buying in and killing him five seconds later. But by making this offer, he forced our hand. What he wanted to know was if we were opportunists or if we were just in it for the quick score.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“No, thanks?” Lyle said. He sounded pretty sincere. I hated to let him down.
“We don’t go into business with Ghouls. Never have. Never will. I’d sooner mount up with bin Laden. And anyone coward enough to invite us in is no one I want to be associated with.” I stood up, which got Sam to stand up, too, though somewhat reluctantly. He was still working on his Quarter Pounder. “You got until midnight tonight,” I said. “Five hundred thousand, cash, or it’s a war you can’t win.”
“Show up at midnight,” he said, “you’ll have your answer.”
Real cool.
No pressure.
A man who has spilled blood on the street before acting like: What’s another couple bodies?
Before we walked out, Sam grabbed up his burger and a handful of fries. “Thanks for lunch,” he said. “Good luck with that video game. Let me know when you book the Ghoul-themed cruise, too, okay?”
17
When you’re out for revenge, you tend to lose the ability to think beyond the act of retribution, the fleeting emotion of righting a real or perceived wrong. While I didn’t care for the existence of the Ghouls Motorcycle Club, the fact was they hadn’t actually tried to come at me. They’d only come at Bruce Grossman because he made the error of robbing the wrong damn stash house. That he wanted to give back what he couldn’t use, while admirable, didn’t make him any less guilty of a crime, nor did the fact that he robbed them in order to provide medical care to his dying mother.
When you live in a civil society, you must adhere to the rules. Without rules, only the toughest, most aggressive of the pack will survive.
Bruce Grossman wasn’t tough.
Bruce Grossman wasn’t particularly aggressive.
Bruce Grossman wasn’t even a great bank robber. He was just a lucky one, whose adventures had become romanticized lore, such that even Fiona had heard of him and the FBI wanted to employ him.
And now I had to protect him, which meant two things.
I needed to dispose of the Ghouls and everything of
theirs that Bruce possessed. If I could sell it all to the Ghouls, that would make for a perfect order of life, but I knew well enough that come midnight, there would be war.
Bruce Grossman had to stay dead. If he managed to get arrested again, the Ghouls would know, and then he would be dead again, but with a headstone and appropriate services.
I sat in my mother’s living room and explained both of these things to Bruce. He nodded his head once but then didn’t say anything at first. Sam and Fi were in the kitchen working on a laptop to get some pertinent information and pretending not to listen to our conversation, though every few seconds I heard Fiona sigh or mutter something like, “Oh, just put him on the rack, for God’s sake!” Luckily, Bruce’s hearing wasn’t so swift.
Zadie, my mother and Maria kept themselves busy at the kitchen table trading People magazines back and forth. I could tell my mother was getting jittery from the lack of tar in her body but she was somehow managing to not smoke inside her own home. My bout of childhood bronchitis cursed her.
“So,” Bruce said, as though he’d downloaded my thoughts, “you grew up in this house?”
“I did,” I said. “Nate, too.”
“And your dad, where’s he?”
“Dead,” I said. “But he haunts the linoleum in the laundry room.”
“And you liked it here?”
“Can’t say that I did.”
“Your brother? Did he?”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t always the happy place it is now. We only put the razor wire in for you.”
“But this is home, right?”
“For better or worse, Bruce, this is home.”
“I go and work for the FBI,” Bruce said, “I never see home again. I lose everything that’s me. What if they stick me in Phoenix or something? Me and Sammy the Bull get to hang out together? Is that what my life would be? I’d rather be in prison.”
“Sammy the Bull is in prison,” I said.
“See what I mean?” Bruce said.
“Listen to me,” I said, “you go to prison, you’ll be dead in twenty- four hours. There are Ghouls in every prison in the country. You turn to the feds, they’ll put you up somewhere where your mother can get help and maybe you have to sit around talking about robbing banks all day, or maybe you don’t do anything, because what you have here of the Ghouls, all of this information, that’s one deep cover the feds don’t have to run. You’d be saving lives. Most notably your own and, for a while, your mother’s.”
That seemed to resonate with Bruce. “Okay,” he said, “okay. I get that.”
“One thing,” I said. “If Sam can swing this, you have to recognize that your life of crime is over.”
“What about, say, I see a pack of gum at the CVS and no one is around?”
“You wait at the counter with your fifty cents.”
“What about running red lights? I still get to run red lights every now and then? What about cheating at cards? Is that against the law?”
Bruce was getting agitated, just as I figured he would, which is why I left out one key ingredient to this conversation. One dangling carrot that I knew Bruce could not resist if offered.
“There’s maybe one thing you could do,” I said.
“Yeah? Cheat at bingo?”
“How would you like one more score?” I said.
“I’ve seen this movie,” he said, but, oh, there was a spark in his voice, so I played it out.
“Never mind, then,” I said. “Sam will call the feds, see what we can work out.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” Bruce said. “You haven’t even told me the score.”
I smiled. “That’s the super criminal we know and love,” I said. I waved Sam and Fi over.
“Finally,” Fiona said, this time loud enough that everyone could hear.
Sam sat down between Bruce and me on the sofa and handed him the laptop. “You recognize this?” he asked.
