“Safe in Las Vegas?” Sam said.
“My point is, you ask him for advice and then he starts feeling like he’s out solving crimes and that causes bigger problems down the line. Last thing I need is for my mom to call and tell me Nate’s in trouble three thousand miles away and I’m stuck here.”
“I hear you, Mikey,” Sam said, “I do. Problem was, I couldn’t find anyone else to talk to. I mentioned Big Lumpy to all of my normal dirtbags and most of them hung up on me. Apparently he’s considered some mad genius. A buddy of mine? A guy named Sal? He told me he was pretty sure Big Lumpy was a telepath.”
“I highly doubt that,” I said.
“He did work NSA,” Sam said. “Did you know they have a whole division of psychics?”
“Sam.”
“It’s true. I met one once. We were in Chile. She had a body like a rocket, Mikey, and she knew all of my moves before I even tried them. Spooky stuff, Mikey. Spooky stuff.”
“You don’t exactly cloak your thoughts, Sam,” I said.
“Well, be that as it may, she was pretty much a Ouija board in a skirt. Could be Big Lumpy is one of those, too. Minus the skirt.”
The more likely scenario was that Big Lumpy was probably just much more intelligent than the people who decided to bet with him. And if he was setting the odds, it was a good bet that he was setting them in his favor.
“If he’s such a bad guy,” I said, “why would anyone bet with him?”
“They don’t know they are most of the time,” Sam said. “Nate said the guy franchises. So you think you’re betting with Frankie Four Fingers, but he’s actually kicking upstairs to Big Lumpy. And the only time you find out is when you’re really late and then, you know, you’re probably not in a position to complain too loudly.”
Which meant that Nate had been really late at some point, since I couldn’t imagine he’d learned any of this information through dogged investigation. It also meant that a good many of the people Brent had already paid off could be working under Big Lumpy, too. If Henry Grayson was dumb enough to bet directly with Big Lumpy, it was likely a choice of last resort.
“Savvy,” I said. And it really was. “Well, then, we’ll just have to appeal to his good side.”
“I don’t think he has a good side,” Sam said.
“Well,” I said, “he hasn’t met us yet.”
“That’s my concern,” Sam said. “If he’s NSA, what are the odds he still does some contract work with them? The guy is an expert on game theory warfare and has no moral center. That seems to me like two traits the NSA likes to have near for special projects. Mikey, there’s a good chance he already knows you.”
“Which is why I have the perfect covers for us,” I said. “You’re going to be an ex-Navy SEAL named Sam Axe and I’m going to be a spy named Michael Westen.”
“Play it straight?”
“Yep,” I said.
“I don’t know if I know how to play it straight,” Sam said.
“Have another beer,” I said.
“What about me?” Brent said. I’d nearly forgotten he was in the room. Once he’d stopped making whining noises, he was actually very quiet.
“You’re going to stay here,” I said. “Fiona will be back in a couple of hours.” Provided she hasn’t had to shoot a bunch of members of the Russian Mafia on your behalf, I thought, though I decided not to mention that detail out loud.
“You don’t have any food here,” he said. “And you don’t have cable, either. And Fiona is mean.”
“The kid’s got a point there, Mike,” Sam said. “Fiona is mean.”
“I haven’t eaten in like forever,” Brent said. “You’re basically starving me to death here. You know, yogurt isn’t even considered food? It’s not. It’s a culture.”
While Brent droned on about the toil of his life, I did the one thing I really didn’t want to do: I called my mother, Madeline.
“Ma,” I said, “you have any plans this afternoon?”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” my mother asked.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Because I got a call from your brother a few minutes ago and he sounded very worried,” she said. “He didn’t say you were in trouble, but I felt like he was holding that back from me.”
“You didn’t agree to send him any money, did you?”
“I told him I would,” she said. “He has no blood family out there, Michael. I told him I’d send him money to get a new shirt. He still needs his mother, unlike some people.”
“I do need you, Ma,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling.” Brent had now engaged Sam in a conversation that, as best as I could tell, involved other food groups that were not, technically, foods. They’d moved on to the legitimacy of salads. “I have a young man I’m… mentoring… and I was wondering if I might drop him off at your place for a few hours.”
“Mentoring?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like a big brother-type thing.”
“Really, Michael?”
“No,” I said. It was just easier to be honest. “I’m actually protecting him from some Russian gangsters, every bookie in the city and Fiona.”
“Oh, I see,” she said.
“And he hasn’t had a home-cooked meal since his mother died,” I added.
“When did that happen?”
“Years ago,” I said.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “You’re not just saying that, are you, Michael?”
“Not this time, Ma, no,” I said.
“Do you think he likes tuna casserole?”
My mother’s tuna casserole was notorious for having a consistency somewhere between plaster and the substance that BP used to stop the oil leak in the Gulf.
“I’m sure he does.”
“Then bring him by,” she said.
“Thanks, Ma. I really appreciate it,” I said.
“And, Michael,” she said, “will you pick me up some more shells for my shotgun?”
6
No spy likes to go into a meeting with an unknown adversary-if you don’t have an idea how a person will react in a given situation, it’s difficult to plan your own diversionary tactics. The nice part about working for a huge government agency is that there is always someone you can call in the middle of the night who can provide you with key bits of information. When meeting with an Afghan warlord, for instance, it’s nice to know ahead of time if he has a child you can threaten, or maybe a relative living in the United States that you can abduct beforehand and accuse of being a terrorist, or even if the warlord happens to have a particular unseemly fetish you can exploit. No matter who you are, when someone presents your fetishes to you, it’s more than a little embarrassing.
But when you’re working alone, without all of the resources of spy planes and moles and years and years of surveillance, and are relying only on secondary information from an unreliable source-in this case, my brother, Nate-you need to work on instinct, which is what Sam and I had to do.
“They don’t make dive bars like they used to,” Sam said. We’d arrived early to the meet-up at the Hair of the Dog Saloon in hopes of catching a glimpse of Big Lumpy, but instead had spent the better part of thirty minutes watching young women drinking coffee.
The Hair of the Dog Saloon sounds like one of those places decent people avoid unless they’re looking for someone to hire for a contract killing. But like all things these days, nothing is as it seems.
Instead of being a dark bar located in the shadow of that old abandoned warehouse or just across from the decrepit docks that were left to rot away when the new docks were built a few miles south, or whatever other cliche might apply, the Hair of the Dog was actually tucked into the sun-dappled center of a new outdoor shopping center near the Miracle Mile in Coral Gables called the Shoppes at Mariposa Circle.
On one side of the Hair of the Dog was, of course, a Starbucks. On the other side was a Panera. There was also a clothing store called Blonde across the palazzo from the Hair of the Dog which featured clothing that could fit only on mannequins and that only mannequins would dare wear. Palm trees with overgrown fronds, presumably for shade and not for the Norwegian roof rats who liked to live among them, were placed decoratively every few feet along the inlaid-brick walkways surrounding the other shops, while young women, apparently in the midst of a nudity competition, sat on dark wood benches chatting on their cell phones and practicing looks of general disinterest. Other shops-or, as the shopping center thought of them, shoppes-extended outward from the center cluster in spokes of shaded walkways. Logistically, it was a perfect place to meet someone you might want to abduct or kill, since there were ten different offshoots from the center island, thus making surveillance a nightmare.