There was a part of me that wanted to pull out my gun and shoot Alex Kyle between the eyes. It was a part of me that I didn’t particularly like, a part of me that I’d kept pretty well in check since getting back to Miami.
“That’s me,” I said. “Big disgrace.”
We stared at each other for a moment, and I could feel him making decisions, figuring out maybe his information was wrong. “Anyway,” he said, “whoever wants you alive has more power than the people who want you dead. And has better technology. Five times in the last year I thought we had you. Five times I had to claim a corpse.”
“It took you five dead bodies to figure this out?”
Alex shrugged again. “You’re still Michael Westen. I just figured you were hard to kill. I didn’t realize you had guardian angels.”
I looked at Alex sitting there on my Charger. I thought about all the men he’d sent to kill me who had died. Thought about the reasons behind it-pure, unadulterated greed-and felt something surge inside of me.
“Here I am,” I said. “Only person to stop you is Fiona. And you could take her out, I’m sure.”
Alex gave a slight chuckle. “Last guy I sent? Former Army Ranger. Kills on every continent. Damn near had ESP. Whoever is watching you left a note, carved into his back like scrimshaw, letting me know that they were aware of the situation and monitoring it closely and that if anyone was going to kill you, it was going to be them. So you’ll pardon me for not taking you up on your kind offer.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I said.
Alex got off my car and stretched his back, cracked his neck, ran through each knuckle on both of his hands.
“Professional courtesy,” he said. “Mr. Bonaventura decides he wants you dead, there’s nothing I can do about that. You came to him, I didn’t come to you, so the rules are different here. Strictly business, Michael, but not spy business. I want that known.”
“Right,” I said. “You’ll light me the fuck up, as I recall. You’re just not going to be the one to pull the trigger, are you?”
“I’m just a consultant. He kills you, it’s not like I end up any richer. And I don’t claim it. I don’t endorse it. But I will say that you don’t go in and threaten someone like Mr. Bonaventura and not expect recrimination. And while I don’t approve of what you’re doing to Mr. Dinino or Mr. Stefania, that’s your business.”
I could hear some hesitation in Alex’s voice. Gone was the brazen Jarhead of this afternoon and gone, too, was the confident version I found sitting next to Fiona mere minutes previous.
He was pleading for his life.
“Did you endorse killing the guy in front of my house today?”
“That wasn’t me,” he said.
“No?”
“If someone is dead near you, it’s them or it’s because of them. That’s what I’m telling you.”
Them.
“No,” Fiona said, “what you’re telling us is that you’re scared and don’t want to die. So I suggest you scurry back to your hole.”
Alex Kyle looked around himself, figuring, I’m sure, that there was a gun trained on him somewhere. Maybe there was. Maybe there was one on all of us. “Not a lot of places to hide on the open sea between here and Nassau,” he said. “You want to make sure you live another day, I’d leave Maria and Liz Ottone alone. You want to press Nicholas Dinino? Fine. Have at him. Scumbag, in my opinion. But you drag Mr. Bonaventura into this, you drag everyone you’ve met into it. And that’s forever with him.”
“I feel pretty protected,” I said. “Five for five, right?”
“It won’t always be like that,” he said.
“And if that’s the case,” I said, “you can bet that I’ll come looking for you first. And Alex? Ask those kids about the smile and the sunglasses, they’ll tell you some stories.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. He checked his watch. “Boy, it’s late. And I think we’ve both got a long day tomorrow. I don’t suppose you want to give me back my guns?”
“Good guess,” I said.
A smirk ran across Alex Kyle’s face. “Tommy the Ice Pick. The funny thing? You check out. You got wise guys who swear to your veracity. Bonaventura actually believes someone called Tommy the Ice Pick has him cornered on a potential murder rap.” He shook his head once, very slowly, and started backing away from us. A black SUV pulled into the parking lot right on cue and idled next to him. “He killed his own father and brother and didn’t get caught, and you actually have him worried.” He patted the hood of the SUV. “All else fails, you got that going for you.”
Alex Kyle got into the SUV then and pulled away, even offered a brusque wave out the window as he passed us.
“He was nice,” Fi said. “And he donated some very nice guns to our rebel cause.”
“That’s good,” I said. “But I don’t think we’ll need them.”
“Don’t be such a disgrace,” Fiona said. “We could have been killing people and improving your standing among your peers all the while. We should take up that opportunity now that we have it.”
“Next time,” I said. We got in the Charger and headed back toward Fiona’s.
My cell rang. It was Nate. I answered in one ring. Never too late to set a good example.
“You owe me big, bro,” Nate said.
“What do you have?”
“You ever hear of a country called Calabria?”
“It’s not a country,” I said. “It’s a province. In Italy. On the Ionian Sea.” I remembered I was talking to Nate and added, “It’s the part that looks like the toe of the boot.”
“Awesome,” Nate said. “We ever get on a game show together, you’ll handle world geography questions and I’ll be the guy saving lives.”
Nate with confidence was a scary thing. It presupposed a level of involvement in my affairs that usually promised bad things.
But maybe this time was different.
The idea of a game show involving geography and death did, admittedly, have some allure.
“Slade Switchblade came in handy tonight,” Nate said. “I called in all the favors I had-and that reminds me, next week, no rush, but a friend of mine is going to need some help with an ex-girlfriend who is stalking him. I waived your normal fee, but said you’d take care of whatever problems existed in an expedient and spyish fashion that would be totally badass to witness. He wants her car to blow up, but I said, ‘Hey, no promises.’ ”
“Nate,” I said. “Get to it.”
“Right, right.” He explained that a friend of his was picking up some “businessmen” at the airport and bringing them to a race party at South Beach and that in the past, he’d gotten the impression they were in the Mafia. “The real Mafia,” Nate clarified. “So I tell him, ‘Hey, this isn’t something to trifle with; let me and my big bro take care of it.’ ”
“Tell me you didn’t threaten these guys,” I said. The last thing I needed on my plate now was even more angry crime bosses, which reminded me I was still angry with Sam for getting me in their business again. Next job he offered I was going to demand that he first provide expert witness testimony that whatever bad guys we were about to engage had more petty concerns than perpetuating a myth of toughness and respect based on a bullshit code from the last century.
“I’m not stupid,” Nate said. “I just recorded them. But here’s the thing. One guy wasn’t even Italian. He was Iranian. Or Iraqi. One of those places where they don’t use the alphabet.”
When you’re xenophobic, not knowing the difference between Iranian, Iraqi or any other Middle Eastern point of origin makes you dangerous. When you’re a common person who can’t pinpoint the 50 states on a map, much less imagine explaining Puerto Rico’s role, it just makes you ignorant, but not uncommon. In Nate’s case, this was the latter. What was notable about Calabria was not that it was in Italy, but that it’s also home to traditionally the largest concentration of Mus lims in the country-in Italy, over one-third of the country is Muslim-and normally that only means good things.