On the screen was a two-story house in what appeared to be a nice neighborhood. The lawn was cut. The windows had white shutters. In the driveway was a Volvo SUV. You could almost hear the sound of a gold dog barking and small, adorable children telling their J. Crew-model mother that they were bored.
Suburbia personified.
“Am I supposed to?” Bruce asked.
“It’s a stash house belonging to the Banshees,” Sam said.
“Nice taste,” I said. I looked at the address. It was a neighborhood only a few miles from my mother’s that was once just open fields but was now a housing development absurdly called Coconut Commons. Still, the homes were the kinds thirtysomethings imagined in their Pottery Barn dreams.
“The Banshees just know how to protect their interests,” Sam said.
Sam was probably correct. Houses in nice neighborhoods don’t get robbed as often as houses in bad neighborhoods and just because the Banshees were criminals, it appeared they at least read the newspaper more often than the Ghouls did. Pick up the Miami Herald on any given day and you’re more likely to see a home invasion robbery in the toughest parts of Liberty City or Miami Gardens than in the toniest areas of Key Biscayne.
“So you never cased this place?” Sam said.
“No,” Bruce said, “it doesn’t look familiar.”
“What’s inside?” I said.
“My buddy who did undercover? He says they have a couple houses like this all through Miami that they grow marijuana in.”
“In?” I said.
“Yeah,” Sam said, “they gut all the rooms and turn the entire place into a hydroponic farm. Maybe have two or three guys living in the place, tending to the crop.”
“What’s there to steal?” Bruce said.
“Finally,” Fiona said, “someone asks a good question.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Sam said. “They don’t keep cash here, or if they do it’s just a small amount, and we don’t know if they’ve got a new crop that they are cutting and bagging, so could be that the worst case is that all there is to steal is a bunch of trees, which might be hard for Bruce to hustle out.”
“He wouldn’t be going alone,” I said.
“I dunno, Mikey,” Sam said. “You get caught walking out of that house holding a bunch of trees, that’s not something you can easily talk your way out of if the nosy neighbors get the law involved. Last thing you need is to get picked up by the police.”
“I can think of worse things,” I said.
“You don’t want to be locked in one place for too long,” Sam said.
“Well, that’s true,” I said. “Besides, I thought Fiona might enjoy this.”
“There is no ‘might,’” Fiona said. “I will enjoy this. Provided you don’t slow me down, Bruce.”
She gave him one of those looks that makes men do stupid things in hopes of seeing it again, maybe with fewer clothes involved. Bruce, naturally, had no chance with Fiona, but then very few people did.
I’d seen that look a few times. Never regretted the outcome. Too much, anyway.
“What if there is a new crop?” Bruce said.
“You don’t need to take all of it,” I said. “Just enough to make the Banshees angry.”
“How will they know who they are mad at?” he asked.
“I’ve got that worked out,” I said and told him what our plan was. All the Banshees would need to see was a single Ghoul patch left on the floor. No one had access to Ghoul colors but the Ghouls; or at least that was the case prior to Bruce Grossman’s booty. Fiona and Bruce would leave just enough evidence to point the Banshees in the right direction. And then we’d do the rest.
“What if this doesn’t work?” Bruce asked.
“That’s not a possibility,” I said.
“You can say that,” he said, “but you’ll pardon me for saying that I’ve never done a job with a partner before. You want me to break into the place without ever having seen it. I normally spend a few days, maybe a week, making sure I know every angle. How much time do we have for this?”
>
I looked at my watch. “None,” I said. “We case it now. Then we make our move.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “How can you be sure the Banshees will be out of the house? And what about the neighbors? Have you thought any of this through?”
When you’re a spy, sometimes the best way to explain a complex plan is to lie. It saves everyone a lot of worrying and heartache.
“It’s all taken care of,” I said. “We’ve actually been planning this for months, Bruce. Really. Since long before you came on the scene.”
“Really?” he said. He looked to all of us and we all nodded.
Yes.
Sure.
Absolutely.
It didn’t matter, really. Bruce wanted to hear the positive responses because he wanted to do the job. The only thing that could dissuade him would be if I told him it was going to end with him in a body bag. Bruce was a good bank robber, but he wasn’t a “please go on without me, I’ll just die right here” kind of guy.
“Okay, then, I guess I’ll have to put my trust in you, Michael. And Fiona,” he said. “I trust you, Fiona.” Bruce gave Fi a smile that was probably very enticing over at Sherman’s Deli but didn’t do much for women under seventy.
“Okay,” I said. “You agree to this, then you’re agreeing to Sam making a few calls to see what can be done for you. There’s no guarantee. If the feds don’t want you, your friend Barry is going to have to find you a new life. Either way, your time as Bruce Grossman is done. Understand?”
“Being Bruce Grossman was never that great, honestly,” he said. He looked down at his hand, at his missing finger, and shook his head. “You know, if I had to do it all over again, I think I would have made a pretty good spy. What do you think, Michael?”
“Maybe something a little less interactive,” I said.
He chuckled. “Hmm, maybe so. You know what I might like to do in this new life? Maybe get a wife and settle down. After my mom is all taken care of, of course. Get a house in Big Sur. Maybe have a couple dogs or chickens or hamsters, you know? Something I have to take care of that I can’t mess up too badly. That sounds like a good life, you ask me.”
