We saw our dad create that particular explosive concoction in the garage one afternoon by accident. It's one of my few good memories of him. Anyway, it taught me how to make things go bang during a bad situation.
Which got me thinking about Dixon Woods again. I had to figure out a way to draw him out, get close enough to him to figure out where the money was, or where it had gone, and why he needed it in the first place. I figured if he just wanted a quick score, he could have had one. Coming back for more, getting married, all that-it screamed of intricacy. Greed was one thing. But this kind of personal involvement was something different.
"You say you're doing something online with my mother?" I said.
"Online. Offline. We are getting very close." Fiona was already working through another issue of Palm Life, this one with a picture of Priscilla Presley gracing the cover. She sat on the hood of a Bentley beneath a headline trumpeting a charity called "Hound Dogs for Humanity." Fiona flipped a page and I saw her eyebrows rise in actual surprise, rare coming from Fiona. She slid the magazine over to me. "How do you dance when you're hooked to an oxygen tank?"
"Slowly," I said. In the foreground of the photo, a man in pink gabardine slacks and matching liver spots was doing a kind of palsied shimmy alongside his tank and a girl-she wasn't a woman, at least not in the conventional sense, particularly since her most prominent parts didn't look much older than toddler age-in a tight black dress and about a quarter million dollars in diamonds.
But that wasn't what Fi was surprised by. In the background of the picture was a woman who looked a lot like Cricket O'Connor doing a shimmy of her own, but the man she was dancing with was blurred by movement. The paragraph beneath the photo indicated that it was taken during a fund-raiser for literacy… held at a nightclub called Love/Blue. Not a lot of things that happen in Miami make sense when you look at them directly. A benefit for literacy at a nightclub didn't even register on my egre-giousness barometer. But the picture was a nice reminder: Scan the background, dig a little, you'll find the dirt you expected.
In this case, there were likely hundreds of shots taken at this event-probably two dozen of this one moment alone, particularly if the photographer had a sense of humor-and that meant there was a strong likelihood a photo of Dixon Woods, whoever he really was, would be in one of them and we'd be able to start making good on one of my core beliefs: that people frequently do illegal things out of desperation and stupidity. It was clear Dixon was desperate for money-and that whoever he'd screwed was desperate to get their money back, too-but it was also clear Dixon was stupid in a very basic way: He made poor, sloppy decisions, and that meant he was probably already juicing someone else like he had juiced Cricket, or was about to.
Figuring out what the hell he looked like would be a good start. Cricket's description of him-"tall wavy brown hair, brown eyes, a little thick in the middle, a very hairy chest and a body like Sam's"- boiled him down to about three billion men. Not a good statistical control.
Nevertheless, Sam was going to spend the afternoon checking a bit more deeply into Dixon, though we both knew that it was unlikely to lead us anywhere directly related to Cricket's problem. We also knew that to know Dixon Woods' name in the first place meant that whoever was pulling this grift knew more than he should.
It was a level of the game we didn't impart to Cricket. I figured it could wait. First, we had to figure out who we were dealing with. I told Fiona that I thought it would be nice if she used her online time-in between her Learning Annex classes with Mom-to create an enticing profile on one of the singles support groups Cricket had originally used, a plan she immediately embraced.
"Maybe I'll get a bit of an eyebrow lift, too," she said.
We'd need to see about a photo, no matter what. The offices of Palm Life might turn up the evidence Cricket couldn't. Predictably, according to the masthead, the offices for Palm Life, which covered the good life of the golden years under the palms, were located in a fashionable neighborhood of Coral Gables, a good dozen miles from even a marginal life. I made a bet with Fiona that the offices would be surrounded by palm trees that not a single drunken couple had managed to desecrate and that they'd be happy palms, unlike the ones near my mother's house, which have that sad, dead look caused by too many fruit rats using them as their winter homes.
I checked my watch. It was just past noon. Plenty of time to play dress-up with the media folks.
"You feel like going on a field trip?" I asked.
"Depends," she said. "Are we stopping by the Hotel Oro first to exact some bloody revenge?"
I figured I had two choices here. Tell the truth or lie. The problem in dealing with Fiona is that either response was likely to end up with violence. Fiona didn't think fondly of Natalya, to say the least. She never really appreciated knowing anything about anyone I'd ever been with who wasn't her; tended to react poorly upon meeting these women, tended to react with escalating anger, then violence, then protracted gun battles and high-powered explosives. Best-case scenarios involved the pulling of hair.
Gut punches performed with brass knuckles.
Car bombs.
Certain treaties being revoked.
This situation? The threats against her? The threats against me? Well, that was the sort of deal that would take some massaging, particularly if I wanted her to help me, which I would. Eventually. Not quite yet. But soon.
"That turned out to be nothing," I said.
"Did you know that I have perfected the Palestinian hanging technique?"
I took a bite of lamb and peppers, and chewed thoughtfully. "This really is excellent."
"What is so interesting is that you don't even really hang. It's more like death by crucifixion, minus all of that awful martyrdom. A slow, excruciating death." Fiona took the fork out of my hand, stabbed a chunk of gristle that I'd pushed to one side of the plate, and then ate it, smiling all the while. "This is lovely. You're right."
"Fi…" I said.
"Of course," she said, "I've been reading quite a bit about this new torture technique they're testing now in Pakistan. It's really very revolutionary. You take a conventional hot box and you throw in a live electrical wire. As the humidity in the room rises from the prisoner's labored breathing, the air actually turns electric. Like a lightning storm in a room. Only done it on rats thus far, but I'd be willing to bet that a human would make it work spectacularly."
"Fi," I said, "listen. I handled the situation. Everything is going to be fine. A little issue of mistaken identity. But I cleared it up and everyone involved is sorry that you were ever in jeopardy. They'd even like to buy the guns."
"That's so sweet," she said. She reached over and touched my cheek and I thought, Huh, I didn't think that was going to work. Especially that part about the guns. That was a real stretch. How am I going to make good on that? And then I realized that the touch Fiona was giving me was actually gaining in intensity, that she was now actually gripping my face, was digging her thumb into my jaw. Was sort of affecting my breathing.
"Fi," I said, but it came out sounding more like flea because my jaw wouldn't open and my tongue's movements were impeded.
"Natalya Choplyn? Really, Michael? You're lying to me about her again? I have to hear it from Sam?"
I liked it better when Fiona and Sam didn't get along, kept secrets from each other, used me only as a sounding board for complaints and threats. For the better part of a decade, it was one of those points I knew would remain fixed. For the first month I was back home, I was fairly certain Fiona would shoot Sam, provided Sam didn't dime her to one agency or another, foreign or domestic. There was an incident several years ago-money was lost, bullets were fired, flesh wounds were had-that left both feeling, well, distrustful of each other.